The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left an uneven paper trail. Some of it is a full judgment, signed and dated. Some is the secretary’s summary of papers that a king later burned. Some is a stack of witness statements gathered for a trial that never took place, and some is a ballad printed in the week of an execution. Six cases from Europe, in five jurisdictions and across a hundred and sixty years, show what that trail contains when a historian finally sits down with it: the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory, the Roman circle around the name of Giulia Tofana, the Marquise de Brinvilliers and the Parisian fortune-teller Catherine Monvoisin, the Moscow landowner Darya Saltykova, and a young carrier in Coimbra named Luísa de Jesus.
The question put to each is the same. Who made the record, and for what purpose? What does it actually say about the dead, and about the accused? And where does the story that circulates today leave the document behind? The answers differ sharply from case to case. In two of them the court produced a judgment. In two the principal figure was never charged. In one the king destroyed the evidence, and in one the evidence was so thin that the sentence itself is the main surviving source.
Elizabeth Báthory belonged to one of the most powerful families in the Kingdom of Hungary. Born in 1560 and married at fifteen to the soldier Ferenc Nádasdy, she ran the family estates through long stretches of war. According to Alena Mišíková of the State Archive in Prešov, the royal inquiry began early in 1610, when King Matthias II ordered the Palatine of Hungary, György Thurzó, to look into rumors about murdered maidservants and girls. The countess herself was not told.
What the inquiry produced is the heart of the surviving record. The historian Gábor Várkonyi, writing in 2025, counts statements from 327 witnesses. Of those, 220 had seen or heard nothing relevant. Of the 107 who had heard something, 43 gave statements that did not support the accusation. The remaining 64 said they had heard of killings, and none of the 64 was an eyewitness. The numbers they offered ranged from a handful to "innumerable" and up to 650. Várkonyi’s reading is that almost every substantial claim can be traced back to about ten people, and he lists the figures they gave: 650 from a woman named Zsuzsanna, 560 from János Kadludecz, 300 each from Boldizsár Poky and Mihály Blaho, 200 each from a vicar named István Racziczénusz and from Ferenc Török, and 175 from Benedek Bicsérdy. The State Archive in Prešov summarizes the testimony as claiming between 2 and 650 deaths of girls and young women across the years 1585 to 1610. No court ever made a finding on any of those numbers.
Várkonyi also points to who stood behind some of the accusations. Two former servants of the countess’s late husband, the steward Benedek Dezső and Jakab Szilvásy, claimed to have witnessed many wrongs. In 1608, as a widow, she had ordered a complete survey of her lands, with a census of the villages and a list of her income, and Várkonyi suggests the two men may have feared that it would expose their own management of the estates. He calls what followed a campaign against her character. The historian Tünde Lengyel, in a companion essay, adds a caution about the psychological portrait of the countess drawn up in the 1980s: it went beyond their expertise, she writes, rested on uncertain sources, and was then repeated as fact.
The countess seems to have known something was coming. In September 1610, before any result of the inquiry was announced, she made a will dividing her property among her son and two daughters, according to the Prešov archive. On December 29, 1610, the palatine’s men seized her after dinner at Čachtice, in what is now western Slovakia, and the next day she was taken up to the castle on the hill above the village. The Slovak Spectator reported in 2014 that about thirty noblemen were present as witnesses, and four members of her household were arrested at the same time.
Those four were taken to the palatine’s court at Bytča. The Čachtice castle administration names them as János Újváry, called Ficzkó, Katarína Beniczky, Dorottya Szentes, called Dorko, and Ilona Jó. Their confessions were taken during interrogation in custody, and Várkonyi notes that what they said may partly describe what their own interrogators had done to them. Three were executed at Bytča in January 1611: two women and the manservant Újváry on January 7, and a further woman on January 24. The fate of Katarína Beniczky is reported differently in the sources, and the record gives no clear answer.
The countess was never charged. The Prešov archive records that a document drawn up from the investigation, apparently with a trial in mind, was never used. She was confined at Čachtice Castle from December 30, 1610, on the palatine’s order, and King Matthias accepted life confinement after her relatives pleaded for leniency. She died there on August 21, 1614, aged fifty-four. The Prešov archive’s summary of the later prosecution account says the palatine had caught her in the act of mistreating girls and sentenced her to life imprisonment on the spot; Várkonyi observes that a girl freed during the arrest was the only alleged victim interviewed who gave no evidence, and asks why nobody took her statement.
There is another question about who was at risk. Bledsaw, quoted by National Geographic in 2022, argues that the countess fell because she harmed the daughters of the minor nobility, not because she harmed servants: the deaths of serfs and servants were, in her words, "gauche but not really illegal," while the deaths of girls of noble birth were a graver matter. That is an interpretation. The record itself says only that the palatine moved against her after the accusations reached the king.
