Countess Dracula (5 page)

In the same year that Dózsa's revolt was suppressed, a noble expert in law, Stephen Werböczy, drew up a legal code known as the
Tripartitum,
which enshrined and confirmed the privileges of the nobility and decreed perpetual serfdom for the peasant populace. The feudal system which it consolidated remained in force in Hungary until 1848. The new code chose to see the peasants' affrontery as a sin against the divinely ordained right to rule. It declared: ‘The memory and punishment of their treachery must be visited on their descendants, so that all mankind should know what a sin it is to rise against the lords. Therefore in this country all the peasants have lost their liberty by which they may move wherever they will. They are placed under eternal servitude to their landlords.'
¹⁰

Both the higher nobility and the lesser gentry were exempt from all taxes and their absolute power as landlords was guaranteed by force. Serfs were tied to their masters' lands, paid in cash or kind according to the whim of the lord in question, forced to pay tithes, give fifty days' unpaid labour in every year and forbidden to own firearms. They could be judged and condemned even to death by their landlords according to the mediaeval
pallos jog
– the right of the sword – which in theory remained in force until well into the eighteenth century. Refusal to serve was viewed as an act of sedition and the poor were made to sign declarations of obedience whereby they forfeited their right to travel.

The privileges which the aristocrats were to enjoy were set out clearly in the codex, but exactly what their obligations were towards their
fellow-citizens, and how they would be punished if they transgressed was not made explicit, even in the case of the murder of a servant by their master – or mistress. Social rank counted above all other considerations in all circumstances: even an act of rebellion against the legitimate ruler was treated quite differently when the rebels were of noble blood. When John Zápolya defeated the forces of two rival barons, Balassi and Majláth, who were trying to unseat him in Transylvania, he ceremonially returned their swords to them and pardoned them both, together with all their followers, who were allowed to rejoin their families unharmed.

The pleasures that the citizens of Hungary enjoyed during those years of the early sixteenth century must have been all the more intense for being so few and so fleeting; peasants and soldiers sleeping in the fields in the long soporific summer afternoons, dancing arm in arm to pipes and viols outside the itinerant wine-seller's tent, while in their strongholds the great families feasted, prayed, arranged their children's marriages and drilled their private armies. No sooner had the national trauma of the Dózsa revolt begun to dissipate than dynastic power struggles and the looming threat of occupation by the Turkish empire combined to throw the Kingdom into turmoil once again.

The name of the small riverside settlement in the south where the most devastating defeat in Hungary's history took place has entered the language as a byword for disaster: it is a staple of modern black humour that a man whose whole family has been wiped out in an accident can be consoled by the set phrase, ‘Don't forget, we lost even more at Mohács.' Ula
ś
zló's successor, the young King Lajos or Louis II, had not been on his throne long before the Grand Turk, Suleyman, known as the Magnificent, mounted a massive offensive, breaking out of the Balkans and overwhelming the Serbs, who were holding the frontier of Christian Europe, and pushing inexorably towards Vienna. The unpopular King first staged a spectacle for his subjects in his capital; a model of the coffin of the Prophet Mohammed was put on display, suspended as if by Islamic magic ‘between heaven and earth', before being set ablaze in front of an exultant crowd. Then, surrounded by foreign counsellors and accompanied by his bishops, the Magyar nobles and mercenary commanders, the King led an ill-disciplined collection of 27,000 quarrelsome and dispirited troops, cumbersome heavy cavalry in the vanguard, out into the field to stop the Ottoman advance. He
confronted the Turks at Mohács in the south of the kingdom in August 1526, but a pitched battle turned into an ignominious rout and Louis and 20,000 troops, including many leading churchmen and 500 of Hungary's nobles, died as they fled the battlefield in panic. The Turks sacked the capital of Buda and left a landscape scattered with corpses and burned-out towns and villages before regrouping.
¹¹

A former nation defeated and paralysed by internal rivalries allowed the Ottomans to consolidate their position for a planned penetration further west. Their ultimate prize was the city of Vienna, from which they could dominate most of Christian Europe, but to ensure their supply-lines from Constantinople they had to pacify the entire turbulent region in between, a task they never fully completed.

