Vlad III Dracula crossed the frozen Danube into Ottoman territory, sacking towns and reportedly killing tens of thousands of Turks and Bulgarians in a scorched-earth campaign. His own account, sent to the Hungarian king, claimed a body count so staggering that historians still debate its accuracy. The raid provoked Sultan Mehmed II's retaliatory invasion of Wallachia later that year.
Vlad III, prince of Wallachia, spent the winter of 1461-1462 waging a campaign of calculated terror against the Ottoman Empire south of the Danube. Moving through snow and ice, his forces struck towns and villages, burning granaries and slaughtering inhabitants in numbers he proudly tallied in a letter to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary.
His own count, likely exaggerated for political effect, claimed over 23,000 Turkish and Bulgarian dead—numbers he listed with almost bureaucratic precision, distinguishing between those killed by sword and those burned alive. The campaign was meant to demonstrate loyalty to Hungary and rally Christian Europe against Ottoman expansion.
The raid backfired strategically. Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople nine years earlier, took the incursion as a personal affront and assembled an enormous invasion force that spring, eventually driving Vlad from his throne. Yet the campaign, and the impaled corpses Vlad left along his retreat routes, fed the legend that would centuries later inspire Bram Stoker's Dracula.