countess.doc
                     THE BLOODY COUNTESS BATHORY

ELIZABETH BATHORY was born in 1560 in a great castle in the northwest part of
Hungary in the shadows of the Carpathian mountains near Transylvania.  Her
father, the Count Gyorgy Bathory, was a famous soldier and her mother, Anna, was
the sister of Stephen Bathory, the king of Poland.  They were leaders of the
Protestant nobility within the empire.
     Elizabeth was brought up carefully and lovingly by her parents, who were so
far ahead of their time intellectually that she was taught to read and write, a
rare accomplishment for young women in those days, even among the nobility.  But
when she was ten years old, her father died suddenly, and on her mother's
shoulders fell all the cares of the family's enormous estates.  Also, she alone
had to determine the fate of her daughter Elizabeth.
     The next year, Anna arranged for the 11-year-old girl's  betrothal to
Ferencz Nadasdy, scion of another of the important Protestant families of
Hungary.  It was decided that Elizabeth should go to live in Leka at the chateau
of the Countess Ursula Nadasdy, her fiance's mother, to be trained to rule over
those great lands.  So she moved to that strange environment.  She was a
precocious girl in every way and was quickly bored by the routine of managing a
noble house.  For amusement, she took to frolicking with the peasants, which was
all right so long as she was eleven.  When she became twelve, things began to
change; and by the time she was thirteen, she was quite a grown-up young woman.
She continued to frolic, however, until she turned up pregnant, a peasant boy
the father of her unborn child.
     Elizabeth had the good sense to conceal her condition from her future
mother-in-law, but she did tell her mother, and Anna came storming down to the
Nadasdy chateau.  The poor girl, Anna declared, was in the first throes of a
dreadful and very infectious disease.  She had detected in just in time to
prevent the most dreadful consequences; there was not even opportunity to
discuss the matter with the Countess Nadasdy.  She rushed Elizabeth away for
"treatment."  At least part of what she said was true; among the nobility in
sixteenth-century Hungary, a young noblewoman could do almost anything to the
peasants except sleep with them.  Had the Countess Nadasdy even sniffed a hint
of the scandal, Elizabeth's betrothal would have been voided.  But she did not.
Countess Anna took her daughter to one of the more remote of the Bathory
castles, and there she remained until the disease had run its course and
Elizabeth had given birth to a baby.  Without a moment's delay, the child was
turned over to a local woman, who was sent out of the country with a generous
financial settlement and orders not to reappear in Hungary during Elizabeth's
lifetime.  That was the last ever heard of the baby.
     A few months  later, when Elizabeth was not quite fifteen years old, she
was married to the young Count Nadasdy.  For Hungarians it seemed a marriage
blessed by heaven.  The soldier-husband was a handsome, dashing young man with a
dark beard, and dark eyes and skin.  The bride was a beauty with big black eyes,
dark hair, the fairest of skin, regular features, and sensual lips.  He was
the youngest general ever to command the border fortress defenses of Southwest
Hungary.  She was the image of noble young woman hood, educated, intelligent,
apparently shy and virtuous, and beautiful in every way.  They were married in
Varanno on the edge of the Hungarian plain, between the two remote family
castles, on a lovely day, May 8, 1575.  The Emperor Maximilian was so pleased
with this alliance of two of the greatest houses of Hungary that he sent a
letter of approval, along with large golden jar of rare wine for a wedding
present and two hundred thalers in gold, which would keep a common Hungarian
citizen for ten years.
     In what was a hint of Elizbeth's true character, she chose to settle in one
of the smaller of the Nasady castles, Csejthe, a dark and foreboding
bastion on a rock high on the side of one of the Carpathian foothills, bordered
by dense forest where the wolves howled at night.  It was a wild and gloomy
place, with thick walls, low ceilings, few windows, and a labyrinth of
underground passages, cellars, and dungeons, hardly the sort of honeymoon 
cottage one would expect a sprightly, blushing bride to adopt.  But it was 
just what Elizabeth wanted, so she moved in, with husband, mother-in-law, and 
a raft of servants.
     When the count was about, life was fine for Elizabeth.  They began thinking
about raising a family and enjoyed themselves.  But when the count was off
fighting the wars with the Turks, Csejthe was indeed a dark and gloomy place.
Also, like many a young bride before and after her, Elizabeth had problems with
her mother-in-law.  The countess was a somber, puritanical, religious woman.
She forced Elizabeth to manage the household in the way of the Nadasdys.  As the
Turks took more and more of the count's time, it was not long before Elizabeth
became thoroughly bored.
     She was intelligent enough to leave the peasant boys alone now, but she had
to have something to love, so she turned to herself.  She painted her face
for hours.  The servants concocted various cosmetic preparations, and she
tried them all.  After every application of each new balm, she regarded
herself critically to see if it had made her more beautiful and, if so, how
much more beautiful.  She fussed for hours with her hair- when she was not
having headaches.  These came often.  Small wonder her servants prepared drugs
and potions by the score and she took them all in great quantity.  These were
supposed to bring about the conception of a child, for, in spite of the fact
that she and the count tried often when he was at home, no baby came for nearly
ten years.  It was very frustrating to the young bride, enough to drive her to
turn almost anywhere.   Elizabeth turned to magic, and that annoyed the 
Countess Nadasdy.  To avoid arguments, Elizabeth took to keeping to her own
apartments when the count was not around.  That behavior forestalled family
arguments, but it did not solve any of her problems, including loneliness. Since
peasant boys were off-limits, Elizabeth turned to peasant girls for amusement
when the count was soldiering.
     But as she grew older, the idea of amusement became something special.  She
favored beautiful blonde girls with big breasts, and among other things, she
liked to beat them and bite them.  The countess Ursula had some hint of this
behaviour, but fortunately for her immortal soul she died before she learned too
much about what was going on in Elizabeth's rooms.
     What was going on stopped, or slowed down, only when the count came home
for a respite from the wars.  Then he would take Elizabeth to Vienna, to the
great balls and parties given by the emperor and his entourage.
Elizabeth loved the glitter, but too soon it was time to return again.
     As time went on, she found herself able to relax enough to conceive again,
and between 1585 and 1595 she bore four children.  But the preoccupation with
the girls was an established part of her life.  To conceal from her husband what
really went on, she was constantly complaining about help.  The sewing girls had
to be beaten because they were slow in their work.  The maids had to be beaten
because they were slow in their work.  The maids had to be beaten because they
were stupid and insolent.  The serving girls had to be beaten because...
    The count heard these litanies with half an ear.  He had others things on
his mind, such as figuring out how to overcome the Turks, and raising that
family.
     One day when they were walking in the garden, the count and the countess
came across one of the servant girls, naked, tied to a tree, smeared with honey,
with insects crawling all over her body.  The count looked and made no
objection.  In fact, he taught his wife a few new tricks: for example, how to
put paper between the girl's toes and then light it.  That particular torture
was called "star-kicking," because it was said the pain would make the victims
see stars.
     When the children began coming along, from Elizabeth's letters to Ferencz
one would think that she was a totally devoted mother with no thought for
anything but her children.  But the fact was that the children were in the hands
of nurses and governesses, and Elizabeth was dabbling in black magic these days,
under the guidance of Dorottya Szentes, known as Dorko >note: there is a accent
over the o like /<    Dorko had been the wet nurse for Elizabeth's daughter Anna
until Anna was weaned.  When Elizabeth learned the Dorko was adept in the black
arts, the witch's future was assured.  She taught the countess chants and
incantations and the ways of magic.  One day Elizabeth wrote delightedly to
Ferencz at the front:

