Max "Trevor Down at the Pub" Waters

November 11, 1673. Polish hussars broke into a fortified Ottoman camp at dawn, drove 35,000 men onto a single bridge over the Dniester, and then put artillery on the bridge. Only a few thousand of them reached safety. The man who commanded it found out the next day that the King of Poland had died, rode back to Warsaw, and got himself elected king on the strength of what he had just done. The background is one of the most humiliating moments in Polish history, which is why what follows mattered so much. In 1672 the Ottomans had invaded, taken the great fortress of Kamieniec Podolski, and forced the Commonwealth into the Treaty of Buchach, which ceded territory in Ukraine and committed Poland to paying annual tribute to the Sultan. A tribute. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which a generation earlier had put a king on the Russian throne, was now paying protection money to Constantinople. The Sejm refused to ratify it and voted money for an army instead. In 1673 the Sultan could not get a field army together until autumn, and by the time Hüseyin Pasha's force was in position the campaigning season was effectively over. So the Ottomans were ordered into winter camps, and Hüseyin's army settled in around the fortress of Khotyn on the Dniester. An army in winter quarters is an army that has stopped expecting to fight. John Sobieski was Grand Hetman, the Commonwealth's senior field commander, and he moved fast. He crossed the Dniester and had about 30,000 men at Khotyn in early November. The detailed breakdown of that force is worth reading, because it shows what a Polish army actually was: 1,670 hussars, 11,105 armoured cavalry, 5,828 dragoons, 1,619 Wallachian light horse, 342 arquebusiers, and about 8,500 infantry including a Hungarian contingent. Look at the ratio. Roughly 20,000 cavalry to 8,500 foot. No other European army of the period was built like that. Hüseyin had about 35,000, with Moldavian and Wallachian contingents, inside the fortress and a fortified camp built on the site of an earlier Polish entrenchment from the 1621 campaign. On November 10, Sobieski made attacks that were really reconnaissance, to find out how the camp was laid out. Then he kept them awake. The Polish guns bombarded the camp all night, in a hard wind and severe cold, and the Ottoman troops spent the night under fire instead of sleeping. By dawn they were exhausted and freezing, and the Moldavians and Wallachians were already deciding they would rather be on the other side. At first light Sobieski attacked in person. A cannon salvo, then infantry and dragoons went at the ramparts and tore openings in them, and then the hussars came through the gaps under Hetman Jabłonowski. The Polish winged hussar in 1673 was the last effective heavy shock cavalry in Europe. The lance was up to five and a half metres long, hollowed to keep the weight down, and it outreached anything an infantryman or another horseman could present. They were not shock troops in the sense of charging into a solid formation and hoping. They charged into formations that had already been opened up for them, which is precisely what happened here. The sipahis counterattacked and could not hold them. The fighting went into the tents and the fortress. Hüseyin ordered a withdrawal across the Dniester, and the only crossing was the bridge at Khotyn. Polish artillery hit the bridge. It collapsed under the weight of the men on it. Of 35,000, only a few thousand got away to Kamieniec Podolski. Polish accounts put Ottoman dead and wounded at 20,000 to 30,000, roughly two-thirds of the army, with the rest killed or captured. Commonwealth losses were about 2,000. Those figures come from the winning side and are probably generous. The scale of the disaster is not in doubt. They also took the fortress with large stores of food, munitions and artillery, and the Moldavian and Wallachian troops changed sides. And here is the part that reads like fiction. King Michael Wiśniowiecki had died on November 10, the day before the battle. Sobieski did not know. So the news reaching Warsaw was that the king was dead and that the Grand Hetman had just annihilated an Ottoman army. He was elected King of Poland in May 1674. What the victory did not do was end the war or recover Kamieniec Podolski, which stayed Ottoman until 1699. The Ottomans pulled back out of Poland proper but held most of western Ukraine, and the fighting continued to 1676. What it did was restore the Commonwealth's standing in Europe and make Sobieski's name. The Turks called him the Lion of Khotyn. Ten years later, in September 1683, he led the relief army to Vienna and commanded the largest cavalry charge in history down the slopes of the Kahlenberg into Kara Mustafa's camp. He had already done exactly that, on a smaller scale, at Khotyn.