The Blood Countess Elizabeth Báthory

at least have a passing familiarity with Bathory. She's often positioned, including by the Guinness Book of World Records, as the most prolific female serial killer of all time. In the centuries since Elizabeth Bathory's life, her story has traveled as folklore and word of mouth, horror story, as pop history,

and now spooky Internet irreverence. The basic version of the narrative is that Elizabeth Bathory was a wealthy and powerful countess in sixteenth and seventeenth century Hungary, and that her estates became nightmare dens of sadistic torture that she inflicted first on her servant girls and then eventually as time went on and the daughters of noblemen too young girls who had been sent to her palaces to learn basic courtly etiquette. Stories of Elizabeth Bathory often include gruesome details

of her torture. That she would take a girl and strip her naked before covering her with honey and sending her out into the fields to be devoured by insects. Bathory would stick needles beneath fingernails, cut off flesh, whip servants with stinging nettles, or forced girls naked into freezing ice baths. There was seemingly no end to Elizabeth Bathori's depravity,

nor to her creative means of indulging her sadism. Most popular culture depictions of Elizabeth Bathory also include one very specific element that the countess not only murdered young girls, but that she bathed in their blood, believing that it would keep her forever young and beautiful. It's the perfect detail, incredibly visual and cinematic. Can't you picture it now, the aging Countess, vain and ever fearful, lowering herself into a golden tub filled with crimson. It gives her motivation for

the murders beyond insanity or mere sadism. It makes the story unforgettable. If you know the name Elizabeth Bathory, at all. It's because, you know, Elizabeth Bathory, the bloody serial killer, the blood countess. But what if we been wrong about her this entire time? What if Elizabeth Bathory was completely innocent.

In recent years, a few scholars have attempted to reframe Elizabeth Bathory not as a murderous but as a victim of circumstances, manipulated by the Hungarian crown and the encroaching Habsburg power, punished for being a wealthy and powerful woman in the wrong family, conveniently disposed of on trumped up charges. Those scholars suggest that, as so often happens, hundreds of years of rumors and exaggeration have taken root, and when a story is better than the truth, well that story

is almost impossible to kill. Now, personally, I'm not certain I'm fully convinced one way or the other. I think the problem with certain pieces of evidence is that they can be explained reasonably in either direction. But to put the case into modern legal parlance, there's certainly reasonable doubt, and I think it's worth trying to understand why maybe a famous historical monster might have just been a woman all along. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood.

In the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth Bathory was born, Transylvania was a principality within the Kingdom of Hungary. The Holy Roman Empire was a looming neighbor ruled by the powerful Habsburg family. At certain periods in history, Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire would have the same monarch. That's what the Habsburgs certainly wanted to consolidate their power, for their leader not only to be emperor but also king of Hungary,

and why not Lithuania and Poland as well. Transylvan Out was a pebble in their shoe, a stronghold for Eastern independence from Western Habsburg influence of these little principalities, and the Bathories were one of the most influential families across those principalities. Elizabeth born August seventh, fifteen sixty was a product of an illustrious lineage. Her paternal uncle was the Voivode, or highest ranking official of Transylvania. Her father was a baron.

Elizabeth's mother was also a Bathory, and on that side, her grandfather was a previous by vote of Transylvania, and her uncle, Stephen Bathory, was the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Some here that Elizabeth's parents were both Bathories, and we've that into their Halloween story about her, that being in bred was the source of her mental illness, her sadism. There were reports of her having epilepsy in her childhood. Surely that too, some believe is the result

of her parents blood being too close. Fortunately for Elizabeth, her parents were from two extremely distant branches of the family, though the name had been preserved. Her mother and father were separated from their last common ancestor by seven generations and two hundred years. But Elizabeth was sickly as a young child, prone to seizures that were diagnosed in the

sixteenth century as falling sickness. Some say that one of the treatments involved opening a cut and letting the blood of a healthy person enter the body, and so that too, is used as a morbid little detail to foreshadow Elizabeth's alleged blood lust. The rumors about Elizabeth Bathory's life are countless, and I've found that most sources on the Internet either willfully forego actual evidence or just except that Elizabeth today

lives more as folklore than an actual historical figure. One of the rumors is that when Elizabeth was thirteen, she had an affair with a peasant boy and gave birth to a child. There's no evidence of that. What we do know is that when she was ten years old, she was engaged to Count Ference Nadashti, who was five years older than her and from one of the most

powerful noble families over in the Kingdom of Hungary. The pair were married when Elizabeth was fifteen and Ference was twenty, at an event with four thousand and five hundred guests in attendance. We don't know if the pair were in love, but they seemed to at least like each other well enough to have five known children, three of whom survived to adulthood. But the purpose of their marriage, like most

early modern marriages, wasn't happiness. This marriage codified an incredibly lucrative allotans, one that would make the couple two of the most powerful figures in Eastern Europe at the time, with enough the states scattered across Hungary that an army could traverse the country by using their properties as protective lily pads. If it's difficult for you to visualize the very complicated geopolitics at the time. Think of Transylvania and

