Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
5
Legends of Blood
While the very name Dracula and the mystery that surrounds his grave at Snagov Monastery conjure up terrifying questions in our search for the real vampire, it is perhaps important that we pause for the moment and return to the “scene of the crime” to examine further evidence that promises to add yet another layer to this dark riddle. In the process we’ll explore more of the true history of Dracula, along with several other well-documented figures from the past accused of such atrocities against their fellow man that their names alone bring to mind images of cruelty, torture, sadism, and bloodlust. During their lifetimes these violent men and women were greatly feared by all who crossed their path, and when their bodies had finally disappeared back into the cold earth their memories were so lasting that they became infused into the folklore of the vampire and they themselves became legends of blood.
In 1933, when the crypt at Snagov Monastery proved to be empty of all but a few bones and broken bits of pottery, it must have at first seemed to Dinu Rosetti and George Florescu that they had reached the end of their quest for the legendary grave of Dracula. Yet for these two intrepid archeologists, the work continued on, and as the days passed and further excavations progressed within the ancient chapel, additional finds added yet more clues to the mystery of the empty grave.
Upon carefully examining the rest of the building’s interior, the team stumbled on a curious stone slab to the right of the chapel’s heavy wooden doors that closely resembled the one marking the empty grave they had previously uncovered. On removing the stone they discovered that it concealed a second crypt identical in both size and shape to the first. The only difference between it and the first was that, as the weighty cover stone was lifted from the grave, Rosetti and Florescu were elated to find this one was occupied.
Deep within the cool recesses of its brick and mortar-lined interior lay a rotting coffin, and inside that the headless body of a man dressed in the red and yellow remnants of a nobleman’s garments. Over the body lay a tattered cloth of purple with gold embroidery and to one side a crown intricately shaped and fitted with stones of turquoise.
Although most of the objects had long ago deteriorated beyond recognition, a battered cup, a belt buckle of gold, and other remains were removed to the City of Bucharest History Museum for further study. Also discovered sewn into the folds of the occupant’s cloak was a small jeweled ring resembling the type given by ladies of high status to favored knights victorious in tournament. For Rosetti and Florescu, who had studied surviving portraits and eyewitness accounts of the infamous prince, the clothing and objects found in the grave were a dead match for those belonging to Dracula. Dracula’s father, Vlad II Dracul, just happened to acquire such objects after successful bouts in a tournament of arms following his initiation into the Order of the Dragon at Nuremberg on November 8, 1431. Later he bequeathed these trophies, along with his prized Toledo sword, to his son Dracula, who was at the time a prisoner of the Turks.
Yet while the archeologists were convinced they had discovered the true and final resting place of Vlad Dracula Tepes, others in the scientific community were still unsure about the find. After reviewing the evidence collected at Snagov Monastery, subsequent scholars and historians pointed out that although the corpse did indeed appear to be that of a nobleman from the middle of the fifteenth century, its location in the chapel was not in keeping with Orthodox traditions. Given its distance from the altar and the fact that there was no inscription upon the stone bearing the identity of its occupant, the lonely grave in the corner of the chapel did not seem a fitting place for a Wallachian prince who at one time was both the monastery’s patron and its protector.
In response, the archeologists argued that the coffin may have in fact been originally placed in the first grave near the altar but then, for one reason or another, was secretly exhumed and moved to the second. One of the monastery’s abbots could have felt uneasy about having the body of such an evil man so close to the holy altar of God and therefore repositioned the coffin farther away near the door. In an added bit of poetic justice, by placing him near the chapel entrance it allowed the subjects he once crushed under his iron heel to now trample over his remains on their way to worship God.
While his cruel and bloodthirsty reputation may have helped determine the fate of his burial, an even stronger factor could have been his decision to convert to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. In the eyes of the Orthodox Church, such a move branded him a heretic—making it a violation of church law to inter his body at the altar’s base. This may also account for why the grave was unmarked or why no murals or icons of the monastery’s former patron existed in the chapel.
Supporters of what we’ll call the “musical graves” theory surmise that the transfer occurred either when the monastery came under the control of Greek monks in the 1700s or by order of Metropolitan Filaret II, who headed the Romanian church in 1792. In either case neither the monks nor the patriarch himself bore any love for the memory of the oppressive tyrant. Others claim a third suspect might have been the monks who resided in the monastery in the 1800s and who moved the body to avoid looting by peasants from nearby villages just before the island was abandoned by the holy order.
More than forty years after the initial discovery of the unknown nobleman, a monk residing in the Snagov chapel told reporters in 1975 that he was convinced that Dracula’s remains still lay within the grave near the altar and that the original archeologists simply did not dig down far enough. Nobility and other important personalities, he noted, were generally buried very deep, and tricks such as false graves and other disguises were often used to foil grave robbers in search of loot.
Following the release of the story, Raymond T. McNally, a professor of Russian and Eastern European history at Boston College, and Romanian academic Radu Florescu, the nephew of George Florescu, petitioned the Romanian government for permission to reopen the grave and investigate the monk’s claims. Unfortunately, their request, along with subsequent others, was denied by officials on the grounds that the chapel’s foundations were weakened by earthquakes in 1940 and 1977. To dig within the confines of the chapel at Snagov, the officials claimed, posed a serious threat to both the structural integrity of the ancient building and the safety of those undertaking the excavation. The search for definitive proof of Dracula’s resting place would have to wait.
