The end of the Middle Ages saw attempts to reconcile the Western (or Roman or Catholic) and Eastern (or Orthodox) Christian Churches, without success, at a time when the Ottoman Empire and other non-European polities were encroaching on Europe. The Byzantine Empire was in decline, the kingdoms of Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria were struggling to maintain control of their lands, and the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania to the north of the Danube River were emerging onto the scene (Fig. 1). The regions that we today associate with Lesser Poland, Hungary, Romania, and western Ukraine—where the lower Danube and Dniester rivers reach the Black Sea—were the focus of political and religious struggles but also cultural negotiations. Right at the very heart of this realm was the principality of Moldavia— a territory that extended along the eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains within the borders of northeastern modern Romania and the Republic of Moldova (Fig. 2). This principality gained its independence from Hungary in 1359, and soon after began establishing its borders and cultural identity at the crossroads of traditions.

This short book introduces readers to a key area of Europe that is little known to Anglo-American scholars, and, due to the languages of the majority of historical sources and scholarship (i.e., Church Slavonic, Romanian), inaccessible to most. The book traces the remarkable story of the principality of Moldavia through the last decades of the fourteenth century and during the fifteenth century, with a special focus on the reign of Stephen III “the Great” (r. 1457–1504) who ruled Moldavia for almost half a century after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In doing so, the book demonstrates Moldavia's crucial role as a buffer zone for the increasingly expansive Ottoman Empire, and as a frontier for Christian Europe. The rulers of Moldavia survived by juggling alliances or truces with powerful neighbours, including Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The extant documentary and material evidence—consisting of letters, documents, chronicles, and inscriptions, as well as coinage, seals, and objects of art and architecture—reveals the different forces that played out in this territory before and after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. When studied together, the surviving sources reveal a much richer picture of the past than the textual evidence alone could expose.