Erzsebet Bathory was born in 1560 into one of the most powerful families in the Kingdom of Hungary, a niece of the King of Poland, and married Ferenc Nadasdy, a famous soldier, at fifteen. She ran extensive estates alone for years while he was at war, and after his death in 1604 she was a widow holding enormous lands and owed enormous sums by the Crown.
In 1610 the Palatine of Hungary, Gyorgy Thurzo, acting on complaints that had been circulating for years, raided Csejte castle and arrested her and four servants. Over three hundred witnesses were heard.
They described girls, at first peasant girls, later the daughters of minor gentry sent to the household to be educated, being beaten, burned, starved, cut and left to die of exposure, and buried secretly.
Four servants were tried and three were executed. Bathory herself was never tried. She was confined at Csejte in December 1610 and died there on August 21, 1614.
The usual explanation for the lack of a trial is that a public prosecution of a Bathory would have been politically impossible, and would have forfeited her estates in a way that suited nobody who mattered. She was the largest creditor of a Crown that had every reason not to hear the case.
The numbers need care. Witnesses at the 1611 trial testified to figures in the region of thirty-seven to fifty-one. One of them, a woman named Susannah, referred to a book kept by Bathory listing 650. No such book was ever produced and no one else corroborated it.
650 is one hearsay sentence. It is also the only number most people have ever heard about this case.
The story that she bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth does not appear anywhere in the 1610 and 1611 material. It was written by the Jesuit Laszlo Turoczi in 1729, more than a century after her death, and it is now the single thing everyone knows about her. She is the archive's clearest example of a case whose famous detail was invented by a writer, not established by a court.
A revisionist argument, that she was a wealthy widow framed by a Crown that owed her money and by neighbours who wanted her land, has serious historians on its side and is not settled either way. What is not in doubt is that girls in her household died, and that the witnesses were numerous and consistent about it.