Who won the Battle of Obertyn?
The Battle of Obertyn was fought on 22 August 1531 between a Polish army of about 6,000 under Hetman Jan Tarnowski and a Moldavian army about three times larger under Voivode Petru Rareș. Tarnowski fortified his camp with a ring of wagons, beat off the Moldavian assaults and artillery fire, then counterattacked with his cavalry and routed the enemy. The victory restored the province of Pokuttya to Poland and made Tarnowski famous.5
In 1530 the Moldavian ruler Petru Rareș invaded the borderland of Pokuttya, and in the summer of 1531 he marched there with an army far larger than anything Poland had in the field. Hetman Jan Tarnowski answered with a few thousand men, a ring of wagons and a plan.6
A borderland in dispute
Pokuttya, a borderland between the Dniester and the upper Prut, south of Halych, had been fought over by Poland and Moldavia for decades. At the end of 1530 Petru Rareș occupied it again. King Sigismund the Old raised a small army of hired soldiers and gave command to Jan Tarnowski.7
Moldavia had once been a Polish vassal, but after King John Albert's expedition was destroyed in the Bukovina forest in 1497 it passed into the Ottoman orbit. Rareș, a son of Stephen the Great whom the Poles called Petryło, wanted his principality strong and independent, maneuvering between Poland and the Ottomans while working with the Habsburgs and Moscow. A settlement of 1510 had left Pokuttya with Poland; Rareș meant to take it back.8
On 3 December 1530 his army crossed the border, took several small border castles and, on 31 December, beat the weak Polish border troops near Khotyn. Poland answered only some six months later, after diplomacy had been exhausted and the court had made sure of the intentions of Rareș's overlord, Sultan Suleiman. The Sejm at Piotrków voted taxes for a hired army, and Tarnowski was ordered to recover Pokuttya without crossing into Moldavia itself, which the Ottomans regarded as their vassal.9
Tarnowski, grand hetman of the Crown since 1527, was no beginner. In 1514 he had commanded one of the volunteer divisions in the great Polish-Lithuanian victory at Orsha, and he had since fought Tatars and Turks.10
The wagon fort
The army was slow to gather. Aleksander Bołdyrew, working from the muster rolls, found that the first companies assembled on 19 July 1531 but the last arrived only on 31 August, nine days after the battle. Even so, Tarnowski retook the border castles in a quick campaign, and on 19 August he relieved the besieged town of Gwoździec (Hvizdets), routing a Moldavian corps of about 6,000; Mazur puts its dead at close to 2,000.11
Believing Rareș weakened, and bound by the king's ban on any advance into Moldavia, the hetman turned back toward Halych. His scouts then reported that the hospodar's main army was following him. Tarnowski took a low, flat hill above the village of Obertyn, and during the night his men drew the wagons up on it and chained them together, with woods at the camp's back so that it could not be outflanked.12
Facing an army roughly three times larger, Tarnowski chose to fight on ground of his choosing near the town of Obertyn. He drew up his wagons into a fortified camp, the tabor, protecting his infantry and guns, and kept his cavalry ready inside.13
Assault and counterattack
The battle opened with an artillery duel that lasted several hours, 12 Polish guns against 50. The Polish ranks took real losses, and officers brought wounded men to the hetman to press him to attack, but Tarnowski held his men in place and waited for the enemy to make a mistake.14
On 22 August the Moldavians bombarded the camp with their artillery and launched assaults against the wagons. The Polish infantry and guns held. When Rareș shifted his main forces and left his guns weakly covered, Tarnowski sent his cavalry out of the camp against the Moldavian right flank and center.15
According to the Polish Army Museum's reconstruction, Tarnowski first drew the Moldavian left wing into a charge against a strong body of Polish infantry, whose fire threw it back, and sent several cavalry banners to support the foot soldiers. Rareș took this for an attempt to break out and moved his main strength to that side, leaving his guns weakly guarded. The Museum of Polish History adds that the 50 Moldavian guns stood on the right wing, while the hospodar massed his light horse on the left.16
The rout
The Moldavian army broke and fled. Rareș escaped, but all of his artillery was captured and his losses were heavy, while Polish losses were light by most accounts.17
Mazur describes a battle of about five hours. Rareș, wounded, got away with a small escort, and the pursuit was halted after about 10 kilometers, because the king had forbidden his army to follow the enemy into Moldavia. About 1,000 prisoners were taken, among them the logothete Toader, six of the hospodar's councilors and eighteen leading boyars, together with the whole Moldavian camp and three banners, one of them a great banner the sultan had given Rareș.18
How large were the armies at Obertyn?
