| Excerpt |
Recent archival research conducted by the research team of the project Corpus Draculianum in Italy and Austria has surfaced unknown documents on the life and reign of Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476). The State Archive of Florence contains a document which indicates an ”international” diplomatic campaign undertaken by Matthias Corvinus in favour of his once discredited vassal Vlad. The king of Hungary had sent to the Catholic powers like Venice and to the Holy See in the summer of 1476 a somewhat heroic depiction of the former voivode who was about to attack and conquer Wallachia later in autumn. A potentially new perspective on the last year of the famous voivode’s life is also provided by an undated German-language letter from the archive of the Melk Monastery, recently discovered by the German medievalist Christof Paulus. A citizen from the city of Krems reported in Vienna about the Hungarian-Ottoman clashes in the region around the fortress of Smederevo in Serbia with Vlad participating as a commander in the service of Matthias Corvinus and barely escaping with his life. This document allows us to finally understand the puzzling report given by the chronicler Jakob Unrest who may have used the very same contemporary sources. However using other reports like the one written by the well informed Milanese diplomat Leonardo Botta it seems likely that both authors suffered a confusion: the fightings in Serbia and Wallachia may have taken place at almost the same time in December 1476/ January 1477 and were consequently mixed up in the reports. Vlad therefore was maybe never involved in the Smederevo campaign, but was overwhelmed by the Ottoman forces who kept the Hungarians busy on the Western Danube front. |
