A presentation delivered with the blessing and in the presence of His Eminence Varsanufie, Archbishop of Râmnic, to mark the 605th anniversary of the death of Prince Mircea the Elder, at the Holy Monastery of Cozia, 31 January 2023.
As historians and archaeologists with a focus on historical monuments, we were, from the outset, prompted by the methodology of our discipline to examine how Mircea the Elder (1386–1418) is portrayed in the latest work of our academic historiography, the treatise Istoria Românilor (History of the Romanians), Vol. IV, From Christian Universality to the Europe of Homelands, the latest edition, from 2012, revised and expanded.
However, alongside the ‘great giaour hero’ of the anonymous Ottoman Chronicles, the ‘bravest and most agile of all Christians’, in the adaptation of those same annals by Hans Löwenklau, and the finalisation of the country’s administrative and political organisation, the presentation of the history of his reign in an international context remains ambiguous.
Against the backdrop of the erosion of Tsar Ivan Shishman’s rule in Tarnovo by Ottoman expansion, Mircea the Elder is said to have captured the fortress of Drâstor (Silistra) and the despotate of Dobrotici in 1388 by fighting against the Sultan’s armies. In that same year and the following one, 1389, taking advantage of the anarchy in the Kingdom of Hungary, Wallachia recaptured Făgăraș, Amlaș and the Severin region. The years 1390–1391 were to see, within the borders ruled by the Prince, the “Tatar regions”, defined as that “region situated north of the Danube estuary, from the Prut to the Dniester’s mouth in the ‘Great Sea’”1 We are told nothing about the north-eastern border of Wallachia, between the Curbură Carpathians and the Prut, nor how one might reach the “Tatar regions”.
However, at the same time, in 1391 following the conquest of Vidin, Firuz Beg organised a raiding expedition from there into Wallachia, which was repelled by the forces of Mircea the Elder, who subsequently restored the rule of Tsar Ivan Sracimir across the Danube. The campaign by the army of Sultan Bayezid I, ‘the Thunderbolt’, against the Bulgarian Tsardom of Tarnovo in the summer of 1393, however, ended with the complete conquest of its territory. At the same time, it is thought to have resulted in Mircea the Elder losing certain possessions in Dobruja, including Silistra (Drâstor).
The year 1393 is considered the start of the defensive war led by Mircea the Elder. In response to the losses suffered and the threat looming over the country, the Romanian prince organised an expedition in 1394 to the southern Balkans, which destroyed the Ottoman base at Karinovasi, now Karnobat, which had been established in that region the previous year. This defeat led to a major punitive campaign north of the Danube, with clashes reportedly taking place in October 1394 and the decisive battle on 17 May 1395, namely at Jii. But faced with a Moldavian-Polish coalition, also supported by the Ottomans, Voivode Mircea was forced to cede part of the country’s territory to the pretender Vlad, despite the assistance of King Sigismund of Luxembourg of Hungary. Mircea had already concluded a treaty of alliance with him as early as March 1395.
The defeat of the crusading expedition organised by King Sigismund of Luxembourg—in which Prince Mircea also took part—at the hands of Sultan Bayezid’s army at Nicopolis (25 September 1396) led to the Ottoman conquest of the Principality of Vidin. This is said to have prompted the boyars to abandon Vlad the Voivode, who, besieged in the fortress of Dâmbovița, was captured by Știbor, the Voivode of Transylvania. Having thus been restored to power throughout Wallachia, Mircea the Elder was able to decisively repel the Ottomans’ final attempts at conquest in 1397 and 1401, liberating the parts of Dobruja, including Silistra, from the rule of Sultan Bayezid, as interpreted from an inscription dating from 1408, discovered in the Danube fortress.
With the crushing of the Ottoman forces and the capture of Sultan Bayezid at the Battle of Angora by the armies of Timur the Lame (1402), the great political era of the Romanian prince began. In 1403, he took Chilia from the Genoese, ‘recaptured most of the Dobrujan territory’ – though it is not stated when he had lost it again – and between 1411 and 1413, by installing Emir Musa on the Ottoman throne at Adrianople, he reached the height of his power. Musa’s defeat and murder were followed by raiding expeditions by the akingis and azaps of Emir Mehmed I into Wallachia, forcing the prince to pay tribute in 1415.