Louis II was succeeded by King John Zápolya and there was a standoff until his death in 1541, whereupon the Habsburgs by dynastic agreement inherited the crown and took control of the west and north of the country. The Turks under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent laid waste the central zone and fifteen years later retook the capital Buda. They occupied the whole of the south-central territories of Hungary, splitting off the eastern region, in which they installed Zápolya's son as puppet prince. This disputed zone, known as Transylvania, was formally constituted in 1568 as a semi-autonomous principality owing allegiance to the Sultan in Constantinople. The defeat at Mohács was not only a psychic wound that stayed fresh for nearly two centuries, it was a strategic catastrophe which allowed the Austrian Habsburgs and the Turks to carve up the ancient Kingdom of Hungary. It is an interesting question whether, had Dózsa's followers been given back their rights and incentives to honour their national heritage, the army facing the Turks at Mohács might have been 300,000 strong and united, instead of 27,000 and indecisive.

For 150 years after this, Hungary remained a divided and unstable entity, under constant threat of invasion from the Turks and from the Habsburgs, who needed Hungary (and coveted Transylvania) as a buffer against the Ottomans, but resented the independence of its powerful aristocracy. With open war or undeclared raids a constant threat in the south and east, the aristocrats of the Kingdom of Hungary remained west of Lake Balaton, on which their fleet rode at anchor beneath the castle of Szigliget, in permanent standoff against the Turkish ships whose topsails and pennants could be seen at the other end of the lake. The great families (sixteen of them owned more than half
the surface of Hungary) fortified their palaces and moved in summer from the hot dry flatlands of the little Hungarian plain to the cooler uplands just south of the Danube, or across the river where
Č
achtice and Byt
č
a can be found in present–day Slovakia.

The political manoeuvring inside the country throughout the years which followed defeat and partition was based on a tension between the ‘Habsburg Party' – a faction within the aristocracy who thought that the power of the Austrian empire offered the best chance of reuniting Hungary, and the ‘Transylvanian Party' – those who sided with the Transylvanian Prince and sometimes even with the Turks in the hope that this would bring about a new independence. These distinctions were never clear-cut, especially in that everyone concerned was aware of the tactical and emotional importance of Transylvania to the Magyar peoples. Even Count George Thurzó – known all his life as a Habsburg man – secretly nursed an ambition to rule there.

The sense of post-Mohács Hungary as a land deserted by God and good fortune was shared by foreign observers and Hungarians alike. The sixteenth century was a turbulent time for most European countries, with the religious upheaval of the Reformation and the fragmenting into competing beliefs and sects that followed. Then at the end of the century on the continent the Counter-Reformation began to build up momentum. The certainties and structures of mediaeval society were transformed under the influence of humanist intellectuals, and, while the European mind was struggling to cope with these changes, the European body was prey to epidemics. The age was brutal, but full of contrasts; feuds were commonplace, though mediated by codes. There was near-anarchy at times in the political sphere and economic and social progress stopped completely, but poetry flourished.

All of Europe was infected with cruelty, conspiracy and neurosis, but Hungary was in a more dangerously ambiguous state. Its traditions and institutions were still seemingly intact, but operating in an amputated portion of the old nation, threatened on the frontiers by anarchy, beyond the frontiers by hostile aliens, and alternately mocked, threatened and enchanted by the ‘fairy garden' of Transylvania, with its febrile vitality and its own geographical integrity. Within the remains of the Kingdom loyalties were divided and allegiances uncertain and shifting: as the people lamented, the Protestant and Catholic propagandists each blamed the other for the tragedies which afflicted their nation.

