What happened at the Battle of Vaslui?
On 10 January 1475, near the town of Vaslui in Moldavia, Prince Stephen III, remembered as Stephen the Great, defeated the Ottoman army that Sultan Mehmed II had sent to punish him. Its commander was Hadım Süleyman Pasha, the beylerbey of Rumelia. Stephen met the invaders at Podul Înalt, the High Bridge, in a foggy, marshy valley ringed by forests, and the Ottoman army was routed. The victory made him famous across Christian Europe, and Pope Sixtus IV praised him as an athlete of Christ.5
In the depth of winter, in a river valley of eastern Moldavia, the army of a small Christian principality met the army of the empire that had taken Constantinople twenty-two years before. The Ottomans came to punish a rebellious vassal and went home beaten. The Turkish historian Halil İnalcık records the campaign in one plain line: the army was routed in January 1475. Nicolae Iorga, the great Romanian historian, called it the greatest victory of Stephen's life, won over the most powerful of his enemies.6
A vassal who stopped paying
Stephen III ruled Moldavia from 1457 to 1504. His principality lay between three powers that all wanted it as a vassal: Hungary, Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Hungary had already tried force. In 1467 King Matthias Corvinus invaded Moldavia, and at Baia Stephen beat him so badly that the king rode home wounded. Moldavia had paid tribute to the sultans since 1455, when it accepted Ottoman overlordship and a yearly tribute of 2,000 gold pieces under Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople.7
Stephen did not stay quiet. He captured Kilia, the fortress near the mouth of the Danube, and he stopped paying the tribute. In 1473 he drove the Ottoman vassal Radu the Handsome from the throne of neighboring Wallachia and set up his own candidate, Basarab Laiotă. İnalcık notes that he chose his moment while the Ottoman army was away in the east, fighting Uzun Hasan.8
Laiotă did not stay loyal. He made his peace with the sultan, and in the autumn of 1474 Stephen, with help from Transylvania under its vice-voivode Stephen Báthory, tried to replace him with another claimant. For the sultan this was open rebellion. As İnalcık puts it, Mehmed first summoned Stephen to obedience, then sent an army against him.9
The sultan sends his beylerbey
The man Mehmed chose was Hadım Süleyman Pasha, the beylerbey of Rumelia, the Ottoman governor-general in Europe. Iorga calls him Soliman the Eunuch, which is what the epithet hadım means. He came straight from a failure: in the summer of 1474 he had besieged the Venetian fortress of Shkodër in Albania and could not take it. İnalcık dates the siege from mid-July to the end of August.10
The army set out late in the autumn of 1474, so the campaign was fought in the depth of winter, a season, Xenopol remarks, the Ottomans were not used to campaigning in. Laiotă of Wallachia had to march with it. Iorga writes that the two sons of Mihaloğlu, the feared raider lords of the Danube frontier, joined the army, and Ovidiu Cristea, who studied the list of Ottoman commanders preserved in Stephen's own report of the battle, finds that its leaders included the most active akinji (raider) commanders of the Ottoman Balkans.11
The invaders found an empty land. Stephen had the country stripped in their path, the habit that served him in all his wars: he fell back behind scorched earth until the enemy stood where numbers no longer helped and baggage and guns became a burden. Iorga describes burned villages, foul marsh water and Ottoman columns floundering in the mud of a winter thaw, harassed by an enemy they never saw.12
Stephen's army and its allies
Stephen's army was mostly a levy of his own peasants, called up to defend the country, around a core of household troops and boyars. Jan Długosz, as Xenopol quotes him, called them nearly all peasants and tillers of the soil. Ernest Latham notes that it fought on foot but moved on horseback, for speed and surprise.13
He did not fight entirely alone. About 5,000 Székely from the Székely seats of Transylvania came to his camp, a figure Stephen himself gave to the king of Poland, and with them some 1,800 Hungarian soldiers left behind by Stephen Báthory after the expedition against Laiotă. Vasile Pârvan, who studied Stephen's relations with Hungary in 1905, argues that they were not sent by King Matthias Corvinus, with whom Stephen was not yet at peace.14
Poland's part is uncertain. The seventeenth-century chronicler Grigore Ureche, following Polish writers, adds 2,000 Poles to Stephen's army, and one Moldavian-Polish version of a Moldavian chronicle also mentions Polish help, while the old Moldavian chronicles know nothing of Hungarian aid, Pârvan observes. Iorga records that in his camp at Vaslui Stephen also received a Venetian envoy, Paul Ognibene, on his way home from Uzun Hasan in Persia. Ognibene would carry word of the battle to the West.15
10 January: the battle in the fog
The armies met on 10 January 1475 at Podul Înalt, the High Bridge, near Vaslui, in a marshy valley surrounded by forests. Stephen had chosen the ground with care, to cancel out the enemy's numbers. A thick fog lay over the valley that morning, and the Moldavians attacked.16
The date is the one given by the Moldavian chronicler Grigore Ureche and followed by modern historians such as Latham and Cristea. Xenopol points out that the old sources disagree: the Putna chronicle has 7 January, and the Polish chroniclers Długosz and Miechowski 17 January.17
