Saint Stephen’s immediate descendants, naturally, cared for the monastery, but Putna’s connection with the voivodes of Moldavia was never broken. It can even be noticed that the greatest rulers also came to Putna, feeling beholden to continue what had been started by Saint Stephen, their prince model.

Alexander Lăpușneanu (1552–1561, 1564–1568), who was married to Princess Ruxandra, the daughter of Peter Rareș and Princess Helen Brankovich, had built his own necropolis in Slatina, yet he also joined the Putna ktetor voivodes. In 1559, he built there an edifice from which only the dedicatory inscription survived.

His consort renewed the silver binding of the Gospel Book of Palladius. Together, in June 1567, they donated a silver koliva vessel and restored a gilded silver font that was originally donated to Putna by Stephen the Great.

During this period, some of Putna’s monks, valued for their virtues, were elevated to the rank of hierarchs. Abbot Anastasius was elected bishop of Roman in 1558, then metropolitan, after which he retired to Putna. Chronicler Azarius described him as follows: “A gentle man, quiet, full of wisdom, adorned with humble astuteness, whose face and heart bore the flowers of the gift of benevolence.”

Another Putna monk who became bishop of Roman was Eustathius (1576–1580). After he retired from the episcopal see, he was tonsured into the Great Schema receiving the name Jeremiah. He requested the “rhetorician and scholar Lucaci” to write a code of ecclesial and civil laws for the monastery in 1581. Known as the Rule of Rhetorician Lucaci, this writing is of great importance for Romanian law. Some of its legal provisions were also drafted in the Romanian language. During this period, a famed book in the European culture, Fiore di Virtù (Flower of Gifts) was translated at Putna. The book presented virtues (“the gifts”) in opposition to passions. With these two translations, Putna Monastery reserved for itself a special place in what P.P. Panaitescu called “the victory of writing in the Romanian language.”

The earliest evidence of a wood carving workshop has been preserved from this period as well.

The seventeenth century is the least known page in the history of Putna Monastery, perhaps because of the many disturbances that affected Moldavia and, implicitly, the monastic life.

In June of 1622, there is a mention of a robbery. In 1629, the monastery was threatened by Tartars. In February of 1676, “Poles and Cossacks came and robbed the monastery and burned it all to the ground.”

Despite all these terrible trials during which monks were killed and precious objects were stolen, the monastery still endured and remained a powerful center of Orthodoxy. Its spiritual life attracted a young man from Galicia, who came to Moldavia and took his monastic vows at Putna. After becoming a monk, the future Saint Theodosius of Manyava (†1630), later became the abbot of Manyava Skete in Galicia (then in Poland, today in Ukraine).

Saint Elijah Iorest lived in Putna in the middle of the seventeenth century. Tonsured a monk at Putna, he was elected metropolitan of Transylvania in 1640 at the recommendation of Prince Basil Lupu, ruler of Moldavia. Persecuted by the Calvinist prince of Transylvania, he was deposed and imprisoned in 1643, and then he returned to Putna where he died in 1678.

Toward the end of his reign, Voivode Basil Lupu wished to restore the church, especially its foundation, weakened by time. In doing so, he dismantled its walls and began to rebuild them on a foundation larger than that of the old church. But Basil Lupu lost his reign in the spring of 1653, and that summer an attack was launched throughout Moldavia by the Cossacks led by Tymis Khmelnitsky, who burned the monastery and stole the lead used for the roof.

The rulers who followed: Prince George Stephen (1653–1658); Stephen Lupu (1659–1661), Basil Lupu’s son; and Prince Eustratius Dabija (1661–1665) continued the restoration of the church. The completing of the work is mentioned on the dedicatory inscription set above the entrance into the narthex: “† This church was rebuilt by Io George Stephen Voivode, and it was finished in the days of Io Eustratius Dabija Voivode, in the year 7170.”