The legend that most people know, of a countess who harmed girls to keep her youth, sits outside all of this. It first appears in print in 1729, in a history of Hungary by a Jesuit scholar, more than a century after the countess died, according to Slovak and Hungarian historians. No witness in the 1610 inquiry is reported to have said it. The record is a set of depositions, several of them traceable to people with reasons of their own, and a dossier that the men who held it never put before a court.
The documentary position of Giulia Tofana is the strangest of the six. She was never charged, never tried and never punished. She died in Rome in 1651, apparently in her bed and unsuspected, aged about seventy by the death record National Geographic cites. Everything the archives say about her comes from an investigation that began eight years later, in 1659, into a group of women who were making and selling a poison in Rome. In that investigation, witnesses and prisoners named her as the woman who had brought the recipe from Sicily and taught it to her stepdaughter, Gironima Spana.
The principal source is the criminal file of the Governor of Rome’s court, kept in the State Archives of Rome. It was first described by the Italian historian Alessandro Ademollo in a short book of 1881, and it was studied at length by the American historian Craig A. Monson, whose book The Black Widows of the Eternal City (University of Michigan Press, 2020) rests on a notary’s transcript of about 1,450 pages. The Italian legal historian Simona Feci has since worked through more than 700 documents on the investigations for L’acquetta di Giulia (Viella, 2024). A second source is the account that Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino wrote in the 1660s in his life of Pope Alexander VII. A third is a group of chronicles, diaries and street ballads from the time.
The file shows how the case opened. Pallavicino writes that the authorities first learned of the poison through a woman who had used it on her husband, confessed months later to a priest, and offered to tell everything in return for immunity, which she received. To obtain the poison itself as evidence, the court set a trap. A clerk’s wife dressed as a noblewoman and sat in a borrowed palace; a go-between told one of the sellers that a great lady wanted help with an unbearable husband. The seller, Giovanna De Grandis according to National Geographic’s account of the modern research, arrived and was arrested with a flask in her hand. The liquid was tested on two animals, and Pallavicino records that the one given the antidote recovered. De Grandis confessed, and her statements led to the arrest of other sellers and buyers.
Five women were finally held as the principal makers and sellers, Pallavicino writes. Four, after days of denial, confessed. Gironima Spana, by then the center of the network, denied everything to the end, yet the judges held her guilty and condemned her to the same penalty as the rest. On Saturday, July 5, 1659, five women were taken from the Tor di Nona prison on carts through Rome and executed together in the Campo de' Fiori: Spana, De Grandis, Maria Spinola, Graziosa Farina and Laura Crispolti. The five names and the date are recorded in a ballad printed soon afterward, which the Sicilian scholar Salvatore Salomone-Marino judged to match the trial file in every particular he could check. Pallavicino explains that the authorities chose the busy square over the usual place of execution so that the crowd would be as large as possible; despite the heat, he says, one shop window overlooking the square was let that day for four gold doubloons.
What the file does not show is a body count attached to Giulia. Trevor Dean, reviewing Monson’s book, notes that the suspicious deaths in the file fall between 1655 and 1659, beginning with the husbands of two sisters and their aunt in 1655, and that none of the physicians who treated them appears to have suspected poison. Rome had just come through the plague of 1656. The mixture itself was described by witnesses in 1659 as an ordinary compound sold in small flasks under several names, among them the "little water" of the Italian title and, on some bottles, a saint’s manna. The ingredients were not mysterious, and modern writers stress as much.
Giulia herself enters the file only as an origin. Salomone-Marino’s 1881 summary of the trial file records testimony that she left Palermo after a Genoese gentleman, Ippolito Larcari, died of a poison she was said to have prepared and another man to have given him. It is the only death in any source tied to her by name. It rests on testimony given in Rome some thirty-five years after the event, about a death in another city, and no charge or trial in Sicily is known. It is an allegation in the record, not a finding. The modern archival work of Monson and Feci gives her married name as Giulia Mangiardi, places her move to Rome in 1624, and describes a healer and marriage broker who offered fortune-telling, creams and love potions to well-off clients and who, in Feci’s view, probably inherited the recipe and sold it only now and then.
The selectivity of the punishment is itself part of the record. Dean’s review records that two noblewomen who had allegedly obtained the poison were not pursued by the investigator, and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s account says noblewomen implicated in the case were pardoned by the pope. National Geographic reports that only one of the buyers was executed, two received papal immunity for testifying, and the others were banished. The summaries do not agree on how many executions followed in 1659; Monson’s publisher says only six women were executed in all. Pallavicino adds that the executions were followed by an edict requiring a written license from the magistrates for the making or sale of any poison and ordering physicians to report suspected poisonings.
