On 10 January 1475 Stephen III of Moldavia, remembered as Stephen the Great, defeated an Ottoman army sent by Sultan Mehmed II at Podul Înalt, the High Bridge, near Vaslui in what is now eastern Romania. The battle was fought in a foggy, marshy valley, and the victory made Stephen famous across Christian Europe.
Battle of Vaslui
10 January 1475 · 551 years ago
A punitive campaign
Moldavia was a small principality between Hungary, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, and Stephen had ruled it since 1457. He had defied Sultan Mehmed II, and the sultan sent an army into Moldavia to punish him. It set out late in the autumn of 1474, and the campaign was fought in the depth of winter. The Turkish historian Halil İnalcık names its commander as Hadım Suleiman Pasha, the governor (beylerbey) of Rumelia.1
The battle in the fog
The armies met on 10 January 1475 at Podul Înalt, the High Bridge, near the town of Vaslui, in a marshy valley ringed by forests and covered by fog. The chroniclers wrote that the fog helped Stephen's men. The Ottoman army was routed.2
Stephen did not fight entirely alone. According to the historian Vasile Pârvan, some 5,000 Székely and 1,800 Hungarian soldiers from Transylvania fought on his side. They had not been sent by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, Pârvan argues, although Matthias soon spread the claim across Europe that his vassal had won with Hungarian help.3
Numbers nobody can trust
No reliable count of either army or of the losses has come down to us. The figures of the time vary widely: Pârvan quotes a chronicle that gives 90,000 Turks, of whom 40,000 fell and 4,000 were taken prisoner, and Venetian annals that credit Stephen with 42,000 Moldavians and 26,000 Transylvanians, a total he calls impossible. Figures like these are claims, not counts.4
Athlete of Christ
Stephen at once wrote to the rulers of Christian Europe, announcing his victory and asking for help against the revenge he expected from the sultan, but no army came. Pope Sixtus IV praised him as an athlete of Christ.5
Mehmed II led the next campaign in person. In 1476 he defeated Stephen at Valea Albă, also called Războieni, and besieged Suceava, Stephen's capital, but could not take its fortress and had to withdraw. For the wider story of the sultans' wars, see our guide to the greatest Ottoman battles.6 › Battle of Valea Albă, 1476
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