The saint who lost his greatest battle

Chapter

1457 – 1474

The throne

Doljești, 12 April 1457

Chilia

failed 1462, taken 23 January 1465

Baia

15 December 1467, the king flees

Stephen stormed into Moldavia in the spring of 1457 at the head of 6,000 horsemen lent by his cousin Vlad Țepeș. He routed Petru Aron at Doljești on Thursday 12 April, beat him again at Orbic, and at Direptate the boyars and Metropolitan Teoctist acclaimed him prince. He was about 19; the birth year itself is undocumented.

His obsession was Chilia, the Danube port. In June 1462, while Vlad fought the Sultan, Stephen besieged it with Ottoman help and failed: on 22 July a shot struck his ankle, a wound that never healed in 42 years. He took Chilia on 23 January 1465 instead, with Cetatea Albă, and spent a decade walling Moldavia – Suceava, Neamț, Hotin, Roman, Orhei, Soroca.

The neighbors tested him and bled. Matthias Corvinus of Hungary invaded in 1467 and was carried off the field at Baia on 15 December, thrice wounded by arrows; the Tatars were broken at Lipnic on 20 August 1470. In 1473 Stephen stopped the yearly tribute to the Porte and beat Radu's Wallachians at Râmnicu Sărat in November. The Sultan answered with an ultimatum – and an army.

Then Stephen gathered the boyars of the country, great and small, with Metropolitan Teoctist and many monks, at the place called Direptate, and asked them all: is it their will that he be their prince? And they all cried with one voice: “May you reign many years, from God.” (Own translation from Ureche.)

Ureche on the acclamation, April 1457

Meanwhile Constantinople had fallen on 31 May 1453, four years before Stephen took the throne.

Chapter

1475

The fog

Tuesday, 10 January 1475

The bridge

Podul Înalt, over the Bârlad

The fast

40 days on bread and water

Mehmed ordered Hadım Suleiman Pasha to finish Moldavia in the winter of 1474–75: Ureche counts 120,000 Ottomans with Tatars and Wallachians, modern records far fewer, either way several times Stephen's host. Stephen burned his own villages, poisoned the wells and waited with about 40,000 Moldavians – the standing army plus Oastea Mare, every free man over 14 – 2,000 Polish horse, Székely and Hungarians. It was one of only two times he ever raised the Great Army.

He chose the ground his father had used in 1450: a marshy semi-oval below Vaslui, hills and forest on every side, one wooden bridge over the Bârlad. On Tuesday 10 January 1475, in fog so thick the guns aimed by sound, the Székely center retreated on orders to draw the column in; the bridge broke under the cavalry; hidden buglers sounded behind Ottoman lines; the boyars charged from all sides. The pursuit ran three days to Oblucița on the Danube.

Europe noticed. Stephen sent 36 captured standards to King Casimir and wrote to the Pope and Matthias Corvinus – who replied by claiming the victory as his own. Długosz reports that Stephen fasted 40 days on bread and water and forbade anyone to credit him. Sixtus IV named him Athleta Christi, the Champion of Christ. Nobody sent soldiers.

Stephen went out to meet the Turks above Vaslui, at Podul Înalt – and beat them not so much with bravery as with craft. First he had the grass burned everywhere, so the Turks' delicate horses grew weak. Then, God helping, the fog so wrapped the Turks that none could see another. (Own translation from Ureche.)

Ureche on 10 January 1475

Meanwhile Six months later, on 6 June 1475, the Ottoman fleet took Caffa, the Genoese capital of the Black Sea trade.

Chapter

1476

The Sultan

in person, from May 1476

The defeat

Războieni, 26 July 1476

The retreat

August 1476: plague, hunger, held walls

Mehmed came himself. In May 1476 the Conqueror marched from Sofia with the imperial host while Crimean Tatars raided from the north; Stephen beat the Tatars off, then – Iorga tells it – let his peasants go home for two weeks to see their burning villages. Some 10,000 to 20,000 men stood with him when he dug a wagon-and-trench camp on a wooded hill above Pârâul Alb.

On 26 July the Ottomans attacked uphill all day. The Janissaries lay flat under the guns until the Sultan rode forward with his shield; then Gedik Ahmed Pasha opened a breach in the Moldavian front and the camp fell at dusk. Ureche names the fallen boyars two by two; Stephen was unhorsed but unharmed and slipped away with a few men. Some 7,000 to 8,000 prisoners were beheaded.

It was a victory that conquered nothing. Suceava, Neamț and Hotin all held – Neamț through August – while plague and hunger emptied the Ottoman camp, and Mehmed withdrew the same month. Stephen was back in the field by autumn: with Hungarian help he put Vlad Țepeș on the Wallachian throne that November, with 200 Moldavian guards. Vlad was dead by December.

They fell not anyhow, but defending themselves to the death – not beaten out of their arms, but crushed by the multitude of the Turks. And so many of ours perished that the meadow whitened with the bodies of the fallen. (Own translation from Ureche.)

Ureche on 26 July 1476

Meanwhile In November 1476 Vlad Țepeș retook Wallachia with Stephen's help; by December the Janissaries had killed him near Bucharest.

Chapter

1476 – 1504

The loss

Chilia 14 July, Cetatea Albă August 1484

The churches

21 documented by inscription

The death

2 July 1504, buried at Putna

The Sultan's revenge came anyway. In July 1484 Chilia fell on the 14th, and Cetatea Albă followed in August; Moldavia lost its sea gates and Stephen swore fealty to Casimir at Colomeea on 12 September 1485. He beat the raiders at Cătlăbuga that November, then nearly died at Șcheia on 6 March 1486 – saved, tradition says, by Aprod Purice – and resumed the yearly tribute the same year.

The last wars were in the north. When John Albert of Poland marched on Suceava in 1497, Stephen with Hungarian and Ottoman auxiliaries destroyed the retreating army in the Cosmin Forest that October; the treaty he ratified at Hârlău in 1499 ended Polish suzerainty over Moldavia. In 1502 he told his Venetian doctor Matteo Muriano that he had fought 36 battles and lost two.

Then the building. Between May and September 1488 he raised Voroneț for Vaslui; the Războieni church of 1496 stands over the bones of the defeated; 21 churches in all are documented by surviving inscriptions. He died at Suceava on 2 July 1504, was buried at Putna, and in June 1992 the Romanian Orthodox Church canonized him: Stephen the Great and Holy.

He was a whole man by nature, never lazy, and he knew how to cover his work – where you least thought, there you found him. A master at things of war; where need was, he threw himself in person. And where others beat him, he did not lose hope: knowing himself fallen, he rose above his conquerors. (Own translation from Ureche.)

Ureche on Stephen's death, 2 July 1504

Meanwhile In 1490 Matthias Corvinus died; Hungary's pressure on Moldavia died with him.