The legend came afterward, and the record lets a reader watch it grow. Pallavicino never names the poison and never mentions Giulia; he calls the ringleader only "a certain Girolama Siciliana." The Folger notes that the women executed in 1659 did not call their product by Giulia’s name, and that the ballad printed after the executions calls the liquid "the water of Palermo," made by "the vile Tofania," a reference to a Palermo poisoner rather than to her. A Roman gossip quoted by Monson remarked on the day of the executions that the poison might have killed "five hundred husbands," and that remark, a guess made in the crowd, is among the earliest sources of the large numbers that later attached to her name. The figure of 600 that circulates today has no document behind it.
A second legend gives her a different end: a convent, an arrest, a confession and an execution in Naples in 1709. The German traveler Johann Georg Keysler, whose letters were printed in English in 1758, described a woman in a Naples prison, called "Tophana," a small old woman of a religious sisterhood whose life had been spared although she was said to have sent "many hundred people out of the world." Keysler’s prisoner was alive around 1730, nearly eighty years after the Rome death record, and by his own account was not executed. Whoever she was, she cannot have been the woman who died in Rome in 1651. Even Mozart is dragged in: the composer’s first biographer, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, wrote in 1798 that Mozart believed someone had poisoned him, without naming a poison, and a 2015 review in the Revista Clínica Española called the poisoning theory untenable. The name that frightened man could reach for says nothing about Giulia.
The modern consensus that Monson, Feci and the historian Mike Dash reached by different roads is narrow and firm. A real Sicilian woman named Mangiardi lived in Rome from 1624 and died there in 1651. Testimony in 1659 named her as the source of a recipe and as someone who sold it. She was never accused in her lifetime. Her stepdaughter and four other women were executed eight years after her death. The surname, the Palermo parentage, the death toll and the execution story were added afterward. Her case belongs in a survey of court records precisely because the record is so much smaller than her reputation.
The Marquise de Brinvilliers is the one Parisian defendant of the period whose judgment survives in full. On July 16, 1676, the Parlement of Paris, with the Grand Chambre and the criminal chambers of the Tournelle sitting together on the conclusions of the king’s procureur general, declared "the said d’Aubray de Brinvilliers" duly convicted of having had her father, Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, poisoned; of having had her two brothers poisoned, one the civil lieutenant of Paris and the other a councillor of the Parlement; and of having attempted the life of her sister, Thérèse. The text is reproduced, with passages of Madame de Sévigné's letters on the trial, on the Le Droit criminel site. The court ordered public penance before the cathedral of Notre-Dame, in which she was to declare that she had acted out of vengeance and to have their property, and then sentenced her to death. She was executed at the Place de Grève on July 17, 1676. The judgment also stripped her of any right to inherit from her father, her brothers or her sister, counted from the day of the crimes.
Her family belonged to the magistracy. According to Benedetta Faedi Duramy’s 2012 study in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, she was the eldest of five children of Antoine Dreux d’Aubray, a councillor of state who had been named civil lieutenant of Paris in 1643. The civil lieutenant was one of the chief judges of the Châtelet. Her elder brother took the same office; her younger brother sat in the Parlement that later tried her. The accused and the bench belonged to the same professional world.
The evidence began with a death that had nothing to do with her family. Her lover, the officer Godin de Sainte-Croix, died on July 31, 1672, according to the French Ministry of Justice, and his death was natural. When officials inventoried his effects they came upon a small casket. The ministry says it held nine letters from his mistress, the marquise, in which she claimed to have poisoned her father in 1666 and her two brothers in 1670, and a note of debt connected with the financier Louis Reich de Pennautier, a friend of the finance minister Colbert. When she learned of the casket she left the country. The ministry writes that she went to London, and that the war minister, Louvois, ordered the lieutenant general of police, Nicolas de La Reynie, to arrest her; Faedi Duramy adds that she moved on to Holland. She was sentenced to death in her absence in 1673. She was arrested in March 1676 in a convent at Liège and brought back to Paris.
Her trial before the Parlement began on April 29, 1676. Faedi Duramy writes that it ran to twenty-two sessions over two and a half months and that she had no lawyer. Among her papers was a long written confession, which Sévigné, writing on April 29, reported as Paris had heard it: that in it she accused herself of having poisoned her father, her brothers and one of her children, and of much else. Faedi Duramy calls it the only conclusive evidence against her. Shown the document in court, the marquise admitted that it was in her own handwriting and said she had written it in a high fever, in a fit of frenzy. Sévigné thought this a poor defense. She also recorded, with the eye of a diarist, that the prisoner defended herself fairly well and that the day before she had asked to play piquet because she was bored. In court the marquise denied poisoning her father and brothers and laid the blame on Sainte-Croix, whom she described as a man with a black soul.
