Battle of Valea Albă
Battle of Valea Albă/Războieni/Akdere | |||||||
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Part of the Moldavian-Ottoman Wars | |||||||
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Belligerents | |||||||
Ottoman Empire[1] |
Moldavia Kingdom of Hungary[2] Lithuania[3] | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
Mehmed the Conqueror | Stephen the Great | ||||||
Strength | |||||||
90,000-150,000[4] | 10,000-12,000[5] | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
30,000[5][6] | 1,000 and 11 boyars[5][7] |
The Battle of Valea Albă, also known as the Battle of Războieni or the Battle of Akdere, was an important event in the
Background
In 1475 the Ottoman's attempt to bring
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.[10] 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.[11]
Aftermath
Stephen retreated into the north-western part of Moldavia or even into the
Meanwhile, anti-Ottoman forces were being assembled in Transylvania[8] 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.
References
- ^ Kármán & Kunčevic 2013, p. 266.
- ^ "Tartalomjegyzék". oszk.hu (in Hungarian). Retrieved 29 June 2023.
- ^
Öztuna, Yılmaz (29 October 2023). Fatih; Büyük Kartalın gölgesi. Yakın Plan Yayınları. p. 168. ISBN 9786055535995.
- ^ D. Deletant, K. Hitchins, History of Romania, Ed. Corint, Bucharest, 2002, p. 157
- ^ a b c d "Moment Istoric". Jurnalul Național (in Romanian). 26 July 2005.
- ^ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, Volume 1, ed. Clifford J. Rogers, (Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.
- ^ Tony Jaques, Dictionary of Battles and Sieges: P-Z, Vol. 3, (Greenwood Press, 2007), 1058.
- ^ ISBN 973-653-215-1.
- ISBN 0-521-29163-1p.68
- ^ (in Romanian) Akademia, Rolul distinctiv al artileriei în marile oşti moldoveneşti Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine (The special role of artillery in the larger Moldavian armies), April 2000
- ^ https://enciclopediaromaniei.ro/wiki/B%C4%83t%C4%83lia_de_la_R%C4%83zboieni
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.