The question then remains as to what Rosetti and Florescu really found on that lonely island in 1933. Did they in fact lay to rest the mystery of the empty grave with the discovery of the headless corpse, or did the ever-elusive clues needed to identify the body only add new layers to the riddle of Dracula’s tomb? Who was really buried in the Snagov chapel, and did the spirit of Dracula still roam the lands he once ruled—moving through the ruins of his crumbling castles or lingering among lost battlefields where his sword once tasted the blood of his enemies?
Son of the Dragon
Here begins a very cruel, frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man, Prince Dracula. How he impaled people and roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and skinned people and hacked them to pieces like cabbage. He also roasted the children of mothers and they had to eat the children themselves. And many other horrible things are written in this tract and in the land he ruled.
—from the frontispiece of a pamphlet
printed in nuremberg in 1499 by ambrosius huber
Sultan Mehmed II reined his magnificent stallion to a halt with a swift flick of his wrist, just as he and his bodyguards of elite Janissaries (infantry units) topped the tree-lined ridge. Below him stretched a small valley and just beyond that another sloping ridge. He was only twenty-seven leagues north of Dracula’s fortified capital of Tirgoviste, which according to his spies was even now being frantically manned with troop and cannon in preparation for a siege against him.
Turning his mount, the sultan looked back into the forested valleys from which he had just traveled and watched his army of over 100,000 men struggling through the dense trees and marshy ground. Like one long, serpentine beast, the great troop moved, comprised of Arabian calvary in white turbans, azab spearmen in robes of red and green, Janissary shock troops in long mail tunics, the beshlis with their deadly firearms, and slave soldiers known as sipahis who hoped to win their freedom if they survived the campaign. Struggling to keep up in the boggy ground, heavy cannon and supply wagons followed, mixed with the sick and wounded stragglers who had fallen behind.
In 1453, only ten years before, the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II had, at the age of twenty-one, sacked the Christian city of Constantinople and broken the back of the Byzantine Empire for good, sending waves of panic throughout the Western world. Now his once-glorious army found themselves wearily trampling through a rugged landscape filled with dark forests and impenetrable marshes in order to punish the Wallachian prince Dracula and his boyar noblemen for raiding lands that belonged to the Ottoman Empire.
As his army left Constantinople and pushed to cross the Danube River, his military advisors were confident that the sultan’s forces, which outnumbered those of Dracula’s more than four to one, would make quick work of the infidels and transform the vassal state of Wallachia into a new Turkish province. Yet from the beginning of the campaign the enemy refused to meet him in direct battle, choosing to rely instead on lightning-quick raids to the army’s flanks and rear. They had also adopted a scorched-earth tactic, burning crops, poisoning wells, and depopulating the countryside ahead of his advance for miles to come. Hunger and thirst now consumed them all, and while the sultan sent foragers farther afield to gather food, they increasingly fell prey to the prince’s forces.
The worst of the fighting occurred just a few nights before while the Turkish army lay encamped. Mehmed remembered waking in the darkness of his tent to the sounds of clashing steel and the screams of dying men. Grabbing his scimitar, he rushed out only to be immediately surrounded by his personal guards. Flares lit the sky and tents blazed as his men battled against an attack force of knights, led by Dracula himself, who using the darkness made a desperate charge into the camp killing all in their path. If the enemy had not mistaken the tents of two of his viziers, Mahmud and Issac, for his own and concentrated their attack there, the sultan knew he might not be alive this day. While initially many of his troops fled in panic, screaming “the Kazıklı Voyvoda has come,” it was his beloved Janissaries who rallied and forced the attackers to retreat. Many of his men died that night under the sword and lance of his enemy, but now that they were in reach of Dracula’s capital it would all be over soon.
An officer of the advance guard quickly galloped up the ridge towards the sultan’s position, breaking his thoughts.
“Your highness …” he breathlessly exclaimed as he came to a stop and bowed low in his saddle. “The advance has stalled just over the next ridge … there’s something you must see, my lord.”
There was terror in the man’s eyes, making Mehmed grip the hilt of his scimitar tightly.
“Very well then, lead on,” the sultan barked, spurring his horse forward, and the armored troop descended into the valley and up the opposite slope. Upon cresting the rise, the whole party came to a stop as if they had crashed into an invisible barrier. The horses rose on hind legs and cried out in fear, and it took all the strength the riders possessed to keep them from pure blind panic.
Before the sultan and his men lay a scene so horrific that even the most battle-hardened of his officers shuddered in dread amazement. Below them on a vast plain spread a forest of 20,000 stakes placed at various heights, each with the decaying carcass of a Turkish captive impaled upon it. The smell of rotting flesh filled the air as carrion birds circled, screeching and fighting over the ghastly feast. This was the work of the Impaler, and for the sultan it was too much to bear.
