by Jason Porath
So, with Caterina held hostage and the family seat under siege, the only thing under her control was Ravaldino, which refused to surrender to the Orsis. Reasoning that the fort commander might relent in Caterina’s presence, the Orsis allowed her to enter the fortress and parley with the commander for a limited amount of time. They realized their mistake when she entered the fortress and the drawbridge rose up behind her—as she stood there flicking them off.* Reasoning that she would back down if they threatened her children, the Orsis brought the young Sforzas to the fortress and did just that.
Her response? Appearing on the ramparts, she flashed her nether regions and yelled, “I can make more!”*
They backed down, and soon thereafter she turned the tables. Reinforcements arrived from her allies, and she took back Forlì. Her first order of business was establishing for the benefit of everyone that Caterina Sforza was not to be played with. She executed 80 people—Orsis and collaborators—by ingeniously terrifying methods. While that was the banner headline, the truth was that she was remarkably restrained. Controversially, she forbade her allies to rape and loot in Forlì (which was standard operating procedure). She let the Orsi wives and children live.
Over the next several years, Caterina consolidated her power. She dodged assassination attempts and permanently moved shop to Ravaldino. She refused to let any slurs on her reputation stand—gossip about her and you’d end up either in chains or in the ground.*
The final chapter of her life started with a meeting with Niccolò Machiavelli, of all people. War had broken out between factions to the north and south of Forlì, and Caterina was caught right in the middle. Machiavelli came to convince her to side with the pope’s faction, but left humiliated after she politically ran circles around him. The obstinacy she’d shown in that meeting quickly got her on the pope’s bad side. He rescinded her right to rule and accused her of trying to poison him. In response, she burned down every building and farm outside the walls of Forlì and prepared for war with the faction represented by the pope and Machiavelli. Soon she was going cannon-to-cannon with one of Renaissance Italy’s most brutal nobles, the inspiration for Macchiavelli’s The Prince: Cesare Borgia.
While Forlì itself folded relatively quickly, Caterina held out at Ravaldino. At night, she’d play music so the enemy forces would think she was partying. Her soldiers would scrawl insults on cannonballs before firing them at Cesare’s forces. When the fort was finally breached, Caterina set a wall of explosives on fire to control the flow of enemies and personally fought for two hours, sword in hand. Eventually, some of her allies betrayed her and gave her over to Cesare.
Cesare, in a series of acts sure to send most readers into a blinding rage, raped her, psychologically tortured her, and kept her in a dungeon for a year. Upon taking the fort, he declared to his forces that “she defended her fortresses better than her virtue”—thus earning the endless sadistic abuse he is now doubtless experiencing in the deepest pit of hell.
Caterina went on to live a quiet existence for the remainder of her years, mostly engaged in legal battles to eke out some small inheritance for her children. She outlived both Cesare and the pope, dying of pneumonia at the age of 46. Speaking of her life in her final years, she said: “If I were to write all, I would shock the world.”
Elisabeth Báthory
(1560–1614, HUNGARY)
The Blood Countess
First off: Trigger warnings. All of the trigger warnings. No trigger unwarned. (Okay, fine, it’s actually just triggers for gore, violence, rape, incest, and murder. But, um, tread lightly regardless.)
Now then, let’s take a step into the life of one of the most vilified women in history. On December 29, 1610, a garrison of soldiers stormed the Hungarian castle of Cachtice and arrested Elisabeth (Erzsébet) Báthory. They accused her of roughly 100 Saw movies’ worth of torture and took her into custody. As the story goes (and please keep in mind, absolutely none of this should be taken at face value), they caught her in the act, finding a freshly buried corpse and a cowering servant, badly beaten but still alive.