Hungary as a square rectangle situation. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Transylvania was a part of Hungary, but there were parts of the Kingdom of Hungary that existed outside of Transylvania. At the start of the sixteen hundreds, when Elizabeth was reaching middle age, Habsburg Emperor Rudolph the Second inherited and claimed both the titles

of Holy Roman Emperor and King of Hungary. There was so much resentment and an anti Hapsburg independence movie in Transylvania that eventually forced Rudolph to abdicate Hungarian throne and give it to his brother Matthias. It was still in the family, but hopefully people would get less mad if

it was more of a nominally separate kingdom. In sixteen o four, after twenty nine years of marriage, Count Ference died while off fighting the Ottoman invasion of Hungary, and Elizabeth Bathory became one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in the kingdom. She was sitting on incredibly important land that she inherited from her husband's powerful Hungarian family.

States that she was already more than comfortable managing. She had managed them for decades while her husband was off fighting. The properties were vast, and she was so wealthy that even King Matthias the Second was in debt to her. Meanwhile, over in Transylvania, her nephew, Gabor Bathory was being crowned prince. With Elizabeth's wealth and rank, Gabor seemed like an even

bigger threat to the Habsburgs of Hungary. Her estates were huge, stretching from the west to the southeast of the Hungarian Kingdom. If the Bathories wanted, Elizabeth could grant Gobor safe passage across the entire kingdom, giving him access to possibly claiming the Polish throne or even the Hungarian throne. The Bathories were a threat. This is the larger context in which

Elizabeth Bathory was accused of terrible things. On December, the Palatine of Hungary, Gregory Thorzo, stormed into Elizabeth Bathories castle with a regiment of guards. The Palatine is the highest ranking official of the country, think of him almost like a prime minister, and had been ordered by King Matthias to investigate the terrible rumors about the widow Elizabeth Bathory.

Thorso had succeeded in his task and then some, eventually gathering hundreds of testimonies, all of which were in agreement that Elizabeth Bathory was a murderer. Thorso would right that he burst into the castle and found Elizabeth Bathory in the act of torture, with one young girl already dead at her feet and another strung up and being flayed. But in truth, according to the documentation of the secretary

at the time, Bathory was actually just eating dinner. It's hard to find where the stories of Elizabeth Bathory murderer began. One visiting priest had written to the king back when Elizabeth's husband was still alive, saying that he saw the two of them being noticeably cruel to their servants. The local Lutheran pastor, Janis Picenus seemed to delight in accusing Elizabeth of witchcraft and cannibalism. He even wrote to Thurso saying that Elizabeth would transform into a black ut and

that she would stalk him at night. His clearly exaggerated outrage doesn't seem particularly easy to explain, at least from a religious perspective. Though Elizabeth's husband was Lutheran, Elizabeth herself remained a lifelong Calvinist, just like her mother had been. But even still, she didn't renounce Lutheranism or hinder the

religious freedom of the Lutherans on her land. Her records as a landowner indicate that she built schools and educated ministers, and supported Lutheranism to the healthy extent that the local pastor should have been content with. Still, it's worth noting that before Thorso's investigation into Bathory, there were no formal legal complaints made against her at any time from either anyone on her estate or in her community, and this was during a period when the Hungarian legal system kept

meticulous records of all grapes and grievances. It was just rumors that swirled around her that motivated Thorso to move on Bathory. King Matthias authorized Thorzo to investigate the rumors around Bathory at the start of six and the Palatine sent two notaries out into the Hungarian territories to gather whatever evidence they could. By October there were fifty two witnesses. Later,

after Bathori's arrest, there would be over three hundred. The stories were damning Elizabeth Bathory, they said, like to torture young girls, that she mutilated even bit them, that she beat and stabbed and starved them. Almost all of the testimony, it's worth pointing out, was word of mouth hearsay from people who had heard of Bathoris abuse, or from people who had had relatives who had entered service at the