     Dorko has taught me something new:  Beat a small black fowl to death with a
     white cane.  Put a drop of its blood on your enemy's person, or, if you
     cannot reach him, on a piece of his clothing.  Then he will be unable to
     harm you.

     This was the faithful helpmeet, offering her soldier-husband the very
latest wrinkle in self-protection from his Turkish enemies.  He need
it.  The wars went on for years and he was away from home for months at a time.
Elizabeth had nothing to do but refine her own amusements.
     Often, she went to visit her aunt, the Countess Klara Bathory, who was
among Hungary's foremost lesbians of her day.  It was said that she raped
all her ladies-in-waiting.  What a time the two of them had!  Beating up naked,
big-bosomed serving girls was apparently the principal amusement of aunt and
niece during these visits.  Elizabeth learned a lot.  And so her two personal
maids, Barsovny and Otvos.  They were young, beautiful lesbians.  "Elizabeth
abandoned herself to all the possible pleasure one woman may know in the arms of
another," it was said.
     Back at home, Elizabeth put into practice what she had learned.  Girls were
marched down to the torture chamber in the bowels of the castle.  Sometimes they
were kept in the dungeon for days without food or water, awaiting their turns to
amuse the countess.  The Jo Ilona, along with Dorko took part in some of these
tortures.  So did Kateline Beniezky, Elizabeth's washerwoman.  But Elizabeth was
the leader; she was becoming a tiger in the torture game.
    In the winter of 1604 when Elizabeth was forty-four years old, her husband
took sick and died.  All Hungary mourned the death of this great soldier of
the realm.  To Elizabeth, his death meant an end to her sexual relationships
with men and a renewed furious round of torture orgies to keep herself merry in
her widowhood.
     Her valet, Ujvari Janos, was the only man in the castle privy to
Elizabeth's strange manners of amusement.  Ficzko, as she called him, around the
castle for big-busted peasant girls and promise their families that they would
be taken "into service" at the castle.  Then he brought them to Elizabeth, who
showed them what their service would be: To begin with, they were starved and
beaten bloody.  And soon there was to be more.