Because in 1416 Mircea the Elder attempted to support a new Ottoman pretender, Mustafa, the new Sultan Mehmed I (1413–1421) organised, in that same year, 1416, a personal campaign in Wallachia, securing victories in Dobruja, ‘apparently’ capturing the fortresses of Giurgiu and Turnu, and ‘perhaps’ temporarily that of Severin as well, ‘plundering the country mercilessly’, and forcing it once again to pay tribute. Thus, on 31 January 1418, the life and reign of the great voivode and prince Mircea the Elder came to an end.
This is a succinct summary, but in its letter and spirit, the reconstruction from the academic treatise of the reign of the greatest of the voivodes and lords of Wallachia, to which even the champion of demystifying our history, Mr Lucian Boia, would not have hesitated, we believe, to endorse.
In fact, with insignificant nuances and without incorporating any real contributions, this reconstruction is the one found in the monograph Mircea cel Bătrân (1944), painstakingly compiled by our great Slavist and cultural historian, Petre P. Panaitescu (1900–1967).
Its compilation went hand in hand with P.P. Panaitescu’s preparation of the first critical edition of the documents of Wallachia from the 14th–15th centuries, published in 1938. And since many of the documents issued by the Romanian princes—many of them from the archives of the Holy Monastery of Cozia—did not bear the date of their issuance, P.P. Panaitescu dated them in accordance with the chronological framework he had devised for the reign of Mircea the Elder in his planned monograph 2.
However, nearly 80 years have passed since the publication of his monograph, and the contributions of Pontic medieval studies, Black Sea studies and European Turkology have been so significant that they fundamentally alter Petre P. Panaitescu’s reconstruction and, by extension, that of the recent academic treatise.
A Crusader principality, as indicated by the Carpathian or Wallachian eagle bearing a cross in its coat of arms, Wallachia was involved from 1345 in the anti-Mongol Reconquista. Under the princes Nicolae Alexandru, Vladislav Vlaicu and Radu I, Wallachia liberated a vast territory stretching from the Argeș basin to Trajan’s Wall in southern Bessarabia, as far as the Sasic estuary – though not as far as that of the Dniester – and also reunited the Drâstor region by around 1385.
Documented in 1369, the political and military alliance between Vlaicu Vodă and the despot of the Land of Cărvuna and the neighbouring regions, Dobrotiță (c. 1347–1385), was certainly formalised, in accordance with medieval custom, in a marriage alliance. The Crown Prince Radu, who had lost his first wife, married Ana, the daughter of Despot Dobrotiță, whilst another of the despot’s daughters was married to Mihail, the son of the Emperor of Constantinople, John V Palaeologus.
The Great Voivode and Prince Radu I and Lady Ana completed the construction of the princely church of Saint Nicholas at Curtea de Argeș, where they are depicted in the masterful frescoes of the Byzantine Renaissance under the Palaiologos dynasty. The fresco at Argeș and the tomb painting in Radu I’s tomb at the Royal Church of Saint Nicholas are marvellous examples of medieval Romanian civilisation, representing a synthesis of Byzantine and Western influences. The son of Radu I and Lady Ana was Mircea, and thus we can understand why and how the lands of Despot Dobrotiță were reunited with Wallachia upon his death. This reunification had to be defended against the claims of the Tsar of Tarnovo, Ivan Shishman, supported by his son-in-law, Sultan Murad I; during the fighting, the Prince of Wallachia, Dan I—Mircea’s half-brother—perished.
Indeed, the Cozia documents contain one of the keys to these territorial developments, for the monastery’s control in 1388 over the Căbălul marsh in the inner Danube delta was placed under the supervision of the Drâstor chiefdom, a sign of the princely authority extending to the right bank of the Danube 3.
Mircea the Elder’s Wallachia – contrary to popular belief and what we have been accustomed to imagining – was an estate-based monarchy, a territorial principality covering an area of over 100,000 square kilometres, reaching at its peak almost the 130,000 square kilometres of the medieval Kingdom of England.
Unlike the latter, which was defended on its island, a matter of the utmost importance for Wallachia immediately following the unification achieved at the start of Mircea the Elder’s reign was the organisation of its military to stem the virulent Ottoman expansion which was particularly fierce under Sultan Bayezid, nicknamed ‘the Thunderbolt’. This could not have been a defensive war, as is commonly believed, but rather a Crusade, waged with united European forces and, first and foremost, with the French King of Hungary and future Holy Roman Emperor, Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437). The role of Wallachia, with its Danube-Pontic possessions—in particular Dobrotiță’s Dobruja as the Danube pivot of the Crusade—was defined in the treaty concluded between the two sovereigns at Brașov in March 1395. The Lower Danube, from the Iron Gates to Silistra, under the control of the Romanian prince, was to be the axis of the crusader offensive that would subsequently extend beyond the Balkans to the shores of the Black Sea.
