In 1475 the Ottoman's attempt to bring Moldavia under their control, at winter by using an army of Rumelian local levies, ended disastrously with a defeat in the Battle of Vaslui.

During the proper military campaign season, the Ottomans assembled a large army, estimated by contemporary western sources at about 90,000-150,000 soldiers, under the command of Sultan Mehmed II and entered Moldavia in June 1476.

Dennis Deletant and Keith Hitchins regard these numbers as accurate,[4] but according to Kármán Gábor, these sources are undoubtedly exaggerated, the fact that the first 100,000-strong army in Ottoman military history was formed during the reign of Selim II and that Ottoman military records kept at the time of the war recorded that the army was close to 30,000 shows that western sources give exaggerated numbers.

[10] But according to Shaw Stanford that joint Ottoman and Crimean Tatar forces "occupied Bessarabia and took Akkerman, gaining control of the southern mouth of the Danube.

On 25 July 1476, Stephen attacked the Ottoman vanguard led by the beylerbey of Rumelia, Süleyman Hadambul, whom he had previously defeated at the Battle of Vaslui.

Seeing the imminent defeat of his forces, Mehmed charged with his personal guard against the Moldavians, managing to rally the Janissaries, and turning the tide of the battle.