During this 20-year period, these newly conquered boundary districts were subject to direct military rule from Vienna for strategic, fiscal and other reasons.
As a result of the devastation brought about by previous Austrian-Ottoman wars, these areas were in poor condition, with a scarce and partly nomadic population, little agriculture and an emphasis on cattle-breeding.
Many of the Serbs, especially those who had immigrated from Ottoman-held areas, were recruited as militiamen (hajduks) for the peacetime protection of the borders and for regular military service at war, in exchange for unalienable lots of land.
According to the account of the Medveđa locals as retold there, Arnold Paole was a hajduk who had moved to the village from the Turkish-controlled part of Serbia.
His veins were replete with fluid-blood "and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears; that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin were completely bloody; that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown".
Concluding that Paole was indeed a vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, to which he reacted by frightful shriek as if he were alive, groaning and bleeding, and burned the body.
According to her father-in-law Joviza (Jovica), Stanojka had gone to bed healthy 15 days previous, but had woken up at midnight in terrible fear and cried that she had been throttled by the late Miloje.
Flückinger states that the locals explain the new epidemic with the fact that Milica, the first to die, had eaten the meat of sheep that the "previous vampires" (i.e. Paole and his victims from five years prior) had killed.
The latter, fearing an epidemic of pestilence, sent for Imperial Contagions-Medicus (roughly, Infectious Disease Specialist) Glaser stationed in the nearby town of Paraćin.
He failed to find any signs of a contagious malady and blamed the deaths on the malnutrition common in the region as well as the unhealthy effects of the severe Eastern Orthodox fasting.
Glaser outlined his findings in a report to the Jagodina commandant's office, recommending that the authorities should pacify the population by fulfilling its request to "execute" the vampires.
Calmet notes: "They discovered at last, after much search, that the defunct Arnold Paul had killed not only the four persons of whom we have spoken, but also several oxen, of which the new vampires had eaten, and amongst others the son of Millo.
Amongst forty, seventeen were found with all the most evident signs of vampirism; so they transfixed their hearts and cut off their heads also, then cast their ashes into the river.
All the information and executions we have just mentioned were made judicial, in proper form, and attested by several officers who were garrisoned in the country, by the chief surgeons of the regiments, and by the principal inhabitants of the place.
The verbal process of it was sent towards the end of last January to the Imperial Counsel of War at Vienna, which had established a military commission to examine into the truth of all these circumstances.