The Story of a Courageous Woman

The book Lady Nephele’s Devilry  was conceived on my honeymoon in 1965. I stood behind the crumbling parapet of the Fortiza in Novigrad, Croatia, imagining how terrifying it must have been for Queen Jelisaveta of Hungary (known to us as Elizabeth of Bosnia) when she was kept in that dungeon for five months, dragged to the parapet, strangled, and thrown over that parapet in January 1387. I had previously known nothing about this Bosnian princess who became the Queen of Hungary, but the pronounced reverence and love the Novigrad villagers had for her, captured me in a net of curiosity that has bound me all these years.

When I learned the bits of her life that are known, I felt an acute certainty that her story was far more complex and interesting than those data bits. Did she deserve to die that way? Was she a victim of the ambitions of others? What happened to her children? There were many questions about her life that remained unanswered. Lady Nephele’s Devilry is my attempt to answer those questions with as much historical accuracy as possible.

I do not know whether my book has had the longest gestation period of any book written, but the 57 years of its incubation have indeed taxed my belief in the book. Over these years I have collected information, books (43 to date), anecdotes, and testimonies. I have made journeys to the lands where Jelisaveta lived. I have started many times to try to write Jelisaveta’s story, giving up each time because there was no feeling of truth to what I wrote.

In 2018 I read a book about the Great Plague, popularly called the Black Death. I was at that time researching information about the plague called the Spanish Flu, which had killed my grandmother in 1918 when she was 27 years old, the mother of four children ages seven years to six months.

The night I finished reading the book about the Black Death, I went to bed, not suspecting that the concept of the Black Death would be the key to unlocking my story about Jelisaveta Kotromanic.

The next morning, I woke and moved to my computer as though I were on autopilot directed by internal commands. I started typing furiously, trying to keep up with all the thoughts tumbling through my brain trying to get themselves onto the page. It was as though all those thoughts had been dammed and now the dam had broken, and they poured through the breach.

To put this in less grandiose words, there seemed to be a sudden and explosive awareness in my mind that Jelisaveta’s story could not be told without telling other stories of the tumultuous century in which she lived, 1300s Europe. There was awareness that Princess Jelisaveta would not have become the Queen of Hungary were it not for the Black Death that killed her predecessor. There was awareness that her story could not be understood without learning the story of her controlling mother-in-law or without recognizing her father’s status as the head of the krstjani Bosnian religion. There was awareness that the religious corruption in both the Christian religions of the time, which generated heresies and the inquisitions and resulted in the Great Schism of two popes, was embedded in the very fabric of her story.

Those realizations triggered multiple others: the crusades, including crusades against Jelisaveta’s native country; socioeconomic upheaval as the European world of serfdom evolved into the world of Three Orders in which the nobles and clergy consolidated their power and kept the peasants enslaved within a rigidly enforced class structure; the secularization of learning and the resultant surge in writing and scripting as education expanded from the monasteries to the towns and universities; the rapid growth of towns and merchant trade to the east and by sea, with all the resultant conflicts and wars over trade routes and profits; the introduction of gunpowder into war; the remorseless campaigns undertaken by the Roman Christian church to prevent the education of girls and women, particularly in the field of medicine, where it had started to blossom in Salerno, Italy; and the attempts by women to find a measure of self-agency within a social and religious structure determined to make of them either slaves or whores or saints.

The fourteenth century may not take the prize for most turbulent century in European history, but in my opinion, it runs a good race for that prize.

It was apparent to me that Jelisaveta’s story could be understood only by understanding the times in which she lived. Therefore, this book has grown from one story to many, most of them based on real people and facts that have been written as history. My task has been to assemble these people and facts into a coherent whole that provides readers a chance to decide for themselves what might be the truth about the story of Jelisaveta. To use a simple metaphor, my job was to connect the dots between the small bits of information available about Jelisaveta Kotromanic, Princess of Bosnia, Queen of Hungary and Croatia, mother of King Maria of Hungary and King Jadwiga of Poland. Connecting those dots became possible by understanding the times in which this remarkable woman lived.

I find a deep sense of satisfaction in completing her story and being able to bring it now to you, her reader, the one who gets to decide the meaning of her story. If you are a believer in cosmic coincidences, it may come as no surprise to you that Lady Nephele’s Devilry  was written during the COVID years.

Further Notes About This Book

Trying to evoke on a page a mood that allows a reader to suspend immediacy of environment to be able to fall into the experience of living in a time and place not his own, is a balancing act between historical accuracy and readability. Too much historical accuracy about things like names, spoken and written languages, popular perceptions, and interpersonal relations can quickly overwhelm the reader with such a surfeit of detail that the intent of the writing, the story, is lost.

