On December 29, 1610, Count George Thurzo, accompanied by an armed phalanx of soldiers, seized a small castle in northwest Hungary. Searching the grounds, they found the body of a young woman, recently dead and covered with bruises, rope burns, and cuts. In a dank dungeon, they found another woman, nearly dead from the festering wounds all over her body. And there were others, the count wrote to his wife in a hastily scrawled note on December 30, “that damned woman was keeping them for torture.”
”That damned woman” was Countess Elizabeth Bathory, princess of Hungary and one of the most powerful aristocrats in sixteenth-century Europe. A mass murderess, the story goes, she believed that bathing in the blood of young maidens would maintain her youth. This is probably just a myth, but Elizabeth was undoubtedly cruel, sadistic, amoral, and insane.
The number of women and young girls she either killed or tortured – by beating, biting, burning, branding, cutting, and starving them, as well as forcing them to stand naked in freezing streams in the middle of winter – is unclear. Her servants, four people named as accomplices by an investigating commission, claimed they’d been party to between 36 and 50 murders. Later witnesses put the number as high as 650, though that figure is likely an exaggeration.
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In public life, Elizabeth was a doting mother and a strong political force, even after the death of her husband, the reportedly cruel Count of Nadasdy. It appears that her murderous activities came to light only about 1609, when she began preying on noblewomen; in fact, most of the victims named in court testimonies were related to Elizabeth by blood or marriage. Though she had a reputation as a hard taskmistress, she enjoyed a steady supply of young noblewomen from poor families – years of war had left many families with more daughters than they could marry off.
Despite the stunning charges against her, not to mention the political factions who would have loved to see her executed, Elizabeth was never convicted of any crime. Three of her servants/accomplices were executed, as was a local woman accused of being a witch in Elizabeth’s service. Elizabeth was punished, however, but it was her family, not a court, that decided to incarcerate her. She was locked in her bedchamber, the door bricked up, with only a small slot for delivering meals. She died on August 21, 1614.
Source:
McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “Three Mad Princesses (And One Who Probably Wasn’t).” Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories From History-- Without the Fairy-Tale Endings. MJF Books, 2013. 251-52. Print.
Further Reading:
Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (Hungarian: Báthory Erzsébet, Slovak: Alžbeta Bátoriová)
Count Ferenc Nádasdy de Nádasd et Fogarasföld
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