The Legend
For decades, the following story was widely considered fact. Only in recent years have historians begun to question the truth of the legend of Erzsébet Báthory, the Blood Countess. What we now know to be false or at least highly unlikely is in red below. What we can't prove but may have still happened is in orange.
Erzsébet was born in 1560 in Transylvania, now a Region of Romania, to the extremely powerful Báthory family. To keep their bloodline strong, the Báthorys often married close relatives. This inbreeding led to severe mental illness throughout the Báthory family. Epilepsy also ran in the family, and Erzsébet began suffering from epileptic seizures, violent mood swings, as well as painful migraines at as young as four. Violence was extremely prevalent in this time and Erzsébet witnessed her relatives severely beating their servants. At six years old, Erzsébet witnessed the public execution of a Romani man accused of a selling a child to the Turks. The man was sewn up inside the belly of a horse to be digested along with the poor creature's last meal. Erzsébet's eduction was not limited to violence. She was even more highly educated than boys from noble families were at the time, learning to read and write in Hungarian, Slovak, Greek, Latin, and German.
Her intelligence, powerful family name, and renowned beauty made a sought after bride. At 10 years old, Erzsébet was betrothed to 15-year-old Ferenc Nadasdy. Shortly before their marriage, when Erzsébet was 13 she had an affair with a peasant boy, leading to a pregnancy. Her baby was taken from her and shipped off to Wallachia in Romania where he grew up under the care of a peasant woman. Ferenc, learning of the affair, had Erzsébet's lover castrated and eaten by dogs. Erzsébet (15) and Ferenc (19) married in 1575 at a ceremony with 5,000 guests. As a wedding present, Ferenc gave Erzsébet a castle and several surrounding villages along with their peasants (who were counted as property in this time).
By all accounts, their marriage was a relatively happy one, and the couple agreed on many things, including their interest in discipline. Ferenc once punished a servant girl by covering her in honey and tying her up outside to be eaten by insects. He also gifted Erzsébet a tool for the discipline of their servants, a pair of gloves with sharp points at the end of each finger.
When Ferenc want off to war, killing Turks in brutal ways and earning the name "The Black Bey" (a Turkish title meaning "Chieftain" or "Lord"), Erzsébet was left responsible for the many castles and villages they owned. It was her job as countess to distribute food to the villagers, order supplies for her castle, barter with neighboring nobles, and more. Erzsébet was very adept at this job. She was highly organized and extremely disciplined, expecting the same from those she corresponded with. When they didn't meet her expectations, her temper was short.
While Ferenc was gone, Erzsébet also went to visit her eccentric Aunt Clara in Vienna. Clara indulged in dark magic and lesbian orgies. Erzsébet grew a taste for witchcraft, lesbianism, and sadism during her stay here. Rumors of Erzsebet's sadism took hold of nearby villages in 1585 when screams were first heard coming from the castle. She beat some girls so badly that she had to sprinkle sawdust on the steps of her castle to soak up all the blood. She began writing to her husband asking to hear stories of the brutal methods of torture he used against the Turks in battle and she derived great pleasure from his replies.
When her husband was home, the pair both participated in the harsh discipline of their servants, but some believed Erzsébet was taking things too far. A Protestant minister complained of Erzsébet's behavior and asked Ferenc to rein her in. Ferenc died in 1604 and rumors began that Erzsébet may have poisoned him. With no one to tell her no and faced with her own mortality, Erzsébet began her downward spiral. She began to experiment with herbalism and witchcraft in search of youthfulness, turning to her trusted servant, Anna Darvulia, a suspected witch, to help her in this quest. One day, in a rage, she beat a young servant girl so viciously that blood spattered on her face. When she washed the blood off, she noticed that her skin looked fairer and younger than before, creating her belief that the blood of a virgin was the secret to eternal youth.
Erzsébet began taking her torture of servants to a new level. She no longer held back and instead regularly tortured them to death. She drained the blood of virgin girls to fill her bathtub. Her methods of torture were particularly sadistic. As her servants died, the bodies began to pile up and her excuses that they were dying of cholera and the plague were getting harder to believe. The clergy began refusing to provide proper burials for the bodies because of their suspicions. Several clergy wrote to their superiors expressing concerns about the number of bodies coming out of her castles.
She also began performing witchcraft to put curses on her enemies. She possessed "a cake of gray color, braided like a pretzel" which she was obsessed with. A communion wafer was placed in the middle of the cake. She looked into the wafer to see the image of a person whom she either wished to curse or to bless. She used this black magic to curse many powerful men who tried to work against her.
In the winter of 1609, having run out of peasants willing to send their virginal daughters to serve in Erzsébet's castles, she opened an academy of etiquette for high born young women. As a Báthory, her name could offer great prestige to anyone who learned from her. Noble families began sending their daughters to Erzsébet for an education, and when these girls began to die, those in power noticed. Erzsébet claimed that one of the girls in her care had murdered the rest in order to steal their jewelry, and when she was discovered by a servant she committed suicide. Another account says that an outbreak of cholera killed these girls.
