Refusing to pay tribute to the Ottomans or to cede Cilia to them (captured from the Wallachians in 1465), Stephen the Great, voivode of Moldavia, confronted a large Ottoman army of perhaps 120,000 men and considerable artillery under Suleiman Pasha, defeating them ‘on a foggy day, in a marshy place’. Stephen’s own forces totalled 40,000 plus, or perhaps including, 5,000 Szeklers, 1,800 other Hungarians and 2,000 Poles, plus 20 cannons. He drew up in a narrow valley on the marshy flood-plain of the River Birlad, with Moldavian infantry and Szeklers in 2 lines behind defensive ditches with 10 guns on each flank; most of his cavalry he concealed in reserve in woods behind the left flank, sending just a small body of light cavalry out into the fog to lure the Turks on, which they succeeded in doing.
The Ottoman cavalry attacked the Moldavian centre while their infantry attacked the flanks. After stiff fighting the Moldavians fell back to the second defensive ditch, and only when that too looked as if it was about to break did Stephen launch his counter-attack, his heavy cavalry charging out against the Ottoman right flank preceded by 7 volleys from his 20 guns. Simultaneously buglers he had hidden at various points in the woods started blowing loudly on their trumpets, so that the Turks, unable to make out which direction the Moldavians were coming from in the fog, turned to face the buglers behind them, and were thus facing in the wrong direction when the Moldavian cavalry hit them. Before long the Turks had been utterly routed, losing 45,000 men according to optimistic Italian and Austrian sources, including 4 pashas, 100 standards and all their artillery. The Ottoman chronicler Sa’d ed-Din actually wrote that the majority of the Turkish army was killed, and another contemporary admitted that ‘never had a Turkish army suffered such a defeat.’ The Moldavian light cavalry pursuit lasted 3 days.
World History
