Who won the Battle of Kircholm?
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth won a crushing victory at Kircholm near Riga on 27 September 1605. Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, with about 3,600 men led by the winged hussars, lured King Charles IX's Swedish army of some 11,000 off its ridge with a feigned retreat and destroyed it in about three hours. The Swedes lost around 8,000 men; the Commonwealth lost about a hundred killed.5
The Swedes had marched all night through heavy rain, and by eight in the morning they stood on the heights by Kircholm church, wet, hungry and confident. Below them, between the ridge and the Daugava, waited an army a third their size. For four hours almost nothing happened. Then the enemy seemed to break and run, the Swedish king ordered his squares down the slope, and the winged hussars came out of the plain at a gallop. By mid-afternoon Charles IX had lost an army and nearly his life.6
The war for Livonia
The war began as a family quarrel. Sigismund III Vasa was king of Poland-Lithuania and, from 1592, of Sweden too, but he was a Catholic ruling a Lutheran kingdom, and in 1599 the Swedish estates deposed him in favor of his uncle, Duke Charles of Södermanland, the future Charles IX. In March 1600 Sigismund proclaimed Estonia part of the Commonwealth, and the Swedes answered by invading Livonia, the Baltic province between them. They took Pärnu in October 1600 and Dorpat (Tartu) in January 1601, and for the next five years the province changed hands fort by fort.7
The Commonwealth's answer was Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, a Lithuanian magnate who had already beaten a much larger Swedish force at Biały Kamień (Weissenstein, now Paide) in September 1604. In 1605 he was made Grand Hetman of Lithuania and given the Livonian front. That summer Charles IX landed with a new army and laid siege to Riga, the richest port on the eastern Baltic. In September he left some 3,000 men in the siege lines and marched upriver with the rest to destroy the small army coming to the city's relief.8
Armies and commanders
The armies could hardly have been more different. Charles brought a modern army built on infantry: Swedish and Finnish foot formed into pike-and-shot squares thirty men wide and thirty deep, almost 4,000 foreign mercenaries under Duke Frederick of Lüneburg and Count Joachim Frederick of Mansfeld, reiter cavalry armed with pistols, and eleven guns. He drew them up in four lines on a ridge, with the river covering his right and a marsh his left, and gaps left between the infantry blocks so his horsemen could ride through.9
Chodkiewicz had about 3,600 men, most of them cavalry. Magnus Olofsson counts some 1,750 hussar lancers, 200 Western-style pistoleers, 450 light Cossack and Tatar horsemen, about 1,040 hajduk infantry and five small guns, with 300 more reiters on the way from the Duke of Courland. It was mostly a Lithuanian army: the historian Mariusz Balcerek notes that the Polish Crown sent only two companies of infantry, about 280 men, and that two small companies of "Poles" actually stood in the Swedish line, in a mercenary regiment of Scots, Germans and Hungarians.10
The waiting game
The ground decided the battle before a shot was fired. Chodkiewicz placed his army on the low ground near the river, facing the Swedish ridge across a plain made for cavalry. In the reconstruction published on the Ministry of Education's ZPE platform, his left wing under Tomasz Dąbrowa held light horse and hussars, the center held 300 hussars of Wincenty Woyna interleaved with infantry, the right wing under Jan Piotr Sapieha mustered about 1,000 riders, and hussars under Teodor Łacki stood in the second line. Behind them the baggage train and camp servants were arranged to look like reserves.11
The Swedish position was too strong to attack, and Chodkiewicz did not try. Instead he sent skirmishers forward and waited, for about four hours by HistoryOfWar's count, while the tired Swedes stood in the rain-soaked fields. Around noon he made his last arrangements. Then part of his line turned and began to pull back, as if the Lithuanians had lost their nerve.12
The charge and the rout
Charles took the bait. His squares and reiters came down off the ridge to pursue, losing the shape that made them dangerous, and walked into the fire of the hajduks and the light guns. Only about half the Swedish army was engaged at first. On the left, Dąbrowa's horsemen, who had led the false retreat, wheeled around and struck the reiters of Mansfeld; in the center Woyna's hussars hit the infantry as it came down the slope.13
The hussar charge was a wall of armored lancers riding knee to knee, their long hollow lances reaching the enemy before his pikes could reach them. On the right, Łacki's hussars swung around the Swedish left and took it in the flank, and panic spread through the lines. Within about half an hour the Swedish cavalry had been driven off, leaving the infantry exposed. The foot broke into three isolated blocks, and the hussars rode them down one after another. Chodkiewicz then committed every unit he had.14
The worst killing came in the pursuit. Charles IX's horse was shot from under him and his helmet took a sword stroke; an officer gave the king his own horse and stayed behind to die, and Charles got away. Chodkiewicz himself came close to death when a Swedish reiter fired a pistol at him at point-blank range and hit the hussar beside him instead. Nearly the whole Swedish guard was killed. In his diary the king blamed his cavalry and wrote simply that he had lost the battle.15
Magnus Olofsson calls Kircholm the worst defeat a Swedish army has ever suffered on the field of battle. Swedish dead are put at about 8,000 to 9,000, some 70 percent of the army and 90 percent of its infantry; the burghers of Riga reported burying close to 9,000 bodies, although civilians killed in the pursuit were among them. Few Swedes were taken prisoner. The Commonwealth lost about 100 killed, 13 of them hussars, and some 200 wounded.16 › The Winged Hussars' Greatest Battles
Aftermath: a victory without a harvest
Riga was saved, and the Swedish army in Livonia was paralyzed for more than a year. But the Commonwealth could not turn the victory into a peace. Its soldiers had not been paid, and in 1606 the veterans formed confederations and refused to serve on. A rebellion of the nobility against Sigismund III broke out the same year and gave Charles the breathing space he needed. A truce ran until the end of October 1608; fighting resumed in 1608 and 1609, and another truce followed in 1611.17
The long-term outcome went Sweden's way. Charles IX's son, Gustavus Adolphus, renewed the war in 1621 and took Riga, and when the Peace of Oliva finally ended the Polish-Swedish wars in 1660, most of Livonia was Swedish. Chodkiewicz went on to fight Muscovy and, at the end of his life, to hold the camp at Khotyn against the Ottoman army in 1621, where he died in the besieged camp on 24 September.18 › The Wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Legend and memory
The news of Kircholm traveled fast and far. The Commonwealth made the most of it, and congratulations reached the victors from the rulers of England and Persia and from the pope. Balcerek points out that the patriotic retelling has tended to forget awkward details: that this was above all a victory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, won with Livonian and Courland troops alongside a few Polish companies.19
Kircholm has nonetheless become the battle most often invoked when the husaria are called the finest heavy cavalry of their age, and it still ranks among the greatest cavalry charges in history. Polish historians call it one of the greatest victories of Polish arms in the early modern era, and it set the pattern for later hussar triumphs over Western-style armies at Klushino in 1610 and in the war against Gustavus Adolphus.20 › The Battle of Trzciana, 1629
