Battle of Valea Albă

Battle of Valea Albă/Războieni/Akdere
Part of the Moldavian-Ottoman Wars
Date July 26, 1476 Location Războieni, present-day Romania Result Pyrrhic Ottoman victory
Belligerents
Ottoman Empire	Moldavia Kingdom of Hungary Lithuania
Commanders and leaders
Mehmed the Conqueror	Stephen the Great
Strength
90,000-150,000	10,000-12,000
Casualties and losses
30,000	1,000 and 11 boyars

The Battle of Valea Albă, also known as the Battle of Războieni or the Battle of Akdere, was an important event in the medieval history of Moldavia. It took place at Războieni, also known as Valea Albă, on July 26, 1476, between the Moldavian army of Stephen the Great and an invading Ottoman army which was commanded personally by Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror.

Background

In 1475 the Ottoman's attempt to bring Moldavia under their control, at winter by using an army of Rumelian local levies, ended disastrously with a defeat in the Battle of Vaslui. During the proper military campaign season, the Ottomans assembled a large army, estimated by contemporary sources at about 90,000-150,000 solders, under the command of Sultan Mehmed II and entered Moldavia in June 1476. Meanwhile, groups of Tartars from the Crimean Khanate (the Ottomans' recent ally) were sent to attack Moldavia. Romanian sources may state that they were repelled. Other sources state that joint Ottoman and Crimean Tatar forces "occupied Bessarabia and took Akkerman, gaining control of the southern mouth of the Danube. Stephan tried to avoid open battle with the Ottomans by following a scorched-earth policy." In the process the Moldavians forces ended up being dispersed throughout the country, leaving only a small force of about 10,000–12,000 men, led by Stephen himself, to face the main Ottoman attack.

Battle

The Ottoman army crossed the Danube in the second half of June 1476, then advanced on the Siret Valley, towards Suceava. Under these conditions, Stephen strengthened the fortresses and sent part of the army against the Tatars, succeeding in driving them out of the country, cutting the supplies of the Ottomans. Without receiving help from the Poles or Hungarians, Stephen was forced to oppose the invading army with only about 10,000-12,000 soldiers. He established his camp on a high plateau, that he fortified with trenches, palisades and wagons linked together, according to the Hussite model.

On July 25, 1476, Stephen attacked the Ottoman vanguard led by the beylerbey of Rumelia, Süleyman Hadambul, whom he had previously defeated at the Battle of Vaslui. He inflicted heavy losses, but the arrival of the main Ottoman army forced him to retreat to the fortified camp, sheltered by the artillery. The next day, on July 26, 1476, after an artillery duel, the main Ottoman forces were lured into a forest that was set on fire, causing some casualties to the attacking Ottoman army in the forest. According to another battle description, the defending Moldavian forces repelled several attacks with steady fire from hand-guns. The attacking Ottoman Janissaries were forced to crouch on their stomachs instead of charging headlong into the defenders' positions. Seeing the imminent defeat of his forces, Mehmed charged with his personal guard against the Moldavians, managing to rally the Janissaries, and turning the tide of the battle. Ottoman Janissaries penetrated inside the forest and engaged the defenders in man-to-man fighting.

Stephen, after a fierce resistance, overwhelmed by the number of opponents, was forced to abandon the camp and retreat through the forest. Although the Moldavian chronicler Grigore Ureche says that both the Ottomans and Stephen suffered heavy losses, saying that the entire battlefield was covered with the bones of the dead, other Christian sources say that the losses were very small for the Moldavians. The Polish chronicler Jan Długosz estimates them at "more than 200 dead", and the Italian Giovanni Maria Angiolello states that "about 200 were killed and about 800 captured". Given the subsequent course of events, Stephen likely saved most of his army, which he regrouped and used to constantly harass the Ottomans.

Aftermath

Stephen retreated into the north-western part of Moldavia or even into the Polish Kingdom and began forming another army. The Ottomans captured considerable parts of Moldavian territory but were unable to conquer some of the major Moldavian strongholds such as Suceava, Neamț, and Hotin and were constantly harassed by small-scale Moldavians attacks. Soon they were also confronted with starvation, a situation made worse by an outbreak of the plague.

Meanwhile, anti-Ottoman forces were being assembled in Transylvania under Stephen V Báthory's command. Confronted with this army and with Stephen's counterattack, the Ottomans retreated from major parts of Moldavia in August 1476 to come back again in 1480.

In fiction

In the Romanian theatrical play Apus de Soare by Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea (set in the final year of Stephen's reign), one can find a description of the battle in the form of a dialog between the daughters and widows of the boyars who had fallen in the battle, in which they describe how their respective fathers and husbands had to drag Stephen out of the battle, as he desperately tried to keep fighting.

Bibliography

• Kármán, Gábor; Kunčevic, Lovro, eds. (2013). The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9789004246065.