Battle of Rovine, 1395: Mircea the Elder against Sultan Bayezid

At the end of the 14th century the Ottoman Empire was pushing north through the Balkans. After the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 the Ottomans occupied Bulgaria, taking its capital, Tarnovo, in 1393, and their raiders crossed the Danube into Wallachia. Mircea the Elder, prince of Wallachia, struck back at the raiders' base, called Karınovası in the Ottoman chronicles, as part of a wider offensive organized by King Sigismund of Hungary. Sultan Bayezid I came north to punish him.²

A battle with no fixed name or date

"Rovine" is not a place on any map. The historian Alexandru Madgearu explains that it was a Serbian word meaning "cliff" or "ditch", used to describe the battlefield. Ilona Czamańska of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań reads it as "in the ramparts" and places the fighting probably near the Wallachian capital of Argeș and the river of the same name; Madgearu puts it somewhere on the route from Turnu Măgurele on the Danube to Curtea de Argeș.³

The date is just as uncertain. The date now generally given, 17 May 1395, should be treated as a convention, Czamańska argues: it is the date of death of Constantine Dragaš, and no one knows whether he died on the day of the battle or later. One Ottoman source even speaks of fighting that lasted a week. Madgearu, by contrast, sees no strong reason to reject the date of 10 October given by one of the Serbian annals, and places the battle in the autumn of 1394. The anniversary on our calendar follows the conventional date.⁴

What the chroniclers saw

No eyewitness account survives, and the sources contradict each other. The life of the Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević, written in the first half of the 15th century by Constantine of Kostenets, says that Bayezid crossed the Danube, fought "the great and autocratic voivode John Mircea", and that "unspeakably much blood" was spilled. Prince Marko and Constantine Dragaš, Serbian lords who rode with the sultan as unwilling vassals, were killed; Marko is said to have prayed that God would help the Christians, even if he died first.⁵

An anonymous Bulgarian chronicle describes so many broken lances that the sky could not be seen for arrows, a river of blood, and Bayezid himself taking fright. Yet in the same passage the sultan installs a ruler of his own in Wallachia, Mircea flees to the Hungarian side, and Bayezid goes on to capture and kill the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman. The Byzantine historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles tells of a different kind of war: Mircea sent the women and children to the mountains near Brașov and harried the Ottoman columns from the oak forests, until Bayezid formed a fortified camp and crossed back over the Danube.⁶

Ottoman chroniclers, writing generations later, describe a hard-fought battle that ended with Mircea submitting and paying tribute. One, Oruç, tells how the vizier had the Muslim dead collected and thrown into the river by torchlight, so that at dawn Mircea saw only his own dead on the field and took fright. Czamańska warns that these chronicles were written to glorify the sultans and reflect the Wallachia of the later 15th century.⁷

Who won?

Romanian historiography has long treated Rovine as a clear victory for Mircea, partly because of an abridged retelling by the 17th-century chronicler Mihai Moxa, in which Bayezid loses his whole army. Madgearu still judges that the battle was won by Mircea. Czamańska is more cautious. Both armies lost heavily, she concludes, but separated with their fighting power intact. Bayezid was strong enough to go on and take Nikopol and end the Bulgarian tsardom, while Mircea retreated to Transylvania and joined forces with Sigismund.⁸

In Wallachia itself Mircea lost his capital. A group of boyars who favored peace with the Ottomans backed a rival prince, Vlad, known as the Usurper. Mircea signed an alliance with Sigismund at Brașov on 7 March 1395, and a Hungarian army helped him retake the fortress of Turnu, or Little Nicopolis, but Bayezid struck back in May 1395. Mircea did not regain full power until December 1396, with Hungarian help. That autumn Sigismund's great crusade was destroyed by Bayezid at Nicopolis.⁹

A Polish footnote

Vlad looked for protection in Kraków. Because Wallachia was formally a fief of the Angevin crown, he turned after the death of Queen Mary of Hungary in 1395 to her sister, Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and her husband Władysław Jagiełło. His act of homage was issued at Argeș on 28 May 1396. Czamańska finds no evidence for the claim that the Poles put Vlad on the throne: apart from accepting the document, the Polish royal couple did nothing at all for him.¹⁰