In the occupied zone, the Turkish Vilayat, ruled from Buda, the
Magyar peasants who had not fled their villages were forced to pay tithes to the local agents of Constantinople, but in some ways they were better off than those who lived in ‘free' Hungary, who were bound to their masters' land and had to submit to the hated
robot
system of forced labour. As rights and conditions for commoners slowly improved in England, the Low Countries and Germany, the lot of the three and a half million Hungarians and the 600,000 in Transylvania became worse. The manor estates of the great noble families were enlarged and the aristocracy took up trading in cattle, horses, wheat, wine, cloth and even metals, hoarding when prices were low and virtually crippling the peasant markets and the economies of the towns. Although the senior nobility could have nearly all necessities made on the estates – furniture, clothing, weapons, ornaments and jewellery – and to command their local economies, forcing innkeepers to sell only their wines, for example, the smaller feudal landlords often ran short of cash, and had to resort to moneylenders or pawnbrokers. The senior nobles oppressed the lesser nobles by using litigation, trickery or force to take over their properties and at the same time they enclosed common land: the local records show how the family of Count Thomas Nádasdy (later to be Elisabeth Báthory's father-in-law), who already owned nearly a score of farms in the region, forcibly attached to their estates land belonging to peasants around
Č
achtice in 1569. To make matters worse for the great majority who depended on the earth for their livelihood, there was a series of poor harvests in the years after 1570 and some landowners reacted by increasing their demand for forced labour from their serfs from one to two or three days in every week; others like Countess Báthory herself later excused her villagers from the labour requirement, but replaced it with high taxes to be collected in the form of cash or wine. Many poor communities, after protesting to the authorities that their lives had become intolerable, staged local insurrections and suffered the terrible consequences. The peasants of
Č
achtice did not take up arms against their landlord, but did later lodge two formal complaints in Vienna against Count Francis Nádasdy and his wife which were, like all the others, listened to impassively by Rudolf II's officials and then forgotten.
¹²

Hungarian did not mean Magyar, but a citizen of the ancient territory of Hungaria or Pannonia, which had first been delineated by the Romans. Hungary and its offshoot, Transylvania, were said to be
two
patriae
and one nation. This is because they had been constituted on the same legal basis and had the same common law, judicial traditions and rights towards the King. Legal and religious identity always took precedence over ethnic identity. The other feature of early modern Hungary that is difficult for citizens of modern western nation-states to grasp is its multilingual and multinational nature. In this the Kingdom of Hungary resembled the Habsburg Empire, which was made up of over a thousand separate territories, and in which the emperors themselves never explicitly identified with any particular nationality. Within Hungary there were cities and towns where the German language and customs predominated – among them modern Bratislava (then known as Pressburg in German, Pozsony in Hungarian and Prešporok to the Slovaks living around it), Sopron and Szepesség – and villages where the main language spoken was Slovak or Croatian, not to mention the mobile population of an unknown number of Romany-speaking gypsies.

The senior aristocracy who served the Austrian court were themselves of mixed origins: the Wallensteins and Zerotins were from Bohemia, the Zrínyis, the Pethös, the Keglevichs and the Kollonichs were Croatian; the Drágffys, to whom Elisabeth Báthory was related, were probably of Romanian blood. The Drágffys' name means ‘sons of the dragon', referring to the order of knighthood formed to fight the Turks from which Vlad Tepes, the historical Dracula (‘little dragon'), took his nickname. Elisabeth Báthory's son-in-law Nicholas Zrínyi was the scion of the Croatian Zrinski warlords, and the Thurzó and Drugeth families likewise bore non-Magyar names. The lords and sometimes the ladies were fluent in several languages; George Thurzó wrote in Latin and classical Greek and, as well as his Hungarian mother tongue, spoke German and Slovak.

It is normal today in a spirit of rapprochement to gloss over the ethnic tensions between the Hungarians, those who oppressed them and those who they in turn oppressed. In the past these divisions were rarely referred to, and such matters are difficult to investigate, since most correspondence was carried on in Hungarian or in the Latin lingua franca, whatever language was spoken privately. Nevertheless, tensions were undoubtedly present, particularly in those parts of the kingdom such as the Nádasdy–Báthory territories in Nitra county where Magyars ruled over native Slavs, just as the Norman barons in England had ruled over their Saxon serfs, whose language they disdained and
whose thoughts were hidden to them. Elisabeth Báthory was highly educated and knew Latin, some Greek and some German, but had been brought up in the parts of the Kingdom where only Hungarian was spoken. Whether or not one should learn the Tót (Slovak) or Horvát (Croatian) languages of the subject peoples was a matter debated in handbooks of aristocratic etiquette; the consensus among sophisticates was that it was not necessary.
¹³
So, unlike the priests who preached in the church beside her mansion, the Countess could not communicate with the humbler inhabitants of her
Č
achtice estates and surrounded herself with Hungarian-speaking servants brought from the western parts of the country.