“I cannot take the land of a man who could do such a thing,” he said almost to himself as the last of his resolve melted away. “It will be dark soon and we must camp, but tomorrow we return to our own lands and away from this accursed place.”
That night the Turkish army dug a deep trench around their encampment to keep out the Impaler, and the next day the soldiers of the great Ottoman Empire began to retreat back across the Danube River.
Vlad III Dracula was born in the heavily fortified town of Sighisoara, Transylvania, on a cold winter night in 1431—the same year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for witchcraft. His father, Vlad II, was an exiled contender for the throne of Wallachia, a region bordering eastern Transylvania in what is now part of Romania, while his mother was the Princess Cneajna of Moldavia. That same year his father traveled to the city of Nuremberg, where he was initiated into the Order of the Dragon, founded in 1408 by the Hungarian King Sigismund to oppose the spread of the Turkish Ottoman Empire into Christian lands. To honor his new allegiance, Vlad II took the name Dracul, which in Romanian means both “dragon” and “devil.” His infant son, Vlad III, was therefore given the surname Dracula, which can be translated into “son of the dragon” or, more ominously, “son of the devil.”
Five years later, in 1436, Vlad II Dracul ascended the throne of Wallachia over the bodies of his main rivals, the House of Danesti, who were aligned with Hungarian interests. Dracula, like any young prince of the era, spent his days with Greek and Romanian tutors studying geography, mathematics, science, and languages, as well as the arts of warfare and combat. Yet even in these early days the young prince exhibited a dark fascination for the macabre, and it’s noted that he took great pleasure in watching criminals being led from their cells to his father’s castle courtyard to be hanged. When Dracula was twelve, his father shifted policies and allied himself with his sworn enemy, the Turks, against the greater threat of Hungarian aggression. In return for Turkish support, Vlad II Dracul consented to pay tribute to the sultan, part of which included sending his sons Dracula and Radu to the Ottoman court as royal hostages to ensure his loyalty.
It was during his stay among the Turks from 1444 to 1448 that Dracula’s propensity for cruelty and bloodlust was further shaped and refined by the various methods of torture and execution he learned from his captors. One of his favorites was that of impalement, which he later used to such great effect that it earned him the title Kazıklı Voyvoda, “the Impaler prince,” among his enemies. A stout pole or stake was sharpened at one end and driven into the rectum or side of the condemned person, who was then hoisted into the air. Gravity and the victim’s own struggles forced the stake deeper into the body, slicing into organs and eventually working its way out through the sternum, mouth, or the top of the head in an excruciatingly painful process that could take days to kill the victim. In some cases the stakes were oiled to avoid piercing vital organs and to prolong the process, and even infants were sometimes impaled upon the very stakes that protruded from their mother’s dying breast.
In December of 1447 the boyars, or landholding nobles, of Wallachia rebelled against Vlad II Dracul and assassinated him in the marshes of Balteni, near Bucharest, to make way for the return of his old nemesis, the House of Danesti. Dracul’s eldest son and immediate heir to the kingdom, Mircea, was also captured and blinded with red-hot iron stakes before being buried alive. To keep the Hungarian throne from using the turmoil as a pretext to invade Wallachia, the Turks released the now seventeen-year-old Prince Dracula, who with the support of Turkish cavalry and other troops led a bold and successful coup to recapture his homeland. The son of the dragon had finally returned, and this time he was out for blood.
Over a period spanning the next twenty-eight years, Vlad III Dracula ruled Wallachia on three separate occasions in 1448, 1456 to 1462, and for a brief two months in 1476. Upon first taking the throne, Dracula was met by a land wracked with internal conflicts, rampant crime, a failing agricultural system, and an unstable economy. Wasting no time, the young prince enacted a series of long and bloody reforms aimed at consolidating his power and ridding the land of potential threats to Wallachia’s stability. One of his first acts was to avenge the deaths of his father and brother and exterminate the greedy boyars who lined their pockets with foreign gold at the expense of the people.
In what can only be seen as a bit of brilliant Machiavellian maneuvering, Dracula invited all the wealthy boyar households to an Easter celebration as a sign of his reconciliation and forgiveness. At the end of the festivities, as the nobles left one by one, soldiers loyal to Dracula seized and placed them in chains. Once all the guests were rounded up, Dracula immediately impaled the old and infirm among them on tall spikes. The rest he force-marched under guard for two weary days until they reached the ruins of Poenari Castle, sitting high above the Arges River gorge. Here he planned to rebuild the once-imposing fortress and would use the nobles as labor. Men, women, and children were brutally worked until their once gaily colored Easter clothing became rags and fell from their limbs. Many died in the construction either from falls into the gorge or from pure exhaustion, but in this one bold stroke Dracula achieved several important aims: he effectively rooted out any remaining boyar resistance to his rule; he seized the boyars’ wealth and lands, giving him an instant source of capital to buy loyal followers; and it gave him the dispensable workforce he needed to compete his castle stronghold.
