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My greetings and updates the love it has. I arrived here at Whose early yesterday evening in Good Health. Thank God. I'll be on the day in Adasti Woman.
By now she has been led away to the castle above. Now those who taught you that murdered the innocent, those evil women in Lee with that young lad who is in silence, cruelly assisted them with their atrocities, who are sent to Bitchah. They are on the guard and will be held in strict captivity until God willing. I arrive home to bring the strong justice they deserve.
The woman can remain imprisoned in the town, but the young lad must be confined at the castle. As for the people and servants that I brought with me, when my men entered the Chatsha Manor, they found a dead girl in the house. Another followed in death as a result of many wounds and avenues. In addition to this, there were also a womb to dance to torture a womb there.
The other victims were kept hidden away, where this damned woman prepared these future marches. I am just waiting until his cursed woman is brought to the castle, and the other's destination is determined. And then I break away and hope if the way permits that I make it home by tomorrow. May God grant it.
Now I have written this in the greatest haste, 30 December 1610 in Vagojellie, your loving Lord and spouse Count Giorgi Thazou. Good evening, dear listener. I hope you are comfortable for tonight. I shall take you on the beginning of a journey into the very lands where serial murder became common knowledge.
Back then it was of course not called serial murder or serial killers, bar from it. In these times the common folk and nobility alike talked of vampires and werewolves, of witches and warlocks and servants of Lucifer himself. As an old Norwegian saying goes, they will love a child as many names. So imagine if you will, lightning flashing in the dark night, illuminating the Jagdantans surrounding the veil in which you see them hot back.
You are in a small village and the year is 1610, the date, the 29th of December. Most of the buildings in the little village are small wooden huts, many with attached straw or roofs. Few windows and small doorways. It is raining and the road is a wits slipply mess of mud.
The man in charge of your small party of able-bodied men is the prime minister called the Palatine of Hungary, Giorgi Thazou. The man who is a letter I just read. Many other nobles followed him, Counts Miklos Erzarinnier and Giorgi Thrugeth, the Homenai and the third, Squire Imre Magyrian. A squad of armed guards accompanied these men, lending very real force to their titles of authority.
They are all standing in front of the manor house, much larger and better built than all the other houses in the village. They had all been inside the house but quickly left. Inside the manor, they had found countless air-sabets buffory having supper. Some of the guards detained her, the others searched the premises for evidence of a crime.
According to Thazou, when they first had entered, they found the courts mentioned the letter, a young girl who had been beaten to death. The body had also been mutilated. Soon, they found two more young girls, also stabbed and beaten. One would later die from her wounds while the other survived, although maimed for life.
Following the sounds of screaming behind the door, the party came up on three old women and a young man, all servants of Counts' buffory. The four of them were in the midst of torturing a very young girl, while another sobbing young female child waited her turn to be tortured. Even more victims were soon discovered, those who had been hidden away until their turn. The soldiers apprehended the four servants before returning to the Counts' buffory, also known to them as Lady Widow N'Dasty.
When they returned, she was at her feet screaming at them. What is this intrusion? You shall pay all of you for this. Then, slowly, as she recognized the men in the dim candlelight, her face changed appearance from that of arrogant rage to that of uncertainty.
The prime minister of the Palatine declared, Lady Widow N'Dasty, in the name of the king, you are hereby under arrest. The Count has laughed at him, but she stopped when the large soldiers brush-lit her by the arm and started to lead her away. The Palatine himself pulled her by the hair and dragged her screaming through the manor house. He demanded that she take a hard look at the beast of carnage her four accomplices, now being placed in trades, had done.
The Count has stopped screaming insults and a look of calm arrogance came over her face as she simply stopped speaking. This only infuriated the Palatine, who ordered the Countess to be taking up to the castle too. Outside, by now nearly 30 local men from the town of Tetshire had gathered, a grim procession made its way toward the castle, determined to discover the tool behind their ghastly rumors. What they would find there would forever change them and give rise to a story that would haunt polite Hungarian society for hundreds of years.
During the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Bathory family rose to prominence and exerted a great deal of influence over central Europe. Its members, including several princes, a cardinal, and even the king of Poland, were all held positions of high authority in the kingdom of Hungary and surrounding areas. The Bathory family belonged to a clan of Hungarian nobles called the Good Kellead, which, according to history, formed when two German brothers, Good and Kellead, moved to Hungary. History traces the technical beginning of the family, however, to hundreds of Rachommej, patron of the monastery of Sarvar, in the county of Shatmar.
