278 chapter four
of hungary to recognise the romanian principality, so the news of their
defeat at Velbujd in 1330 had the opposite effect. the haste with which the
king sought to take advantage of this situation shows that he was gam-
bling that the coalition would fall apart for a while, and that he could
take his adversary by surprise, unprepared and isolated: he did not take
the time to gather his forces from the various fronts where they were
scattered,555 which allowed him to enter enemy country in September,
only two months after Velbujd.556
the gamble was mistaken: even without support from tartar
detachments,557 the romanians not only withstood the attack but won
a great victory.
even if the defeat at Velbujd had routed the losers, this was only a
temporary state of affairs. after the hungarians were chased out of the
romanian principality, Basarab chalked up another victory: his young
son-in-law Ivan alexander was enthroned at tarnovo. the steppeland
hegemon also made its presence felt once more in this sensitive region,
which had been so stubbornly fought over in preceding years.558
the alliance of forces in the carpathian-Balkan region would endure
under the protection of the great cuman power, without encountering
any further resistance worthy of note, until khan Özbek’s death in 1341.
*
after the khan’s death, the Golden horde contracted significantly, and
this was felt in the carpathian-Balkan region which, to all intents and
purposes, escaped from the horde’s control.
although Janibek delegated his brother-in-law atlamush to lead the
Bujak tartars, they had dwindled from a force to be reckoned with in
their own right to become only a memory of their former power: where
Noghai had gone from victory to victory, ruling expansive lands with an
iron hand and governing countless peoples until he was overthrown by
555 Ibid., pp. 108–109: [.. .] cum rex copiosum exercitum, non tamen totum suum posse,
quia ad confinia regni sui in diversas expediciones contra aduersarios eiusdem regni, quam
plurimos destinauerat pugnatores.
556 18th July 1330 (Iosipescu, “românii,” p. 75, ciocîltan, “Bătălia,” p. 32).
557 the much-discussed charter of Louis of anjou from 1351 is not only very late, but is
also biased by the king’s need to justify his father’s defeat by the voyvode, who supposedly
had “all his strength and that of his pagan neighbours” (Documente/hurmuzaki, I/2, p. 14).
the document’s value as a source is certainly less than that of the Chronicon Pictum, which
does not say a word about any such help.
558 a letter from one ragusan noble to another in December 1331 expressed the worry
che Tartari erano vinudi aprovo Bedino [= Vidin] (Jireček, “Würdigung,” p. 257).