When was the Battle of Hodów?
The Battle of Hodów was fought on 11 June 1694 during the Polish-Ottoman War. About 400 Polish cavalrymen from the fort of Okopy Świętej Trójcy under Konstanty Zahorowski, at most about 100 of them hussars, were caught by a Tatar raiding army many times their size. They retreated into the village of Hodów, dismounted, built barricades and held out for five to six hours, by one account loading Tatar arrows into their guns when their bullets ran out, until the Tatars gave up and withdrew. The stand is often called the Polish Thermopylae, although historians now treat the famous figure of 40,000 Tatars with great caution.1
In June 1694 a few hundred Polish horsemen rode out to meet a Tatar raid and found themselves facing a whole army. They did not flee. They turned a village into a fortress and held it until the enemy gave up.2
A war of forts and raids
Eleven years after the relief of Vienna, the war with the Ottoman Empire and its Tatar allies still went on. Poland had joined the Holy League with the Emperor and Venice in 1684, but King Jan III Sobieski's campaigns into Moldavia had failed, and the great Ottoman fortress of Kamianets in Podolia, taken from Poland in 1672, still held out. In 1692 the Commonwealth switched to a defensive plan: a blockade to starve Kamianets of supplies and to stop Tatar raids.3› Siege of Vienna, 1683
The key to the blockade was a new fort, Okopy Świętej Trójcy (the Holy Trinity Entrenchments), built in 1692 at the mouth of the Zbruch where it flows into the Dniester, on the initiative of the king and Grand Hetman Stanisław Jan Jabłonowski. It sat between Kamianets and Moldavia, which fed the Ottoman garrison. In 1693 a second post, the Szaniec Panny Marii (St. Mary's Redoubt), was added on the Dniester line. Their garrisons were to raid the convoys that supplied Kamianets and harass its garrison in every way they could.4
The men of Okopy
The cavalry of Okopy was an unusual force. From 1693 the regular cavalry units sent picked companions with their retainers instead of whole banners, and these were formed into new banners tempted by higher winter pay. In October 1693, under the regimentarz Konstanty Zahorowski, the fort's Polish cavalry numbered eight banners and 626 horses: two of hussars with 98 horses, four of armored cavalry (pancerni) with 312, and two of Wallachian light horse with 216. The first hussar banner, 48 horses, was led by Captain Mikołaj Gutteter Dobrodziejski, a companion of the king's own hussar company.5
The legend speaks of 400 hussars. The historian Zbigniew Hundert has shown that Zahorowski brought about 400 men from Okopy, of whom at most about 100 could have been hussars, so no more than one defender in four. About 200 more horsemen came from St. Mary's Redoubt under Lieutenant Mikołaj Tyszkowski. Most of the men at Hodów were armored cavalry like the one in Józef Brandt's painting.6
The raid of June 1694
In May 1694 the royal court at Żółkiew heard that the Tatars were preparing a raid. While the main Ottoman forces and the Crimean Tatars were busy against the Emperor, the Nogai Tatars of the Budjak, settled between Kiliya, Bender and Akkerman, were sent north to escort supplies to Kamianets and to raid Ruthenia as a diversion. Polish estimates put the invaders at as many as 30,000. The raid lasted four days, from 8 to 11 June. Unusually, the horde moved in one mass instead of scattering raiding parties, apparently because it knew Polish detachments were closing in from every side.7
On Friday 11 June, near Złoczów and fearing encirclement, the horde turned back through the royal estates toward Pomorzany and then, by forced march, toward Kamianets by way of the village of Hodów. Zywert, the Lwów postmaster, who wrote the fullest contemporary account, described its order of march: a vanguard of 500 to 600 horsemen, a main body too large to count, and 3,000 to 4,000 picked riders as a rear guard.8
Into the village
Near Hodów the horsemen of Okopy and the Redoubt, about 600 in all, ran into the Tatars and attacked, thinking they faced a single raiding party. Then they realized that the whole horde was coming. As the Tatars began to surround them, they fell back into the village and threw up improvised defenses among its buildings and fences. Tyszkowski covered the retreat with his men from the Redoubt and was taken prisoner.9
Arrows for bullets
For five to six hours the Tatars stormed the village again and again, some of them on foot behind improvised shields against the Polish fire. One later account, the notes of Szymon Pułaski, who served in the hetman's hussars, describes the position with a pond behind and a fence on one side, and says that when the defenders ran out of bullets they loaded their guns with Tatar arrows. Pułaski counts 13 of the Okopy men killed and claims that every one of the 400 had several wounds, though not fatal ones. He also puts the Tatar dead at nearly 4,000, burned by their comrades in the village huts, a figure Hundert treats with as much caution as the rest of the late memoir, which even misdates the battle to 1693.10
The Tatars withdraw
What ended the attack, according to Zywert, was the advice of the Lipka Tatars from Kamianets, who had met the men of Okopy before: the horde would sooner all perish, they said, than take these unbeatable men. Unable to break the defense, the Tatars gave up and continued their retreat. Among the Polish dead was Captain Gutteter Dobrodziejski. The first record of the fight, in the diary of the young Jabłonowski, was terse: Zahorowski's men had been stormed at Hodów, there had been much shooting and killing, Tyszkowski was taken, Gutteter killed, and then the enemy had moved on.11
Within days the king rewarded the men who brought him prisoners with 100 thalers and sent 1,000 złoty to the wounded left at Pomorzany; a week later the court learned that the horde had gone home to the Budjak.12› Battle of Khotyn, 1673
News, propaganda and numbers
Zywert's letter of 16 June already gave 40,000 for the horde escorting the convoy, though in his conclusion he wrote only of tens of thousands. At court, the famous 40,000 first appears in the diary of Kazimierz Sarnecki on 27 June, when some wounded companions came to the king on foot asking for support and said that the horde had come 40,000 strong and gone home with no more than 30 captives. Hundert points out that men hoping for a reward had every reason to make their success look larger. The king took up their version. The court decided that Zahorowski's stand had been decisive in repelling the raid and used it in its campaign before the Sejm of 1695, but failed to persuade most of the nobility that Hodów was a great victory over the Porte.13
Sobieski therefore marked the event himself: with a medal for the successes of 1694 and with a stone monument at Hodów raised in 1695, whose Latin inscription speaks of 70,000 Tatars and dates the battle to 5 June. Only in recent years has Hodów become widely popular, and Hundert warns against accepting uncritically that 400 defenders turned back 40,000 Tatars. The Tatar force was certainly many times larger than the Polish one, but no one counted it.14
The Polish Thermopylae
The comparison is almost as old as the battle. Zywert, the first to describe it, likened the defenders to the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae: where else, he asked, had a few hundred horsemen, without a fortress, guns, infantry or wagons, withstood tens of thousands? Unlike the Spartans, the men of Hodów survived and the enemy withdrew.15› Battle of Thermopylae, 480 BC
The monument outlived the Commonwealth. Between the wars it was lit at night, and after 1945, in what is now western Ukraine, it was left at the margins of history, but it escaped vandalism. In 2014, for the 320th anniversary, the MOSTY Foundation restored it with the Polish Ministry of Culture, and on 25 October 2014 it was unveiled again with a Mass at the church in Pomorzany and Polish army honor guards. On 5 June 2018 the National Bank of Poland issued a 20-złoty silver coin in its Polish Thermopylae series, showing a hussar in a leopard skin against the earthworks of Okopy and the inscription “HODÓW 11 CZERWCA 1694”.16
