 Radu Mihnea, as the first Prince of Wallachia directly appointed by the Porte, had helped to "relaunch these antagonisms" in the 1610s and 1620s.As scholar Neagu Djuvara notes, the Ottomans made sure that both Wallachia and Moldavia were "militarily insignificant" by this moment in time, on their way to becoming "mere pawns in games of the great powers".In both countries, Ottoman fiscal demands had declined after the Long War, stabilizing themselves at possibly a third of the previous decade "(see Transformation of the Ottoman Empire)".