The subsequent questioning of over 300 people about the doings of the Blood Countess (as she’d later become known) has put her in the record books as easily the most prolific female serial killer in history, by an order of magnitude. The low-end estimate for her body count (and this was the number given by her closest associates and allies, mind you) was just in the thirties. The high-end estimate was 650 bodies, all of them female servants. The collected testimonials contained a litany of charges against her so vile that they have literally become legend—she would later be used as one of the primary inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and her story has been referenced in hundreds of books, movies, songs, you name it. There were so many charges levied against her that, typed out, it initially took up 10 single-spaced pages. (The list provided here is understandably somewhat truncated.)
So let’s make a drinking game of it. The rules are simple: every time you’re grossed out, take a shot. Here’s hoping you have a full bottle or a strong stomach. Here we go!
According to the surviving testimonials, Elisabeth and/or her closest servant-confidants:
• Kept her servants chained up every night so tight their hands turned blue and they spurted blood.
• Beat them to the point where there was so much blood on the walls and beds that they had to use ashes and cinders to soak it up.
• Beat a servant in Vienna so loudly that her neighbors (some monks) threw clay pots at the walls in protest.
• Strangled a servant to death with a silk scarf (a harem technique known as “the Turkish way”).
• Burned her servants with metal sticks, red-hot keys, and coins; ironed the soles of their feet; and stuck burning iron rods into their vaginas.
• Stabbed them, pricked them in their mouths and fingernails with needles, and cut their hands, lips, and noses with scissors.
• Used needles, knives, candles, and her own freaking teeth to lacerate servants’ genitals.
• Stitched their lips and tongues together.
• Made servants sit on stinging nettles, then bathe with said stinging nettles. During the bath, she’d push the nettles into their shoulders and breasts.
• Had them stand outside in tubs of ice water up to their necks until they died.
• Smeared a naked girl with honey and left her outside to be bitten by ants, wasps, bees, and flies.
• Kept servants from eating for a week at a time, and, if they got thirsty, made them drink their own urine.
• Forced servants to cook and eat their own flesh (usually from the buttocks), or make sausages of it and serve it to guests.
• Heated up a cake to red-hot temperatures and made a servant eat it.
• Baked a magical poisonous cake in order to kill a rival magistrate, George Thurzó (who was also the guy who arrested her—more on him in a bit).
• Cast a magic spell to summon a cloud filled with 90 cats to torment her enemies. Okay, that’s actually kind of awesome.
• Had an ongoing affair with some guy named “Ironhead Steve” (no, really).
• Stuffed five servants’ corpses underneath a bed and continued to feed them as if they were still alive.
• Buried victims in gardens, grain pits, orchards, and occasionally cemeteries. Sometimes with rites, often without.
And that’s just the charges levied against Elisabeth in her lifetime! After she died, more details were added to the picture:
• She bathed in virgins’ blood! (A lie dreamed up centuries afterward. Also would’ve been nigh-impossible due to coagulation.)
• She was syphilitic from centuries of inbreeding! (Maaaaybe? Seems perfectly with-it in her letters, though.)
• She was epileptic! (Well, she did once mention her eye hurt in a letter . . . ?)
• She was raped when she was young. (Possible but, given scant evidence for it, unlikely. Her powerful position in the world, practically since
birth, further complicates this theory.)
• Her aunt Klara was a bisexual or lesbian. (Possible.) The two had an incestuous relationship! (Uh . . . doubt it.) After having numerous affairs, Klara was raped by an entire Turkish garrison before having her throat cut! (Augh, no! What the hell!?)
• She was menopausal, and thus crazy! (If menopause worked like that, the world would have a much smaller population.)
• Her cousin Gábor (whom we talk about later) slept around a lot (true), was bisexual (maybe?), and had an incestuous relationship with his sister Anna (not true), who was herself accused of sleeping with a silversmith (super not true) and being a witch (super ultra not true).
So after all this went down, the sentences went into effect almost immediately. Elisabeth’s female “accomplices,” all old ladies, first had their fingers torn off with iron tongs, and, once fingerless, were bodily tossed into a large fire. Her one male “accomplice,” being less of a participant in the supposed crimes, was shown a tremendous amount of mercy: he was decapitated before they tossed his body into a fire. And Elisabeth Báthory herself was “immured”—which is to say, bricked up into a room in her own castle, where she died four years later.