Once most of Dracula’s political opponents lay either broken among the rocks at the base of his castle or rotting atop blood-drenched stakes, the now-seasoned prince could turn his attention to other matters, but as with all his measures, Dracula moved with a tyrant’s callous brutishness. In one example of Dracula’s particular brand of justice, a Gypsy was caught stealing in a nearby village and thrown into the dungeon. When relatives of the man came to beg for his release, Dracula had the thief boiled in a pot and forced his relatives to eat the body, after which he had them impaled for the crime of cannibalism.
On another occasion, the prince became distressed that his land was becoming overrun with vagabonds and other undesirables who drained the countryside of its resources and burdened the people. Taking a page from his earlier playbook, Dracula held a great feast at his castle and invited all the poor, lame, sick, and homeless in his kingdom to attend. Once the riotous guests filled their bellies to the point of bursting and their flagons to the point of drunkenness, Dracula stood before the assembly and asked if after all this there was anything else they might want. They in their joviality answered back that their lord had now given them everything they could ever ask for. This appealed to Dracula’s ironic nature, and with a wolfish grin he exited the hall, locked the doors behind him, and set the place ablaze—killing all inside.
Yet of all the bloody acts Dracula committed, it is perhaps his raid on the Transylvanian town of Brasov in April of 1459 that received the most attention. Brasov was primarily a German Saxon town whose merchants were competing with native Wallachians for trade in the region. In order to break their monopoly, Dracula sacked the town with his army. After blasphemously looting the local church, his forces led thousands of the town’s people outside the city walls and impaled them. When a nobleman in his routine complained of the stench, the prince had him impaled on a taller stake so that he would be above the smell.
During many of the mass impalings he ordered it was said that Dracula liked to have a table set amid the stakes where he could dine and casually watch his victims writhing in agony. Adding to the tales it was also claimed that his servants collected into a bowl the blood that ran down the stakes, which Dracula frequently dipped bread into and ate. Although the latter addition of blood-drinking may have been an invention by his German enemies to demonize him to the rest of Europe, the stories of his atrocities and allegations of blood-drinking began appearing in pamphlets across the continent even in his own lifetime. Two of the most famous examples that survive to this day were printed in Nuremberg in 1499 and Strasbourg in 1500 and show the well-dressed prince at a table dining before a forest of impaled bodies, while his soldiers hack and boil other victims in a caldron.
It is estimated by some that during the course of Dracula’s reign he impaled between 40,000 and 100,000 victims, a figure that does not take into account those he killed by other means.
By the year 1462, Prince Dracula began to chafe under the heavy yoke of the Ottoman Empire, and goaded by calls from Pope Pius II for a new crusade against Turkish aggression, he decided to break his alliance with Sultan Mehmed II. Since he could ill afford to battle along two fronts simultaneously, his first move was to seek an uneasy peace with his former enemies to the west: the Hungarian dynasty and the German Saxons of Transylvania. Having achieved a truce with his neighbors and even promises of support from the Hungarians, Dracula formulated a plan to draw the sultan into armed conflict. He began by ceasing his annual shipment of tribute in the sum of 10,000 ducats to the Turks, claiming that years of constant warfare with his neighbors left him no time to deliver on these earlier promises.
He next seized any Turkish merchants or officials unfortunate enough to cross into his lands and impaled them on stakes. In one well-recorded incident, Turkish emissaries arrived at his court to inquire as to the prince’s true intentions and remind him of his debt to the sultan. When Dracula asked them to remove their turbans in his presence, something he knew they could not do, the diplomats refused, citing that it was against their customs. Enraged, Dracula had them held while his men nailed the turbans to their heads with tiny metal pins. He sent them, insulted and bleeding, back to their master as a clear message of his intentions. Finally, Dracula began raiding Turkish settlements across the Danube River, burning and pillaging without mercy. The sultan was furious by these acts of open hostility, and Dracula now had his war.
In the initial phases of the campaign, Dracula’s forces seemed unstoppable as they crossed into Turkish Bulgaria, laying waste to the countryside; but while many of the Christian kingdoms he hoped to draw into the conflict praised his efforts, none, including the Hungarians, came to his aid. The sultan in the meantime was committed to other fronts in Asia but finally managed to turn his attention to the fighting along his western borders, and with a massive army he invaded the tiny kingdom of Wallachia. Over the course of the conflict, Dracula’s smaller force struck repeatedly at the lumbering Turkish army with lightning-quick raids and guerilla tactics designed to wear their opponent down.
By the time the sultan limped back home with his broken army, it’s estimated that almost one-third of his original forces were lost to the fighting. While Dracula was momentarily seen as the victor of the contest, he too suffered tremendous losses and desertions that chipped away at his forces until there was little left save a small group of loyal bodyguards hiding in the mountains. More damaging, however, was that dissident boyars weary of his harsh tactics began turning against him in favor of his brother Radu, who was still in service to the sultan.
