June 1476 – January 1477
Valea Albă, 1476
Mehmed leads the next campaign against Moldavia himself and sets out in June 1476 with Basarab Laiotă's 12,000 Wallachians. At his order the Crimean Tatars break into Moldavia first, but Stephen defeats them and persuades the Tatars of the Great Horde to attack the Crimea, which draws the Crimean Tatars home. Near Varna Mehmed offers Stephen peace if he pays the tribute and gives up Kilia, and when Stephen refuses, the army crosses the Danube and enters Moldavia in late June.
Stephen lays waste to the land before the Ottomans and attacks their smaller detachments. On 26 July 1476 he makes a stand with 10,000 to 20,000 men in the White Valley near Războieni, with his back to a wooded hill and trenches and felled trees before him. Under the fire of his guns the janissaries lie down on the ground, until Mehmed rides forward with his shield and they follow him. By nightfall the Moldavians break, and Stephen escapes with a few men to the north-west of Moldavia or into Poland.
Stephen the Great offers a Gospel book to the Virgin, in the Humor Gospels of 1473Wikimedia Commons, unknown illuminator, Public domain (Stefan cel Mare 1473.jpg)
The Ottomans fail to take Suceava and Neamț, hunger and disease break out in the camp, and an army under Stephen Báthory and Vlad III comes from Transylvania. In August Mehmed leaves Moldavia. In November Báthory and Vlad take Târgoviște and Bucharest, and Vlad becomes prince of Wallachia for the third time, but Basarab returns with Ottoman help, and Vlad is killed near Snagov in late December 1476 or early January 1477.
The citadel of NeamțWikimedia Commons, Cristibur, CC BY 3.0 (Neamt.citadel1.cristibur.jpg)
Sources
- Giovanni Maria Angiolello, Historia Turchesca (about 1490).
- Ibn Kemal, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (early 16th century).
- Jan Długosz, Annales seu Cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae (about 1480).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Pál Engel, The Realm of St Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895–1526 (2001).
- Jonathan Eagles, Stephen the Great and Balkan Nationalism (2014).
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