The Battle of Hodów Anniversary Thread

BACKGROUND

The Great Turkish War lasted from 1683 to 1699 and saw the Muslim Ottoman Empire pitted against the Christian Holy League; an alliance of Russia, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth along with other smaller powers. The war is perhaps most remembered for the 1683 Battle of Vienna which saw the largest known cavalry charge in history when Polish King Jan Sobieski III led almost 20,000 Polish and German horesemen down the slopes of Mount Kahlenberg to rout the unsuspecting Ottoman forces laying siege to the city. Sobieski led the attack from the front, surrounded by almost 3000 Winged Hussars, the famed Polish Heavy Cavalry of the era


Artist's depiction of the Hussars at Vienna


The charge as seen in the shitty but awesome film September Eleven 1683

and the event has gone on to inspire numerous works of fiction...


scenes from Return of the King and Game of Thrones

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THE BATTLE


The Hussars would have another moment in the sun eleven years later when a horde of around 40,000 (estimates ranged as high as 70,000) Crimean Tatars, Muslim allies of the Ottomans, invaded Southern Poland on a mission to capture nobles to ransom and common folk to enslave. King Sobieski quickly dispatched the best reaction force he could muster, a meager band of little more than 400 horsemen of which 100 were Hussars and 300 were Towarzysz pancerny or Polish light Cavalry.


Jan Sobieski III: Duke of Lithuania, Defender of Europe, Savior of Christendom, King of Poland, and fricking based

On 11 June 1694 the Poles made their stand outside the village of Hodów in present day Ukraine. 324 years ago today those 400 men met their enemy head on and began the battle with a cavalry charge in which they routed a Tatar cavalry force twice their size.


Opening charge of the Hussars at Hodów

They then dismounted, sought cover behind hastily crafted barricades, and for six hours fended off wave after wave of Tatar attackers. The fighting was so thick that the Poles ran out of ammunition and began to load Tatar arrows in their guns.


Hussars vs the Hordes

As the day came to a close the Muslim invaders sent forth envoys from the Lipka Tatars, Tatars who'd settled in the commonwealth and could speak Polish, to convince Hodów's defenders to surrender. The overtures were swiftly rebuked at which point the Tatars abandoned the field. The Poles lost around 100 men while the Tatars lost as many as 2000. The defeat forced the Tatars to abort their invasion entirely and they quietly departed Poland.


A Hussar stands victorious

The battle is remembered as a "Polish Thermopylae" and is commemorated by a monument on its site.


The monument as it stands today

Poland has always been awesome.



I'm glad that the Muslim invasions have stopped and that there are absolutely no parallels between that time and today.