Being the Voivode of Wallachia in the 15th century couldn’t have been an easy gig. The principality was strategically located on both the shore of the Black Sea and the northern bank of the Danube, and also happened to sit on the frontier between Hungarian Transylvania and the Ottoman Empire. Successive Wallachian rulers tried to manage these two much larger neighbors, with varying degrees of success. Generally this consisted of the occasional temporary victory in a sea of larger strategic defeats. The Wallachian ruler Mircea I (d. 1418), for example, fought a number of successful engagements against the Ottomans, but ultimately was forced in 1417 to become an Ottoman vassal because the alternative was a more complete subjugation.
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