Ștefan Lăcustă

Ștefan Lăcustă (German "Stefan Heuschrecke", also Ștefan V.) (* 1508; † 1540 in Suceava ) was Prince of Moldova from September 18, 1538 to December 1540 .

As the grandson of Stephen the Great and son of Alexandru , Lăcustă was the first Moldovan ruler who was no longer elected by the autochthonous population, but was determined directly by the Turkish sultan (in blatant contradiction to the treaty of 1511). Suleyman the Magnificent drove Petru Rareș from his throne as part of his expedition against the Moldovans and incorporated the Buceag (the south of Moldovan Bessarabia, now Ukraine) into the Ottoman Empire . Then the fortification Tighina was built on the Nistru (Russian: Dniester) .

From February 1539 Lăcustă maintained excellent relations with Poland, but he feared a return of the deposed Prince Petru Rareș, whom he wanted to get hold of. Although Lăcustă demanded his extradition from the Transylvanian Prince Johann Zápolya by the Turks , Rareş managed to get to Istanbul himself and to protest his innocence there in front of the Sultan.

At the same time, a devastating plague of locusts took place in the Vltava, to which Prince Ștefan owes his strange nickname.

The foreign policy stance of Prince Ștefan Lăcustă was only a pretense of loyalty to the Turkish sultan. The princely adviser Bojar Vartic was sent to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation Ferdinand I to assure him the immediate assistance of the Moldavian troops in the event of a military intervention by the Habsburgs against the Turks.

Because of the loss of territory in the south-east of the Vltava (Buceag), the prince did not succeed in winning the sympathy of the local boyars. Even those boyars who had previously betrayed Rareș could not be drawn on Ștefan's side. Only the boyar Cozma succeeded against the Turks, destroying their garrison stationed in Tighina.

When the prince's “leadership style” became increasingly merciless (even boyars were beheaded without mercy during a feast), he finally fell victim to a plot and was murdered in his sleep at the prince's seat in Suceava . The Hatman Alexandru Cornea succeeded him as Moldovan ruler .

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• Nicolae Iorga: History of the Romanian people in the context of their state formation. Gotha 1905, p. 381f