For this book I have tried to err on the side of readability, hoping to help a reader become immersed in the feeling of living in Eastern Europe in the turbulent 1300s. Dates, timelines, and most of what we generally consider historical facts, are retained. If you love history, you will find in this book a surfeit of that. If you only want to follow Jelisaveta’s story, you will not be the poorer for skipping historical details that do not speak to you. My interest has always been in stories, stories that tell of the lives and loves and strivings and triumphs and sufferings of humans born into this world and making the best of things thereafter. Whether it is history or herstory or their story does not matter, only that it is a story. It is the stories that enchant me, but when stories cannot be told without their contexts, we must also tell the contexts.

The language of the book is not the language spoken and written in the 1300s in any of the countries where this story takes place. To try to write the way people spoke then, and in so many different tongues, is beyond my powers. More importantly, I think it would be very confusing for the reader, who would be bogged down trying to comprehend the meaning of a phrase while losing the understanding of it. This book is written in English, and therefore, I have freely used today’s words, phrases, idioms, colloquialisms, and slang expressions that can engage a modern reader’s eye and ear. The stories of our human sojourn on this earth are endlessly fascinating and worth sharing in a way that can be understood.

The same focus on helping the reader to follow and understand the stories has guided me in decisions about the names of people and places. I have followed no rule except to choose the name that facilitates the understanding of the reader and still conveys a sense of historical atmosphere. For example, in the 1300s, King Louis I of Hungary was called Nagy Lajos – Great Louis – in Hungary, but in the book, he is simply King Louis. Families tended to name their children after saints and to pass down names, so there might be many boys in an extended family named Charles, or many girls named Elizabeth. The men are often identified by their nicknames: Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald; Charles the Short. I have chosen to call the girls the way they would have been called in the countries in which they were born. Thus, the heroine of this story, Elizabeth of Bosnia, is Jelisaveta, her mother and her mother-in-law are the Polish Elzbieta; her niece is the Hungarian Erszebet.

Place names changed as conquests changed boundaries. For example, at the time of this story, Zadar, Croatia, was called Jader or Jadra or Zadra by Croatians and Zara by Venetians. Bosnia was called Bosna after the River Bosona. Buda and Pest were two separate towns.

Lady Nephele’s Devilry  might be called the story of the life of a willful krstjani princess who was taken at age eleven from her country and culture to become queen in a prominent Christian kingdom beset by the consequences of greed for power during the turbulent fourteenth century AD; but what I hope it will be for you, dear reader, is simply a good read, a vehicle that will time-travel you back to one of the most fascinating centuries in western history.

For me the book is the long-delayed fulfillment of a promise I made 57 years ago when I stood lost in thought on the parapet of that castle where my heroine had been imprisoned in the dungeon for the last five months of her life before being strangled there.

And Yet Further Notes About this Book

The following Letter to Reader is a tongue-in-cheek piece I wrote purely in a mood of indulgent self-pity after another night of too frequent disruptions by the book demanding to tell me its latest breakthroughs. Again, you will not be the poorer for not reading this little piece, but if you are in the mood for something light and nonsensical, this might fit the bill.

Dear Reader,

Authors sometimes remark that a book they are writing has written itself and decided its own fate.

This book, Lady Nephele’s Devilry, has been just such a book, stubborn and ornery from the beginning and wanting her own way in everything. That is probably why she took 57 years to be born, despite many attempts on my part to help her along in that process. All my expectations for her fell by the wayside as the years passed. She simply tossed my title (s) with a disdainful snort and chose her own, which I told her nobody would understand. That only prompted her to remind me that my readers are smart. I tried to tell her that readers have certain expectations for a book, about its size and length and all. She was having none of that.

“But they like to be able to pick it up if they are into hard copies,” I said to her. “They like to be able to follow the story line from beginning to end without losing their way.”

She became incensed at my words and said with a sniff, “You think the readers who pick me up will get lost? I am sorry to have to enlighten your ignorance. They are clever and savvy.”

“Besides,” she continued, “when you first started allowing me to come into this world (and I remind you again that had I known how nitpicking you are, I would have chosen another parent), you wanted to answer a few basic questions about your heroine’s life, like why did she wait 17 years after marriage to have a child, when in those days, the primary role of a queen was to have an heir for the kingdom? And what did she do during those seventeen long years? And how did she get her daughters on to the thrones of Hungary and Poland as kings? And why did she take that fateful trip down into the Balkans when she knew those lands were a tinder box waiting to explode? You wanted answers to these questions and many more, dear ‘author’, and now that I am giving them to you, you try to muzzle me? What an ungrateful wretch you are indeed!”