castle but who had never emerged. Elizabeth was arrested that night December in her castle, along with four of her servants, her so called accomplices. Thorso tortured all of the servants into confessing to assisting the countess with various murders, although all four gave differing numbers of victims, ranging from twenty to sixty. One of the later witnesses would allege that an officer had told him that he had seen a ledger, the Countess's own ledger of her murders, and that they

numbered in these six hundreds. Under torture, one of the countess's servants gave Thorso the location of a young girl's body buried on the estate. Before the torture, the servant had maintained that the young girl was one of eight who had died of the plague earlier that fall. Bristling with excitement, Thurso and his men dug up the body, still fairly well preserved, having been buried in the cold

dirt of autumn. There's a hoisted the decomposing, play gritten corpse onto a wooden platform in front of the castle, and he invited all the servants and noblemen of neighboring estates to come and see, Come, be witness see the naked tortured body of one of the Countess's victims. Elizabeth herself was forced to stand there in full view a punishment of public humiliation. Thorso shouted at her to look

at her poor victim. Though the body was more than two months old, Thorso claimed that it was fresh, which no doubt colored the opinions of onlookers when it came to make their statements about Elizabeth's brutal torture. After all, they had seen the Countess standing next to a clearly mutilated body. Though King Matthias urged Thurzo to follow the strictest legal procedures, Thurso ignored the wreck. He claimed to spare the Bathory family the shame of a public trial

and to preempt the order of execution. The servants that had been arrested, were tried and quickly put to death. But though Elizabeth had private hearings, she never had the large public trial that would have been standard at the time. She wasn't permitted to make a defense or speak on her own behalf. There was never a sentencing. Thurzo continued to claim that it was a mercy that if she went to trial she would be put to death instead.

Without a verdict, she was merely detained under house arrest at the castle for the rest of her life. The rumors would only continue and grow. The thorso wrote to the king and said that she was bricked into a locked room. Visiting priests at the castle would write and remark that she actually moved freely about the castle, at least until she died three years later at age fifty four.

The story could be complete there. Elizabeth Bathori as a murderess, for whom the extent of her crimes will never be fully known. A woman who was cruel and sadistic, who killed as many servants as she could because she could protected by her wealthy and powerful family. Only in the end, when she was no longer fully protected, her wealth and privilege at least allowed her to remain comfortable under house arrest,

guilty and disgraced, but not hanged by the neck. But in recent years, Hungarian scholars in particular, have found that Bathori's case is less cut and dry than some people might believe. I don't know if there's a smoking gun one way or the other, but I think it's interesting and important enough to examine that there might be more

gray area than originally meets the eye. Doctor Irma Shadeki Kardo's posits that the quote I witness testimony of the hundreds of witnesses against Elizabeth Bathory are less compelling than they might originally seem. For one thorso had restricted his investigation only to the parts of the Hungarian Kingdom where he had full power and where many of the tenants were beholden to him. He obtained confessions under torture. The

vast vast majority of the testimony gathered is hearsay. There are no firsthand accounts of anyone who was actually abused by the Countess. Much of the later testimony came after the witnesses would have seen a decomposing corpse on a platform with Elizabeth standing beside it, while Thorzo was shouting that this was one of her victims. I think that

would buy us anyone a little, at least subconsciously. But again, though Thorso claimed that his lack of public trial was to protect Elizabeth, it also conveniently prevented any recorded defense. Her disgrace, and the rippling disgrace of the entire Bathory family was irreconcilable. It was also fairly convenient for Thorso that his own son, Imre, happened to be the same

age as Elizabeth's son, Paul. Paul, being the scion of two powerful families, would easily eclipse Thorso's son when it came to Hungarian politics, unless, of course, the Bathories family fortunes changed. Dr shadeky Cardo's also raises a fascinating point that many of the so called tortures that Bathory was reported to have engaged in were actually well recorded medical

procedures for the sixteen hundreds. In Transylvania, where Bathory had grown up, in the seventeenth century, it was considered the duty of landowners and nobles to provide for the welfare of their tenants and servants. The lady of the house was responsible for the women and children. According to Schadecki Cardo's, Elizabeth's letters aren't blood chilling manifestoes of a sadistic murderer,

their normal, reasonable business management. Elizabeth writes, petitioning the King for her tenants, she installed in each of her estates herbalists and healers, and appointed the same personal healer that she used for her own children for her underlings. Coming from Transylvania, Elizabeth was familiar with a more hands on approach to herbal medicine and healing methods that would have been unfamiliar to the local people when she moved with

her husband to western Hungary. One of Elizabeth's most famous, quote unquote accomplices was a woman named Anna Darbuglia, a Croatian midwife and healer and one of the few women who performed rudimentary surgeons on her patients so that the female patients wouldn't have to be treated by men. It would have been a rare and strange sight, maybe for some to see a woman doing something like blood letting, even though blood letting at the time was a conventionally