The judges were looking past her. The ministry’s history says they concentrated on her links to Pennautier, who was accused and imprisoned. On July 10 Sévigné reported that the marquise had been brought face to face with him, and that people expected she would drag him down. She did not: the ministry writes that she never stopped affirming his innocence, and he was released for lack of evidence. Sévigné predicted on July 22 that he would come out of the affair "a little whiter than snow." The ministry’s reading is political: Louvois wanted to tie Pennautier to the case to damage his rival Colbert, and the rivalry shaped how the inquiry was pursued. Faedi Duramy quotes President Lamoignon of the Parlement as saying that it was in the public interest that her crimes should die with her, which is to say that the court wanted the names of accomplices and the secret of her poisons and did not get them.
Three years later the same atmosphere of fear produced the larger inquiry that reached the court of Louis XIV. The next case begins where the marquise’s ends.
Catherine Monvoisin, known in Paris as La Voisin, is a case in which the quality of the record is the story. She read palms and faces for a living and worked as a midwife. She was arrested in Paris on Sunday, March 12, 1679, on an order transmitted by La Reynie; the arrest record survives in the Archives de la Bastille. On April 7, 1679, Louis XIV created a special court for what it called an "affair of poisons." It sat at the Arsenal near the Bastille, which gave it its formal name, the Chambre de l’Arsenal, and it was nicknamed the Chambre ardente. About a dozen senior magistrates of the Parlement sat on it. The Ministry of Justice says that between April 1679 and July 1682 it dealt with 442 accused and ordered 367 arrests, of which 218 were maintained, and that it sent 34 people to execution, 5 to the galleys and banished 23. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives different totals: 210 sessions, 319 writs of arrest and 36 death sentences. The two do not reconcile, and neither source ties its totals to a specific document.
The papers themselves have a history. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789 the fortress archives were scattered and partly looted; what was recovered went to the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In the nineteenth century the Arsenal librarian François Ravaisson classified them and published them as the Archives de la Bastille. His fifth and sixth volumes, printed in 1872 and 1873, reproduce the arrest record, interrogations, the record of La Voisin’s questioning and of her execution, letters between Louvois and La Reynie, and La Reynie’s own memoranda. The archivist Frantz Funck-Brentano, who completed the inventory, drew on the same files for his history Le Drame des poisons (1900).
The record has a large gap. Louis XIV burned the papers he had kept back from the court. The Ministry of Justice dates that burning to July 1709, and the historian Holly Tucker of Vanderbilt University, interviewed by the History News Network in 2017, said it came not long after La Reynie’s death that year. Funck-Brentano wrote that the main statements of La Voisin’s associate Lesage were among the papers the king burned in his fireplace. What survives is partial, and much of it is La Reynie’s summary of documents that no longer exist.
The chain that led to her is documented. The inquiry began with the Brinvilliers affair; the ministry records that in September 1677 an anonymous note about a plot was left in a Jesuit confessional, and The Connexion reports that a fortune-teller named Magdelaine de La Grange was arrested for poisoning that year. La Reynie’s inquiries led to a widow named Marie Bosse, arrested on January 3 or 4, 1679, according to a document Ravaisson printed. Bosse, questioned under the procedure of the time, named Catherine Deshayes, the wife of Antoine Monvoisin, and the ministry’s account says that is how La Voisin came to the attention of the police. In a confrontation printed by Ravaisson, Bosse reported that La Voisin’s servant had spoken of many dead children. That statement, a servant’s remark relayed by a prisoner, is the root of the infant allegation. La Voisin denied it, and no court made any finding on it.
The prisoner was questioned many times at Vincennes. The interrogations of October 1679 that Ravaisson prints show her discussing clients by name. Ravaisson notes that she never fixed dates. By January 1680 the inquiry had reached the high nobility: a countess left France rather than face the court, a marshal of France gave himself up at the Bastille, and a duchess and a princess were questioned at the Arsenal. Sévigné reported the gossip to her daughter and thought there was nothing "black" in the follies charged against such women, "not even grayish-brown." The duchess, by her account, entered the chamber "like a little queen" and said she had never thought that wise men could ask so many foolish questions.
