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Stephen, by name Stephen the Great, Romanian Ștefan cel Mare, (born c. 1435—died July 2, 1504), voivod (prince) of Moldavia (1457–1504), who won renown in Europe for his long resistance to the Ottoman Turks.
With the help of the Walachian prince Vlad III the Impaler (Dracula), Stephen secured the throne of Moldavia in 1457. Menaced by powerful neighbours, he successfully repulsed an invasion by Hungary in 1467, but in 1471 he invaded Walachia, which had by then succumbed to Turkish vassalage.
When the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II launched an attack on Moldavia, Stephen defeated the invaders near Vaslui (now in Romania; 1475). He was in turn defeated at Valea Albă (1476), and he barely managed to escape with his life.
STEFAN CEL MARE
His search for European assistance against the Turks had little success, but his determin-ation “to cut off the pagan’s right hand” won him the acclaim of Pope Sixtus IV as the “Athlete of Christ.”
After 1484 Stephen had to contend not only with new Turkish onslaughts but also with Polish and Hungarian designs on Moldavian independence.
Finally in the latter years of his reign he concluded with the sultan Bayezid II a treaty that preserved Moldavian independence but only at the cost of an annual tribute to the Turks.
Though it was marked by continual strife, Stephen’s long reign nonetheless brought consid-erable cultural development and was a period of great ecclesiastical building and endowment