Balc of Moldavia
Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia
Balc (Hungarian: Balk) was, according to many historians (e.g., Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol, Ştefan Pascu), the third voivode of Moldavia, ruling in ca. 1359 or 1364, but the sequence of the voivodes listed in the Romanian chronicles does not refer to him. He was the son of Sas, the second voivode of Moldavia.
Although Balc was the legitimate pretender to the throne, Bogdan, who had been voivode in Maramureș, crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Moldavia possibly immediately after the death of Sas, before Balc was able to consolidate his reign. In Moldavia, Bogdan joined local forces opposed to the Hungarian monarchy.
Balc fought valiantly at the head of his men, but he was severely wounded and lost several members of his family and retinue. Following his defeat, Balc fled Moldavia for Hungary.
According to a diploma issued on February 2, 1365, King Louis I of Hungary (1342–1382) gave Cuhea and other possessions in Maramureș to Balc and his brothers for their faith towards their sovereign and particularly for their devoted behavior in Moldavia. The domains around Cuhea had belonged to Bogdan, but the king had confiscated them in order to compensate Balc and his brothers for the loss of the state east of the Carpathians.
Later, Balc became the head of Szatmár (Sătmar), Ugocsa and Máramaros (Maramureș) counties in the Kingdom of Hungary, and he was also invested with the title of Count of the Székelys.
“Balc of Moldavia” enters the record as voivode (Prince) of Moldavia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Balc, Moldavia and Voivode can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q789380. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1359, 1364, 1365 and 1342.
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This entry incorporates text from “Balc of Moldavia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.