The letters between Louvois and La Reynie show the king managing the timing of the trial. In late January 1680 the chamber decided not to hear La Voisin on the sellette, the low stool on which an accused was questioned before judgment, on a planned Friday. Another letter said the king wanted her judgment postponed as long as necessary, so that her accusations would remain supported by evidence even after her execution, and suggested that the police officer Desgrez tell her the trial would be delayed for months so that despair would not lead her to harm herself. A later letter set the plan: La Voisin would be put on the sellette on Saturday, February 17, and judged on the Monday. According to Ravaisson’s note she appeared on February 17 and was condemned, after the question and public penance, to death. The record of her execution, written by the court’s clerk, Sagot, gives the date of the judgment as February 19. The king’s prosecutor had asked for added penalties; the chamber set them aside, Ravaisson wrote, as having fallen out of use.
What the judgment named as her crimes has not been quoted in print. Sévigné, describing the execution, called her "famous for her crimes and for her impiety." The questions put to her at Vincennes concerned poisonings, abortions, profanations and impieties. Popular accounts say she was convicted of witchcraft alone; the records cited by historians do not support that wording.
The one death she admitted in the record is that of Président Leféron, a senior magistrate who died on September 8, 1669. The record of her questioning, the procès-verbal de question, survives in part and Ravaisson printed it. In it La Voisin said that a woman named Leroux had supplied the poison, that she had passed it to the magistrate’s wife, and that after his death the widow came to see her, happy to be free. At about four in the afternoon on February 22, 1680, on the day of her execution, Sagot’s record shows her asking to speak to her confessor privately, and then making a declaration "to put her conscience at rest": she had not given Madame Leféron a vial, and Leroux had not given her one. She confirmed that the widow had come to her happy to be a widow, and said the rest of what she had said about her at trial was true. Ravaisson wrote that La Reynie suspected, "not without reason," that the grand penitentiary of Paris had something to do with this softening, and a letter from Louvois advised against using the same priest for the next condemned woman. A partial retraction made hours before an execution is the kind of statement a historian reads twice.
Whether the question had been applied in earnest is itself disputed. The official record says she was put to it. La Reynie, as Funck-Brentano reports, wrote indignantly that she had not truly undergone it, because those administering it had held back for fear that she would say too much, and Funck-Brentano concluded that those administering it and the other judges had received orders. La Voisin was executed at the Place de Grève on February 22, 1680. Sévigné wrote two letters about the day, and the second corrected the first: she had believed the execution was taking place on Wednesday, and it was Thursday. Accounts of her last words disagree. On February 28 Sévigné wrote that she had given her soul to the devil at the moment of her execution. On March 6 she corrected that too, on the word of the confessor, who said that she had pronounced "Jesus Maria," and added that she was careful to correct false news. The early March report that Ravaisson printed quoted the confessor as saying that she declared the evil to be greater than anyone thought.
The explosive testimony came after her death. Her daughter, Marguerite Monvoisin, a prisoner at Vincennes, made a declaration on July 12, 1680, that Louis XIV, writing from Lille on August 2, ordered La Reynie to have clarified. According to La Reynie’s summaries, as Funck-Brentano reports them, Marguerite said that the king’s mistress, whenever she feared losing his favor, sent word to La Voisin, who arranged priests to say masses and supplied powders to be given to the king. She said that a priest, Étienne Guibourg, said masses over a woman lying on a mattress, and that a child was killed at one of them. Marguerite and Guibourg were confronted on October 23, 1680; Funck-Brentano wrote that they confirmed these facts, though Guibourg tried to blame La Voisin for the child’s death. Britannica summarizes the accusations against the king’s mistress made by La Voisin’s daughter and accomplices, and says the black mass and poisoning charges against her were never proven.
La Reynie’s memoranda, printed by Ravaisson, show the investigator weighing this testimony and changing his mind. He called the poison plot Marguerite described "not very plausible" and insufficiently detailed. Yet he thought it hard to believe that she, who seemed intelligent and aware of what was at stake, had invented such things; it seemed to him morally impossible that she had made up an account with so many consistent circumstances, and he noted that Guibourg and Marguerite had separately described the same particular details. He also noted that the accused had every interest in hiding the truth, and concluded that the general presumptions against "the person of importance" whom the two named did not establish certainty. He recorded that Marguerite had tried to harm herself before making her statements. A later paper in Ravaisson’s volume, with no author named in the text, acknowledges an error: its writer told the king that, had God not allowed him to delay his final decision, he might have misled him, because his earlier reasoning had rested on a gross mistake of fact.
The king settled the matter by controlling the paper. Funck-Brentano wrote that Louis ordered the statements of Marguerite and of two other prisoners to be separated from the files sent to the court. The ministry says the king had the interrogations naming his mistress written on loose sheets kept in a sealed casket and barred the chamber from the cases in which she was named. On July 21, 1682, he suspended the chamber and sent the remaining accused to royal fortresses by lettres de cachet, orders that needed no trial, where they stayed for life. A royal declaration of August 29, 1682, regulated the sale of poisons and banned fortune-telling, Actu-Juridique reported in 2022. Madame Leféron, the magistrate’s widow, was sentenced on April 7, 1680, to banishment from the vicomté of Paris and a fine of 1,500 livres, a lenient outcome that Funck-Brentano contrasted with Louvois’s statement that there were thirteen or fourteen witnesses against her. The marshal was discharged. Sévigné called the whole thing "a scandal for nothing."