In 1279, King Lajlow rewarded Andra's brother, Hados, as well as his sons, Giorgi, Benedict, and Britchus, for their military service by granting them the estate located at Bator in the county of Jablus, in 1310 Britchus to possession of Bator. Soon after, he and his descendants referred to themselves as being of Bator, or Bathory. The younger branch of the family, the Bathory of Exed, descended from Lukasz, the youngest son of Britchus. Lukasz possessed why the states in Jafmar, and was granted the lordship of Exed by the king, where he built a castle called Rachay, meaning loyalty in Hungarian.
Since they retained possession of Bator, members of this branch were called either of Bator, Aibathri, or as the younger branch, Neer Bator, meaning simply new Bathri. The Bathries themselves trace their lineage back to the year 900, well before the brother, Newton Kellead came to Hungary. In this rather more fantastical version, a warrior named a vetoes of the first generation of the Good Kellead clan, went to fight a terrible dragon that lived in the swamps of Exed, made a skill to dragon with three landstrusts, and as a reward received both land and castle located there. He was also honored with a name Bathory, which means Good Kiro.
The word for brave in Hungarian is also Bator. Due to this legend, the Bathry co-to-varms featured a three-horsed-on-tilt teeth surrounded by a dragon by its own tail. In the late 1400s, Istvan V was a boy-vod of Transylvania, and aimed most less than a hundred-wheel recognize. He was the first in a long line of Bathries who would rule that country.
In the 16th century, Hungary was divided over two competing claims of the throne, the Exed branch of the Bathory family sided with Habsburgs, who organized the election of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria as King of Hungary. However, the song Leo Branch supported Janos as Japulai, who had been elected king by the majority of Hungarian nobles. The two branches of Bathory family eventually united politically by Asabad's Bathory's own parents, Yoli and Anna, when Yoli Bathory of the Exed branch changed allegiance from Habsburg's two Japulai. When the Habsburg king commandeered his castle as Buyak, Yoli was eager to strengthen his alliance with the boy-vod of Transylvania.
He accomplished this by marrying Anna and, in doing so, united the two branches of the Bathory clan. Tension between the Habsburgs and Bathries would continue for generations, as the two rival families vied for power in Central Europe. Born amidst this conflict was a daughter who shared blood from both sides of the family tree, Countess, Erisabeth Bathory. Erisabeth Bathory was born on the 7th of August 1560, that Exed family estate located in what is today known as Nagi EXET, not far from near Bator, Hungary.
In her time, the massive estate rose under the swamps, resembling a fortified city built upon the marshy plains. Located today in the northern Great Plain region of Eastern Hungary, near Bator, served as a Bathory family siege, and administrative centre and family burial sites. In fact, the Bathory family owned the town, including the magnificent church and the Mosolium. The young Erisabeth spent her childhood at the family holdings in the countryside of Exed and near Bator, near the Romanian border.
Erisabeth had an older brother, Islan, a brother of Gabor, who, unfortunately, do not know the date of birth of, as well as two younger sisters, Jovya and Klaya. Despite the raging political conflict the family patriarchs were wrapped up in, the Bathory children were well protected, and lived a happy peaceful countryside life. The lands surrounding the estates of a pasture lands, misiforists, marshes, swamps and foggy moors. For the most part, the lands still slumbered in the millages, and the Bathory family continued to rule its lands and peasantry, as it had done for hundreds of years.
In addition to political strife for secular power, the Bathory clan was also heavily involved in the Great Religious War, that was going on in Central Europe at this time in history. Protestant Reformation was exploding, and the armies of Islan, were at the border of Romania and Hungary, Hungary, for conquest. Protestantism was particularly popular in Transylvania, as well with the common people and some of the Hungarian nobility. The kings and other great lords of the region maintained allegiance to the Catholic Church and Holy Roman Emperor.
There's a bet's parents chose Protestantism. There's a bet herself was raised a Calvinist by her mother. No doubt, there's a bet was quite familiar with the teachings of both Catholicism and Lutheranism, as well as Calvinism. In 1566, when there's a bet was only six years old, the legendary Sultan Suleiman the magnificent died.
