That's the best account of the Bathory story I have read. I like the idea that Stoker drew on both stories to create Dracula - its interesting that when Hammer films made their own version of the Bathory story they decided to entitle it "Countess Dracula " - although to be fair its doubtful that a film titled 'Countess Bathory' would have put quite as many bums on seats.

As a point of interest - re: the provenance of Stoker's story. I have read that Stoker drew heavily on the most popular pre- Dracula vampire story around - Dr. John Polidori's "The Vampyr". For anyone unfamiliar with the story behind this story, Dr. John Polidori was the physician, and probably lover of Lord Byron, who accompanied him, the Shelleys and Clare Claremont on the European Tour, in which the celebrated ghost-story telling contest took place. the most famous outcome of the contest was Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein ", although the novel which eventually appeared was considerably revised from the original version conceived on this trip. Shelley's and Byron's attempts to write came to nothing. Polidori, however, wrote "The Vampyr" which he too later revised and lengthened to make into a novel.

I confess that I have never read "The Vampyr" but can say this much. It tells the story of one Lord Ruthven - the vampire of the title. Allegedly, the sexual undertones of Stoker's story owe a lot to Polidori's work. In Lord Ruthven, it doesn't take a huge amount of imagination to see something of a caricature of Byron himself. Polidori was supposedly exceptionally jealous of Byron's apparent attractiveness and partiality to members of both sexes, and for much of the time found himself the butt of Byron's vicious wit. One of his most famous remarks about Polidori , made to Shelley in front of the Dr. was,
"John Polidori is the sort of man on whom one would gladly test the adage that a drowning man clutches at straws ." Hence Polidori's caricature of Byron as a creature with the appearence of a man, with exceptional sexual magnetism, but no conscience, and one damned to eternal unrest. Well, as Lady Caroline Lamb said, he was
"mad, bad and dangerous to know."