Later that year, Dracula’s war finally came to an end when he was ambushed and taken captive by the soldiers of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who had initially pledged to assist Dracula in his struggle against the Turks. Charges of secretly seeking a truce with the Ottomans were trumped up with forged documents, and for the next twelve years Prince Dracula remained a prisoner of the Hungarians at Visegrád, near Buda. No stranger to captivity, Dracula managed to win the favor of King Matthias during his stay, even marrying the king’s cousin Ilona Szilagyi and converting to Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Hungarian court. In 1475 Dracula was officially released and accompanied the king in fighting against the Turks in Bosnia, where he proved himself once again a fierce and merciless fighter. Impressed by his prowess in battle and looking to put a pro-Hungarian back in charge of Wallachia, Corvinus placed Dracula at the head of a Hungarian army in 1476 and gave him the green light to win back his kingdom.
With his new fighting force, Dracula once again entered the lands of his father to face the Turks, but after several months of brutal fighting the legendary Impaler Prince fell in battle. Details of his end are sketchy at best and depend on who is telling the story, but the most popular claim is that he was killed in battle by his own men. The story goes on to say that he slew five of his attackers with his own sword before being brought down with the arrows and lances of his adversaries.
While it’s true that Dracula had many enemies on both sides of the border eager to spill his blood, it is perhaps the contemporaneous chronicler Jakob Unrest who gives us our clearest view of the prince’s last moments. He recounts that in the winter of 1476 Dracula’s forces were attacked by a much larger group of four thousand Turks near Snagov Monastery, and that Dracula was assassinated by his personal servant in a small, lonely clearing among the marshes in a forest near Bucharest. His head was then cut off and spirited away to Constantinople, where the sultan displayed it on a pole so that all might see that the dreaded son of the dragon was finally dead.
Bloody Countess
When my men entered Csejthe Manor, they found a girl dead in the house; another followed in death as a result of many wounds and agonies. In addition to this, there was also a wounded and tortured woman there; the other victims were kept hidden away where this damned woman prepared these future martyrs.
—letter from györgy thurzó to his wife (december 30, 1610), as quoted in kimberly l. craft, infamous lady: the true story of countess erzsébet báthory
The company of men made their way grimly through the darkness wrapped against the winter cold in heavy woolen cloaks. Their leader, Lord György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary, paused for a moment as the silent troop continued to file by. Peering through the lightly falling snow to the mountain slopes above, the dark shape of an imposing castle perched like a dangerous beast threatening to devour them. Yet for Lord Thurzó and his men, what waited for them behind those ancient walls that night would be something they would never forget.
When the men finally reached the castle’s massive wooden doors, they were surprised to find them open and unguarded. Creeping inside the smoky, torchlit hall, they spied the body of a young servant girl lying in a pool of her own blood.
One of the men moved forward and examined the corpse. “She is from the castle, my lord,” he whispered. “It looks as if she has been stabbed and beaten many times.”
The men hurriedly discarded their cloaks and drew their swords.
“I want every inch of this damned castle searched,” Thurzó growled. “But most importantly, I want the countess.”
As the men advanced farther into the castle, what followed was a confusing nightmare of horrid sights and sounds. Two more unfortunate women were found tortured and discarded: one long past help while the other clung weakly to life with shallow, ragged breaths. Thurzó stopped long enough to order two of his men to carry the survivor back down the mountain to the village below while the rest continued onward. Deeper into the castle’s depths the men were halted by anguished screams coming from behind a bolted door. Bursting through the wooden barrier, they were shocked by the sight of three old women and a disfigured boy gleefully stabbing to death a young naked girl stretched on a table. In one corner of the chamber another small girl huddled with her head in her hands awaiting the same fate. Rushing forward, the men quickly arrested the murderous foursome and bound them with heavy ropes.
Continuing through the hellish chambers, the armed men came upon still more dead girls all bearing the marks of torture. When they finally chanced upon the door of the countess’s private chambers, even the most hardened among them hesitated. Then, making the sign of the cross as if to protect himself from the evil that waited within, Lord Thurzó stepped forward and kicked in the door.
Rising from an overstuffed chair, the richly clad visage of Countess Erzsébet Báthory came into view, cast by the hellish glow of the fireplace behind her. Momentarily startled by the intrusion, the aging countess, once famed for her haunting beauty, now stood amazed at the sight of the Palatine of Hungary himself standing in her chamber door with his sword drawn.
Twisting her face into an arrogant rage, the countess screamed, “How dare you enter my chambers in such a manner!”
Fueled by what he had seen that night, Thurzó grabbed the countess by the hair and dragged her out into the hallway kicking and screaming. Pulling her up short with a hard yank, Thurzó looked into her cold, hate-filled eyes and from behind clenched teeth exclaimed, “Madam, in the name of the king, you are under arrest.”
If not for the arrest of the Countess Erzsébet Báthory that fateful night of December 29, 1610, the world may never have known of the extraordinary crimes committed by what is perhaps one of history’s most prolific female serial killers. Báthory was accused of the torture and murder of as many as six hundred young girls during her life, and later historians alleged that she also practiced black magic against her political enemies, engaged in lesbian activities with her aunt, and worst of all, drank and bathed in the blood of her victims.
Born on August 7, 1560, at Ecsed Castle in what is now the eastern part of Hungary, Erzsébet Báthory was a precocious child known for uncontrollable fits of rage and violent seizures. Brought up in the privilege and wealth of an influential family of Hungarian nobles, she enjoyed all of the advantages her station afforded, including the best tutors in Eastern Europe and a small company of obedient servants who catered to her every whim.
