The temptation to presume that inexpressible inhumanity is predominantly the kingdom of the males is indeed irresistible. Perhaps, that is why, we being hedonistic creatures succumb to its so called allure. And perhaps it is one of the principal factors which begin the slideshow with names such as Adolf Hitler, Jack the Ripper and Idi Amin etc when we are compelled to confront the atrocities that a human is capable of committing against its fellow humans. It could certainly be argued that it is so because even in this era we live in male dominated societies. But somehow, this line of reasoning reeks of rationalization rather than genuine scientific enquiry. If jabbed and prodded for an authentic reason, it can be speculated and with definite cause that we upheld the aforesaid belief because it keeps our faith in the benevolence of women sacrosanct.
Against this canvas, I paint a blossom plucked from the garden of history and portray a blood chilling tale with elements of cruelty, violence, lust, obsession, murder, greed and political conspiracies. A true saga that is potent enough to shame any fiction to death.
In the mid sixteenth century, when Hungary was swamped by the Turkish forces of Ottoman Empire and was a theatre of war for the Turkish and Austrian armies lived a young girl whose name would later be written with black ink in the pages of history. Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory was born to one of the most noble and wealthiest families in an age when peasants and common villagers enjoyed a status lower than animals. Slavery and bondage were the rule rather than the exception and their lives meant less than nothing if they ever committed even the most innocuous errors. Was this noble blood tainted with malice? Was she doomed from the instant she was conceived owing to her regal bloodlines? Was royalty a curse that unfurled its wrath on those it believed to be beneath it? When impressionable children should be taught to revere life in all forms she witnessed the terrible ordeals and punishments carried out under her family’s command. It has also been reported that she suffered from violent seizures as a child. Maybe, nature and nurture both conspired against her, and it was inevitable that she should fulfill her destiny as the Blood Countess.
Perhaps, the earliest warning of her untamed nature was when at the age of 14, already betrothed to Count Ferencz Nadasdy, she gave birth to an illegitimate child by another man. Elizabeth and the Count were united in holy matrimony on May 8, 1575 and only three years later Nadasdy became the chief commander of the Hungarian forces and led them to war against the Ottomans. In absence of her husband, it befell on eighteen year old Elizabeth’s shoulders to manage and later defend the estates. But she was more than capable of it. In the fog of ignorance and illiteracy, the Countess was a spear of light for she was politically intuitive and could read and write in four languages.
Perchance, it was the non attendance of her husband that she grew bored of her isolation and turned to witchcraft. The count was no innocent himself. Though it has never been ascertained whether he was any wiser to his wife’s “hobbies”, historians account that Count Ferencz was a cruel man himself and it was he who introduced his wife to a delectable new practice of torture. The poor offenders were coated with honey and then left in the wilderness at the mercy of bees and insects. For a beautiful woman, tall and majestic in her bearing she definitely had a cruel streak. Her physical exquisiteness masked the hideousness of her soul. Even the Garden of Eden held in its breast a deadly serpent. Her curious pursuits involved parading the girls naked in front of her men, whipping, freezing them in winters and other assorted delicacies of punishment to sate her sadistic appetite. Elizabeth Bathory had given birth to six children of which three daughters and a son survived.
It was the death of her husband that made her conscious of her own mortality. In her deadly obsession with beauty and eternal youth, her soul, black and tarred as it was, gasped its final breath. One sultry evening, when her maid accidentally pulled her hair while dressing her, she struck like a viper and bled the poor girl. In her eyes, she had discovered the elixir of youth for she believed that the skin where the victim’s blood had spilled looked younger and fresher. This conviction of her signed the death warrants of hundreds of victims. They were captured by her associates and each drop of blood was drained from their supple bodies so a blood thirsty countess lusting after the myth of “eternal youth” could have her bath. The devil himself must have quaked in his boots at such a sight. The accounts of her taking greedy bites from their bleeding forms and sucking at the stream of blood on the bodies could well be the seeds that in time germinated into a whole jungle of vampire lore.
Illusions are only that, illusions and one day their fate is to shatter. The Countess could not fight the inevitable victory of age over beauty but she was in the possession of her false pretenses and fixation. A novel twist in this plot took place when she drew the absurd inference that the blood of the peasant girls was not pure enough. She desired the blood of nobility and thus began the fall of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Under the guise of an educational academy, she took in twenty five girls of noble families and sacrificed them at the altar of her bloodlust.
In all the years that encompassed her killing extravaganza, she had grown arrogant and conceited to the extent of tossing dead bodies out on the street from her passing carriage. Justice, comatose, for all these years came upon her as an avenging angel. She was nobility and therefore a demigod and in those times the noble could do no wrong. She was put on house arrest but never faced trial. Her associates were judged according to their own crimes and each brutally penalized. The number of deaths on her hands were said to be ranging from 40 to 650. A diary was found where she by her own hand had written the names of all her 650 victims as if a keeping track of a grocery list and presented at the trail. All her estates and assets were seized by the King.
Ironically and life in all centuries are so absurdly full of them. The justice that came knocking on her castle was not on behalf of the dead victims but the King’s reluctance to repay the mammoth loan that her husband had given to the King. It is so disheartening to realize that life has no value before political aspirations and motives, be it in a democracy or a monarchy, a castle or a 21st century General election. It seems some things are set in stone. Some hold the belief that she was innocent of the crimes of which she was accused and this production of trial was politically motivated. She merely existed after the trial and was on house arrest. The Countess who wrote the destinies of innumerable victims was walled in and only a narrow opening was her umbilical cord to the world. The woman who had madly lusted after eternal youth embraced death a scant four years later in 1610.
So who really was Elizabeth Bathory? Centuries later when we observe the landscape of her life what do we ultimately believe. An evil woman who left wreckage, blood and dead bodies in her wake or a psychotic who was trapped in an ignorant era with no respite. Did her soul shudder and scream at least in the earlier stages of her malevolence? Or was it all a fair game to her? Or she was an innocent pawn on a political chessboard? In her defense, she was probably more insane than evil. Well facts were buried with her but whoever she was, she was someone whose name was forbidden for centuries and that’s evidence to the terror that must have struck in the hearts of people. She was The Blood Countess.