No eyewitness account of the fighting survives in detail, and the two fullest narratives were written centuries later by Romanian historians who admired Stephen: Nicolae Iorga in 1904 and Alexandru D. Xenopol in his history of the Romanians. They agree on the setting, a stream called the Racova or Racovăț flowing into the Bârlad river among marshes and woods, and on the outline of the fight. The Székely in the front line were overrun by the first Ottoman onset, the Ottoman mass then floundered in the fog and the marshy meadow and was cut down, and the fugitives were hunted down across the country.18
On the details they part ways. Iorga has Moldavian guns hidden in the thickets firing at the Ottoman horsemen on the bridge and peasant infantry holding the forest edge with axes and scythes. Xenopol, following Ureche, tells instead of trumpeters hidden behind a wood whose calls lured the Ottomans into the marsh, and of a charge that Stephen led in person with his best troops. These are reconstructions, not established facts.19
Laiotă's part is murky too. Iorga thought he kept his Wallachians out of the slaughter, and both Iorga and Xenopol say that once the Ottomans fled he fell on their stragglers himself. The Austrian chronicler Jakob Unrest went further and wrote that Stephen won with the counsel and help of Basarab.20
Numbers nobody can trust
No reliable count of either army or of the dead has come down to us. A Venetian chronicle records, as Pârvan shows, that on 7 February 1475 Ognibene reached Venice with the news that the Moldavian, with help from Hungarians, Bohemians and Russians, had beaten 90,000 Turks, of whom 40,000 fell and 4,000 were taken prisoner. Xenopol quotes the same figures from the Venetian chronicler Francesco Longo. Venetian annals credited Stephen with 42,000 Moldavians and 26,000 Transylvanians, a total Pârvan calls impossible.21
Later historians did no better. Nicolae Iorga counted about 30,000 Moldavian peasants, while Ioan Bogdan, dean of the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest, in his address at the 400th anniversary of Stephen's death in 1904, spoke of 40,000 Moldavians holding back an army three times larger. Xenopol found 40,000 Moldavians in most of the old sources, after Długosz, with 5,000 Székely and 2,000 Poles, and 50,000 in a report sent from Turda in Transylvania. For the Ottomans, Iorga and Xenopol both give 100,000 fighting men or more, plus some 20,000 Christian peasants from Bulgaria, while Długosz and Miechowski wrote of 120,000. Figures like these are claims, not counts.22
A letter to Christendom
On 25 January 1475, from his capital Suceava, Stephen sent a letter to the rulers of Christian Europe. He announced his victory and asked for help in the war he knew was coming. Cristea notes that the text survives only in Italian and German translations, and that the prince chose two foreigners as his first messengers to Venice and the papacy, the Venetian Ognibene and the Hungarian Nicholas Ujlaki, because Moldavia was so little known in the West.23
Others hurried to share the credit. King Matthias Corvinus spread word across Europe that his vassal had won with Hungarian help, and Pârvan finds that this claim colored several reports of the time. No army came. Pope Sixtus IV, however, praised Stephen as an athlete of Christ.24
Behind the crusading letters, Stephen played a double game. Cristea argues, from the chronicle of the Polish historian Jan Długosz and a letter of a Genoese from Pera, that after Vaslui Stephen sought Western help and at the same time tried to calm the sultan's anger, and that he broke off his contacts with the Ottomans only after his treaty with Hungary in 1475 made military support certain.25
The sultan's revenge
Mehmed II meant to lead the next campaign himself in the spring of 1475, but illness held him back. He struck in the Crimea instead. An Ottoman fleet under Gedik Ahmed Pasha took Caffa, the Genoese trading city, on 6 June 1475. Then came the turn of Mangup, the Crimean fortress of the family of Stephen's wife, which Stephen's brother-in-law Alexander had taken over with Moldavian help. It too fell to the Ottomans.26
In the summer of 1476 the sultan came to Moldavia in person, with Wallachian troops at his side and the Crimean Tatars raiding from the east. At Valea Albă on 26 July he stormed Stephen's fortified camp, and the Enciclopedia României notes that the Ottoman vanguard there was led by the same Süleyman Pasha whom Stephen had beaten at Vaslui. But Suceava's fortress held. The Moldavians burned the land as they fell back, the Ottoman army ran short of supplies, disease broke out in its camp and the Hungarians began to move, so Mehmed withdrew without taking a single Moldavian fortress.27
The help Stephen had asked for never came in strength. The Columbia Encyclopedia sums up that Moldavia's position grew weaker as Poland and Hungary failed to aid him, and in 1484 Sultan Bayezid II took Kilia and Akkerman, Moldavia's ports on the Black Sea.28
Vaslui could not keep the Ottomans out of Moldavia for good. After Stephen's death in 1504 the principality weakened, and in 1538 Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent marched in, took Suceava and made Moldavia a vassal state. For the wider story, see our guide to the Ottoman wars in Europe and the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire.29
