to Pope PiusII in 1462. Two years later, the Pope included them in his Commentaries. Meistersinger Michael Beheim wrote a lengthy poem about Vlad's deeds, allegedly based on his conversation with a Catholic monk who had managed to escape from Vlad's prison. The poem, called ("Story of a Despot Called Dracula, Voievod of Wallachia"), was performed at the court of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor in Wiener Neustadt during the winter of 1463. According to one of Beheim's stories, Vlad had two monks impaled to assist them to go to heaven, also ordering the impalement of their donkey because it began braying after its masters' death. Beheim also accused Vlad of duplicity, stating that Vlad had promised support to both Matthias Corvinus and MehmedII but did not keep the promise. In 1475, Gabriele Rangoni, Bishop of Eger (and a former papal legate), understood that Vlad had been imprisoned because of his cruelty. Rangoni also recorded the rumour that while in prison Vlad caught rats to cut them up into pieces or stuck them on small pieces of wood, because he was unable to "forget his wickedness". Antonio Bonfini also recorded anecdotes about Vlad in his Historia Pannonica around 1495. Bonfini wanted to justify both the removal and the restoration of Vlad by Matthias. He described Vlad as "a man of unheard cruelty and justice". Bonfini's stories about Vlad were repeated in Sebastian Münster's Cosmography. Münster also recorded Vlad's "reputation for tyrannical justice". German stories Works containing the stories about Vlad's cruelty were published in Low German in the Holy Roman Empire before 1480. The stories were allegedly written in the early 1460s, because they describe Vlad's campaign across the Danube in early 1462, but they do not refer to MehmedII's invasion of Wallachia in June of the same year. They provide a detailed narration of the conflicts between Vlad and the Transylvanian Saxons, showing that they originated "in the literary minds of the Saxons". The stories about Vlad's plundering raids in Transylvania were clearly based on an eyewitness account, because they contain accurate details (including the lists of the churches destroyed by Vlad and the dates of the raids). They describe Vlad as a "demented psychopath, a sadist, a gruesome murderer, a masochist", worse than Caligula and Nero. However, the stories emphasizing Vlad's cruelty are to be treated with caution because his brutal acts were very probably exaggerated (or even