Vampires Through the Ages

by Brian Righi

  In December of 1447 the boyars, or landholding nobles, of Wallachia rebelled against Vlad II Dracul and assassinated him in the marshes of Balteni, near Bucharest, to make way for the return of his old nemesis, the House of Danesti. Dracul’s eldest son and immediate heir to the kingdom, Mircea, was also captured and blinded with red-hot iron stakes before being buried alive. To keep the Hungarian throne from using the turmoil as a pretext to invade Wallachia, the Turks released the now seventeen-year-old Prince Dracula, who with the support of Turkish cavalry and other troops led a bold and successful coup to recapture his homeland. The son of the dragon had finally returned, and this time he was out for blood.

  Over a period spanning the next twenty-eight years, Vlad III Dracula ruled Wallachia on three separate occasions in 1448, 1456 to 1462, and for a brief two months in 1476. Upon first taking the throne, Dracula was met by a land wracked with internal conflicts, rampant crime, a failing agricultural system, and an unstable economy. Wasting no time, the young prince enacted a series of long and bloody reforms aimed at consolidating his power and ridding the land of potential threats to Wallachia’s stability. One of his first acts was to avenge the deaths of his father and brother and exterminate the greedy boyars who lined their pockets with foreign gold at the expense of the people.

  In what can only be seen as a bit of brilliant Machiavellian maneuvering, Dracula invited all the wealthy boyar households to an Easter celebration as a sign of his reconciliation and forgiveness. At the end of the festivities, as the nobles left one by one, soldiers loyal to Dracula seized and placed them in chains. Once all the guests were rounded up, Dracula immediately impaled the old and infirm among them on tall spikes. The rest he force-marched under guard for two weary days until they reached the ruins of Poenari Castle, sitting high above the Arges River gorge. Here he planned to rebuild the once-imposing fortress and would use the nobles as labor. Men, women, and children were brutally worked until their once gaily colored Easter clothing became rags and fell from their limbs. Many died in the construction either from falls into the gorge or from pure exhaustion, but in this one bold stroke Dracula achieved several important aims: he effectively rooted out any remaining boyar resistance to his rule; he seized the boyars’ wealth and lands, giving him an instant source of capital to buy loyal followers; and it gave him the dispensable workforce he needed to compete his castle stronghold.

  Once most of Dracula’s political opponents lay either broken among the rocks at the base of his castle or rotting atop blood-drenched stakes, the now-seasoned prince could turn his attention to other matters, but as with all his measures, Dracula moved with a tyrant’s callous brutishness. In one example of Dracula’s particular brand of justice, a Gypsy was caught stealing in a nearby village and thrown into the dungeon. When relatives of the man came to beg for his release, Dracula had the thief boiled in a pot and forced his relatives to eat the body, after which he had them impaled for the crime of cannibalism.

  On another occasion, the prince became distressed that his land was becoming overrun with vagabonds and other undesirables who drained the countryside of its resources and burdened the people. Taking a page from his earlier playbook, Dracula held a great feast at his castle and invited all the poor, lame, sick, and homeless in his kingdom to attend. Once the riotous guests filled their bellies to the point of bursting and their flagons to the point of drunkenness, Dracula stood before the assembly and asked if after all this there was anything else they might want. They in their joviality answered back that their lord had now given them everything they could ever ask for. This appealed to Dracula’s ironic nature, and with a wolfish grin he exited the hall, locked the doors behind him, and set the place ablaze—killing all inside.

  Yet of all the bloody acts Dracula committed, it is perhaps his raid on the Transylvanian town of Brasov in April of 1459 that received the most attention. Brasov was primarily a German Saxon town whose merchants were competing with native Wallachians for trade in the region. In order to break their monopoly, Dracula sacked the town with his army. After blasphemously looting the local church, his forces led thousands of the town’s people outside the city walls and impaled them. When a nobleman in his routine complained of the stench, the prince had him impaled on a taller stake so that he would be above the smell.

