Historical Women - Ecsedi Báthory Erzsébet

Erzsébet

Ecsedi Báthory Erzsébet, or Countess Elizabeth Báthory as she is known in Western tradition, was born in Nyírbátor in Hungary in 1560. We know that her family was wealthy and her uncle and grandfather are said to have been the two of the mightiest men in the country at the time.

Erzsébet learned Latin, German and Greek and had great influence in the contemporary Hungarian nobility. When she was eleven years old, she was betrothed to Ferenc Nádasdy who was the son of a baron. The wedding was held when Erzsébet was 15. Because she was marrying down, she kept her family name and as a wedding present, Ferenc gave her the castle Csejte in the Carpathian Mountains and the 17 villages that belonged to it.

Ferenc went off to war against the Ottoman empire in 1578. This meant that Erzsébet was left in charge of her household, but also for the Hungarian health care. During this period, she not only cared for her family and staff, but for women in precarious situations. What is interesting is that there is nothing from this time period that indicates what is said to have happened after Ferenc died in 1604.

Also based on what is about to come, there is absolutely no reason to accuse Erzsébet of murdering her husband. He seems to have died of an illness he had had for three years. She also seems to have been very happy in her marriage with him. They had five children together. (There are rumours about some bastards too, we do not know for sure.) Ferenc left the responsibility for his family to his friend  György Thurzó.

Already in 1602 there had been rumours that not everything in the castle Csejte was as it should though and a lot of complaints were made to the government between 1602 and 1604 and around 1610, they finally decided to look deeper into them. For two years they collected over 300 witnesses from priests, the nobility and the lower classes which resulted in a horrifying tale if it was all true.

Erzsébet is said to have held her servant girls chained with their hands in the air during the nights so they became blue and bled. She shall have also beaten them so badly that they had to use ash and cinder to shrape the blood of the walls. She is also said to have burnt her servants with metal rods (some of them, she shall have stuck up into the genitals of the victims), glowing keys and coins and burnt their soles. She shall also have stabbed them and poked them with needles in their eyes, tongue and underneath the nails. One also believed her to cut their hands, lips and noses with scissors.

To destroy the genitals of her victims, she is also said to have used needles, knives, candles and her own teeth and she shall also have sown up their mouth with needles and threads. There are also lots of witness accounts proclaiming that she forced her victims to sit in, bathe in nettles and/or that pushed nettles into their shoulders and breasts. Some is also said to have been forced to stand in containers with ice water up unto their shoulders until they frose to death.There is also a story of Erzsébet having daubed a girl in honey and left her outside to have insects sting and eat off of her.

There are also stories about Erzsébet starving her servants one week at a time and forced them to drink their own urine. They shall also have been forced to cook and eat their own flesh or serving it to guests.

In 1610 György Thurzó went to Cstejte with an order from the government to arrest Erzsébet and he is said to have caught her in the act. At the time you were allowed to beat servants, but everyone agreed that Erzsébet had gone way out of line.

She is thought to have killed over 650 young girls. At first from the lower classes, who worked as servants in her castle. No one reacted, however, until she moved on to more higher classes of society. there are testimonies that she kidnapped girls from the 17 villages that belonged to the castle when the lower classs girls stopped coming to her. When György Thurzó came to the castle, he is said to have seen one dead girl, one girl who was dying and a lot others who was locked in cages.

Erzsébet social status meant that she was first sentenced to be forced into a convent without trial, but as the terrifying tale was exposed, the government decided that a trial was needed. There were lot of witnesses and only one of them gave a statement against the accusations. There was also an investigation of the skeletal remains that were considered evidences. Three of the servants who was thought of as Erzsébet's helpers were sentenced to death. Erzsébet's punishment was to spend the rest of her days locked inte on of her castle's tower. She died there four years later.

There are a lot of myths and legends told about Erzsébet. For example a talein which she is supposed to have bathed in the blood of young girls exists too, seems to be several hundred years younger. Before all the rumours started in 1602, she is not portrayed as a monster at all even though she is said to be a very strict employer. The letters and other texts she wrote does not give any indication of her being crazy. Therefore it is hard to know if there are any truth in the stories of what she is supposed to have done to all those girls or if she was just considered dangerous because she was a woman in a powerful position.

Sources: 
I got this story from the user eeriedearie on Twitter. She tweets stories about serial killers in Swedish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory