Countess Dracula (6 page)

The ethnic mix in Transylvania was more complicated and more volatile: officially the principality was said to consist of the three
nationes,
Magyars, Saxons and Székelys. The Székelys were the descendants of a warrior caste who were ethnically identical to the Magyars, but who had been settled in those regions hundreds of years before to guard its frontiers. The German-speaking Saxons were farmers and merchants who had migrated east in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and now lived according to their own laws in a number of autonomous cities. They had the right to forbid the Prince from entering their territories. Of the Romanians almost nothing is written, and some Hungarian historians claim that there were few of them living within Transylvania at that time. (It was not until 1918 that the region became part of Romania.) But there were certainly serfs of Romanian, Wallachian and Moldavian origin, following the Orthodox faith, which was not officially recognised – the faiths that were accepted were Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism and Unitarianism – as well as the gypsies, living without a voice under Magyar rule and Turkish suzerainty.

In the English language ‘Transylvania' has come to signify one thing only: the home of the Vampire of popular repute. The real Transylvania – the Romans' ‘land beyond the forest', the Germans' and Slavs' Siebenburgen or Sedmohrádsky, ‘land of the seven castles' – in those regions a byword for enchantment, bloody intrigue and almost permanent political chaos, was in Elisabeth Báthory's day a nominal vassal of the Turkish Sultan. Transylvania's instability extended across its mutable borders: between eastern Hungary and Transylvania was a disputed strip, the Partium, whose borders changed according to the tides of war: the townsfolk of Debrecen in the Partium had to pay taxes simultaneously to the Habsburg Emperor, the Hungarian
crown and the Turkish Pasha of Buda, and to keep a wary eye on the tactics of whoever had managed to secure the Transylvanian throne. It was just west of the Partium, still within the Kingdom of Hungary, that the Báthorys' ancestral seats of Nyirbátor and Ecsed were to be found. Modern guidebooks in English have followed the American author McNally in referring to Elisabeth as the Blood Countess ‘of Transylvania' and asserting that her palace at Ecsed and the castle of
Č
achtice once lay within that principality's borders, an idea that any citizen of the region will see as ludicrous – the old frontier at its closest was well to the east of the former and hundreds of kilometres from the latter. Despite her dynasty's long links with Transylvania, there is no proof that Elisabeth ever set foot inside the country; indeed, she discouraged her husband from accepting office there.

For all of its troubled existence, Transylvania played a crucial role in the history – and the psyche – of Hungarians. When it was created, this last remnant of old Hungary had no clear political status. At first it went unrecognised by other nations, but eventually the former voivodeship where the Báthorys, although they possessed very little land there, had traditionally held sway, imprinted itself on the minds of early modern Europe as a real political entity.
¹⁴
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries many Hungarian aristocrats secretly looked to the Prince of Transylvania to re-create a Greater Hungary free of Habsburg and Turkish domination, while the lesser nobility in Hungary welcomed the Prince's support in their resistance to the Habsburgs and their attempts to escape the oppression of their own social superiors. The princely succession which the Turks had intended to be hereditary became elective with the end of the Zápolya line, and every change of ruler meant a new outbreak of conspiracies and attempted coups. In fact any real attempts to reunite Transylvania with the mother-country would certainly have been scuppered by Constantinople, which later rebuffed Prince Gábor Bethlen with the assurance, ‘We shall never cede Transylvania to Hungary, for Transylvania was invented by Sultan Suleyman.'
¹⁵

As for the Turks, they were characterised as lions or devils by their Christian foes, and Turkish domestic culture had little effect on the Protestant aristocracy's habits. When Turks sent dresses as gifts, they were not worn, but made into bedcovers or sheets, even in Transylvania; only the cultivation and arrangement of flowers and fruit and the making of coffee, for example, were openly adopted. The fact
that Turks were infidels precluded any serious attention to their way of life, although among some of those who saw the Turks at close quarters, on the battlefied or on diplomatic missions, there was a sort of mutual respect which even developed into friendship in the case of refugees like Bocskai and Bethlen, who were given sanctuary in the Ottoman court. Long after the Ottomans had been expelled, many Hungarian patriots admitted to a ‘Turkish-nostalgia'). If the Hungarian knights wore green into battle to mock their enemy's sacred colour, they did not desecrate the Turkish graves on Hungarian territory. In the truces between battles, tournaments were organised in which the two sides jousted and duelled according to chivalrous rules; this did not prevent both armies from using terror tactics against one another during the many sieges; the exhibiting of heads and displays of mass-impaling beneath the walls of the besieged castle or city were common.