  During many of the mass impalings he ordered it was said that Dracula liked to have a table set amid the stakes where he could dine and casually watch his victims writhing in agony. Adding to the tales it was also claimed that his servants collected into a bowl the blood that ran down the stakes, which Dracula frequently dipped bread into and ate. Although the latter addition of blood-drinking may have been an invention by his German enemies to demonize him to the rest of Europe, the stories of his atrocities and allegations of blood-drinking began appearing in pamphlets across the continent even in his own lifetime. Two of the most famous examples that survive to this day were printed in Nuremberg in 1499 and Strasbourg in 1500 and show the well-dressed prince at a table dining before a forest of impaled bodies, while his soldiers hack and boil other victims in a caldron.

  It is estimated by some that during the course of Dracula’s reign he impaled between 40,000 and 100,000 victims, a figure that does not take into account those he killed by other means.

  By the year 1462, Prince Dracula began to chafe under the heavy yoke of the Ottoman Empire, and goaded by calls from Pope Pius II for a new crusade against Turkish aggression, he decided to break his alliance with Sultan Mehmed II. Since he could ill afford to battle along two fronts simultaneously, his first move was to seek an uneasy peace with his former enemies to the west: the Hungarian dynasty and the German Saxons of Transylvania. Having achieved a truce with his neighbors and even promises of support from the Hungarians, Dracula formulated a plan to draw the sultan into armed conflict. He began by ceasing his annual shipment of tribute in the sum of 10,000 ducats to the Turks, claiming that years of constant warfare with his neighbors left him no time to deliver on these earlier promises.

  He next seized any Turkish merchants or officials unfortunate enough to cross into his lands and impaled them on stakes. In one well-recorded incident, Turkish emissaries arrived at his court to inquire as to the prince’s true intentions and remind him of his debt to the sultan. When Dracula asked them to remove their turbans in his presence, something he knew they could not do, the diplomats refused, citing that it was against their customs. Enraged, Dracula had them held while his men nailed the turbans to their heads with tiny metal pins. He sent them, insulted and bleeding, back to their master as a clear message of his intentions. Finally, Dracula began raiding Turkish settlements across the Danube River, burning and pillaging without mercy. The sultan was furious by these acts of open hostility, and Dracula now had his war.

  In the initial phases of the campaign, Dracula’s forces seemed unstoppable as they crossed into Turkish Bulgaria, laying waste to the countryside; but while many of the Christian kingdoms he hoped to draw into the conflict praised his efforts, none, including the Hungarians, came to his aid. The sultan in the meantime was committed to other fronts in Asia but finally managed to turn his attention to the fighting along his western borders, and with a massive army he invaded the tiny kingdom of Wallachia. Over the course of the conflict, Dracula’s smaller force struck repeatedly at the lumbering Turkish army with lightning-quick raids and guerilla tactics designed to wear their opponent down.

  By the time the sultan limped back home with his broken army, it’s estimated that almost one-third of his original forces were lost to the fighting. While Dracula was momentarily seen as the victor of the contest, he too suffered tremendous losses and desertions that chipped away at his forces until there was little left save a small group of loyal bodyguards hiding in the mountains. More damaging, however, was that dissident boyars weary of his harsh tactics began turning against him in favor of his brother Radu, who was still in service to the sultan.
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  Later that year, Dracula’s war finally came to an end when he was ambushed and taken captive by the soldiers of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who had initially pledged to assist Dracula in his struggle against the Turks. Charges of secretly seeking a truce with the Ottomans were trumped up with forged documents, and for the next twelve years Prince Dracula remained a prisoner of the Hungarians at Visegrád, near Buda. No stranger to captivity, Dracula managed to win the favor of King Matthias during his stay, even marrying the king’s cousin Ilona Szilagyi and converting to Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Hungarian court. In 1475 Dracula was officially released and accompanied the king in fighting against the Turks in Bosnia, where he proved himself once again a fierce and merciless fighter. Impressed by his prowess in battle and looking to put a pro-Hungarian back in charge of Wallachia, Corvinus placed Dracula at the head of a Hungarian army in 1476 and gave him the green light to win back his kingdom.

