This book does not claim absolute truths, but it speaks for those who can no longer speak for themselves by the histories they witnessed, wrote about, and which defined their ancestors and descendants, including the most powerful woman that ever lived – Countess Elizabeth Bathory. She tried to change the world; she paradoxically succeeded and failed. But what drove her? What did she know, we do not? What is her history? To begin to understand all this, one must travel back in time to when it began, when truth first became obscured, and when European society – Western culture – went horribly wrong. It is why her world was the way it was. Today, historiological “truths” of European Medieval Dark Ages, at best, exist as dim flashes of information in ancient manuscripts. A very interconnected European medieval history has much more, but inconvenient historiological information to informs us of events, names, places, and dates, but like a giant, complicated jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately, many pieces are still missing, none more so than that of Carpathia. Consequently, an incomplete, theoretical picture of historical reality remains. There’s a reason for it. Throughout history, Europeans struggled for Humility, Humanity and Liberty, but only Carpathian Ungars maintained and struggled to keep it for more than a millennium – from about 600 to 1711. Their history has gone missing, supplanted by myths. Their greatest leaders are caricatures of Gothic horror literature, and their greatest traitors are their heroes. Their monuments are everywhere. Carpathia’s history does not exist in Western consciousness. What is it about Carpathia we are not supposed to know? Its missing medieval jigsaw puzzle pieces, when liberated from obscure archives, then reassembled, and inserted into the macro context of centuries, however, allows us to understand why. This book is a sequel to Chrysalis I: Metamorphosis of Odium. The time period covered is roughly from the early eleventh to late fourteenth centuries. The book explores the complexity of the Late Medieval period from a Carpathian, Slavic-Turkic perspective. An extremist, elitist European world sunk deeper into human depravity – of European and Middle Eastern genocides and of material greed. These depravities gave the rise to Hohenstaufen, Arpad, Bathory, and Osman dynasties. Together, they kindled a period of philosophical awakening - a fundamental reformation of the feudal order. Thanks to them, the supreme Vatican lost control over its Holy Roman Empire for the first time. Such heresies had responses too – the Apostolic Inquisition, Avignon Papacy, Mongol Invasions of Europe and the Middle East, and the extermination of non-compliant ruling European dynasties namely Hohenstaufen and Arpad. Only the Bathorys survived, but they had to endure a debilitating war to do so. One dynasty – Habsburg – sought to profit from the chaos. Indeed they did. Their arrival marks the end of the first great pendulum swing of European cultural metamorphosis. Soon, it would be Elizabeth Bathory’s duty to change the world. This is a story of us.
