Battle of the Cosmin Forest
1497 battle
The Battle of the Cosmin Forest was a military engagement between the Kingdom of Poland and a coalition army led by Stephen the Great consisting of mainly Moldavian forces alongside Transylvanian, Wallachian, Ottoman, and Crimean deployments. The battle resulted in a major victory for the coalition army.
Background
In the year 1484, the Ottomans had conquered the last Moldavian ports in the Black Sea, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and Kiliia, making the Black Sea an Ottoman lake. The Ottoman victories prompted the Moldavian ruler, Stephen the Great, to seek an alliance with the Kingdom of Poland, which provided a force of 3,000 cavalry. The Moldavian-Polish army defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Cătlăbuga, enabling Stephan to seek a peace treaty with the Ottoman Sultan. The Polish king, Casimir IV Jagiellon, received papal approval to launch a crusade against the Ottomans. Casimir died, and his successor, John I Albert, took the initiative for the crusading plans. John entered Moldavia to help Stephan reclaim the lost forts from the Ottomans. However, John's primary goal was to place his brother, Sigismund, on the Moldavian throne.
Prelude
Stephan was disappointed and asked for help from his neighboring states, including Ottomans, Crimeans, and Wallachians.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of the Cosmin Forest” 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.