The numbers attached to La Voisin come from a later book, not a court. The figure of more than 2,500 infants appears in Funck-Brentano’s history of 1900, and no court made a finding on any number. What the record establishes is a woman put to the question in February 1680, condemned by a special chamber, who admitted one death, partly retracted it on the day she died, and was followed by a daughter whose account the king himself chose not to test.
The Saltykova case turned on a procedural novelty: a landowner arrested and punished on the strength of her own serfs' testimony. The historian Yerofei Moriakov of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, who worked through the archival record, describes it as the first such case in Russia. Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, born Ivanova in 1730 and widowed in 1756, was a wealthy Moscow widow. In the six years after her husband’s death her serfs died in large numbers, most of them young women of her household. Moriakov reports that 138 peasant women had been brought from her estates to Moscow and to the village of Troitskoye, and that most of them had died or were unaccounted for by 1762. Pravo.ru, drawing on the investigators' tally, breaks the same 138 down: 50 entered in the household records as dead "of illness," 72 listed as unaccounted for, and 16 recorded as having left to join their husbands or having run away. The serfs' testimony credited her and the household servants who acted on her orders with 75 killings. Moriakov counts three men among the known dead, and the Parliamentary Gazette gives the same figure. The pretexts, the sources agree, were trivial: a house badly cleaned, a dress left creased.
What makes the record unusual is how many people tried to get it opened and failed. The first complaint came in December 1757, when a woman of the household went to the Moscow police and reported that her mistress had killed a serf girl. The case passed to the Detective Office; the woman who complained was flogged, and the matter was dropped. In February 1758 a husband, Trofim Stepanov, raised the alarm over his wife’s death; witnesses would not back him and he was returned to the household, and years later the Justice College judged Saltykova guilty in that very death. In May 1759 a servant named Fyodor Somin reported the deaths of six girls that spring, was flogged and sent back. In November 1759 Fedot Bogomolov told a patrol that his nephew had been killed on her orders; the case went to the Detective Office in 1760, the village headman withdrew his support, and Bogomolov too was returned to her. The parish priest, Ivan Ivanov, refused to bury women from the household who had died without the last rites, and from 1760 he reported the deaths to the church authorities. The Moscow consistory asked the police to investigate in December 1760; he reported again in April 1762. Each time, Moriakov writes, the police sent the case back without result.
Moriakov finds three reasons. Under the law inherited from Muscovy, serfs had no standing to testify against their owners in a criminal case. Officials were bribed, and he names a councillor of the Moscow police, A. I. Molchanov, as one who took money to send complaining serfs back. And Saltykova had connections, which she used. Some petitions simply sank in overloaded offices: the secretary of the Moscow governor’s chancellery had more than 800 cases on his hands in 1762.
In the spring of 1762 a group of her serfs fled. Some declared that they had state secrets to report, invoking a decree of February 1762 that protected people who reported political crimes; they were taken to the Senate office in Moscow in April, and six of them were then held for months by the Detective Office. Two others, Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, whose three wives had died, reached St. Petersburg in July 1762. Catherine II had taken the throne that summer. They handed her a petition, which Moriakov writes that Martynov, who could read and write and had kept his mistress’s expense book, probably wrote. On October 1, 1762, an imperial decree ordered the Justice College in Moscow to take up the matter, summon the witnesses and report to the Senate. The Parliamentary Gazette reports that the empress told the Senate to investigate with the utmost rigor. On October 9, 1762, Saltykova was placed under house arrest in Moscow.
The investigation took five years. Pravo.ru names the official in charge as Stepan Volkov, a man of non-noble birth with no ties to the nobility, assisted by Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov. The most useful evidence came from the household’s own paper. Moriakov writes that the expense ledger was used to trace what had happened to the unaccounted-for serfs, and Pravo.ru reports that by November 1763 the investigators had concluded from the account books that most of the dead had not died naturally. About forty serfs were held at the Justice College as witnesses for years. She was removed from managing her estates, which went to a guardian, and when questioned point by point in 1763 she denied everything and never confessed. On December 24, 1763, after reading a report on the case, Catherine ordered that Saltykova be told she faced harsher interrogation. On May 3, 1764, Moriakov writes, the empress directed instead that the case be decided on witness testimony and a general inquest of the neighborhood; Pravo.ru dates the decree forbidding such measures against Saltykova or her servants to May 17, 1764. The inquest was held in June 1764. According to Pravo.ru, about 130 people were questioned around her Moscow household and more than 300 at Troitskoye. The file went to the Senate in the spring of 1765.
