Battle of Okhmativ, 1644: Koniecpolski stops the Tatars at the border

The diarist Stanisław Oświęcim, who rode with the Polish army, watched the Tatars run until night fell. Their horses were spent, he wrote, and had the sun stayed up two hours longer, not one of them would have got away.²

Who won the Battle of Okhmativ and why?

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth won. Grand Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski learned of the raid through his spies, gathered more than 19,000 men and met the Tatars on the border, before they could scatter to plunder. Tuhaj Bey, misled by a prisoner, stood to fight with worn-out horses, and the Polish cavalry broke his army.³

Background: a frontier in flames

Crimean Tatar raids were the scourge of the Commonwealth's south-east. The khanate was a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, and its horsemen crossed into Polish lands again and again. Professor Jolanta Choińska-Mika, speaking on Polish Radio, explains their purpose: not conquest but loot, and captives who could be sold in the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire. Usually the Polish army could only chase the raiders as they went home weighed down with plunder and prisoners.⁴

Hunger made the winter of 1643 dangerous. The khanate was poor after bad times, and Polish Radio adds that Zaporozhian Cossack raids that had driven off Tatar herds made things worse. In the summer of 1643 Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki caught and broke a raiding party, and the Tatars were looking for revenge. The man who would lead them was Tuhaj Bey, the bey of Perekop, one of the most powerful lords of the khanate.⁵

They set out in midwinter. By the time they reached the border their horses had been marching for weeks through hard frost, and they were worn out, a fact that would matter on the day of battle.⁶

The khan, Mehmed IV Giray, did not ride with them. He was meant to lead the raid himself but stayed in Crimea, and the army went under Tuhaj Bey with the veteran Murtaza Aga at his side. Prisoners questioned after the battle told Oświęcim that the khan had ordered his commanders to win back the herds the Cossacks had taken, not to attack the Polish army; Polish Radio likewise describes a horde meant to seize loot and avoid larger battles.⁷

The secret did not keep. Tatar units began gathering in early December, and the Polish command heard of it almost at once: Koniecpolski kept a wide network of spies on the frontier. He expected the attack in December or early January and warned the frontier nobility to be ready.⁸

Armies and commanders

Facing them stood Stanisław Koniecpolski, grand hetman of the crown, a veteran of wars against the Swedes and the Cossacks and, in WielkaHistoria's words, one of the ablest commanders the Commonwealth ever had. He knew the Tatars were coming, but not which trail they would take. So he spread his forces along the border, sending Wiśniowiecki to the Dnieper with the registered Cossacks, the soldiers on the state's payroll, and part of the standing army. The hetman himself had about 10,000 men, and he called his troops together at Vinnytsia.⁹ › Stanisław Koniecpolski

When everyone had joined, the hetman had more men than ever before. Pieńkowski counts them from the roll in Oświęcim's diary: more than 19,000 soldiers, with 22 guns, though WielkaHistoria gives 24. Most of them were not the king's soldiers but the private troops of the frontier magnates, some 60 per cent of the army by Mirosław Nagielski's count. The great lords of Ukraine, afraid for their estates, did not spare money on their defense. Alongside them rode several regiments of registered Cossacks, 4,650 men by the diary's roll and about 4,000 by WielkaHistoria's count.¹⁰

The Tatar numbers are much less certain. Polish Radio and Leszek Podhorodecki, as Pieńkowski cites him, speak of more than ten thousand good horsemen. Jerzy Ronikier's battle lexicon puts the whole expedition at about 30,000.¹¹

The commanders' decisions

Koniecpolski did not know which trail the horde would take, so he waited with his forces spread along the frontier. When word came that the Tatars were moving north beyond Lebedyn toward the Vys river, he decided to cut them off at Okhmativ. The troops from the Dnieper, gathered at Korsuń under Wiśniowiecki, were ordered to march there as fast as they could, while the hetman headed for the town himself.¹²

