Stephen the Great kept little Moldavia free between three empires
For 47 years a prince of a small principality juggled the Ottoman Empire, Poland and Hungary, beating each of them in battle at least once. Pope Sixtus IV hailed Stephen of Moldavia as a Champion of Christ. Five centuries later the Romanian Orthodox Church made him a saint, and Romanians count him among their greatest heroes.
His birth year is unknown, somewhere between 1433 and 1440. He was a grandson of Alexander the Good, prince of Moldavia, and fought alongside his father Bogdan II against a Polish invasion in 1450. When Bogdan was assassinated the next year, Stephen fled to Transylvania. He returned in 1457 with support from his cousin Vlad the Impaler, won the Battle of Orbic and took the throne, driving his father's killer, Peter Aaron, into exile in Poland. In 1470 Peter Aaron invaded with Hungarian backing and was defeated and executed along with the nobles still loyal to him.
Stephen spent years trying to hold the Danube port of Chilia, today Kiliia in Ukraine. He was badly wounded besieging it in 1462 and captured it two years later. In 1467 he repelled King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary at the Battle of Baia. After 1473 he refused tribute to the sultan, installed friendly princes in Wallachia and occupied Bucharest, though each protégé soon bowed to the Ottomans anyway. At Vaslui in 1475 he defeated a large Ottoman army. Mehmed II beat him at Valea Albă a year later, but a failed siege of Neamț Citadel, short supplies and plague forced the sultan out.
Setbacks followed. In 1484 the Ottomans seized Chilia and their Crimean Tatar allies took Cetatea Albă, and Stephen never won them back; from 1486 he paid tribute again, and only in 1503 did he formally accept the loss. He still routed a Polish invasion in the Cosmin Forest in 1497 and helped destroy the last remnants of the Golden Horde at the Samara River in 1502.
At home he repaired and built fortresses that tightened central control, and dozens of stone churches and monasteries went up, shaping a distinct Moldavian architectural style. His son Bogdan III shared power in his final years. He died on 2 July 1504, and in 1992 the church canonised him as Stephen the Great and Holy.
Source: Stephen the Great