And here, at the Holy Monastery of Cozia, we find a symbolic illustration of these developments: in the fresco of the votive painting, depicting Mircea the Elder and his son Mihail in Western Crusader garb. Embroidered on their capes are the double-headed eagles of the Pontic despotate, a motif also repeated in the carving of the window frame through which the sun crowns the princely portraits.
With regard to the long Crusade waged at that time, particular attention must be paid to the findings of Turkologists concerning the chronological discrepancy in the Ottoman chronicles prior to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which predate the actual occurrence of the events by two years. In any case, it is important to emphasise the epic, fabulous and selective nature of their accounts.
We have long demonstrated that the dating of the Battle of Rovine to 10 October 1394 resulted, from the manner in which medieval chronicles were composed and from an incomplete reading of a tombstone in Serbia, which had no direct connection to the Romanian–Ottoman conflict. The decisive battle took place on the Argeș River, in defence of the princely residence, on 17 May 1395, with the Sultan’s campaign in Wallachia ending in defeat.
The participation of Prince Mircea’s army in the Crusade of Nicopolis in the autumn of the following year, 1396, is illustrated – alongside King Sigismund’s endorsement of Mircea Voivode to lead the vanguard – by a colourful detail. The renowned crusader baron Enguerrand VII de Coucy, having witnessed the fighting prowess of the young Romanian nobles, took several of them into his own army at Nicopolis, with the Romanian prince’s consent. One of these young men, who was taken captive in 1396 alongside the Lord of Coucy and, after many vicissitudes, returned to Wallachia, was appointed by Vlad Vodă Dracul as tutor to his son4 Indeed, somewhat later, the valiant nobles of Mircea the Elder travelled to Buda to take part in tournaments and other chivalric contests.
We thus reach the zenith of Mircea the Elder’s reign during the first and second decades of the fifteenth century, which, however, is said to have ended with the loss not only of Dobruja, but also of Drâstor/Silistra, Giurgiu, Turnul, and perhaps even Severin.
Except that none of this actually happened. A description of the territories and administration of the Ottoman Empire in 1475, by Jacopo di Promontorio de Campis 5, to which my dear and late professor, the academician Șerban Papacostea (1928–2018), places the sultan’s southernmost province south of Deliorman – note that this was in 1475 – whilst the earliest documentary evidence of Ottoman administration downstream of Silistra dates from 1503/1504. As for northern Dobruja, the first administrative regulations date from the beginning of the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver (1520–1566). There is no concrete evidence that Dobruja was lost by Mircea the Elder. Groundbreaking research by Anca Popescu, a distinguished Turkologist, has reconstructed the successive lines of the Ottoman frontier, which advanced into the Pontic-Danubian isthmus after 1476 and 1484 6.
Sultan Mehmed I’s great campaign in Wallachia did not take place, as was previously thought, in 1416, but, according to Hungarian, Ottoman and Romanian documents, in 1419–1421, resulting, of course, in terrible devastation extending beyond the mountains, the death in battle of Mihail Voivode, son of Mircea, and many of his men, and the loss of the fortress of Silistra. Most of Dobruja remained within the borders of Wallachia. The landing of the Burgundian-Venetian-Papal crusader fleet at Mangalia in 1445 is evidence that this port city was not part of the Ottoman Empire at that time.
More broadly speaking, it is worth noting that the Ottoman chronicles equate the spoils taken during plundering raids, or akîn, with the payment of a tribute. Wallachia, however, is recorded as having been a tributary of the Ottomans from 1391. Yet it is known that there was a plundering raid from Vidin, led by Firuz Beg, and that it failed miserably. Such a thing could not be accepted by the pride of Ottoman historiography, driven by the spirit of holy war, the jihad, hence the misrepresentation of the sequence of events.
There is therefore no plausible documentary evidence that Mircea the Elder paid tribute to the Ottoman Porte.
As always, scholarly research continually yields new discoveries and interpretations. Among the early charters of Mircea the Elder’s reign is the confirmation of a donation to Tismana Monastery, namely, ‘from the millstones of Ciop Hanoș of Bratilov, the tithe of copper’. The document has been cited in connection with the development of mining at Baia de Aramă. However, a previously unknown document from 1410, originating from the famous fortress of Caffa in Genoese Crimea, contains an order for bells from Wallachia for the city’s bell towers. Wallachia was, therefore, an exporter of bells to the Black Sea, and at Bratilov, Johannes Czop’s enterprise not only crushed the ore into lumps but also operated a foundry where bells – and perhaps even bombards – were produced.