     At forty-four Elizabeth fretted ever more about her beauty.  It seemed to
be fading.  No longer was her skin pristine and unwrinkled.  There were lines at
her throat and on her forehead, the skin of her neck was not as white and soft
as it had once been.  The search for potions and lotions grew ever more frantic.
And onto the scene came Anna Darvulia, Elizabeth's new house magician, to
supervise the transformation of a middle-aged woman back into a girl.  Darvulia
stayed up half the night writing up incantations and preparing potions, and
during the day Elizabeth up incantations and preparings potions, and during the
day Elizabeth said the words and drank the draughts.  Darvulia made poulitices
from the leaves of deadly nightshade, henbane, and thorn apple, and Elizabeth
applied them to her skin.  Ever whiter the skin must be, younger, smoother,
lovelier- all in the increasingly frenetic search to restore her failing beauty.

     One day, as a maid was arranging Elizabeth's long black hair with a net of
pearls, the girl did something that annoyed Elizabeth.  The countess turned
around and dealt the girl such a blow in the face that blood spurted all over
her arms and hands.  When the blood had been washed away Elizabeth looked with
amazement at her hands and arms.
     Where the blood had fallen, her skin looked twenty years younger.  It was
beautiful  and soft once again.
    Blood!  Blood was the answer to everlasting beauty.

     What a dreadful discovery it was!  Sorcery and torture for sadistic
pleasure would now give way to baths of blood for beauty.  The girls
in the dungeon would soon know a new sort of service.
   Elizabeth now began to revel in blood.  Before, it had pleased her enough to
see the blood run as she beat the poor servants girls.  Now she sucked their
wounds and smeared the blood over her body.  She had come a long way in a
short time.
      The new Elizabeth had girls brought up from the cellars to her bedroom and
laid stark naked on the floor.  Then she tortured them, until the blood
ran so deep that the servants had to scoop it up by the cupful and being up
cinders to cover the puddles and stains.

Soon one girl was not enough.  So they were brought up in twos and threes, and
Elizabeth would run about her room beating one girl after another.  The more
they pleaded for mercy, the harder she beat them.  When she would become covered
with blood, everything would stop while the countess changed her dress- and then
she would be back at it agina.  When the girls collapsed from loss of blood and
the pain, more girls were brought up from the dungeon to replace them.  And when
there had been enough blood, it was time for other amusements.  If a serving
"lingered long and lovingly between Elizabeth's ceaselessly voracious thighs,
she might gain the Countess's favor."  But the favor never lasted long, for
Elizabeth cast off her favorites once the novelty each brought to her work had
faded.