By the age of fifteen Báthory was wed to an older man named Count Ferenc Nadasdy in a union that promised mutual advantage to both families. Nadasdy was a national hero to the Hungarian people through service against the Turks, but as captain of the Hungarian army he was also an absent husband. During what became known as the Fifteen Years’ War, from 1593 to 1606, Nadasdy is listed as participating in every battle until his death on January 4, 1604, possibly from appendicitis. Besides his reputation as a Hungarian patriot, Ferenc Nadasdy was also known as a cruel and vicious opponent whom the Turks called “The Black Knight of Hungary.” One report even mentions that Nadasdy reveled in entertaining his fellow knights by mockingly dancing with the corpses of his enemies or playing catch and kickball with the heads of executed prisoners.
Many historians believe that it was the bloodthirsty Nadasdy who first introduced the countess to the finer arts of torture during the brief periods when he was home. The two often severely punished their household servants for even the smallest infractions. One penalty Nadasdy particularly relished was to strip an offending servant girl of her clothes, cover her in honey, and force her to stand in the hot summer sun to be tormented by insects. Another favorite punishment was to insert pieces of oiled paper between the toes of servants who had passed out from overwork and light the pieces of paper on fire.
In this manner the couple reigned over their servants with terror and violence, and some have surmised that the young countess may even have periodically suffered the same treatment at the hands of her brutal husband when she did not comply with his wishes. Regardless of where Báthory first developed her taste for cruelty, her husband also acted to restrain her sadism from resulting in murder. For the “Hero of Hungary,” murder brought suspicion and unwanted scrutiny, and in numerous recorded instances he hurried home from the front to cajole local officials into turning a blind eye to his wife’s savage excesses.
With the death of her husband in 1604, however, there was suddenly nothing standing in the way of the countess, and it was from this period on that she developed her legendary taste for blood. Perhaps of one of the best known claims against the countess is that she regularly bathed in the blood of adolescent girls, whom she tortured and killed in the belief that their virginal blood would forever keep her young and beautiful. She is said to have stumbled upon the practice after striking a servant girl one day for some minor infraction. As the countess was wiping the servant’s blood from her face and hands, she noticed that it left her skin looking fresher and rosier. Following the recommendation of a local witch named Anna Darvolya, whom she befriended, the countess immediately had the girl killed and drained of her blood, in which the countess bathed. The horrid act soon became a routine that she regularly performed with the aid of Darvolya in the dark hours of the night deep within her protective castle. Over time the countess enlisted the aid of four others to help her lure, with the promise of employment, local village girls to her castle, where they were tortured and killed. The first helper was a deformed boy named Janos Ujvary; the next was an old washer woman named Katalin Beneczky; and the final two were old servants named Ilona Jo Nagy and Dorottya Szentes.
Like her husband, the countess also had favorite forms of torture she indulged in, one of which included stripping a girl of her clothes and forcing her to stand in the freezing cold until she died of exposure. If the process seemed to be taking too long, she would douse her victim with buckets of cold water to speed things up. In other cases she stuck pins under the nails of some girls and cut their fingers off if they dared to try and remove the pins. Some she starved to death, others she cut or strangled, and many were beaten with an iron bar until they died from their wounds. When she was too weak or sick to do the job herself, she had the servants brought to her in bed, where she bit them viciously about the face and shoulders.
Many of the crimes the countess and her accomplices committed took place at Csejthe Castle, which she used as her base of power. Witnesses to many of the events testified afterwards that the countess maintained a series of inner rooms deep within the fortress that she kept under lock and guard and from which late at night the sounds of screams could be heard. When the bodies of her victims began piling up, disposing of them posed a major problem. At first they were secretly buried in the local cemetery at night, but as the cemetery filled up, Báthory’s accomplices began stacking the bodies in the closets and under the beds of the castle. When her conspirators grew too lazy, they brazenly flung bodies over the battlements to be devoured by wolves.
As the years passed and the countess’s deeds continued to go unpunished, she grew bold enough to make the one mistake that would bring her under the scrutiny of the royal court. Until now the countess had chosen her victims from the common peasant stock that resided within her holdings. Having depleted that source, she turned to young girls of noble families, whom she lured into her service with promises of advancement through the ranks of society.
When these girls started disappearing, the ruler of Hungary, King Matthias, began keeping an eye on the countess and her activities. The Hungarian court was after all indebted to the Báthory family for an extraordinary sum of money, which it had previously borrowed to help finance its wars against the Turks. If the countess were to be found guilty of some crime, then not only could the debt be erased but the king might have a claim to her vast estates. With continued complaints filtering in to the king from worried nobles over the mysterious deaths of their daughters, the court ordered the Lord Palatine (a high-level official) Count György Thurzó, coincidentally Báthory’s own cousin, to arrest her in 1610.
On January 2, 1611, a trial ensued against the countess’s four accomplices, who, after being tortured, confessed their crimes as well as the complicity of the countess herself. The four were quickly found guilty and sentenced to public execution while the countess, who was never officially tried, was sentenced to perpetuis carceribus, or perpetual life imprisonment. The punishment was meted out by bricking her in the tower room of her castle with only a small space to allow food to be passed inside. Three years into her sentence, on August 21, 1614, the countess was found dead of natural causes at the then ripe old age of fifty-four.
Despite her many protests of innocence there were few who believed her and even fewer who would support her against the crown. While the king failed to seize her lands, in the end he did manage to wipe out the sizable debt he owed. While the final body count was said to number as many as 650 young girls, this figure had one source: an unknown servant girl who based her claims on hearsay. More realistic estimates report that over the course of two decades it was probably closer to fifty. While none of the three hundred witnesses who gave testimony to her crimes actually saw her commit them with their own eyes, the accusations alone were enough to condemn her.
Indeed, legends of her bloody bathing rituals did not even surface until a hundred years after her death, when a Jesuit priest named László Turóczi collected stories from the villages surrounding Csejthe Castle during the height of the vampire mania that swept Eastern Europe in the 1700s. Though Erzsébet Báthory failed to find the immortality legend claims she sought in the blood of others, she may have finally achieved it in the gruesome legacy she left behind.
Bluebeard
… Lord de Rais and his followers, his accomplices, conveyed away a certain number of small children, or other persons, and had them snatched, whom they struck down and killed, to have their blood, heart, liver, or other such parts, to make them a sacrifice to the devil, or to do other sorceries with, on which subject there are numerous complaints.
—georges bataille, the trial of gilles de rais
Once upon a time, in the Duchy of Brittany, there lived a wealthy and powerful nobleman known as Bluebeard, because he sported a large blue beard that lent him a rather frightening appearance. One day Bluebeard desired the young daughter of a neighboring lord, and after a period of courtship convinced her to marry him despite his fearsome countenance and the fact that his previous wives had all disappeared mysteriously.
As soon as the two were wed, they settled down in one of Bluebeard’s many fine castles and lived peacefully until one day he abruptly told his new wife that he must leave on a long journey immediately. Saddling his steed in haste, Bluebeard turned and handed his wife a heavy ring of keys, stating, “On this ring are the keys that unlock every door within this great castle. As my wife you are free to roam about its halls and chambers as you see fit, but the small room deep within the castle’s keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger.” Taken aback by the fiery look in her husband’s eyes, the young wife dutifully agreed to his command and waved goodbye as he spurred his horse through the postern gate.
Days went by, turning into weeks, as the young wife filled her time waiting for her husband to return by exploring the many twisting corridors and lofty staircases of the castle’s interior. In time, however, she grew bored with these and found herself returning again and again to the very door that Bluebeard had forbidden her to enter. Finally one day her curiosity got the best of her, and wondering what great mysteries lay within, she slipped a key inside the door’s worn lock face and heaved it open.
Adjusting her eyes to the stygian darkness, the young wife gasped in horror at the charnel house she beheld. From floor to ceiling the room was splashed in putrid-smelling blood as the badly mutilated bodies of Bluebeard’s former wives hung from the walls like gruesome trophies. Reeling from the shock of it, the wife slammed the door shut remembering the words her husband spoke to her before leaving: But the small room deep within the castle’s keep you must never enter, for the day you do you shall feel the wrath of my deadly anger.
That same evening Bluebeard unexpectedly returned from his travels, and after washing the dust from his massive blue beard demanded that his wife return the keys he had left in her safekeeping. Noticing how she trembled before him, Bluebeard’s eyes narrowed into angry slits as he hissed, “So, now you know my secret, do you not, my love?”
Falling to her knees, the frightened wife cried out, “Please, my lord, I did not mean to disobey your wishes.”
But Bluebeard’s cold heart would show no pity. As he slowly drew his sword, he exclaimed, “Now, good wife, you will finally join my other wives and make a fine addition to my wall.”
Before Bluebeard could deliver the deadly blow, however, a loud crash sounded at the chamber door, and in burst the wife’s two brothers with their swords drawn—she having sent word to her family of the danger she was in. In order to save himself, Bluebeard turned to run, but the brothers were quicker and ran him through with their blades, ending his life and saving their sister from the horrifying fate that awaited her in that bloody room deep within the confines of the castle’s keep.
The bloody tale of Bluebeard was known to exist long before Charles Perrault first published it in his 1697 collection of French folktales entitled Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Some even speculate that it was created as a veiled warning by the peasantry of Brittany to caution children to steer clear of real-life Bluebeards and their castles in a time when accusing the French nobility of any crime could mean the loss of one’s own head.
Who, then, was this French nobleman who so terrorized the countryside of Brittany to the extent that he was immortalized in the folktales of the French people? While several candidates have been put forward by scholars over the years, many attribute the origin of the tale to one of the country’s greatest knights, Gilles de Rais, who fought his way through the ranks to become Marshal of France.