What could I do but mumble, “Sorry.” That only gave her leave to continue her ranting.

“My readers are going to fall so in love with me and my characters that they will not even notice how long I am because my characters will just carry the stories right from beginning to end. I love my characters, each and every one of them! You are just jealous because you cannot create characters like mine, and so you are trying to muzzle me.”

What could I do, dear reader, but let her have her way? The result is what you have before you: a book in five volumes. When I learned just a few months before completing this effort that there is a book called the Devil’s Bible that weighs 165 pounds, I wondered if Lady Nephele’s Devilry  was trying to compete, especially when I considered the odd title she chose, a title that now makes perfect sense, I guess.

At any rate, I thank you for taking her in hand (?) and braving this adventure with her.

Your humble servant,

Author/Scribe

P.S. I had to sneak this letter in here just to get to talk to you, dear reader. Thank you for listening.

P.P.S. She would hate me for telling you this, but what I really wanted from this book was that you would have a grand old time with it. Yes, it is chock full of all that wonderful history of 1300s Europe and the Balkans, but my fondest hope is that this book might be a magical carpet to take you back there in time, or at least it might provide for you a delightful romp through that century.

Lady Nephele’s Devilry  has her own thoughts about what happened in those turbulent years, and she is highly opinionated and stubborn about things that I think might be important, like names and the way people talked then.

One day I said to her, “But that country is called Bosnia today. Why do you keep calling it Bosna?”

“Well, that is what it was called in those days! You may be too dull to understand that, but your readers will know in a flash that it was called Bosna because it was on the Bosona River.”

I only replied, “Hmm.” I cannot win against her, so I don’t try. Except I remember one time I did win. She kept calling one of the major characters Nagy Lajos, and I said, “Your readers will be pronouncing his name ‘Naggy Lay Juice’. That doesn’t seem very dignified for an important king.” Well, we argued for a few weeks, and then one day she started calling him King Louis.

To tell the truth, I have had a few such victories, but not many. She is so inconsistent it drives me a bit crazy. Sometimes she uses place names and character names that are the ones used in what she calls, inelegantly in my opinion, “those days”, like Zadra for today’s Zadar; and sometimes she discards the old names and uses the modern ones. So inconsiderate, I think. She only responds, “I am using the names my readers will understand. They know what they want.”

One day I said to her, “People did not talk like that back in ’those days.’”

Her answer, which you probably already guessed, was that she knows what you, the reader, want. “My readers want language they will understand,” she says. But sometimes she curses in the old way, like saying “God’s Bones!” One day she said with a decided sniff, “Anyway, I don’t do so well with Latin or Greek or Hungarian or Bosnian or Croatian or Italian or old French, or Aromanian or the language of the Crusaders and all those other things they spoke back then. And anyway, this is my book, and I get to choose.” She had a point.

I have to say I did like how she solved the problem of so many characters having the same name. I think she has about ten Elizabeths in her stories, and she cleverly calls them by the names they were given in the countries in which they were born. The heroine Elizabeth of Bosnia, for example, is Jelisaveta; her mother and her mother-in-law are the Polish Elzbieta; her nieces are the Hungarian Erszebet; and so forth.

My intent for this work is that it will be one you enjoy, dear reader, for the simple pleasure you find in reading it. You might consider it a smorgasbord of historical data bits from which you can pick and choose small portions that please your eye or palate, uninhibited by self-constraint or expectations, unconcerned with the need to remember things like chronology, dates, places, or events, because a flotilla of memorable characters, all determined to have their stories told, will do the work of carrying the history forward and connecting the relevant parts of it.

But if you are one of that rare breed who just cannot get enough pure history, well, you will find a veritable Thanksgiving feast here of historical frolics in medieval Europe. Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction; and as you will find in these stories, some of these historical facts are so entertaining and outrageous, I could never have made them up.

If you enjoy a smorgasbord of history served in dishes of assorted sizes and flavors including saucy and spicy, plain and unflavored, delightful and gratifying, salty and pungent, ribald and raucous, shocking, hilarious, entertaining or just blandly educational, you may find here a meal that is to your liking, one that might leave you, as it has left me, chuckling, tearful, wondering, shaking my head, always coming back for more servings of the astonishing ways we humans are ever so good at messing up our lives in a misguided effort to live better or easier ones.