time the
Sultan sent one Jeremy to be vaivode of Wallachia, whose tyranny
caused the people to rise against him, and he fled into Moldavia. Busca
proclaimed Lord Rodoll vaivode in his stead. But Jeremy assembled an
army of forty thousand Turks, Tartars, and Moldavians, and retired
into Wallachia. Smith took active part in Rodoll's campaign to recover
Wallachia, and narrates the savage war that ensued. When the armies were
encamped near each other at Raza and Argish, Rodoll cut off the heads of
parties he captured going to the Turkish camp, and threw them into
the enemy's trenches. Jeremy retorted by skinning alive the Christian
parties he captured, hung their skins upon poles, and their carcasses
and heads on stakes by them. In the first battle Rodoll was successful
and established himself in Wallachia, but Jeremy rallied and began
ravaging the country. Earl Meldritch was sent against him, but the
Turks' force was much superior, and the Christians were caught in a
trap. In order to reach Rodoll, who was at Rottenton, Meldritch with
his small army was obliged to cut his way through the solid body of the
enemy. A device of Smith's assisted him. He covered two or three hundred
trunks--probably small branches of trees--with wild-fire. These fixed
upon the heads of lances and set on fire when the troops charged in the
night, so terrified the horses of the Turks that they fled in dismay.
Meldritch was for a moment victorious, but when within three leagues
of Rottenton he was overpowered by forty thousand Turks, and the last
desperate fight followed, in which nearly all the friends of the Prince
were slain, and Smith himself was left for dead on the field.

On this bloody field over thirty thousand lay headless, armless,
legless, all cut and mangled, who gave knowledge to the world how dear
the Turk paid for his conquest of Transylvania and Wallachia--a conquest
that might have been averted if the three Christian armies had been
joined against the "cruel devouring Turk." Among the slain were many
Englishmen, adventurers like the valiant Captain whom Smith names, men
who "left there their bodies in testimony of their minds." And there,
"Smith among the slaughtered dead bodies, and many a gasping soule with
toils and wounds lay groaning among the rest, till being found by the
Pillagers he was able to live, and perceiving by his armor and habit,
his ransome might be better than his death, they led him prisoner
with many others."