  With his new fighting force, Dracula once again entered the lands of his father to face the Turks, but after several months of brutal fighting the legendary Impaler Prince fell in battle. Details of his end are sketchy at best and depend on who is telling the story, but the most popular claim is that he was killed in battle by his own men. The story goes on to say that he slew five of his attackers with his own sword before being brought down with the arrows and lances of his adversaries.

  While it’s true that Dracula had many enemies on both sides of the border eager to spill his blood, it is perhaps the contemporaneous chronicler Jakob Unrest who gives us our clearest view of the prince’s last moments. He recounts that in the winter of 1476 Dracula’s forces were attacked by a much larger group of four thousand Turks near Snagov Monastery, and that Dracula was assassinated by his personal servant in a small, lonely clearing among the marshes in a forest near Bucharest. His head was then cut off and spirited away to Constantinople, where the sultan displayed it on a pole so that all might see that the dreaded son of the dragon was finally dead.

  Bloody Countess

  When my men entered Csejthe Manor, they found a girl dead in the house; another followed in death as a result of many wounds and agonies. In addition to this, there was also a wounded and tortured woman there; the other victims were kept hidden away where this damned woman prepared these future martyrs.

  —letter from györgy thurzó to his wife (december 30, 1610), as quoted in kimberly l. craft, infamous lady: the true story of countess erzsébet báthory

  The company of men made their way grimly through the darkness wrapped against the winter cold in heavy woolen cloaks. Their leader, Lord György Thurzó, the Palatine of Hungary, paused for a moment as the silent troop continued to file by. Peering through the lightly falling snow to the mountain slopes above, the dark shape of an imposing castle perched like a dangerous beast threatening to devour them. Yet for Lord Thurzó and his men, what waited for them behind those ancient walls that night would be something they would never forget.

  When the men finally reached the castle’s massive wooden doors, they were surprised to find them open and unguarded. Creeping inside the smoky, torchlit hall, they spied the body of a young servant girl lying in a pool of her own blood.

  One of the men moved forward and examined the corpse. “She is from the castle, my lord,” he whispered. “It looks as if she has been stabbed and beaten many times.”

  The men hurriedly discarded their cloaks and drew their swords.

  “I want every inch of this damned castle searched,” Thurzó growled. “But most importantly, I want the countess.”

  As the men advanced farther into the castle, what followed was a confusing nightmare of horrid sights and sounds. Two more unfortunate women were found tortured and discarded: one long past help while the other clung weakly to life with shallow, ragged breaths. Thurzó stopped long enough to order two of his men to carry the survivor back down the mountain to the village below while the rest continued onward. Deeper into the castle’s depths the men were halted by anguished screams coming from behind a bolted door. Bursting through the wooden barrier, they were shocked by the sight of three old women and a disfigured boy gleefully stabbing to death a young naked girl stretched on a table. In one corner of the chamber another small girl huddled with her head in her hands awaiting the same fate. Rushing forward, the men quickly arrested the murderous foursome and bound them with heavy ropes.

  Continuing through the hellish chambers, the armed men came upon still more dead girls all bearing the marks of torture. When they finally chanced upon the door of the countess’s private chambers, even the most hardened among them hesitated. Then, making the sign of the cross as if to protect himself from the evil that waited within, Lord Thurzó stepped forward and kicked in the door.

  Rising from an overstuffed chair, the richly clad visage of Countess Erzsébet Báthory came into view, cast by the hellish glow of the fireplace behind her. Momentarily startled by the intrusion, the aging countess, once famed for her haunting beauty, now stood amazed at the sight of the Palatine of Hungary himself standing in her chamber door with his sword drawn.

  Twisting her face into an arrogant rage, the countess screamed, “How dare you enter my chambers in such a manner!”

  Fueled by what he had seen that night, Thurzó grabbed the countess by the hair and dragged her out into the hallway kicking and screaming. Pulling her up short with a hard yank, Thurzó looked into her cold, hate-filled eyes and from behind clenched teeth exclaimed, “Madam, in the name of the king, you are under arrest.”