The sources give different figures for what the inquiry established. Pravo.ru and the Parliamentary Gazette both give 38 deaths for which the investigators judged her responsible, 26 more in which she was suspected, and 11 cases in which the serfs were thought to be slandering their mistress. Moriakov, from the archive, writes that in February 1767 the Justice College, in its formal opinion, judged her guilty in the case of 45 serfs, and of plotting against a neighboring landowner and his bride, both of whom survived. Catherine’s decree of October 2, 1768, stripped her of her noble rank and of the use of her father’s and husband’s surnames, ordered that she stand an hour chained to a post on a scaffold in Red Square under a placard reading "Tormentor and murderess," on October 17 or 18, 1768 (the sources differ), and sent her to confinement for life in the Ivanovsky Convent in Moscow. She remained there more than thirty years and died in 1800, by Moriakov’s dating, or on November 27, 1801, by Pravo.ru’s. Russian has called her Saltychikha ever since, a nickname Moriakov believes dates from the time of the sentence.
Several of the dead are known by name, and the record says little else about them. Ekaterina Semenova, who washed floors in the household, died in 1759. Fedosya Artamonova died in the spring of 1761. Aksinya Yakovleva, whom Pravo.ru describes as quiet and pretty, died at the end of February 1762. Fekla Gerasimova, a young maid, died in the summer of 1762. Khrisanf Andreev, nephew of one of the servants, died in November 1759, and a boy, Lukyan Mikheev, in September 1761. The village headman, Nikifor Grigoriev, died in 1761. Moriakov’s list adds others, and notes that the deaths of three women were recorded as suicides. Their names, their places in the household and the years of their deaths are what the documents hold.
The Coimbra case rests on a thin set of documents and on one long-lived argument about where the trial took place. In the spring of 1772 the city learned that infants taken from its foundling wheel had been dying in the hands of a woman trusted to carry them to nurses. The Misericórdia, the city’s great Catholic charity, ran the wheel, the turntable through which mothers left babies anonymously. Luísa de Jesus, a carrier in her early twenties, had collected dozens of infants from the house and had taken, for each, the advance of 600 réis and the cradle and cloth that went with the child. The babies never reached a nurse. The historian Maria Antónia Lopes of the University of Coimbra, who has studied every woman sentenced to death in Portugal from 1693 to the abolition of capital punishment, identifies her as the last woman executed in the country, and her sentence as the harshest given to any woman in the series.
How she worked is described in terms that come from Lopes and from the city council of Coimbra. She went to the wheel and asked for children on behalf of other women, who she said would nurse them; Lopes quotes the phrase that she "went to fetch them in the name of others." The council’s account says she gave the house the names of real people, or of people she invented. The sources do not record when this began or over how long a period it went on. Her age in 1772 is given as 22 by Lopes, Correio da Manhã (2015) and the magazine Sábado, and as 24 by the council. Correio da Manhã, in a 2026 feature, cites a baptism record placing her birth on December 10, 1748, at Figueira de Lorvão in the municipality of Penacova; the council also gives 1748; Correio da Manhã's 2015 account gives Coimbra and 1750; Lopes describes her as born and raised in the city. The archive does not settle it.
The case came to light in early April 1772. Lopes records that she was denounced in April 1772 and that a scandal broke out in the city. By April 19, 1772, the council records, 15 infants had been accounted for; that day she admitted killing nine of them and continued to deny the other six. A further 18 were accounted for in connection with her household, making 33. Of the 34 children the house’s records showed as handed to her, 33 were accounted for as dead, Lopes writes, and what became of the thirty-fourth has not been recorded. She eventually confessed to killing 28, a figure Lopes takes from the friar’s chronicle and that Penacova Actual and Correio da Manhã (2015) repeat. The court held her responsible for all 33. The only firmly dated step in her confession is the early admission of April 19.
The investigation also turned on the staff who had handed the children over. The rodeira, the woman who received infants at the wheel, had been negligent, Lopes writes: she had given children to a woman who said she was collecting them for others and had never checked what became of them. On the order of the criminal judge of Coimbra, the rodeira and a wet nurse who worked inside the house were held in the city jail from April 6 to October 7, 1772, when they were released by an alvará de soltura. Lopes’s source for those dates is the register of prisoners entering the Coimbra jail for 1768 to 1779, now in the municipal historical archive. No penalty beyond those six months is recorded.