Tarnowski had roughly 5,500 to 6,000 men: about 4,500 cavalry, some 1,100 to 1,200 infantry and 12 guns. Rareș brought about 17,000, mostly light cavalry, with 50 guns; some estimates go as high as 20,000. The Moldavians therefore outnumbered the Poles about three to one, and had four times as many guns.19
The muster rolls, as summarized by Przemysław Mazur, list 4,452 cavalry in 24 banners, 1,136 foot soldiers and 32 riders in 10 infantry companies, and 12 guns: 5,648 men in all. The Museum of Polish History rounds the total to just over 5,500, while the Polish Army Museum and Bołdyrew and Łopatecki give about 6,000.20
Losses are less certain. The Polish Army Museum puts the Moldavian dead at almost 7,000, Mazur at more than 7,700, and the Museum of Polish History writes that nearly half of Rareș's army was killed or captured. The official Polish toll was 256 killed, a figure Mazur believes was at least twice too low.21
Why did Tarnowski fight from a wagon fort?
Because he was outnumbered about three to one by an army of fast light horsemen. A ring of chained wagons on high ground gave his infantry and guns a rampart, protected his flanks and rear, and let him choose the moment to send his heavier cavalry out through the gates against a tired and disordered enemy.22
Mazur describes how Tarnowski used the camp as a battle line: the cavalry at the front gate served as one wing and the cavalry at the rear gate as the other. Late in life the hetman set out this way of fighting in his Consilium rationis bellicae, printed in 1558, which became basic reading for generations of Polish commanders. It is one of the classic Polish victories against the odds.23
Why Obertyn mattered
Obertyn returned Pokuttya to Poland and stands among the chief victories of Tarnowski, whom Sigismund I had appointed commander in chief in 1527. It became a model for the Polish art of war, combining a defensive wagon camp with a decisive cavalry counterstroke, a method Tarnowski later described in his own writings on war.24
On 7 November 1531 the hetman rode in triumph into Kraków, bringing the captured guns and the leading prisoners with him. A truce followed in 1532, confirmed in 1533 by a direct agreement with the sultan; the Museum of Polish History credits that settlement with keeping peace between Poland and the Ottoman Empire for 87 years, despite repeated border clashes.25
Rareș did not give up. In early 1538 he raided Podolia and routed Polish border troops on the Seret, and that summer Tarnowski led a new army, which historians put at between about 18,000 and 19,400 men, to besiege Khotyn on the Dniester, the fortress later fought over again in 1621 and 1673. Bołdyrew notes that the siege ended in negotiations rather than a capture, but that the campaign reached its strategic aim.26
How is the Battle of Obertyn remembered?
Mostly through Jan Tarnowski. The battle made his name in Poland, but Mazur observes that it never passed into national legend and that few people remember it today. It survives in a Renaissance chronicle, in a handful of scholarly studies, and in the honors paid to the hetman in his own town and on Polish coins.27
The chronicler Marcin Bielski, who took part in the 1531 campaign, described the Moldavian soldiers in his chronicle, printed in Kraków in 1564, whose woodcut of the battle heads this article. The standard modern studies include Antoni Czołowski's monograph published in Lwów in 1931, the year of the 400th anniversary, and Marek Plewczyński's Obertyn 1531 (1994). In 2011, the 450th anniversary of Tarnowski's death, Tarnów held a Year of Hetman Jan Tarnowski, and the National Bank of Poland has honored him with gold and silver coins in its series on the hetmans of the Commonwealth.28
Obertyn itself is today a village of about 3,500 people in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of western Ukraine, north of Kolomyia, between the Dniester and the Prut.29
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