In conclusion: the Aristocrats!
Well, actually, no. That is not the conclusion. Buckle up, for this entry is about to dump the biggest bucket of cold water on all this malarkey as can possibly be mustered. Based on the evidence and the research meticulously compiled by historian Tony Thorne, there is a case to be made (one which this author believes to be true) that Elisabeth Báthory is innocent.
Mic drop.
Now, this is not to say she was a sweet-hearted, blameless victim—she was absolutely not. The overwhelming impression one gets from reading all the available documents (which it is not recommended that you do in one sitting—learn from this author’s mistakes) is that she was a take-no-crap kind of lady. Her husband was off at war, and she had to manage an incredibly large estate in his absence. She looked after thousands of servants, governed the local populace, and kept up an amount of property second to none.
And so Elisabeth Báthory needed everyone around her to know one thing, and one thing only: she was Head Bitch in Charge, and she had no time for your nonsense.
Her surviving letters illustrate this beautifully with their overwhelming curtness (even to her husband!). In one of the gems she wrote to an encroaching squatter, threatening him, she ended by saying, “Do not think I shall leave you to enjoy it [settling illegally on my land]. You will find a man in me”—a statement that translates roughly to “I will crush you.”
So no, she was not warm and cuddly. She absolutely made life miserable for misbehaving servants (or, more likely, had her head servants do it for her). It is beyond questioning that she beat the hell out of them, and some undoubtedly died from their wounds—she had thousands of servants in an age before penicillin. In fact, scholar Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss claims that the more outlandish tortures (stinging nettles, metal rods, amateur acupuncture) were contemporary folk remedies. Horrifically mean lady? Yes. Cartoon supervillain? No way.
So what happened? George Thurzó—Palatine of Hungary and eminent turd farmer—did.
Now, it’s already been mentioned that Elisabeth was powerful, but you need to understand the magnitude of the target she presented: the Báthorys were like the Hungarian Kennedys and had been for centuries. By the time all this went down, Elisabeth’s earlier-mentioned cousin Gábor was gunning for the throne (literally starting a war), and Elisabeth was widowed, with more money than God. So Thurzó was all, “Nah, dog, no way I’m letting those two partner up,” and decided to take Elisabeth down, hopefully gaining her property and upping his profile in the process.
Now, the details of the plot are a bit murky. Thurzó was a known schemer who’d made a career out of backstabbing people, so a plot of this sort wouldn’t be much of a surprise. There’s evidence in correspondence with his wife (who kept forgetting to write in code) that Thurzó was moving against Elisabeth over a year before her arrest. He’d been in contact with the local church leaders, who were whipping up the general populace against the Báthorys by telling them stories—stories that would, with minor variations, be repeated over and over in the proceedings against Elisabeth and passed off as “I heard this” but with very few firsthand accounts.
And that’s just the cooperating witnesses. In all likelihood—it was standard operating procedure at the time—the members of Elisabeth’s household were tortured before testifying. Their testimonials, which are confused and contradictory, lend credence to that. As historian Tony Thorne points out in his exhaustively researched book Countess Dracula, it’s at times impossible to even tell to whom the witnesses are referring, due to the vagaries of medieval Hungarian pronouns.
The only way to get rid of such an entrenched power as Elisabeth was to catch her committing a horrific act red-handed—which Thurzó said he did, although it took him 24 hours to produce the aforementioned cowering servant and freshly buried corpse. Afterwards, the imprisoned Báthory never had a trial (despite the king demanding one for three years straight). Elisabeth never got to speak in her own defense, and her family records were mostly destroyed. There is very little to go on in determining what sort of a person she actually was.