His larger choice was where to fight. Oświęcim, the hetman's courtier, wrote that Koniecpolski could have let the enemy deeper into the country, destroyed its camp once the raiding parties had scattered and then hunted the parties down one by one, but he preferred to spare the people of the borderland and strike on the threshold. The diarist thought this disproved the old Polish saying that a Tatar could be beaten only on his way out, loaded with loot. Pieńkowski and WielkaHistoria make the same point: the horde was beaten before it could spread out.¹³

Tuhaj Bey made the opposite choice. A Tatar prisoner, Oświęcim recorded, told the bey that the hetman's army was split in two and that the Tatar force alone was larger than both halves. Pleased, the bey decided not to march on but to rest, feed his horses and attack at first light the next day. Pieńkowski quotes the same passage, and Polish Radio tells the story of the prisoner who misled the Tatars about the size of the Polish army.¹⁴

The Tatar prisoners later told Oświęcim that they had known of the Polish army a day in advance and had resolved to fight it, win or lose, rather than go home without trying, and that they had kept their raiding parties together for that reason. It was exactly what the khan had told them not to do.¹⁵

The battle in phases

The approach

The horde crossed the Dnieper on 23 January 1644. Pieńkowski places the crossing near the island of Khortytsia; Nagielski says it was near Kuczkasów. Koniecpolski heard of it at once and marched to cut the Tatars off at Okhmativ, a small town on the Tikich.¹⁶

Tuhaj Bey made a fatal mistake. A prisoner told him that the Polish army was small and not ready to fight, and he believed it. Instead of slipping past, he decided to stand and fight without proper scouting.¹⁷

The hetman's army came on carefully, in a wagon-fort formation. A column of wagons guarded each flank. Infantry and guns marched in front, and the rear was covered by Cossack companies and some 500 dragoons. The cavalry, the arm that would decide the day, was kept ready to strike. Seeing the moving fortress, the Tatars did not attack it on the march.¹⁸

Fog

The army set out at dawn on Saturday 30 January. After many days of frost and wind the morning was fine and mild, Oświęcim remembered, but as the troops neared Okhmativ a fog came down so thick that it was as dark as night. The Tatar camp stood opposite, at Woronne, across the Tikich. The cavalry crossed the frozen ponds and marshy ground on the ice, while the wagons and guns had to go through the little town over a narrow dyke, which took a long time.¹⁹

Under cover of the fog the hetman formed his army. Jan Odrzywolski's regiment took the front; Stanisław Lubomirski's men held the right wing and Marcin Kalinowski with the troops of Prince Samuel Korecki the left. In the center stood the hetman's own regiment under his son Aleksander and the regiment of the field hetman, Mikołaj Potocki, who was ill and absent, led by his son Piotr. The troops of Prince Władysław Dominik Zasławski, Jan Zamoyski and the Niemirycz brothers were kept in reserve, and the guns under Krzysztof Grodzicki went with the right wing, covered by infantry. The fog hid the Polish army, and the Tatars did not dare to attack it with all their strength.²⁰

Some Tatars could not wait. A party crossed the water and drove back the Polish skirmishers, until the hetman sent in Odrzywolski's regiment, which threw the attackers back to their own camp.²¹

Then, as the fog began to lift, the reinforcements arrived. Wiśniowiecki's men saw the Polish wagon camp through the mist, took it for the enemy and charged it; the troops in the camp in turn thought the Tatars had come round behind them, began to wheel about, and Grodzicki had the guns turned toward the newcomers. Only at close range did each side recognize the other. There was no time to re-form the line, so the hetman gave Wiśniowiecki the left wing. With his men on the field Koniecpolski now had some 19,000 soldiers and a clear advantage, and he decided to attack.²²