Where the values of the battlefield prevailed, it is not surprising that the adversaries came to mirror one another, each adapting the other's accoutrements, especially weapons and horse-furniture. The Hungarians were resolutely, bravely Christian, but when today we look at the decorated ivory sabre-handles displayed in Sárvár castle which depict the Hungarian light horse soldiers, the Hussars, fighting with their counterparts, the Turkish Janissaries, it is difficult for us to tell one from the other. The German-speaking soldiers who periodically occupied parts of Hungary during the territorial struggles showed the same wilful ignorance and were hated by the natives for their chauvinism as well as their habitual cruelty. They considered that the Hungarians and Turks were one and the same, and when they reconquered a piece of land and were petitioned by the Magyar owners for its return, dismissed them with the stock response, ‘Go back to Scythia!' (In classical writings Scythia was the homeland, north of the Black Sea, of warlike barbarian nomads known for their savagery.) Many many years before, during their nomadic wanderings on the plains of western Asia, the Magyar and the Turkic cultures had indeed come into intimate contact; there were still affinities between the two languages which made the learning easy. A number of Hungarian officers (possibly including Countess Báthory's husband, Lord Francis Nádasdy) spoke some Turkish, and Turkish officers wrote letters in Hungarian. Not only did the nobles vie to mount recitals by captured Turkish musicians, but Hungary's foremost romantic poet, Bálint Balassi, had his verses arranged for Turkish music.

After more than a decade of uneasy standoff punctuated by local raids, sieges of border strongholds, advances and withdrawals, full-scale war between Christians and Moslems broke out again in 1591. The fifteen-year conflict, known as the Great Turkish War, was sparked by the Serbs, specifically the lawless
uskok
refugees who haunted the border areas; on the Turkish side, illicit raids were launched across the frontier by marauders known as
akinci.
But the fighting soon became generalised, the eastern and western powers locked into an inconclusive but bloody series of campaigns, and war became the
raison d'être
for another generation of men and boys.
¹⁶
The picture of the period of the Turkish wars which has been sustained by Hungarian fiction since the nineteenth century is typified by Géza Gárdonyi's novel,
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon,
first published in 1899, in which the dusty summer landscapes are crisscrossed by soldiers, their beards waxed and white with badger grease, travelling as best they can on one or even two wooden legs, missing an arm, a nose, ears. The whole book is pervaded by a kind of jauntiness in the midst of carnage.

It was perhaps the disappearance of the royal court, even more than the territorial losses, that had the most devastating effect on Hungarian society in that period. When Buda fell to the Turks in 1556, the country lost its administrative centre and its cultural and historical heart. The Habsburgs allowed the Hungarians to set up a new capital where the Diet sat at Pozsony, the present-day Bratislava, only a few miles from Vienna. They also maintained a royal court of Hungary as a place for ceremonies, retaining official posts and awarding titles, but all under their patronage. In return for the cosmopolitan culture which the Habsburg court embodied, the Hungarians lost most of their independence. While the alien King ruled from Vienna, it was the native Magyar magnates who were responsible for the functions that the monarch's court fulfilled elsewhere: the great noble families set up schools, established printing presses and libraries, founded scholarly societies and academies and patronised the various churches. In the rest of Europe governments or parishes had just begun to acknowledge a need to take care of the poor and to set up hospitals to tend to the wounded returning from wars and shelter the veterans who survived. In Hungary this had to be done by the aristocratic families who donated land and left legacies for the first hospitals and themselves cared for the sick on their estates.

