Principality of Moldavia

A principality between the Carpathians and the Dniester that survived by paying tribute to whichever empire was strongest and occasionally by refusing to. It emerged in the middle of the fourteenth century and spent its history between Hungary, Poland, the Ottomans and later Russia. Its high point was the reign of Stephen the Great from 1457 to 1504, who fought most of his neighbours and won more often than the size of his country allowed. He beat a large Ottoman army at Vaslui in 1475 in winter marshland where numbers could not be used, was defeated the following year at Valea Alba, and kept the principality autonomous by paying tribute while conceding nothing else. He is said to have founded a church for each battle; several dozen survive, and their painted exterior walls are among the distinctive monuments of eastern Europe. After him Moldavia became an Ottoman tributary in fact as well as name, governed from the eighteenth century by Greek Phanariot appointees from Istanbul who bought the office and recovered the price in taxes. Russia took the eastern half, Bessarabia, in 1812. The rest elected the same prince as Wallachia in 1859, which is how Romania was made. Moldavia's culture was formed by the same position. Its chancellery wrote in Church Slavonic while its people spoke a Romance language, its churches were built in a style that mixes Byzantine plans with Gothic detail, and its chroniclers produced the earliest sustained historical writing in the region. The Phanariot century was also when the first modern legal codes and the first printing in Romanian arrived, so the period remembered as foreign misrule was the one that supplied the tools of the national movement that ended it. Bessarabia, taken by Russia in 1812, is the reason there is a Republic of Moldova today.

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