Ţepes’ next move is a campaign to…

Ţepes’ next move is a campaign to slaughter enemy soldiers and populations that might have sympathized with the Turks; first in southern Wallachia, then, in Bulgaria by crossing the frozen Danube.

While in Bulgaria, he divides his army into several smaller groups, which in the space of two weeks kill over twenty-three thousand Turks and Muslim Bulgarians.

In a letter to Corvinus, dated February 11, 1462, he states: I have killed men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rahova, which is located near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen.

We killed 23,884 Turks and Bulgars without counting those whom we burned in homes or whose heads were not cut by our soldiers....Thus your highness must know that I have broken the peace with him [the sultan].

Because of his sadistic cruelty toward subjects and Turkish prisoners alike, the Wallachian monarch becomes known as Vlad the Impaler (and, as Dracula—or son of the Devil—will become the source of the Dracula legend).