Hey
everyone. I hope all of you are enjoying the holidays. Something that I really
think about during this time of year is family. Everyone has a family that they
care about, even if others don’t agree with how someone shows how they care for their
family. Elizabeth Bathory may have been a serial killer, but she was also a
woman with a family. She was married to Count Ferenc Nadasdy of Hungary, and she
had 7 children with him. They had 4 sons and 3 daughters. Elizabeth
also had a daughter outside of wedlock just before she married Ferenc. The
family may not have been the most typical of families, but they were a family
nonetheless.
Elizabeth was only 12 years old when
she was engaged to Ferenc. When she was 13 or 14, Elizabeth was reported to
have had an affair with one of the servants at her family home. The result of
this affair was Elizabeth’s first child, Anastasia Bathory. Needless to say,
Count Ferenc was not happy about this news. He had the servant castrated and
then thrown to the dogs as punishment for sleeping with Elizabeth. He then had
Elizabeth shipped off to one of his estates where birth in secret, so
that no one would know about her indiscretion. Ferenc made sure that the child,
Anastasia, was kept a secret. He also made sure that there was no way to
connect the Nadasdy or Bathory families with Anastasia. Elizabeth was to never
see Anastasia.
In the years of her marriage to
Count Ferenc, Elizabeth did fulfill her wifely duties, and she gave him 7 children
of his own — three daughters, Anna, Katalin, and
Orsolya, and 4 sons, Pal, Miklos, Andras, and Gyorgy. These children were
raised by governesses, just as Elizabeth was. This was the responsible thing to
do back in the Middle Ages. Elizabeth would have had minimal contact with her
children, especially during their infancy years. The thing is, in her own mind, Elizabeth
was being a good mother if she had any contact at all with her children.
There are questions about how a
woman like Elizabeth Bathory could be a good mother and still commit the crimes that she
did. There are also some unanswered questions about what Elizabeth did with her children during
the five year span that she was killing. It is known that the children spent
quite a bit of time with family members at the different estates that the
Nadasdy family owned. There is also a very good chance that the children would have spent time with Elizabeth’s family. This could mean that
they may have spent time in Transylvania, since Elizabeth was a cousin of the
Duke of Transylvania on her mother’s side of the family.
Sure, Elizabeth was nowhere near eligible to win the mother of the year award, but I will say that she at least had the decency
to not have her children around when she was killing young women and bathing in
their blood. In this way, she showed how she cared about her children.
Elizabeth definitely had her own way of showing how she loved her children.
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