Battle of Cecora, 1595: Zamoyski's camp on the Prut

The name Cecora is remembered in Poland mainly for a disaster: in 1620 Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski was killed after his army was destroyed there. Twenty-five years earlier, by the same stretch of the Prut, a Polish army under Jan Zamoyski held its camp against the Crimean khan and came home with the ruler it had come to install. The two expeditions bracket a quarter century in which Poland tried to keep Moldavia as a friendly buffer between itself and the Ottoman Empire.²

Background: a principality between two empires

Moldavia, with its capital at Iași, was a Christian principality under Ottoman overlordship: its rulers, the hospodars, owed tribute and obedience to the sultan. In 1595 that order was shaken. The Ottomans were at war with the Habsburgs, and the princes on the Danube were drawn into the war against them. Sigismund Báthory, prince of Transylvania, engineered a change of ruler in Moldavia: the hospodar Aron, who had looked to Poland, was removed, and Báthory's ally Stefan Răzvan took the throne.³

Cossack bands from the Polish borderlands joined the fighting too, raiding toward the Ottoman fortress of Tighina (Bender) on the Dniester. The Porte answered the revolt with a plan to end Moldavia's autonomy altogether and turn it into a regular Ottoman province. Its governor was to be Ahmed Pasha, sanjak-bey of Tighina and a nephew of the Crimean khan.⁴

For Poland an Ottoman province on the Dniester, directly on its border, was the worst outcome. Jan Zamoyski, Chancellor and Grand Hetman of the Crown, decided to forestall it by putting a friendly ruler on the Moldavian throne while the sultan's main armies were tied down in the Habsburg war. He acted with the king's backing: Sigismund III, Britannica notes, left him a free hand in Moldavia, and the historian Ilona Czamańska argues that the intervention was state policy rather than a private venture.⁵

Armies and commanders

Zamoyski's candidate was Jeremi Mohyła (Ieremia Movilă), a Moldavian boyar and a personal friend of the hetman who had lived for years as an exile in Poland. On 27 August 1595, before the army crossed into Moldavia, Mohyła swore that once on the throne he would recognize the suzerainty of the Polish king.⁶

The army was small. Jerzy Ronikier, in the lexicon Bitwy polskie, puts it at about 7,000 men; Dariusz Milewski, working from the campaign's diaries and chronicles, counts 7,250. Both include some 1,500 infantry raised from the royal estates. The core was cavalry, hussars and lighter Cossack-style companies, supported by infantry and artillery. Zamoyski himself, then 53, was the Commonwealth's most experienced commander and the victor of Byczyna in 1588.⁷ › Jan Zamoyski

Against him came the Crimean Tatars of Khan Gazi II Giray, with Turkish troops under Ahmed Pasha. Ronikier gives the khan about 20,000 men. Milewski writes that, with their Turkish allies, they numbered more than 20,000, and notes that estimates run as high as 70,000. Neither figure can be checked, and the sources used here give no reliable losses for either side.⁸

The battle in phases

Zamoyski marched to Iași, the Moldavian capital, and installed Mohyła there as hospodar. He did not stay in the town. The army moved a short way down the river and built a fortified camp at Cecora (Țuțora, in Romanian), on the left bank of the Prut, where a bend of the river covered part of the position.⁹

In October the khan came on with his whole force, joined by Ahmed Pasha's Turks. Both Ronikier and Milewski date the fighting from 18 to 20 October 1595, with the decisive attack on 19 October, when the khan's army surrounded the Polish position.¹⁰

The day began with skirmishes in front of the camp, Tatar riders against Polish detachments. Then the Tatars moved to storm the camp itself.¹¹

Turning point

The assault was broken by a sally. Zamoyski led his hussars and part of the light companies out through the camp gate and threw them at the attackers, who were driven back. The historians weigh the result differently. Milewski credits the Polish victory to the camp's firepower, above all its artillery, and to Zamoyski's leadership; Czamańska judges the battle inconclusive, with some advantage to the Poles.¹²

Either way, the khan had learned that the camp could not be taken cheaply, and his side asked for talks. Ahmed Pasha, both historians note, was ready to come to terms.¹³

Under the agreement that followed, the Ottoman side recognized Jeremi Mohyła as hospodar of Moldavia instead of turning the country into a province, and the khan promised to obtain the sultan's confirmation of the new ruler.¹⁴

Aftermath

Zamoyski led most of the army home but left Polish companies in Moldavia to guard the new ruler. They were needed within weeks. In December 1595 Stefan Răzvan came back with Transylvanian troops, and on 12 December he was defeated near Suceava by Polish and Moldavian forces led by Jan Potocki, starost of Kamianets. Răzvan was put to death by impaling.¹⁵

Diplomacy followed the fighting. Mohyła's envoys came to the Polish sejm in 1597, and in a treaty with the sultan negotiated in 1598 the Ottomans agreed to keep Mohyła on the throne as long as he stayed loyal to the Porte, and to let his son succeed him. In law, as Paweł Tyszka puts it, the hospodar now depended both on the Polish king and on the sultan.¹⁶

The arrangement was tested in 1600, when Michael the Brave of Wallachia invaded Moldavia and drove Mohyła from the throne. Zamoyski marched again, restored his protégé and defeated Michael, and for a time brought Wallachia under Polish influence as well.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

In the short run Cecora gave Poland what it wanted without a war against the Ottoman Empire. The longer story was less happy. After Jeremi Mohyła's death Moldavia slid into civil war. Three of his daughters had married into great Polish families, the Wiśniowieckis, the Koreckis and the Potockis, and their husbands went on leading expeditions into the principality on behalf of Mohyła claimants. Czamańska argues that even these were tied to state policy; for dzieje.pl they left Moldavia ravaged and weaker than before.¹⁸

Zamoyski's own circle remembered the campaign as one of his great deeds. The portrait at the head of this article, painted in the eighteenth century and now in the National Museum in Kraków, surrounds the old hetman with scenes of his achievements, one of them labeled Moldavia in fidem recepta, Moldavia received into allegiance.

The precedent proved dangerous. In September 1620 Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski led an army into Moldavia and camped at Cecora on the Prut, as Zamoyski had done. This time a large Turkish and Tatar army came against him, the Polish army was destroyed in the retreat that followed, and the old hetman was killed. For the war that followed, see the Battle of Khotyn, 1621.¹⁹ › Stanisław Żółkiewski