  If not for the arrest of the Countess Erzsébet Báthory that fateful night of December 29, 1610, the world may never have known of the extraordinary crimes committed by what is perhaps one of history’s most prolific female serial killers. Báthory was accused of the torture and murder of as many as six hundred young girls during her life, and later historians alleged that she also practiced black magic against her political enemies, engaged in lesbian activities with her aunt, and worst of all, drank and bathed in the blood of her victims.

  Born on August 7, 1560, at Ecsed Castle in what is now the eastern part of Hungary, Erzsébet Báthory was a precocious child known for uncontrollable fits of rage and violent seizures. Brought up in the privilege and wealth of an influential family of Hungarian nobles, she enjoyed all of the advantages her station afforded, including the best tutors in Eastern Europe and a small company of obedient servants who catered to her every whim.

  By the age of fifteen Báthory was wed to an older man named Count Ferenc Nadasdy in a union that promised mutual advantage to both families. Nadasdy was a national hero to the Hungarian people through service against the Turks, but as captain of the Hungarian army he was also an absent husband. During what became known as the Fifteen Years’ War, from 1593 to 1606, Nadasdy is listed as participating in every battle until his death on January 4, 1604, possibly from appendicitis. Besides his reputation as a Hungarian patriot, Ferenc Nadasdy was also known as a cruel and vicious opponent whom the Turks called “The Black Knight of Hungary.” One report even mentions that Nadasdy reveled in entertaining his fellow knights by mockingly dancing with the corpses of his enemies or playing catch and kickball with the heads of executed prisoners.

  Many historians believe that it was the bloodthirsty Nadasdy who first introduced the countess to the finer arts of torture during the brief periods when he was home. The two often severely punished their household servants for even the smallest infractions. One penalty Nadasdy particularly relished was to strip an offending servant girl of her clothes, cover her in honey, and force her to stand in the hot summer sun to be tormented by insects. Another favorite punishment was to insert pieces of oiled paper between the toes of servants who had passed out from overwork and light the pieces of paper on fire.

  In this manner the couple reigned over their servants with terror and violence, and some have surmised that the young countess
may even have periodically suffered the same treatment at the hands of her brutal husband when she did not comply with his wishes. Regardless of where Báthory first developed her taste for cruelty, her husband also acted to restrain her sadism from resulting in murder. For the “Hero of Hungary,” murder brought suspicion and unwanted scrutiny, and in numerous recorded instances he hurried home from the front to cajole local officials into turning a blind eye to his wife’s savage excesses.

  With the death of her husband in 1604, however, there was suddenly nothing standing in the way of the countess, and it was from this period on that she developed her legendary taste for blood. Perhaps of one of the best known claims against the countess is that she regularly bathed in the blood of adolescent girls, whom she tortured and killed in the belief that their virginal blood would forever keep her young and beautiful. She is said to have stumbled upon the practice after striking a servant girl one day for some minor infraction. As the countess was wiping the servant’s blood from her face and hands, she noticed that it left her skin looking fresher and rosier. Following the recommendation of a local witch named Anna Darvolya, whom she befriended, the countess immediately had the girl killed and drained of her blood, in which the countess bathed. The horrid act soon became a routine that she regularly performed with the aid of Darvolya in the dark hours of the night deep within her protective castle. Over time the countess enlisted the aid of four others to help her lure, with the promise of employment, local village girls to her castle, where they were tortured and killed. The first helper was a deformed boy named Janos Ujvary; the next was an old washer woman named Katalin Beneczky; and the final two were old servants named Ilona Jo Nagy and Dorottya Szentes.

  Like her husband, the countess also had favorite forms of torture she indulged in, one of which included stripping a girl of her clothes and forcing her to stand in the freezing cold until she died of exposure. If the process seemed to be taking too long, she would douse her victim with buckets of cold water to speed things up. In other cases she stuck pins under the nails of some girls and cut their fingers off if they dared to try and remove the pins. Some she starved to death, others she cut or strangled, and many were beaten with an iron bar until they died from their wounds. When she was too weak or sick to do the job herself, she had the servants brought to her in bed, where she bit them viciously about the face and shoulders.