The case was decided in Lisbon. Lopes notes that Coimbra lay within the jurisdiction of the Relação do Porto, the high court of the north, and not of the court at Lisbon; even so, Luísa de Jesus was tried and executed in Lisbon. The Lusa news agency, in a 2021 report printed by Observador, states that she was tried and sentenced to death by the Casa da Suplicação de Lisboa, the kingdom’s highest court. The Coimbra council quotes the sentence’s closing line, "Lisboa, 1 de Julho de 1772," and describes the case as without precedent in the kingdom and as judged by the intendant Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique, later the most powerful police official in Portugal. Lopes’s chapter does not name the judges, and none of the sources explains why the case went to Lisbon. The judges' own words, as Sábado and Correio da Manhã quote them, were that no heart so perverse and corrupt could easily be matched, and that there would not easily be another such example in the present century.
The foundling wheel itself is part of the evidence. In 1813 Filipe de Araújo e Castro concluded that three-quarters of all foundlings died, Lopes records, and in 1832 the Misericórdia warned that the house risked becoming "a cemetery rather than an asylum for unfortunate innocents." Infant deaths in the system were so common that a run of them, on its own, would not have marked out any one woman. The court and the historians treat the payments as the motive.
The victims were newborns, left by mothers who were for the most part poor, and none of them has been named. What the documents give is a friar’s chronicle, a jail register and the sentence itself. The house’s own archive, the Misericórdia that ran the wheel, left no trace of the case.
Taken together, the six cases sort into three kinds of document. Two are judgments: Brinvilliers in 1676, and the decree of 1768 that closed the Saltykova inquiry. Two are the work of inquiry without a verdict on the main accused: the Hungarian depositions and the Roman file, in which a countess and a woman eight years dead were the subject and never the defendant. Two are cases in which the surviving record is something other than a court’s finding: La Voisin’s, where a king chose what to burn and what to seal, and Coimbra’s, where a sentence, a chronicle and a prison register carry the whole weight.
None of them yields a clean number. The Hungarian witnesses said between 2 and 650. The Roman gossip said five hundred husbands, and the retellings said 600. Funck-Brentano said 2,500 infants, a figure no court touched. The Moscow investigators counted 38, then 45, from an accusation of 75 and a household ledger of 138 unaccounted for. In Coimbra the number is 33, or 34, or 28, depending on whether a historian is counting what the court held, what the house recorded or what the prisoner admitted. A historian’s task with such records is to say which figure belongs to which document, and to leave the legend where it belongs, in the centuries that produced it.
• 1560: Elizabeth Báthory born.
• 1575: Báthory, aged fifteen, marries Ferenc Nádasdy.
• 1585 to 1610: the period covered by the witness testimony in the Báthory inquiry.
• 1608: Báthory orders a survey of her estates as a widow.
• Early 1610: King Matthias II orders Palatine György Thurzó to investigate.
• September 1610: Báthory makes a will dividing her property.
• December 29, 1610: Báthory seized at Čachtice; confined at the castle from December 30.
• January 7 and 24, 1611: servants executed at Bytča.
• August 21, 1614: Báthory dies at Čachtice Castle.
• 1624: Giulia Mangiardi, later called Tofana, settles in Rome, according to modern archival work.
• 1651: Giulia dies in Rome.
• 1655 to 1659: the suspicious deaths examined in the Roman file.
• July 5, 1659: five women executed in the Campo de' Fiori.
• 1666 and 1670: the deaths of the Brinvilliers father and brothers, as held by the 1676 judgment.
• July 31, 1672: Sainte-Croix dies; a casket of letters comes to light.
• 1673: Brinvilliers sentenced to death in her absence.
• March 1676: Brinvilliers arrested at Liège.
• April 29, 1676: her trial begins.
• July 16 and 17, 1676: judgment; she is executed.
• March 12, 1679: La Voisin arrested in Paris.
• April 7, 1679: Louis XIV creates the Chambre de l’Arsenal.
• February 19, 1680: La Voisin condemned; February 22, executed at the Place de Grève.
• July 12, 1680: Marguerite Monvoisin’s declaration.
• July 21, 1682: the chamber is suspended; the remaining accused are sent to fortresses.
• 1709: Louis XIV burns the papers he had held back.
• 1756: Darya Saltykova’s husband dies.
• December 1757 to 1762: repeated complaints about deaths in her household go nowhere.
• July 1762: two serfs reach St. Petersburg with a petition to Catherine II.
• October 1 and 9, 1762: the Justice College is ordered to act; Saltykova placed under house arrest.
• February 1767: the Justice College gives its opinion on 45 serfs.
• October 2, 1768: the decree of sentence.
• April 1772: the Coimbra deaths come to light; April 19, the first admission.
• July 1, 1772: Luísa de Jesus sentenced in Lisbon; executed the same year.