Battle of Valea Albă, 1476: Stephen the Great against Mehmed II

In the heat of late July 1476, in a wooded valley of northern Moldavia, a small army sat behind ditches, palisades and a wall of chained carts and waited for a far larger army. At its head rode the sultan who had taken Constantinople. Facing him was the prince who had destroyed an Ottoman army the year before. The battle that followed was Stephen the Great's bitterest defeat, and the campaign it opened ended with the sultan going home empty-handed.¹

Background: the revenge for Vaslui

In 1475 Stephen III of Moldavia, later called Stephen the Great, had crushed an Ottoman army at Vaslui. The Enciclopedia României writes that Mehmed II could not leave such a disaster unpunished, and in 1476 he took command of the campaign against Moldavia himself.² › Mehmed II the Conqueror

Stephen knew what was coming and looked for allies. In July 1475 he accepted the suzerainty of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who promised to help him against the Ottomans, and he had agreements with Poland as well. But Moldavia was a small state wedged between Hungary, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, and in the event neither of the Christian kingdoms sent an army in time.³

Armies and commanders

The sultan's army crossed the Danube in June and marched up the valley of the Siret toward Suceava, Stephen's capital. Its size is uncertain. The Enciclopedia României cites contemporary estimates of 90,000 to 150,000 men; Doxologia, the portal of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolis of Moldavia, gives 150,000. With it came 10,000 to 12,000 Wallachians supplied by Basarab Laiotă, the prince of Wallachia, who had gone over to the Ottomans. At the same time Mehmed ordered the Crimean Tatars to raid Moldavia from the east, to split its defense.⁴

Stephen met the double threat as best he could. He strengthened his fortresses, sent part of his army against the Tatars and drove them out of the country, and laid waste to the land in the Ottomans' path, evacuating people and goods to deny the invaders supplies. The historian Andrei Mirea adds that the Tatars left in haste when their own homes in Crimea were attacked by the Golden Horde, whose khan was Stephen's ally.⁵

The army left to face the sultan was small. The Enciclopedia României puts it at about 12,000 men, Doxologia at 20,000. Mirea, reviewing the contemporary reports, finds figures of 6,000, 10,000, 12,000 and 20,000 for the men still in Stephen's camp shortly before the battle. Why so few is an old debate. In 1896 the historian A. D. Xenopol wrote that Stephen's peasant soldiers went home to protect their families from the Tatars and never came back; in 1904 Nicolae Iorga had them return after two weeks of leave. Mirea himself points to hunger, heat, exhaustion and rumors of Tatar raids that drove men to slip away from the camp.⁶

The battle in phases

The camp. Stephen chose his ground on a high plateau in the valley of the Pârâul Alb, the White Stream, a tributary of the Moldova river near the village now called Războieni. He fortified it with ditches, palisades and carts chained together in the Hussite manner.⁷ › Battle of Německý Brod, 1422

25 July: the first blow. Stephen did not wait to be attacked. On 25 July he struck first, falling on the Ottoman vanguard under the beylerbey of Rumelia, Süleyman Pasha, and drove it back with heavy losses. Then the Ottoman cavalry, the sipahis, came up, and Stephen pulled his men back into the camp under the cover of his guns.⁸

26 July: the azaps. The next day, after an artillery duel, the Ottomans sent their azap infantry against the camp. The Moldavians threw it back with heavy losses.⁹

The janissaries. Mehmed then committed the janissaries, the elite of his army, and led the decisive attack himself. After a bitter defense, overwhelmed by numbers, the Moldavians broke. Stephen abandoned the camp and withdrew through the forest.¹⁰

Turning point: a defeat that was not a conquest

How many Moldavians died is disputed. The seventeenth-century chronicler Grigore Ureche wrote that so many fell that their bodies whitened the field, and that many great boyars and brave men perished. Other Christian sources, which the Enciclopedia României calls subjective, give far smaller figures: the Polish chronicler Jan Długosz speaks of more than 200 dead in the encyclopedia's reading, while Doxologia credits him with 200 dead and 800 prisoners. The encyclopedia concludes, from what followed, that Stephen saved most of his army and regrouped it.¹¹

What followed proved it. The sultan had won the field, but not the country. The Ottomans plundered Moldavia, yet the fortresses held, Suceava among them, and the sultan's army, short of supplies and harassed by Stephen's rebuilt forces, began to withdraw toward the end of August. Doxologia's verdict is that the conqueror of Byzantium went home undefeated but without having conquered anything.¹²

Aftermath

The Enciclopedia României has the retreating Ottomans pursued by Stephen's army and by Transylvanian troops who had arrived too late for the battle. Mirea disputes the Hungarian part of that story: he finds that the Hungarian army mobilized under Stephen Báthory, with Vlad the Impaler in its ranks, never crossed into Moldavia that summer, and that the five sources cited for its intervention prove nothing.¹³

Later in 1476 Stephen and the Transylvanians marched into Wallachia and put Vlad the Impaler back on its throne. He did not last long: the Ottoman-backed Basarab Laiotă soon defeated and killed him. Moldavia had been devastated by the Ottoman and Tatar raids, and Stephen's efforts to keep a Christian alliance together came to nothing; as the Columbia Encyclopedia puts it, Moldavia's position grew steadily weaker because Poland and Hungary failed to help him.¹⁴

Historians have long argued over what happened inside Stephen's camp. Mirea traces two theories: that some boyars betrayed their prince, and that Mehmed's agents spread word that the war was waged against Stephen alone and not against his country. The historians Liviu Pilat and Ovidiu Cristea, quoted by Mirea, point to a pretender to the Moldavian throne in the sultan's camp as the reason Stephen risked battle at all.¹⁵

Legacy and memory

Twenty years after the battle, in 1496, Stephen built a church on the battlefield and dedicated it to the Archangel Michael. It is a mausoleum, built to hold the bones of the Moldavian soldiers who died there. An inscription on its south wall tells the story of the battle and, unusually for a princely foundation, admits the defeat: by God's will, it says, the Christians were beaten by the pagans, and a great multitude of Moldavian soldiers fell there.¹⁶

Restoration work in 1975 to 1977 returned the church to its original form, and when the stone floor was lifted the excavators found a thick layer of human bones under it, confirming the tradition. Dumitru Manolache calls it the first pantheon of the Romanian army, a feudal mausoleum unique in the country. Even the name of the place is remembered in two ways: the Enciclopedia României derives Valea Albă from the White Stream, while local tradition has the valley named for the bones that whitened it.¹⁷

Visiting Războieni today

The church stands in the village of Războieni in Neamț County, where it is once again a working monastery, and the bones of Stephen's soldiers still lie beneath its floor.¹⁸