Fiii lui Ştefan cel Mare şi soţia sa la Pacea de la Hârlău (1499)
Stephen the Great’s Sons and Wife at the Peace of Hârlău (1499)

Summary/Abstract: The Peace treaty of Hârlău (July 12, 1499) was concluded between Moldavia, Poland and Hungary (all three designated as regna), nominally between Stephen III the Great and the sons of King Casimir IV Jagiello, the brothers John Albert, king of Poland, Alexander, grandduke of Lithuania and Sigismund, duke of Glogów, through the mediation of their elder brother, Wladislaw II, the king of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia. On one hand, the arrangement brought an end to the regional conflict officially initiated through John Albert’s “Moldavian crusade” of 1497. On the other hand, because of its anti-Ottoman tonalities the settlement reached between Buda, Krakow and Suceava laid itself at the gate of the new “total war” between the Ottoman Empire and Venice (1499-1503), a war that started not even a month after the Peace of Hârlău. Based on the Zagreb copy of the Latin version of the peace, the paper focuses on a neglected issue: the inclusion of the sons and of the wife of Stephen III the Great, Mary (Voichiţa), the daughter of Radu III the Handsome of Wallachia and Lady Mary (Despina), among the “warrants” of the treaty. It was generally accepted that in 1499 Stephen III had one living son in Moldavia, his associate and Mary Voichiţa’s son, the future Bogdan III the One-eyed, and that the ruler of Moldavia, aged around 60 at that time, possibly also head another son, Alexander (born by Stephen’s first wife, Evdokia Olelkovich of Kyiv), who was hostage in Istanbul. The treaty of Hârlău, also in his Russian variant (noteworthy enough only the Russian, the Polish and “Zagreb” versions, the latter two in Latin, have survived), clearly shows however that, even though Bogdan was Stephen’s designated heir, the Moldavian ruler had at least one more son, in Moldavia, not elsewhere, beside Bogdan. This fact is also consistent with later evidence regarding Stephen’s succession (1504), the succession of Bogdan (1517), as well as the two contested rules of his alleged illegitimate son Peter IV Rareş (1527-1538, 1541-1546). The final years of Stephen’s rule worth consequently a closer inspection, with focus also on Stephen’s relation to Maximilian I of Habsburg, King of the Romans. According to a report drafted (certainly preserved in the archive) in the entourage of the influential Hungarian prelate and future cardinal, Thomas Bakócz, the conspiracy of Maximilian and Stephen, who further facilitated the entente (the truce) between the “Western emperor” and Sultan Bayezid II, had nearly collapsed Jagiellonian rule in East-Central Europe in 1497. Furthermore, precisely on the eve of the Peace of Hârlău, Maximilian re-invited Bogdan to join the Habsburg monarch on his Romzug. Last but not least, the paper attempts to integrate the role played by Mary Voichiţa in the policies of Stephen III. In all likelihood, Mary was the niece of the influential Sultana Mara Branković. Next to Zoe (Sofia) Palaiologus, the second wife of Ivan III of Muscovy, Mara was one of the femme fatales of the future Saint Stephen. His grand-child, Dimitri, the son of Helena and of the late Ivan Ivanovich, Ivan III’s first-born son, had just been designated official heir to the Muscovite throne (1498). Within four years, Helena and Dimitri lost their power, which only increases the complex history of Stephen’s family. Stephen’s political expansion, westwards and eastwards in the final decade of his rule, contained, and covered, mainfold vulnerabilities, several of them within his own family. The Peace of Hârlău was therefore in effect both a peak and the start of a downhill slope.

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