Who won the Battle of Berestechko?
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth won the Battle of Berestechko, fought from 28 to 30 June 1651 in Volhynia. King John II Casimir's army met the Cossacks of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Crimean Tatars of Khan İslam III Giray, one of the largest land battles of 17th-century Europe. On the third day the Tatars fled the field and took Khmelnytsky with them. The Cossack camp held out in the marshes for some ten days before it collapsed in a massacre. It was a great Polish victory, though it did not end the war.1
On the afternoon of 30 June 1651 the king's army stood in a new order of battle on the fields by the Styr: guns in front, infantry and foreign cavalry with firearms behind them, the Polish horse on the wings. Facing it stood an enormous army, which Albrycht Radziwiłł, who was there, put at 300,000 men. A few hours later the Tatar khan was galloping away from the field with the Cossack hetman in his train, and the Cossack army was left alone, with its back to a marsh.2
The great uprising
In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky raised the Zaporozhian Cossacks against their Polish rulers, who had tried to cut their numbers, stop their raids on Turkish and Tatar neighbors and push them toward serfdom. Allied with their old enemies the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks won a run of victories at Zhovti Vody, Korsun and Pyliavtsi. In 1649 they forced the Compact of Zborów on the Polish king.3
The compromise satisfied no one, and within eighteen months war returned. In April 1651 the Cossacks placed themselves under the protection of the Ottoman sultan and were reinforced by his vassal, the Crimean khan. In Warsaw the Sejm voted the largest army the Commonwealth had raised in years, and the king called out the noble levy and took command in person.4
The fighting began before the great armies met. In February 1651 Crown troops under Marcin Kalinowski pushed into Podolia, and near Vinnytsia they were almost destroyed by Cossack and Tatar forces under Colonel Ivan Bohun. Kalinowski escaped, the historian Sławomir Leśniewski writes, only by abandoning nearly a thousand sick and wounded. At home, small peasant risings, the best known led by Aleksander Kostka-Napierski at Czorsztyn under the Tatra Mountains, showed that the unrest reached far beyond Ukraine.5
The armies of 1651
The royal army gathered at Sokal in late May and June, and it was not a pretty sight at first. Kalinowski's foreign regiments, many of them veterans of the Thirty Years' War, had been worn down by winter marches, hunger and typhus, and shrunk from 12,000 men to fewer than half. The unpaid troops refused to march until the king scraped together money for them. Then the noble levy poured in, tens of thousands of armed nobles with horses, wagons and servants, until the camp, as one historian put it, looked as if the whole nation were founding a new capital. Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, nearly bankrupt after three years of war, made his will before the campaign.6
The horde, perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 strong by Leśniewski's estimate, joined Khmelnytsky near Wiśniowiec on 22 June. Nobody knows how many men in all faced each other. The Museum of Polish History gives the king 34,000 soldiers and as many nobles of the levy, against Khmelnytsky's 90,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry, 100,000 armed peasants and about 100,000 Tatars under Tugay Bey; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives the king 150,000 men against almost 100,000 Cossacks and almost 50,000 Tatars. All agree it was one of the greatest armies ever put in the field in that part of Europe.7
The field was chosen on the advice of Stefan Czarniecki, backed by the king: near Berestechko on the Styr, south of Lutsk, a place that suited the Cossacks and Tatars badly.8› Stefan Czarniecki
Two days on the Styr
The Cossacks struck first, and by 28 June Khmelnytsky and Tugay Bey had drawn their armies around the Polish camp. For two days neither side could gain the upper hand. The old way of fighting, a wagon fort against the Tatars and the cavalry against the Cossacks, brought the Poles no results.9
The third day
On 30 June the king decided to force a decision, against the warnings of his hetmans. He drew the army up in a new way, the so-called Swedish order: a checkerboard of cavalry and infantry, with the artillery pushed forward, the infantry and foreign cavalry with firearms behind the guns and the Polish cavalry with lance and saber on the wings. The real battle began after three in the afternoon, when Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki led the first charge.10
For hours the fight swayed back and forth. Then the guns and the fire of the foreign infantry broke the Tatar wing. Tugay Bey was killed, and the Tatars were driven back by the artillery general Zygmunt Przyjemski. The horde turned and fled, and Khmelnytsky with it.11
The flight of the khan
Why the khan left is still argued over. Some historians call it treasonous desertion; others see a maneuver to form a new line of defense nearer the Dnieper and protect Kyiv from the advancing Lithuanian army. Either way, the Tatars took Khmelnytsky with them, and he was released only days later for a large ransom.12
The camp in the marshes
The leaderless Cossack army dug in behind its wagons on the marshes of the Plyashivka. Colonels Filon Dzhalalii, Matvii Hladky and Ivan Bohun directed the defense of the camp under Polish siege for about ten days. The only way out lay across the bog, and on Bohun's orders the Cossacks began to build a causeway, throwing hundreds of tree trunks and wagons into the mire.13
When a rumor ran through the camp that the commanders were fleeing, panic broke out. Thousands ran for the causeways, trampling one another and sinking in the swamp, and the Poles stormed the camp. Polish Radio's account calls it the Cossacks' day of judgment: whoever escaped the sword drowned in the Plyashivka. Bohun nevertheless led a large part of the army out, but most of the artillery and supplies were lost. Accounts date the fall of the camp between 7 and 10 July.14
Aftermath
The victory restored the fighting spirit of royal troops that had known only defeat, and abroad it kept Tsar Alexis from going to war with the Commonwealth. In the north, the Lithuanian army of Janusz Radziwiłł took Kyiv in early August. But the main army moved east only slowly, and on 20 August Prince Wiśniowiecki died suddenly in camp near Pavoloch.15
On 28 September 1651 the war paused with the Treaty of Bila Tserkva. It cut the Cossack register from 40,000 to 20,000, left autonomy only to the Kyiv province and forbade Khmelnytsky to deal with foreign powers. Neither the Cossacks nor the Sejm accepted it. In 1652 Khmelnytsky destroyed a Polish army at Batih, and in January 1654, at Pereiaslav, the Cossacks accepted the suzerainty of the Russian tsar.16
Two memories
In Poland Berestechko is remembered as the largest clash of the Polish-Cossack wars and one of the great victories of Polish arms, the battle in which John II Casimir showed real talent as a commander. A relief of the battle decorates the monument to his heart in Paris. Bohun, who led the Cossacks out of the trap, became the model for one of the central figures of Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel With Fire and Sword.17
In Ukraine it is remembered as a tragedy. Near the village of Pliasheva, on Zhuravlykha Island, a memorial known as Kozatski Mohyly, the Cossack Graves, was built in 1910 to 1914 over a mass grave of the Cossacks. Its churches include the wooden St Michael's of 1650, brought from the village of Ostriv, in which Khmelnytsky is said to have prayed before the battle, and a crypt where skulls gathered from the battlefield are kept. A museum opened there in 1966, and since 2008 it has been the Battlefield of Berestechko National Historic Memorial Preserve.18
Berestechko belongs with the other great clashes in the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and among the greatest battles in Polish history.