So, even if she did commit said acts (which is entirely possible, although at nowhere near the scale of the accusations), ask yourself what is more likely: an incredibly outlandish list of violent acts perpetrated by a cadre of old women over decades or an orchestrated persecution against a powerful, harsh, and independent woman—in the age of actual witch hunts!
• ART NOTES •
This is one of the more complex pieces. Here’s the thought process.
The reader should see through her eyes, as best as possible. Still, you never see her, just a reflection in a dusty mirror. Her expression is meant to be somewhat inscrutable—you can’t tell what’s on her mind. She’s purposely stiff and posed.
Elisabeth has her back turned to Thurzó (in the background, with a feathered cap, in silhouette) bricking her up, with her image caught in her own shadow—symbolizing how her true story has been locked away and obscured.
The whole composition is meant to feel claustrophobic, with her not only caught inside the mirror but also surrounded by the shadows cast from the bricked-up wall.
Her outfit is from a portrait that purported to be of her, but was recently proven not to be. The mirror is a Venetian glass mirror (one of the only types of mirror at the time—each one was as expensive as a battleship!), and the scratches and cloudiness are actually characteristic of that type of mirror.
Elisabeth is washing her hair, a reference to the blood-bathing legends. Is that water reflecting the red candlelight and her dress, or . . . ?
The symbol at the top of the mirror (the dragon) is the actual Báthory family crest, believe it or not. The candleholders are callbacks to that dragon.
Everything on the desk (including the bleeding candles) is related to a different torture rumor. The chest with the small mirror is a scrying box that witches were said to use.
Very barely visible in the darkness of the reflected room, up above a balcony, are a bunch of cats, a reference to the 90-cat curse.
Malinche
(1496 [1501]–1529, MEXICO)
The Maligned Mother of Mexico
Few people can claim the distinction of having their very name become synonymous with a swear word—but Malinche was a rare woman indeed. Alternately characterized as the greatest traitor in the history of North America or a victim thrust into hideous circumstances, even to this day Malinche is a divisive figure.
Our story starts with the arrival of Spaniard Hernán Cortés in 14th-century Mexico. It’s worth taking a moment to really describe this loser, as he was one of the more despicable human beings our race has ever created. He was in Mexico only because he’d flunked out of law school, become a sailor, and then mutinied against his boss to claim l
and for himself like he was playing Monopoly. He had two sets of kids, one legitimate and one illegitimate, and gave both sets the same names. Cortés wasn’t even the worst of the conquistadors on that mission, but you get the idea.
It is in regard to his staggering mistreatment of the indigenous peoples that we first meet Malinche. Early on in Cortés’s travels, traders give the Spaniards 20 women as (sex) slaves—one of them being Malinche. Cortés gives her to one of his men and promptly forgets about her. Not long after, the Spaniards run across native peoples speaking a language that their translator does not understand, but Malinche does. This earns her a promotion to chief translator and woman number three (out of several dozen) with whom Cortés is cheating on his wife.
Thus begins the ludicrously tortured translation chain of the Spanish conquest: the Nahuatl-speaking people speak to Malinche, Malinche translates it into Mayan, and the Spaniard translator translates the Mayan into Spanish. There were often other local languages involved. Forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards, for months. After a short time, Malinche learns Spanish, but the translation train is pretty tortured for a while.
And the things they have Malinche translate! Once they get to Tenochtitlan—a brilliant lake settlement larger than any European city of the time—they are given a tour of the grounds. Once the tour is over, Cortés tells Moctezuma (aka Montezuma—the leader), in no uncertain terms, that his people are heathens, that the land now belongs to Spain, and that Moctezuma is to tear down the temples and turn them into churches.
And Malinche translates that. How do we know? Because immediately afterwards angry warriors start chasing the Spaniards through the palace, until the conquistadors barricade themselves in their quarters. Shortly thereafter, Cortés, Malinche, and a couple others sneak into Moctezuma’s room, where Cortés tells him that he is now a prisoner of Spain. And Malinche translates again!
