| Easter Sunday of 1459, Vlad invited all of the aristocrats, called boyars, who had played a role in his father's death, to a feast. |
| The boyars and their fortified towns submitted to Samuil's supreme authority. |
| The Tsar jumped to his feet, the tsaritza screamed, the princes and boyars opened their mouths. |
| In the 10th to 12th centuries the boyars formed the senior levels of the princes' retinues. |
| From the 15th to the 17th centuries Muscovite boyars formed a closed aristocratic class drawn from about 200 families. |
| He ruled in an increasingly arbitrary and absolutist fashion, brutalizing the aristocratic boyars in a decade-long period of terror known as the oprichnina. |