He was born in 1404 to Guy de Laval-Montmorency and Marie de Craon at the family’s castle at Machecoul. Both his parents died while Gilles was still very young, and he afterwards found himself under the tutelage of his scheming grandfather, Jean de Craon. Left to his own devices as a child, few if any restraints were placed upon him—and while some education was afforded him, most of his time was spent preparing for his introduction to the battlefields of France. During the frequent and violent clashes that later became known as the Hundred Years’ War, Gilles distinguished himself as a courageous and reckless warrior earning many honors upon the field. In 1420, Gilles inherited his father’s estates and increased his fortune by marrying Catherine de Thouars.
For a French nobleman of the period, however, the only true profession was that of war, and from 1427 to 1435 he served as a commander in the royal army, fighting alongside Joan of Arc against the English and their Burgundian allies. After the siege of Orléans in 1429, Gilles and three other lords were rewarded with the honor of transporting the holy oil of Saint Remy to Notre-Dame de Reims for the coronation of Charles VII as King of France, after which Gilles was named Marshal of France.
A few years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake as a witch by her English enemies in 1431, Gilles hung up his spurs and sword and retired to his vast estates, where he quickly squandered his wealth with extravagant displays and costly theatrical productions. Before long these excesses threatened to bankrupt him, and he did the unthinkable for a French nobleman: he began selling off his holdings to pay for his uncontrolled spending. Feeling the pinch, Gilles also looked for alternative solutions to his dwindling funds and several times found himself swindled by charlatans claiming to be magicians who could turn base metals into gold through alchemy. When these failed, Gilles grew more desperate and began experimenting with the occult under the direction of an equally suspicious character named Francesco Prelati, who claimed to be able to raise a demon he called by the name “Baron.” It was this demon, Gilles later testified, that first provided the impetus for his ghastly crimes, as Prelati promised the restoration of his fortune if he would but sacrifice the lives of innocent children to the evil fiend.
Regardless of whether Gilles truly believed that torturing and murdering children would satisfy the demon Baron or, as is more likely the case, he was simply satisfying his own inner demons, it’s believed that he began his bloody work in the spring of 1432 after the death of his grandfather. Most of the abductions involved local village children whose parents were powerless to complain and occurred deep inside the moated walls of his castle at Machecoul, where even their screams could not be heard. The first documented case concerned a twelve-year-old boy named Jeudon, an apprentice furrier. Gilles’s cousins, Gilles de Sille and Roger de Briqueville, asked the boy to deliver a message to the castle, but when he failed to return the accomplices told inquirers that the boy must have been carried off by bandits.
Often the crimes followed a ritualistic pattern. They began subtly with a twisted game of cat and mouse that involved dressing the abducted child in fine clothes and setting before him a feast unlike anything he had seen before. As the child ate with relish, Gilles and a small band of confidants riotously feasted and drank a mixture of heated spice wine known as hippocras. Then when the party reached a fever pitch, the child was suddenly taken to a private room where Gilles had him strung up with ropes and strangled while he watched. Many tortures and abuses were committed against his victims before they were finally beheaded with a thick, double-edged blade known as a braquemard. Witnesses to these horrific events later reported that Gilles also stabbed some in the jugular and allowed the warm blood to cover him, which he drank with great excitement. When the men were done with the victim, the body and any traces of the crime were destroyed by fire and the ashes dumped into the castle’s moat.
Such atrocities might have gone unpunished if Gilles’s own greed and arrogance had not gotten the better of him. On May 15, 1440, he and a small band of armed followers kidnapped a local cleric during a dispute over property Gilles had sold to the clergyman’s brother and now intended to take back by force. The incident prompted an investigation by the Bishop of Nantes, who in the process uncovered shocking evidence of Gilles’s darker crimes. In short order, Gilles and two close servants, Henriet and Poitou, were arrested and charged with unspeakable crimes ranging from witchcraft to murder. During the trial that followed, Gilles did little to exonerate himself in the eyes of the court but to the contrary exhibited a number of bizarre behaviors, including attempts at bribing the court and delusions that he was a Carmelite monk. In the end, however, Gilles finally admitted to the charges against him in all the graphic details he could muster for the court scribes who took his confession. He was condemned to die by the hangman’s noose.
At nine o’clock on October 26, 1440, Gilles and his co-defendants were led to their place of execution on the Île de Nantes, where in a crowded meadow he addressed onlookers with contrition and remorse, even extolling Henriet and Poitou to die bravely and think of salvation. Gilles was then hung by the neck until dead, after which the body was carried away to an unknown resting place. His co-defendants also faced the rope, and afterwards, like many of their young victims, were burned to ashes and scattered to the wind.
It’s difficult to truly account for the number of children who fell into the clutches of the bloodthirsty Gilles de Rais, since he carefully disposed of the bodies. Most of his victims, both boys and girls, ranged in age between six and eighteen, and while some historians claim the final body count is somewhere between eighty and two hundred, others have estimated it could be as high as six hundred.
Although Gilles de Rais achieved many triumphs on the battlefield in defense of his country, it will be his crimes history remembers most. Several years after his execution, his daughter Marie erected a stone memorial at the place of his execution, which over generations became strangely regarded as a holy altar until it was destroyed by Jacobins during the French Revolution. Now all that remains of Gilles de Rais are horror stories told to children to keep them awake at night.