The courts of the great landowning families depended on the concept
of familiarity: a network and hierarchy of related aristocrats and gentry down to the poorest tenants and serfs, all owing a particular service to their lord. At the main Thurzó seat of Byt
č
a, there were about fifty members of the close household resident in the castle. Young men of the middle nobility provided armed retainers and other officials and guards were stationed in the town. George Thurzó kept heavy armour and weaponry at the easily defended stronghold of Árva (Orava) where the family would repair in times of danger.
¹⁷

Elisabeth Báthory's court at
Č
achtice was slightly smaller, with twenty to thirty people working in the manor house and castle and another thirty to forty tending to the fields and vineyards. The records of the estate show that the business of cultivation and husbandry was exceptionally well organised. Nobles sent their daughters to the courts of this most powerful of chatelaines from far away. It was a great honour for a girl to be given a position in her household, even that of a humble seamstress or chambermaid, and all her servants had to come recommended for a particular skill. Some witnesses testifying in the investigations into Elisabeth's alleged crimes, however, claimed that the Countess had to lure girls into her service, and one witness among the hundreds who were questioned said that the poor families around
Č
achtice hid their daughters when they heard that the Lady was approaching. In fact, Elisabeth Báthory was related by blood or marriage to nearly all the victims named in the testimonies, which makes it difficult for some modern commentators to imagine that she could wantonly slaughter them. Had the relatives been aware of such cruelty, they say, surely they would not have sent their daughters to be educated at her court. But social tensions in the Hungarian territories had been heightened by the male-female imbalance which the wars had created. Towns and villages were filled with unmarried or widowed women, with the result that a dowry and the chance to acquire a skill or trade were even more desperately sought.

It was the twenty or so wealthiest families who owned more than a quarter of the land. The hereditary governor
(comes)
of each county was a member of the senior aristocracy, but the county assemblies were administered by the lesser gentry, who were not usually refined, but rather rough squires addicted to hunting and tippling. Many of these 9,000 families, whose nobility consisted of a coat of arms and exemption from taxes, were impoverished and in debt: the charters conferring the lowest levels of nobility were referred to as ‘dogskin
parchments', the lesser gentry as ‘the mean puttee-wearers' or the ‘lords of seven plum-trees'.

Countess Elisabeth Báthory owed allegiance to the crown of Hungary, and that crown was worn in Vienna by an Austrian. The Habsburg family had ruled Austria since 1278 and the Holy Roman Empire since 1438, a rich, ornate, cosmopolitan and complex edifice that was landlocked but diffuse, introverted and quite without any geographical reason for its existence. In 1576 Rudolf II succeeded Ferdinand as ruler of the Empire, having already assumed the crown of Hungary, which the Habsburgs had acquired as a hereditary right by marriage. Much as the Hungarian nobility disliked Rudolf personally and resented being ruled by a foreigner, their sense of realism and their veneration for the Holy Crown of Hungary itself prevented them for the most part from openly defying Vienna.

Rudolf was obsessive, introspective and morose at the best of times, and seems to have lapsed into deep melancholia for months on end. Until recently it has been usual to dismiss him as a weak ruler, a mythomaniac and a decadent, whose failing sanity eventually left him incapable of government. After rejections by Maria de Medici and the Spanish Infanta, the unfortunate Emperor did not marry, and, although he fathered children by his mistress, Barbara Strada, lurid rumours accused him of sodomy and paedophilia and ascribed his physical and mental peculiarities to the onset of tertiary syphilis. Rudolf may be seen more sympathetically as a failed mystic, who dreamed of reversing the Reformation and uniting Christian Europe under the divinely sanctioned control of his family. Protestantism was forbidden in Vienna after 1598 and he enraged the proud Hungarians by persecuting the Lutherans and Calvinists who made up a majority of their senior nobility. His own eccentric religious ideas led him to abandon all acts of worship and he was said to be terrified by the sight of the sacramental host, leading gossips to surmise that he had been the victim of an evil spell cast by his chamberlain, Makovsky. It was murmured that Rudolf himself practised alchemy and cabbalistic magic.