• Advance Read the first pages of 'Dracula's Story' (Harp editorial)
  • The Dracula brothers.The brutal impaler and the handsome boy who made his life bitter
  • Visit to Bran Castle.The last bite of Count Dracula

Dracula is an elegant aristocrat who needs to drink blood to stay alive. Dracula is a man. However, in real life, the person who has had a behavior closer to that of vampires has been a woman.

Her name was Elizabeth Bathory . He was born in 1560 in Transylvania, in one of the oldest, most powerful and respected families of the Hungarian aristocracy. A family that has given the world a cardinal, several princes, a Hungarian prime minister and Elizabeth Bathory, nicknamed The Bloody Countess .

Bathory was related to the famous Vlad Tepes , better known as Vlad the Impaler, the cruel and bloodthirsty Hungarian ruler who punished his enemies by impaling them and torturing them to death and that some consider to have inspired Bram Stoker to create the character of the Count Dracula

Elizabeth Bathory was born 130 years after The Impaler, also a Hungarian, also possessed the title of countess and her coat of arms was represented by a dragon. "But unlike Tepes, she drank real blood , a fact that made her a living vampire," says historian Clive Leatherdale, one of the world's leading authorities in the figure of Dracula, in his book History of Dracula , which has just see the light in Spain (Arpa editorial). "She was the most famous and authenticated vampire practitioner in life of which there is evidence," summarizes Leatherdale.

The Guinness Book proves that the bloody countess was the most prolific murderer in history, attributing a minimum of 610 confirmed victims. The sacrificed were all virgins who ended up being tortured and sacrificed to provide fresh blood to the aristocrat, who believed that the fluid red possessed rejuvenating properties. Blood intake, they tell, made Elizabeth Bathory feel and look younger.

As it corresponded to her lineage, Countess Bathory received during her childhood an exquisite education. But he grew up in a time when certain practices that today would be considered deeply sadistic were the order of the day . As a child she witnessed "unusually cruel punishments" inflicted on gypsies and peasants who broke the law, Raymond McNally revealed in the 80s, the man who identified elements of Dracula in the figure of Vlad The Impaler, in his book on Elizabeth Bathory Dracula was a woman .

With 11 years they promised her in marriage with Ferenc Nasady, another Hungarian nobleman. With 12 he went to live in the castle of his fiance to be integrated into his new family. With 13 she became pregnant with a servant and, to keep the scandal a secret, she was held in a remote fortress where she gave birth to a child who was quickly taken out of the country.

Finally, he married Ferenc Nasady at age 15. But he spent the day immersed in wars and away from the marital home. And Countess Bathory began to apply some exemplary punishments, from those that were styled at the time, to those servants who did not fulfill their obligations. A maid who had stolen a coin, forced her to have that red-hot coin pressed in her hand. "He had to have it until he left a visible mark on his hand, as a warning symbol about possible robberies to other maids," McNally explains.

But the countess went much further. After the death of her husband in 1604, and after expelling from the castle where she lived her family, she gave herself up to an unparalleled sadism. He began routinely applying to his maids brutal punishments for insignificant or directly invented offenses that included wild humiliations, mutilations and finally death. To a maid who in his opinion spoke more about the account, for example they had her mouth sewn . Another one that seemed to have a slightly dissolute behavior made her sit for a couple of hours on a red-hot grill. And several saw their fingers cut off.

They say that Elizabeth Bathory was very pretty. But, over the years, its beauty began to wilt. He then asked one of his nurses for advice, and she suggested that he take bloodbaths . Not surprisingly, since the beginning of time it has been considered that blood has special properties.

"The concept of a vampire is based on two precepts: the belief in life after death and the magical power of blood," explains Leatherdale, who reveals how the most primitive communities already knew the mystical and biological significance of that red fluid . It was something that was based on simple observation: if someone lost a lot of blood, they died. The conclusion then was to think that blood was the essence of life ...

"A perverse theory ensued then: if the loss of blood weakened and killed, it was probably later believed that the consumption of this magic liquor could regenerate, rejuvenate and restore life," says Leatherdale, recalling how the bleeding for healing, based purposes in the shedding of the supposed bad blood of the patients, they were carried out until the 20th century or as blood transfusions have been practiced since ancient times.

"An old remedy that was prescribed to lepers was bloodbaths," says the author of Dracula's Story . " During the battles, the warriors drank the warm blood of the fallen , not only as a gesture of domination and possession but by the conviction that the victor would thus obtain the strength and courage of the victim. The blood also acted as an element fertilizer and was used to irrigate crops, "he adds.

And with the arrival of Christianity, the symbolism of the blood was further reinforced . "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, since my flesh is true food, and my blood, true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I, in him ", pray verses 54, 55 and 56 of chapter 6 of the Gospel according to St. John.

"The Eucharist was not the only means to strengthen the belief in the mystical properties of blood. The cult of the Virgin Mary encouraged charlatans to prescribe the uncorrupted blood of virgins as an antidote to every conceivable evil . Throughout medieval Europe the maids were very much in demand, not so much for their sexual favors but for their innocent blood, "says Leatherdale.

But Elizabeth Bathory took that idea to the extreme. One day, they say, he slapped a maid to a maid as a reprimand for pulling it while brushing her hair . The slap was so strong that the maid bled, a few drops of the red fluid falling into the countess's hand. Bathory had the impression that the area of ​​the skin in which the maiden's blood had fallen was younger and smoother. So she ordered that they cut her throat and fill a bathtub with her blood .

From there, bloodbaths became a routine. Although many other times, several witnesses later declared, the countess directly bit her victims in the neck or on the shoulder to drink her blood.

His crimes began to be so bulky and the bodies of his victims so great that King Mathias II of Hungary ordered an investigation. One of the countess's accomplices in the murders stated that the death toll (because they were all young women) was approximately fifty. But a witness said he had seen a list, written in handwriting by The Bloody Countess , which collected all of his victims as an inventory and that they totaled 650.

Elizabeth Bathory was tried in 1611 (without appearing in person to the process) and sentenced for the rest of her days to be held in Esei Castle , where she was walled leaving open only a tiny slit through which water and food passed . He died three years later, in 1614.

It seems very unlikely that Bram Stoker knew the story of The Blood Countess when he conceived the character of Dracula. But everything indicates that he was not inspired by Vlad Tepes The Impaler by creating the vampire protagonist of his novel Dracula . "We can say for sure that the contribution of Vlad the Impaler in the novel was minimal, if he had one, and probably Stoker had barely heard of him," says Leatherdale.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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