Wallachia is depicted as stretching far beyond the Danube to the Maritime Balkans, into Deliorman – part of the later Quadrilateral – and it is natural to ask what evidence exists to support this. It turns out that an Ottoman document, a privilege granted by Sultan Murad II in the mid-15th century, guaranteed the princes of Wallachia privileged possession of Basaraba on the Lom7 This refers to Basarabovo, south of Giurgiu, where the monastery dedicated to Saint Demetrius, the patron saint of Mircea the Elder, once stood. The relics of this Saint Demetrius had, since 1774, been a treasure of the Metropolis of Wallachia. They were saved from Bulgarian looters during the First World War thanks to the efforts of Field Marshal August von Mackensen, commander of the enemy occupation forces.
Representing the National Heritage Institute, we could not, of course, fail to dwell on the relationship between the Holy Monastery of Cozia and the Commission for Historical Monuments, whose mission our Institute continues, at least in part.
Following the horrors of the First World War, which had shattered the old world, Cozia Monastery lay in ruins, devastated and desecrated. The report by the abbot of Cozia, Protosinghel Athanasie Popescu, to the chairman of the Commission for Historical Monuments, Dimitre Onciul 8, dated autumn 1919, concluded dramatically: ‘The gratitude we owe to Prince Mircea the Elder, to whom we owe the rule of Dobruja and Silistra, demands that the Holy Monastery of Cozia be restored without delay and restored to its former splendour, and endowed with its precious treasures, as a token of gratitude to Almighty God, who has shown mercy and blessed the sacrifices of the peoples who fought in His name for faith, truth and justice”. Among other things, it was proposed that the floor of the main church be paved with marble, in place of the stone where the German-Austro-Hungarian occupiers had kept their horses. On 1 November 1919, Nicolae Ghica-Budești, architect of the Commission for Historical Monuments, stated in his report that it was imperative for his institution to take charge of “this important monument, which has suffered so much as a result of the foreign occupation”, proposing that a survey campaign for the restoration project should begin the following year, to be carried out progressively, transforming the monastery into a cultural institute, a printing house and a school. However, even in the autumn of 1921, Cozia Monastery, like Tismana, still housed Russian refugees from Admiral Wrangel’s army, who, having subsequently been transferred to Oradea Fortress, left the buildings deserted and “a mess that was entirely and utterly Russian”.
In 1923, the ½-hectare plot of land on the banks of the River Olt, one kilometre upstream from Cozia Monastery, with the ruins of Old Cozia and the monumental complex of Cozia Monastery, was declared a historic monument by Royal Decree No. 2205 of 8 May 1923.
In the spring of 1929, the Commission decided to commission the carving of Mircea’s tombstone for the reburial of his remains in January 1930. This was not to take place until 15 May 1938, with the service being officiated by Bishop Vartolomeu of Râmnic, in the presence of Grand Voivode Mihai, Nicolae Iorga and Ioan Lupaș, and Father Nae Popescu, Under-Secretary of State for Culture and the Arts in Patriarch Miron’s government.
In the first issue of 1931 of the ‘Bulletin of the Commission for Historical Monuments’, Virgil Drăghiceanu published a short article about his excavations at the church of Cozia Monastery. These were aimed at locating the tomb of Mircea the Elder, which had been mentioned only by the poet Grigore Alexandrescu in his account of his 1842 journey—an occasion that also inspired him to compose his poem The Shadow of Mircea at Cozia. According to our classic poet, Mircea the Elder ‘is buried in the church, at the first entrance: two large stones cover the tomb. The inscription on one has begun to fade, so that one can barely make out a few words and the name Mircea, whilst on the other one the following can be clearly read: ‘Here rests Mother Theofana the nun with her daughter Lady Florica and her son Prince Nicolae,… in the year 1605’.
The excavator Virgil Drăghiceanu, who was working ‘under the auspices of the Commission for Historical Monuments’, was ‘investigating’ the tomb of Mircea and the ‘neighbouring one containing the remains of the mother and daughter of Mihai Viteazul’. He must have overlooked the tomb of Nicolae Voivode, son of Mihai Viteazul, just as he did the year 1605 in the inscription.
