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

Few battles are as famous and as poorly known as Rovine. Historians still disagree about where it was fought, in which year, and who won. What is certain is that it was very bloody, and that it cost the lives of two Serbian lords who rode with the sultan, one of whom became the greatest hero of South Slavic song.²

Background: the Ottomans reach the Danube

At the end of the 14th century the Ottoman Empire was pushing north through the Balkans. After the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 the Serbian rulers became the sultan's tributaries, and Bayezid I, who came to the throne that year, went on to take the Bulgarian capital, Tarnovo, in July 1393. Ottoman raiders then crossed the Danube into Wallachia.³

Wallachia, the Romanian principality between the Danube and the southern Carpathians, was ruled from 1386 by Mircea the Elder. He was caught between the Ottomans to the south and the Hungarian king Sigismund of Luxembourg, who claimed him as a vassal and was preparing a great crusade against the Turks.⁴

Mircea struck back at the raiders' base north of the Danube, called Karınovası in the Ottoman chronicles, as part of a wider offensive organized by Sigismund. Bayezid came north to punish him. Czamańska adds another motive: the last Bulgarian tsar, Ivan Shishman, still held out at Nikopol on the Danube with Wallachian supplies, and the sultan wanted him finished before the crusade could come.⁵

Armies and commanders

No reliable figure survives for either army. On one side stood Mircea with the Wallachian host; on the other Bayezid, called Yıldırım, the Thunderbolt, with his own troops and the contingents of his Christian vassals. Among them were the Serbian prince Stefan Lazarević and two lords from what is now North Macedonia, King Marko and Constantine Dragaš.⁶

A battle with no fixed name or date

“Rovine” is not a place on any map. 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.⁷

The date is just as uncertain. One group of Serbian annals gives 10 October, and both Madgearu and Marius Diaconescu, writing in Mediaevalia Transilvanica, place the battle in the autumn of 1394. The date now generally given, 17 May 1395, comes from the death of Constantine Dragaš, recorded in a monastery's book of commemorations and confirmed by a grant of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II and his wife Helena, Dragaš's daughter, to a monastery in Constantinople. Czamańska argues that it should be treated as a convention, since no one knows whether Dragaš died on the day of the battle or later; one Ottoman source even speaks of fighting that lasted a week. Some historians tried to reconcile the dates by supposing two battles, one in each year. The anniversary on our calendar follows the conventional date.⁸

The battle in phases

No eyewitness account survives, and the sources contradict each other. All agree on the essentials: the sultan crossed the Danube, Mircea met him, and the fighting was hard and very bloody. In Czamańska's edition of the texts, the life of the Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević by Constantine of Kostenets speaks of “unspeakably much blood,” and says that Marko prayed for the Christians to win and to be the first to fall himself.⁹

The other chroniclers tell different stories. An anonymous Bulgarian chronicle describes a sky darkened by arrows, yet in the same passage the sultan installs his own ruler in Wallachia while Mircea flees to the Hungarian side. The Byzantine historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles describes not one battle but a campaign of harassment, with Mircea sending the women and children to the mountains and attacking the Ottoman columns from the oak forests. Ottoman chroniclers, writing generations later, describe a hard fight that ended with Mircea submitting and paying tribute. Czamańska warns that these were written to glorify the sultans, and Diaconescu that even they admit the fight was hard and its outcome uncertain.¹⁰

Turning point: who won?

Romanian historiography long treated Rovine as a clear victory for Mircea. Czamańska traces part of that to a retelling by the 17th-century chronicler Mihai Moxa, in which Bayezid loses his whole army, and Diaconescu notes that it was above all under the communist regime that historians wrote of a “glorious battle” and an “unforgettable victory.”¹¹

Modern historians still disagree. Madgearu judges that the battle was won by Mircea, who stopped the conquest of the whole of Wallachia. Czamańska concludes that it was undecided: both armies lost heavily but separated with their fighting power intact, and Bayezid was strong enough to go on and take Nikopol and end the Bulgarian tsardom. Diaconescu goes furthest the other way: winning a battle, he writes, is not the same as winning a war, and the events that followed showed that the true winners were the Turks.¹²

Aftermath

Whatever happened on the field, Mircea lost his capital. A group of boyars who favored peace with the Ottomans backed a rival prince, Vlad, known as the Usurper, and Mircea took refuge in his lands in Transylvania. There, on 7 March 1395, he concluded a treaty of alliance with Sigismund at Brașov.¹³

Who Vlad was is not certain. Madgearu suggests that he was perhaps a son of the earlier voivode Dan I; Czamańska thinks he was most likely a member of the ruling Basarab family, perhaps an illegitimate son of Vladislav I or Mircea's brother or nephew. Nor is it clear how he came to power: Diaconescu writes that the Ottomans installed him with the help of some of the boyars, while Czamańska leaves open whether Bayezid put him on the throne or he used Mircea's difficulties to make his own deal with the sultan.¹⁴

The Hungarian alliance came at a price. Diaconescu stresses that Sigismund treated Mircea as his vassal and made Mircea's part in the planned crusade south of the Danube the condition of his help against the pro-Ottoman party at home. Madgearu's verdict is that the cooperation between Mircea and Sigismund came too late to defeat the Ottoman invaders.¹⁵

What came next is told in two ways. In Madgearu's reconstruction, a Hungarian army entered Wallachia in April 1395 and helped to retake the Danube fortress of Turnu, or Little Nicopolis, and Bayezid struck back in May. Diaconescu describes the April force as a small contingent of about 1,200 men that was defeated, and has Sigismund himself take Turnu after a long siege in a royal campaign that summer, leaving a Hungarian garrison there. Both agree that Mircea owed his return to Hungarian arms. Turnu mattered because it guarded one of the usual Ottoman crossings of the Danube; the Ottomans had taken it in their campaign against Mircea, and its Hungarian garrison afterward was a reminder of whose help had put him back on his throne.¹⁶

A year later Sigismund's great crusade met Bayezid at Nicopolis, and on 25 September 1396 the sultan destroyed it. Mircea ruled Wallachia until 1418.¹⁷ › Battle of Nicopolis, 1396

Legacy and memory

For Romanians, Rovine is the battle of Mircea the Elder, the prince who stood against the Thunderbolt. For Serbs, it is the battle where Prince Marko fell. Marko Kraljević, Britannica notes, became a hero of South Slavic literature and tradition, joyous, strong and brave, an implacable foe of the Turks and inseparable from his horse, Šarac. In the tales Woislav Petrovitch collected in 1914 he is the favorite hero of the Serbians, given superhuman strength and his wonderful horse by a fairy.¹⁸

The irony did not escape the singers of those songs: the man they turned into the scourge of the Turks died fighting in the sultan's army, as his vassal. Of the real Marko, apart from his death at Rovine, little is documented.¹⁹ › Sultan Bayezid I