Happy Friday!
It's August! I hope that you had a week of joy and fulfillment.
Today is the birth anniversary of two notorious women. One was a serial killer (more accurately termed serial murderer; there is a difference) and the other was a double agent who was perhaps falsely accused of contributing to 50,000 military deaths. It's a macabre topic but kind of fascinating.
The first is Elizabeth Báthory (1560-1614) a Hungarian countess and – to this day – one of the world's most prolific serial killers (and one of only a few females), ranked #3 on one list behind H.H. Holmes (who graduated from medical school in 1886 – OMG) and Ted Bundy. Báthory was born in Čachtice, Hungary (now Slovakia) into a noble family that controlled Transylvania, she was raised in family environment of wealth, education and social status, learning Latin, German, Hungarian and Greek as a young woman. Some say that she was trained by her family to be cruel, and she may have had epilepsy. There are also rumors that she got pregnant at age 13 and gave birth to a child who was fathered by a peasant boy. The child was given to a trusted local woman who was paid to take it.
In 1575, she married Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a member of another powerful Hungarian family, in an arranged political marriage. They moved into Castle Čachtice (a wedding gift from the groom to the bride) where they had four children. In 1578, Nádasdy became the chief commander of the Hungarian troops in the war against the Ottomans. After Nádasdy died in 1604, sinister information about Báthory began to surface. There had been talk about her murdering peasant women which was ignored but the new claims were about murdering women of nobility gained attention. Báthory's cousin, the count palatine of Hungary, was ordered by the King to investigate and he took depositions from people living near the castle. There were reports of her sticking needles into her victims, cutting off their fingers and hands, tearing tendons from their arms, shoulders, legs and buttocks, cutting out large pieces of flesh, roasting them and serving them to victims, starving them, burning or freezing the girls and other gruesome atrocities. The investigation concluded that Nádasdy and her servants had tortured and murdered more than 600 girls (the number is uncertain). The four servants were tried and three were executed. Báthory was not tried but confined to house arrest in the castle until her death.
Modern scholars questioned the accusations although they were well documented in the 1611 trial. Báthory controlled Nádasdy's assets after he died. The King, Matthias, owed a large debt to Báthory, which was cancelled by Nádasdy's family in exchange for permitting them to manage her captivity. Some say that she was framed although there were eyewitnesses to the atrocities. The location of her corpse is unknown.
The second notorious woman born today in 1876 is Margaretha Zelle, a.k.a. Mata Hari. Although she was born into a prosperous family in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, her father lost the family's money when she was a teenager. Her parents divorced and her mother died in 1891, leaving her to live with relatives. After attending college, she married Capt. Rudolph MacLeod, a Scot who was an officer in the Dutch colonial army, in 1895. Rumor has it that he was abusive and gave her the gift that keeps on giving – syphilis. They had two children, one of whom died, and divorced in 1906 leaving Zelle with custody of her daughter. However, she had no money to support her, so dead-beat-dad MacLeod took the daughter back.
Hoping to raise enough money to get her daughter back, Zelle moved to Paris and danced professionally under the name Lady MacLeod. She had learned some basic East Indian and Javanese dances when she lived with her husband in Malaysia for several years. She traveled around Europe, saying that she was born in a sacred temple and taught to dance by a priestess who have her the name Mata Hari ("eye of the day" or Sun). In reality, she came up with the name herself. She was tall, beautiful and slowly undressed during performances to dance in her birthday suit. Not surprisingly, she enjoyed success in Paris and other cities, had numerous lovers (many of them high-ranking military officers) and...well...made money.
It is uncertain how she got into espionage, but some say that an honorary German counsul in the Hague offered to pay her for information on her next trip to France. The French arrested her and she agreed to spy for the French in German-occupied Belgium. Meanwhile, she was still spying for the Germans, a detail that she neglected to mention to the French. The French suspected that she was a double-agent and arrested her in February 1917. She was blamed for the death of up to 50,000 French soldiers through her espionage activities with Germany with little evidence to support the claim (she was actually not a very good spy). She was tried in July 2017 and sentenced to death, which occurred by firing squad in Vincennes 3 months later. She refused a blindfold.
The Germans publicly exculpated her in 1920, writing her off as an ineffective spy, and French documents indicated her innocence. Those documents were released in 2017 leading many to conclude that she was a scapegoat for the French, who were looking for someone to blame for their huge losses on the western front.
There is really no way to celebrate either of these women other than being grateful that they lived in the distant past.
Have a good weekend!
Deb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2tpBrY6GI (Shaken, not stirred)