Virgil Drăghiceanu’s excavation first revealed, 30 cm below the floor of that time, fragments of the old floor made of bricks laid on edge in a herringbone pattern, or ‘zigzag’ as he put it. Towards the head of the tomb, he discovered a transverse wall dividing the narthex in two, ‘perhaps… a remnant of the old church of Nucet, over which Mircea built his own church’. At a depth of over a metre, he found two stone blocks, which he believes probably marked the surface of Mircea’s tomb. Beneath these lay the lid of a stone sarcophagus shaped like a human body, “a curious shape that might lead us to suspect an Egyptian influence”, writes our amateur archaeologist. Fortunately, after being nudged by his colleagues on the Commission for Historical Monuments to consult the textbook on medieval archaeology by the founding father of the discipline, Arcisse de Caumont, Drăghiceanu came to his senses and re-dated these Western-style sarcophagi to the 12th–15th centuries.
In Mircea’s tomb and the adjoining one—a vaulted tomb—only a few skeletal remains were found at the time, a situation explained by the desecrations that occurred during the church’s restoration in 1847 and the German excavations of 1917 9.
In the questionnaire of the Commission for Historical Monuments, launched by Dimitre Onciul after the First World War, the inscription on Theofana’s gravestone was recorded as follows: “Here lies the handmaid of God, the nun Theofana, mother of the late Prince Mihail, and her daughter Lady Florica and her son Prince Nicolae. They agreed and inscribed this… Voivode, in the year 7114” (1606).
At the height of his reign, having established his residence in the fortress of Giurgiu—which he had built on the model of the Bastille in Paris—Mircea the Elder minted a new series of silver coins. It is to the credit of a skilled numismatist, who is no longer with us, Octavian Iliescu, that he examined this series of coins, depicting the prince wearing a chlamys, holding in his left hand a spear or the horn of the unicorn, symbolising Justice, and in his right hand the cross-topped orb. Among the coin’s insignia, the Romanian Cyrillic letter Ț—the customary abbreviation for the title of ‘tsar’ (emperor)—takes its rightful place. During the period of anarchy in the Ottoman Empire and the decline of the Byzantine Empire, the Lord of the Crusade of Wallachia, the ally of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, styled himself ‘tsar’ – ‘emperor’.
In his account of his journey with Ion Ghica to Oltenia in the summer of 1842, Grigore Alexandrescu mentioned that at Cozia, ‘at the very first entrance, by the church door, there is a stone throne, and the double-headed eagle holds the royal crown above it; it is said that Mircea used to rest on that throne; he is depicted inside the church, still a young man, as he was when he founded it. He is of medium height, with a gentle and cheerful countenance, large blue eyes, and blond, curly brown hair. Part of his attire is the traditional costume of the Crusader knights: a short tunic and surcoat, boots and leggings; at the knees are embroidered, in thread, two-headed eagles; over this he wears a red cloak with a gold border and a crown upon his head. The valiant lord is buried in the church, in the first aisle; two large stones cover the tomb. The inscription on one of them has begun to fade, so that one can barely make out a few words and the name ‘Mircea’10’.
At the Holy Monastery of Cozia, as nowhere else, the unusual stone throne marked with the crowned double-headed eagle is the symbol of the full realisation of Mircea the Elder’s reign.
This is how Mircea, great voivode and ruler, prince of Christendom and emperor, is portrayed in the light of more recent research.
- 1
Academician Ștefan Ștefănescu, Academician Camil Mureșan, Academician Ioan-Aurel Pop (eds.), The History of the Romanians, vol. IV, Ed. Enciclopedică, Bucharest, 2012, p. 309.
- 2
P.P. Panaitescu, Mircea the Elder, Casa Școalelor, Bucharest, 1944.
- 3
DRH.D., vol. I, pp. 33–36, doc. 14.
- 4
Foreign Travellers, Vol. I, pp. 115–116.
- 5
Franz Babinger, The Writings of the Genoese Iacopo de Promontorio – by Campis on the Ottoman Empire around 1475, Munich, 1957 (extract from ‘Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse Sitzungsberichte’, Volume 1956, Issue 8.)
- 6
Anca Popescu, The Integration of the Territories of South-Eastern Europe into the Ottoman Empire: The Sandjak of Silistra (15th–16th Centuries), Bucharest, 2013.
- 7
Sergiu Iosipescu, Balica, Dobrotiță, Ioancu, Bucharest, 1985.
- 8
INP Archive, CMI collection, file no. 1284.
- 9
Virg. Drăghiceanu, ‘The Tomb of Mircea Vodă the Elder’, in BCMI, XXIV, 1931, pp. 20–24.
- 10
Grigore Alexandrescu, Poems. A Travelogue, published by Gh. Adamescu, Bucharest, 1926, pp. 228–229.