How did he die, and where is he buried?
When Corvinus released Vlad Tepes, he acknowledged him as voivode of Wallachia, but did not provide any military assistance to depose Basarab Laiota. Tepes’s release was met with loud approval across Europe, as few had been convinced of his guilt on the basis of the clumsy, forged letters. A year later, in the face of Ottoman aggression against Hungary’s neighbours, Corvinus made Tepes a captain of his army, and the ‘impaler king’ was once more fighting the Turkish army, this time in Bosnia. Incarceration clearly had not changed Tepes’s modus operandi one iota, and the campaign was widely successful.
‘He tore the limbs off the Turkish prisoners and placed their parts on stakes… and displayed the private parts of his victims so that when the Turks see these, they will run away in fear!’, gushed Gabriele Rangoni, the papal legate, after the recapture of Srebrenica in 1476. Tepes was again using his knowledge of the Ottoman character, gained from his teenage years at the court of Murad II, which evidently had not changed much in the 12 years of his imprisonment as the terror-tactics worked. Tepes was once again a celebrated hero of the Christian resistance to Ottoman invasion.
His importance to the successful campaign in Bosnia gained Tepes enough support from the Hungarian court, and even Transylvania, to convince Corvinus to give him military support to regain Wallachia. With a 21, 000-strong army of Hungarians and Transylvanians, Tepes first liberated Moldavia from Turkish occupation, before defeating Basarab Laiota’s army on the Transylvania/ Wallachia border, and gaining control of Wallachia in November 1476. Unfortunately, Basarab Laiota remained at large, and when his great army had left Wallachia, Tepes was exposed to attack and unable to defend himself. Inevitably, Wallachia was invaded, and Tepes was killed in January 1477.
The precise details of his death are unknown. The Austrian chronicler, Jacob Unrest, writes that a Turkish soldier disguised himself as a servant, infiltrated Tepes’s court, and quite literally stabbed him in the back when Basarab Laiota’s men attacked the voivode’s small army near Snagov Monastery. A Russian narrative claims that Tepes was in disguise as a Turk, and mistaken for an enemy by his own men. All we really know is that he died in battle, fighting an army twice the size of his own, and had been severely let down by his myopic allies who left him undefended.
Jacob Unrest also claims that Tepes’s head was cut off and displayed (with deliberate irony) on a stake in Constantinople, to prove that the feared warrior was finally dead. Though it is entirely possible that his body was left to rot or buried in a shallow grave on the battlefield, there is some credence to the story that his mortal remains were found by monks from the nearby Snagov Monastery, and buried at the altar. The monks’ alleged respect for Tepes’s remains can be attributed to his and his family’s significant financial contributions to Snagov Monastery over the years.