Tony Thorne - Countess Dracula: Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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First published in 1997 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3DP

Copyright 1997 Tony Thorne

The moral right of the author has been asserted

A copy of the CIP entry for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 3365 0

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For Franoise, Ccile and Mathilde. Girls who died.

an accent on a vowel lengthens that syllable, so Bthory = baahtory

Countess Erzsbet (Elisabeth) Bthory

Count Ferenc (Francis) Ndasdy, her husband

Lady Anna Ndasdy, her elder daughter

Lady Katalin (Kate) Ndasdy, her younger daughter

Lord Pl (Paul) Ndasdy, her son

Count Mikls (Nicholas) Zrnyi, her son-in-law, husband to Lady Anna

Count Gyrgy (George) Homonnay Drugeth, her son-in-law, husband to Lady Kate

Gbor Bthory, her nephew, Prince of Transylvania

Anna Bthory, her niece

Anna Darvulid, her confidential servant

Dorottya Szentes, known as Dork, her confidential servant

Ilona (Helena) J, her confidential servant

Jnos jvry, known as Ficzk, her manservant and factotum

Katalin (Katherine) Beneck or Beniczky, her servant

Erzsi Majorosn, a witch

Count Gyrgy (George) Thurz, Palatine of Hungary

Countess Erzsbet (Elisabeth) Czobor, his wife

Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary

Matthias II, brother and successor to the above

Sir Imre Megyery, tutor to Paul Ndasdy

A note on Hungarian proper names

In Hungary then and now names are given in reverse order, so Bthory Erzsbet. In this text names are given in English order and the Christian names of the main protagonists have been anglicized. The family name ending - or -i can be the equivalent of the French de or the German von when attached to a place-name; the ending -ffy originally signified son of, and -falva (of) the village of. Given the ethnic mixture in eastern-central Europe there are many cases of non-Magyar names which can be represented in a Hungarian spelling or in their original form. Where it is probable that the bearer of the name did not have Hungarian as their first language, the Slovak, Croatian, etc. form has been used here.

During the 1980s a band of young musicians (operating in the hinterlands of the Goth, Industrial and Death-Metal genres) in their search for an arresting name with exotic and sinister associations chose to call themselves Bathory. The group has since disappeared and its leader, the reclusive Quorthon, gone to ground. Since 1991 horror fans have been able to subscribe to a fanzine dedicated to the macabre, published in Topeka, Kansas. Its name is Bathory Palace. A year earlier, a radically different reading of the same historical personage had inspired a young Dutch artist to change her Christian name legally to the Hungarian Erzsbet, to pluck her eyebrows and hairline to resemble more closely the images of her heroine and to appear in her own installations and at social gatherings in the costumes that her muse had once worn.

At the time of writing the most eminent movie-makers in Prague and Bratislava are trying to raise the funds to film a pre-war novel (Nianskys Lady of achtice) based on the life of this same Countess Bthory Meryl Streep is current favourite to play the title role but in the meantime the anti-heroine is already on her way, like Nosferatu on his plague ship, heading westwards from her European home towards Hollywood where new patrons are waiting to reinvent her and exhibit her to a wider world. In the centenary year of that one dimensional fictional villain, Bram Stokers Transylvanian Count, Elizabeth Bthory, the woman caricatured in English as Countess Dracula, is an icon whose hour has come around.

Nowadays the standard biography in English resembles the middle-class novel with its use of an omniscient narrator telling a story woven seamlessly from unseen earlier histories and from the results of library researches. If the subject is a figure from English history, an an Elizabethan grandee, for instance (Elisabeth Bthory was a contemporary of her royal English namesake and of Shakespeare), the wealth of original documents that survive, together with the commentaries of successive generations of experts, will give a modern writer a head start. In the case of a Hungarian of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, even one of the very highest rank, the chances of retrieving sufficient material for a comprehensive treatment are very remote indeed. The archive papers are scattered and incomplete, many collections are still unsorted and inaccessible following the turbulence of the last hundred years. In Elisabeths own day Hungarian nobles very rarely knowingly destroyed documents but many were lost in the upheavals such as the aftermath of the Rkczi rebellion in the eighteenth century when the Habsburgs left many Hungarian castles and manor houses in ruins.