accepted medical procedure. The medical texts of a contemporary Transylvanian doctor Fence Papa peris contain a number of procedures that, to the untrained eye, or to an eye mistrustful of a woman holding a knife, might look suspiciously like torture. Necrotic tissue needed to be cut from healthy flesh to prevent infection from spreading. Maggots were frequent. Blight boils and abscesses had to be lanced. Wounds needed to be cauterized

with red hot irons. For some ailments, hot cupping was recommended, and for those with fever or rubonic plague, a weak, sweating body would be shocked with an ice cold bath. Singing nettles were an old wives cure for rheumatism and arthritis. Some seamstresses suffered from boils under their nail beds, a condition known as finger nail poison. The treatment was lancing

finger tips under the nails with needles. Hearing those treatments out of context, and particularly if they were unfamiliar or gasped done by a woman, you can almost see where the stories of torture might have begun. Shadeki Cardos also points out that the deaths that Dorzo ascribes to Elizabeth happened to coincide with outbreaks of disease. The eight girls whom Thurzo built his case around had possibly actually died

of the plague. They had been quarantined together and treated by two of Elizabeth's servants, and they had died when Elizabeth wasn't even at the castle. Elizabeth was frequently touring between her estates. The pace and pre neticism with which the rumors of Elizabeth Bathery's guilt took hold of the Countryside could also possibly point to Thurso's haste to make her guilt quote common knowledge. Common knowledge was accepted evidence

in court at the time. Elizabeth's confinement meant that her relatives were able to take control of her valuable properties a few of her son in law's new in advance of impending quote surprise arrest. They even helped him to arrange it. King Matthias's debts that he owed to Elizabeth were conveniently dissolved. I don't know exactly where I stand when it comes to a proclamation that Elizabeth Bathory was

either a sadistic monster or completely innocent a framed woman. Personally, I tend to find it a little easier to believe that a few hundred people living in close and unhygienic quarters at the start of the sixteen hundreds were more likely to have died from the plague than from a cruel and unusual Lady Dracula. People were suspicious of powerful women, and especially of powerful women with regional and religious differences.

Rumors were easy to spread, and Elizabeth Bathi's downfall financially benefited many people in power. But on the other hand, I also don't find it difficult to believe that a wealthy, noble woman might have been exceedingly cruel, abusive, maybe even deadly in her treatment of servants. You'll notice that throughout this I didn't mention the whole bathing in blood thing. Well,

that's because that's objectively a complete fabrication. There were absolutely no contemporary witnesses who alleged even rumors of Elizabeth bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her own youth, or doing anything with their blood. That rumor came over a hundred years later during the Counter Reformation. In seventeen twenty nine, the Hungarian Jesuit priests Laslow Taroshi used the by then infamous saga of Elizabeth Bathory as a parable

to discuss the dangers of becoming Protestant. He wrote that she was a Catholic who had broken bad and converted to Lutheranism, and that unleashed in her a blood lust that caused her, this demented Protestant to sadistically torture servants and bathe in young blood in order to try to stay young herself. It's a compelling detail, and kudos to Taroshi for his imaginative creativity that still persists in the popular culture today. But it's just not true. Elizabeth wasn't

even ever Lutheran. She was never elapsed Catholic. As I mentioned, she was a lifelong Calvinist. So no blood lust. But as for the murders, it's up to you to decide what's to and what's merely rumor. That's the saga of Elizabeth Bathory. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break

to hear a little bit more about her legacy. Lists of pop history fun facts are littered with the type of historical anecdote that seems like it should be true, and so these anecdotes are just repeated often enough that

they become fact. One of those seems like it might as well be true is the idea that, upon hearing the rumors of this Eastern European countess from Transylvania, an Irish author named Bram Stoker, while staying on the misty northern coast of Scotland, was inspired to write Us to worry about a man who sucked blood from others to survive.

His book, of course, became Dracula. Now there's no real consensus on whether Bathory directly or even indirectly inspired Stoker, but Bathory did inspire another recent character in pop culture. In the video game Resident Evil Village, there's a glamorous woman with a large black hat and sweeping white gown who stands at over nine ft tall. The character is named Countess Alcina or Lady Dimitrescu, and she became an

almost instant fan favorite. A villainist who rules over a feudal peasantry with allegations of murder and cannibalism swirling around her incredibly glamorous and incredibly tall person. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Mankey. Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by rema il Keali

and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M