The charge at the crossing

Tuhaj Bey sent some 6,000 horsemen to stop the Poles at the crossing. They were driven off by the hussars of Stefan Czarniecki, then lieutenant of the banner of Stanisław Lubomirski, palatine of Kraków, who led the first charge. The crossing was narrow and the first line broke up as it went over: Kalinowski, on the left, had to take post on the right, and Wiśniowiecki took his men across the ice. Aleksander Piaseczyński, castellan of Kyiv, attacked with them, and the regiments poured over after Czarniecki.²³ › Stefan Czarniecki

Turning point: the horde breaks

Seeing the strength of the enemy at last, Tuhaj Bey ordered a retreat and left a rear guard to cover his baggage camp. The sources disagree on its size: 7,000 men in Pieńkowski's account, a force of 4,000 horsemen in Ronikier's. It did not hold. The next charge of the Polish cavalry broke it, and the retreat became a rout.²⁴

Oświęcim, who served in the hetman's entourage and kept a diary of the campaign, described what came next. The enemy was chased for miles and left many dead and many prisoners; many Tatars abandoned everything, even their exhausted horses, and fled on foot into the woods. Only nightfall saved the rest. The prisoners told the Poles that the horde had been 45 days on the road through the frozen steppe.²⁵

The next day Koniecpolski sent some 5,000 volunteers under the Cossack commissioner Mikołaj Zaćwilichowski after the fugitives. The chase went on toward the edge of the Wild Fields, the empty steppe beyond the settled frontier. The volunteers caught the Tatar camp on the Sina Woda river on 31 January and broke it. The ice gave way under the fleeing riders, and many drowned. Bodies lay along some 80 kilometers of the escape route. Beyond the river the fugitives split into three groups, and one band that tried to take Chyhyryn, thinking it undefended, was beaten by the Cossacks.²⁶

Counting the losses

The raid had failed completely. Tuhaj Bey took no loot and no captives. His losses are uncertain: Pieńkowski thinks they were no more than 3,000 to 4,000, WielkaHistoria gives about 4,000, and Polish Radio speaks of at least a third of his men over the whole expedition. Oświęcim, who saw the field, wrote that nobody could say how many had fallen, because the dead lay along miles of the chase. The Polish losses were minimal.²⁷

The Tatar strength, and so the scale of the defeat, is just as hard to fix. The prisoners told Oświęcim of some 20,000 picked horsemen, a figure Pieńkowski thinks he exaggerated to make the victory look greater; Leszek Podhorodecki, as Pieńkowski cites him, wrote of more than ten thousand good horsemen, and Bohdan Baranowski of 8,000 to 12,000.²⁸

Aftermath

The Commonwealth celebrated. The Sejm gave Koniecpolski an ovation. Word of the victory spread abroad: accounts of the battle were printed in 1644 in Italian and German, and the editor of Oświęcim's diary lists five such relations. For King Władysław IV the battle was more than a border success. Both Pieńkowski and Nagielski connect it with the king's plans for a great war against the Tatars and the Ottoman Empire.²⁹

The hetman did not live to lead it. Koniecpolski died suddenly at Brody in March 1646, two years after his greatest victory over the Tatars; Nagielski and WielkaHistoria give 11 March, the Encyclopedia of Ukraine 12 March.³⁰

Legacy and memory

Historians rank Okhmativ very high. Choińska-Mika calls it the Commonwealth's greatest success against the Tatars in the whole seventeenth century, and Nagielski reaches the same verdict. Pieńkowski sees in it the best of Polish cavalry warfare: speed, good scouting and good cooperation between the commanders. What made it rare was where it was won: on the border, before the horde could spread out and plunder.³¹

The Polish Army Museum in Warsaw lists the victory among the landmarks of Polish military history, crediting Koniecpolski and Wiśniowiecki together.³² › The Winged Hussars' Greatest Battles

The victory did not end the danger. Tuhaj Bey survived, and four years later, in 1648, he led the Tatar cavalry that joined Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossack uprising and struck the Polish advance guard at Zhovti Vody. The frontier that Koniecpolski had held so well went up in flames soon after his death.³³ › The Battle of Berestechko, 1651