His son, Selim, temporarily, turned his attention away from Hungary, creating a low in fighting for the next 12 years. As a bet Bathory's childhood, in the first few years of my life, we're spent during this relative quiet period of Hungarian history. And yet, the same period saw the maturation of the early modern, or Renaissance era, across Europe. Explorers were now conquering oceans and reaching the new world, printing presses were operating throughout Europe, telescopes peered into the heavens, cannons and rifles changed the nature of warfare, and some of the world's greatest art and architecture came into being.
This was the world of Galileo, Queen Elizabeth, Davinci, Luther, and Michelangelo. This was also the world, complex, dynamic, revolutionary, artistic, billions, and bloody, in which Elizabeth Bathory grew up. As a member of the high nobility, she would experience all of it. Some scholars have speculated that her subbed suffered from insanity, and exhibited sexual sadism later in life as a result of her formative years spent at the Bathory family estate.
The place has been described as if it wasn't insane asylum, filled with dysfunctional in-bed lunatics. They claim her brother, East one, for example, was a sadistic lecture of sex-themed and drunkard, who could be found running naked in marketplaces after binge. Her uncle, Ka-bor, dressed in armor and fought off invisible attackers while shouting in unknown languages and foaming at the mouth. Her aunt, Clara, was a bisexual who allegedly practiced witchcraft, killed her husbands, and taught Elizabeth how to torture servants and make love to women.
But father refused to leave a favourite chair whether to sleep, eat, or bathe. As a child, Elizabeth witnessed the bizarre execution of a person, who, when accused of selling his child to the Turks, was so alive into the body of a horse. The absolute validity of such stories is questionable. In fact, that this family rose to power and prestige, both at court and on the battlefield, not merely by means of patronage or luck, but due to superior intelligence, cunning, and courage.
While Elizabeth's brother, East one, might have been a sex-themed, and apparently did not result much in the way of offspring. Your no-children with his wife, Fruszina Drugath, and only one illegitimate child. His drunken behaviour would not have affected as much. He was only five years her senior, and she had already moved out of the estate by the age of 11.
Mental illness may indeed have run in the family. In this air-iron Europe, it was very common for an ability to in-breed. The common belief, what's at the blood of nobility, was a difference than that of the common people, hence the phrase blue blood. And thus such, they often turned to incest in order to keep the family lying pure.
Inbreeding, for example between uncle and niece, or brother and sister, increases the risk of chronic illness and mental disability in the fetus by a dramatic factor. While wedding between brother and sister was very rare, a coupling between first cousins was not. Tempertantrum, sword-lined house, or an unusual allegiance to a favourite chair, with all very typical aristocratic eccentric eccentricities in the late and early, 16th century Europe. It is known that young Elizabeth suffered seizures and it's a rage as a child.
It is also said that her father suffered from these symptoms as well. In later years her letters described both eye and head pain that caused her problems, like in migraines and epilepsy. In Elizabeth's time, servants were viewed as only slightly better than slaves. The common notion was that they could be dealt with, almost however their master wished.
Killing servants was generally frowned upon, but no nobleman would face any official sanctions, but executing a servant who had been caught stealing, or even worse, for indicating with someone in the nobleman's family. Cuma life was generally thought of as cheap in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Wars, famines, religious revolts, disease and terrible inflation affected both low and high-born people. Hungarian peasants tasted some of the very greatest of hardships, as the lands they'd tailored their use as frequent battlegrounds by various warlords, be they catholic, Protestant or Muslim.
In addition to this, their landlords exploited them to an extreme degree in order to finance their various religious and territorial wars. Finally, the peasants had enough and revolted in 1514, the already Diorja championed their revolt. Diorja and his men raided villages and towns, looted churches and went on a killing spree in Pailing, Area Priests and Lesson nobles. Diorja and his rebels were eventually met on the battlefield by senior nobility and their knights.
The combined forces of Janos, Jacques Olyai, and Elizabeth's great uncle, East one-bathory, routed and captured the rebels at 10 min. Any hopes of revolution were short-lived and disasters for those who participated. Giorgi Diorja was executed by being roasted alive. An illustration from the 16th century Hungarian almanac shows his reveling captors placing a red-hot metal crown on the captured Diorja's head.