By 1610, nobility were calling for Erzsébet's downfall. György Thurzo stormed into Erzsébet's castle and surprised her while she was eating dinner. On their way to her dining room, they came across the dead bodies of two young women. Upon further investigation of the castle they found one more girl alive but badly beaten. This girl never testified. Four of Erzsébet's servants were arrested as accomplices: János Újváry (Ficzkó), Ilona Jó, Dorka, and Katalin. These four were tortured until they confessed to participating in the horrific tortures and murders of somewhere between 36 and 51 people. (Later, other witnesses testified that closer to 200 girls were killed with the highest claim at 600, though all of these testimonies were hearsay). The four accomplices all testified that Erszébet was an active participant in the crimes and that Anna Darvulia (who had died by this time) was the cruelest of them all. Ilona and Dorka were sentenced to brutal deaths. They had their fingers ripped off before being burned alive. Ficskó, because of his young age, was granted a more lenient sentence. He was beheaded before his body was burned on the pyre. Katalin was the only one not sentenced to death. Instead, she spent the rest of her life in prison.
Erzsébet asked to testify to defend herself from these accusations, but she was not permitted to. King Rudolph II wanted Erzsébet to go through a trial because if she had been convicted in a trial all her landholdings would have gone to the crown. Instead, György Thurzo, her palatine, sentenced her to house arrest for the rest of her life without a trial. One witness testified that Erzsébet admitted to allowing Darvulia, Ficzkó, Jó, Dorka, and Katalin to carry out these murders because she herself was afraid of them, but she denied her participation in these crimes until her death in 1614.
The Real People
Who were these characters in real life? What were they like?
What really happened?
So, was Erzsébet Báthory really the monster history paints her as? If she were tried in the modern American court system, she would not be convicted. There is certainly reasonable doubt, but it's also still likely that she or other servants in her household were guilty of torturing and murdering at least some people. This is a mystery we may never solve, but I'll give you some evidence that supports both sides.
Innocent
The politics surrounding Erzsébet and the Báthory family are perhaps the best evidence to support Erzsébet's innocence. The Báthory family was one of the most powerful noble families in medieval Hungary. Erzsébet lived during the peak of their influence. At this time, the Báthory family was wealthier than the crown, owning extensive land in the territories that now comprise Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. Many powerful people, including King Rudolph II, may have been seeking Erzsébet's downfall in order to seize her many assets for themselves. György Thurzó certainly had reason to take down the Báthory family. Pál and Imre would grow up to be competition for each other, and with the Báthory name, Pál would certainly have eclipsed Imre's power. The only way to even the playing field would be to destroy the good name of Báthory.
It's possible that Erzsébet was doing things like cutting her servants arms, prying infected flesh off them and sticking needles under their nails, but, stay with me here, it might not have been torture. At the time, these were actually medical practices. Bloodletting was a common practice, and women were sometimes responsible for the medical care of their households became trained physicians (male) were extremely rare. However, women's medical care usually consisted of medicinal remedies and more extreme treatments like bloodletting were typically only carried out by these rare male surgeons. Other more unusual treatments at the time included cutting necrotic flesh from the body to prevent the spread of infection, treating fevers with ice baths, using stinging nettles to cure rheumatism and arthritis, lancing boils with knives or needles–seamstresses sometimes developed boils under their nails.
When the trial began, the evidence piled up against Erzsébet. Witnesses testified against her, but most of the testimony was hearsay. The only primary witness accounts were from her accomplices who were tortured into giving their testimony and admitting to their part in the crimes. These confessions were certainly given under duress. No victims testified.
Guilty
At this time, commoners were considered the property of their governors. As a countess, Erzsébet essentially owned her servants and served as their judge, jury, and executioner. She would have been within her legal right to punish her servants for their perceived transgressions, however slight, with torture and death. The methods of torture she's accused of were not terribly uncommon or harsh in the time period if they were carried out by a man. Erzsébet's family came from Transylvania, where Vlad the Impaler carried out his reign of terror 100 years earlier. In Hungary, criminals were punished with torture and death. These methods would not have been unfamiliar to Erzsébet and she may very well have doled out her own punishments liberally.
The testimonies of her four accomplices, while given under duress, were largely consistent. They differed in the number of victims, but they agreed on their accounts of torture, which leads me to believe these four people were participating in the torture of servants, whether Erzsébet was directly involved or not.
It seems certain that young women were dying under Erzsébet's care. Clergy testified to burying an unusual number of bodies, sometimes more than one body in the same coffin. There were stories of bodies being dumped over the castle wall, and someone testified that a girl had escaped the castle and run into the village below with a knife still embedded in her foot, though the girl herself never testified.
Whether they feared a legend or the real woman, commoners stopped voluntarily sending their daughters to Erzsébet's castle to serve her, and we know that in 1609 Erzsébet opened an etiquette academy for young girls. Aristocrats started sending their daughters to her, and when they too started dying, people in power noticed. A mother of one of these girls testified that her daughter was badly beaten before she disappeared, though it's unclear when the mother saw her daughter and why she wouldn't have brought her home at that time.