     She would burn their cheeks and breasts with red-hot pokers prepared by her
lesbian assistants.  When she tired of this activity, she would sit in her
chair and watch while Dorko tortured the girls.  Dorko beat them and burned
them, and cut them with razors until the blood spurted.  The sight of spurting
blood began to give the countess the most extreme sexual pleasure.  She would
work herself into an almost maniacal state. She screamed "more Dorko, More.
Harder, much harder."  Then she would get back into the game and take a lighted
candle and burn the genitals of the girls.  it did not take much of this to turn
even a former favorite into something less than beautiful.
     Precisely when the first girl was beaten to death is a mystery, but it
could not have been long after Elizabeth discovered all the "virtues" of blood.
Soon beating to death became a ritual in itself.  Darvulia tied the girls' hads
and arms, and all the participants beat them, until "their whole bodies were
black as charcoal and their skin was rent and torn."
Dorko cut their fingers with shears and then slit the veins of their arms and
legs with swering scissors.  Dorko did the stabbing.  The wet nurser Jo Ilona,
graduated from her old duties, now tended the fires in the braziers, heated the
pokers, and applied them to faces and noses, sometimes opening the poor victim's
mouth and shoving the burning iron inside.  One day the countess discovered a
new treat: she put her fingers in a girl's mouth, and puller with all her might
until the mouth split wide open.  She also liked to tear the skin with white-hot
pincers and to cut the skin between their fingers to see the blood run.  The
blood was saved and became Elizabeth's favorite skin lotion.  Day after day, she
laved her face and arms and body in blood.
     Even with so many diversions, life palled for Elizabeth, and she trabeled
frequently to one of her other castles or to Vienna where she had a big
town house at 12 Augustinerstrasse.  Wherever she traveled, she installed a
torture chamger.  At Becko Castle, the girls were tortured in an abandoned
storeroom; at Sarvar, in a disused wing of the castle; at Keresztur, in a little
dressing room off Elizabeth's own room.  Scarcely a day went by that she did not
indulge herself in at least a bit of torture.  Even when she was traveling in
her coach, she always had a servant girl or two aling, so that she could bite
them and pinch them and stab them with needles.
    In Vienna, the countess learned something new.  She acquired an iron cage,
which was installed in the cellar of her house on the Augustinerstrasse.
Huge pointed metal spikes stuck inward from the edge of the cage,which could be
lowered and raised on a pulley.  Dorko would drag a naked girl down the stairs
and thrust her into the cage, which was then hoisted up to the ceiling.  The
countess sat on a stepladder directly beneath the cage and watched as Dorko
stabbed at the girl with a sharp iron stake or a red-hot poker, and as the poor
girl writhed about inside the cage, trying to avoid Dorko's thrusts, she ran
into the razor-sharp spikes, which slashed and tore her flesh.  The blood would
flow down onto Elizabeth and she reveled in it.  when the girl had fainted or
died, the countess would gather her bloody garments about her lovingly  and
return to the upstairs world.
     Magician Darvulia assured Elizabeth that she would remain beautiful as long
as she  had plenty of blood, and devised a new method of useing it.  Elizabeth
was to have the regular baths in the blood of virgins.  The supply of peasant 
virgins in Hungary in those days seemed limitless.  Girls were brought to the 
upstairs room and tied up; then their blood vessels were slit with razors to 
make the blood flow fast and hot.  Dorko collected the spurting blood in a 
large earthenware vessel, and while the girls lay dying, she poured virgins' 
blood over her mistress.
     The therapeutic bloodbaths continued, but they had lost their power to
amuse.  So had the iron cage in the cellar at 12 Augustinerstrasse.
Elizabeth was bored again.

    Then she heard of a great clock that had been built for the Duke of
Brunswick at his castle at Dolna Krupa.  It was a fantastic piece of machinery,
and all Vienna talked of its intricate works and chimes.  It had taken a
clockmaker two years to build it.  People came from great distances to see the
marvelous maching at the castle.  So did Elizabeth.  The countess spent more
time at Dolna Krupa than she had expected.  She had long talks with the
clockmaker.  What she wanted, however, was not a duplicate of the Duke of
Brunswick's clock but a copy of the famous Iron Virgin, or Iron Maiden, of
Nuremberg, which was known throughout Europre as the century's most famous
torture machine.
     What the countess wanted, the countess got.  The clockmaker agreed to build
an Iron Maiden.  When it was ready, he delivered it to Csejthe Castle, where
Elizabeth had it installed in the dungeon.  When the Iron Maiden was not in use
she lay in an ornate oak chest.  Next to the chest was the Iron Maiden's
pedestal, where she did her grisly work.

 What a maiden.

The machine was a life-size figure of a beautiful woman; it had the long,
flowing blonde hair of a woman.  The body was painted flesh color; it had red
nipples and pubic hair.  The mouth opened by clockwork to reveal real human
teeth in its cruel smile.  The eyes moved.  A necklace of semiprecious stones
hung down over the big breasts.  Certain of these stones activated the
clockworks.  As Elizabeth sat in a chair and watched, a girl would be brought to
stand before the Iron Maiden, and the stones would be moved.  The arms would
rise to clutch the victim to the iron bosom in a grip that was totally
relentless.  The painted bosom opened.  Five daggers emerged to stab the
victim's body, while other spikes appeared below to pierce the genitals.  The
touch of another stone caused the Maiden's smile to fade, the eyes closed.  The
blood flowed down into a catchment, and it was saved to pour over the countess,
either then, or later in her bath.
     Peasant girl after peasant girl was embraced by the Iron Maiden before
Elizabeth, like any child with a mechanical toy, tired of the sameness of it.
The blood made the works begin to rust, and finally Elisabeth ordered the Iron
Maiden put into her case and retired- but not before the rumors of her
performance had begun to move across the countryside.

  Beginning in about 1608 talk about the Countess Bathory around Hungary began
to take on a definitely unpleasant tone.  The monks in the monastery in Vienna,
near 12 Augustinerstrasse, complained that when Elizabeth was staying at her
town house, they were distressed night after night by shrieks and screams and
wailing that rent the quiet of the night.  In the inn near the cathedral, people
spoke of blood in the streets and murdered girls.  Patrons of the inn began to
refer sardonically to Elizabeth as die Blutgrafin, the Bloody Countess.
   They didn't know the half of it.