Bound half-naked to an iron throne, or coals were shoveled beneath his seat and ignited. His accomplices were not already been impaled all around him, but forced fed their commanders flesh before being broken on the wheel. Before we continue, it is important to understand what being broken on the wheel really entails. The convicted is placed on the ground, usually having his arms and legs bound tight spread eagle outwards.
The executioner then uses a mallet or hammer to break every single bone in the condemned man's body. The smallest finger to the thigh bone. When all the bones had been broken, the condemned was then tied to a large wagon wheel. His limbs interlaced with the wheel spokes.
Before the wheel was raised on a pike, the victim, if still alive, would lie broken on top of the wheel exposed to the elements. Cravens and crows would rapidly descend on him and start to eat his eyes and the flesh on his face. Finally, the condemned man would die of shock, exposure, or thirst. Such spectacular executions were rare.
The most common way of executing criminals were to hang them, or chop their heads with an axe. Not only in special cases, especially threason, did extra-advinds methods like I just described come to use. The results of the pessant uprising was not beneficial to the command. Chief Justice Istvan Verbauche imposed a terrifying decree upon them called the Opus-3-partitum-Eurys-Concuectu-Dinari-Pongaree, printed in 1517.
In short, as punishment for rising up against their noble lords, the peasantry would forever be chained to the land as lifelong slaves. All of their descendants would be enslaved as well, so that they would also be forced to pay tides. Pessants were forbidden to own firearms and expected to provide 50 days of unpaid labor per year, usually consisting of one day every week. They would not be allowed to travel without permission, and their large code at will condemned them to death for any transgression as a lay-sofit.
Erzubet was born almost 50 years after the Opus-3-partitum, and she had thus never known a time when the people who teal their family soil or cultivated their harvest were free to come and go as they pleased, not to mention being free to choose their employer. Travel was, even for the nobles, strictly limited, especially considering how dangerous the lands surrounding the bathroom lands were. Ottoman Turks poured in all over the eastern borders of Europe, and the threat of being kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed was very real, no matter if you were of common or noble stock. By the time Erzubet was born, the local workforce had been reduced to property status.
For commoners, particularly gypsies, the usual punishment for any transgression was hanging, but cutting off of a hand or fingers. Erzubet was witnessed with one of the more unusual punishments, the aforementioned execution of gypsies being sewn into a horse. Her reaction was unusual as well. She is recorded and has giggling gleefully at the site of the poor gypsies head, poking out of the dying horse.
Erzubet had, and for its time, excellent education at her parents' home, and her family believed that a girl should be just as educated as a boy. She was trained in the classics, mathematics, and could read and write Hungarian Greek, Latin, German, and even slow back the language of her many servants. She also appears to have been interested in religion, occultism, astronomy, botanae, biology, and, and not to be. Throughout her life, she ordered books from merchants, requested copies of works from fellow nobles, and appears to have been what we would today call a life-long learner.
She was an avid writer, and many of her letters and diary entries are preserved. She had a writing style that was short, and to the point, almost cut. She waited few words generally, and wrote in the controlled style of one trained in the classics. In addition to this, young Erzubet was somewhat of a tomboy.
Today, nobody would think much of such behavior from a girl, but 400 years ago, it was scandals. She demanded to be treated as well as her male relatives, and enjoyed dressing up like a boy, studying like a boy, and playing like a boy, including fencing and horsemanship. If she didn't get a treatment she demanded, she would throw violently historical fits of rage. In 1571, when Erzubet was only 11 years old, she was engaged to a 16-year-old count, named Ferink Nadasdi de Nodazdi et Fogara's fault.
When she turned 12, the engagement was made official. Her marriage into a prime-year Hungarian family at a young age, combined with her sharp intellect, magnificent education, and impeccable sense of fashion, certainly caused her to be somewhat of a celebrity of her day. She was also very wealthy as a newlywed, since she had inherited an enormous amount of property from both her parents who had died only a couple of years prior to her wedding. Her husband's estate, the castle at Sibar, was approached by a long rampart, and surrounded by a moat as wide as a river.
The town and castle set amidst wetlands, and homes of some staff members who were located on Boggy Islands. In the summer, clouds of mosquitoes, biting flies and a terrible smell of swamp water made for a most unpleasant experience. It is no wonder that, in the future, Erzubet would typically spend summers after other residences preferring the reside at Sibar Court only in the colder months. And so, we come to a close, first chapter in the story of the beloved Countess, Erzubet's battery.
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Thank you. Good night and good luck.