Battle of Rymnik, 1789: Suvorov and Coburg rout the Grand Vizier

Rymnik is the battle that gave Suvorov his name. It was fought by two allied commanders against an enemy several times their number, and it was won by speed: a forced march, a night approach and an attack that never let the Ottoman army settle into its positions.²

Background: an alliance against the Ottomans

In the Russo-Turkish War that began in 1787, Austria under Joseph II fought as Russia's ally. By 1789 the main Russian army was operating toward the fortresses of the lower Danube and the Dniester, while an Austrian corps under Prince Frederick Josias of Saxe-Coburg covered Moldavia and Wallachia. Suvorov, with a small Russian detachment at Bârlad, was the link between them.³

The two had already fought side by side. When an Ottoman corps advanced on Coburg in the summer of 1789, Suvorov hurried from Bârlad to join him, and together they stormed the Ottoman camp at Focșani, at the end of July or the beginning of August depending on the calendar and the source. The Ottoman command then decided to strike at the junction of the two allied forces before they could unite again.⁴

Armies and commanders

Alexander Suvorov was almost sixty and had spent much of his career being passed over. A Moscow nobleman's son, he had enlisted in the Semyonovsky Guards as a boy, fought in the Seven Years' War, and as colonel of the Suzdal Regiment in the 1760s written a training manual for it that put real battle drill above parade-ground show. Philip Longworth, writing in Britannica, describes him as a boldly unorthodox tactician whose victories over the Turks in the 1770s, at Turtukai and Kozludji, showed him to be an incomparable field commander. His victory at Kinburn in 1787 had brought him back into the limelight. At the siege of Ochakov in 1788 he threw himself almost alone against a Turkish sally and was badly wounded, and Longworth notes that this alleged rashness earned him official displeasure. In 1789 he was sent to Moldavia to work with the Austrians.⁵› Battle of Cassano, 1799

Prince Frederick Josias of Saxe-Coburg commanded an Austrian army corps on the eastern flank of the war. In 1788 he had taken the fortress of Khotyn, and at Focșani he had fought in close cooperation with Suvorov.⁶

The Ottoman commander is named differently in different sources. Russian and Soviet accounts, among them the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, call him Grand Vizier Yusuf Pasha. Feridun Emecen, in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, writes that Koca Yusuf Pasha had been removed in June 1789 and that the grand vizier routed near the Rymnik was his successor, Kethüda Hasan Pasha, who in Emecen's judgment lacked the ability to plan and run a great campaign.⁷

The odds were heavily against the allies. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the Ottomans about 100,000 men, most of them cavalry, against an Austrian corps of 18,000 and Suvorov's 7,000; Laverne's life of Suvorov, published in 1814, puts the Ottoman army at 110,000 against no more than 30,000 Russians and Austrians. The Deutsche Biographie speaks of an enemy four to five times stronger.⁸

The battle in phases

The call for help. The grand vizier crossed the Danube and marched by Brăila against the Austrians. Coburg wrote to Suvorov that the vizier was coming at him with 100,000 men and asked him to join. Suvorov set out at once. His men covered about 100 kilometers in two to two and a half days and reached the Austrians before the Ottomans could attack.⁹

Reconnaissance. The Ottomans had pitched their camps between the Rymna and the Rymnik, which the Great Soviet Encyclopedia counts as four, and were still fortifying the largest of them in a wood. Suvorov saw that they did not expect to be attacked and persuaded Coburg to strike before the works were finished. He took over the direction of the combined force.¹⁰

The night march. On the evening of 21 September the allies moved off. They crossed the shallow Rymna and advanced in silence in two bodies. The infantry marched in small squares, with room between them for the cavalry, the formation that experience had shown best against the Turkish horse.¹¹

The first camp. In the morning the Russians fell on the first Ottoman camp, overran the hills around it in spite of the artillery and drove its defenders back toward the main army. The Ottomans, seeing how few the Russians were, sent a large body of cavalry, some 15,000 horse by Laverne's count, to surround them; the Austrian corps, coming up beside the Russians, broke the charge with artillery and musketry.¹²

The village and the wood. The grand vizier now threw his strength at the Austrians, whose squares held. Meanwhile Suvorov turned the fortified village of Boksa, cutting off its defenders and its guns, and the Ottomans fell back into the wood the Russian accounts call Kryngu-Meilor, where their unfinished entrenchments lay. In the afternoon both allied armies attacked it together, the infantry in columns and the cavalry riding through the gaps in the half-built works.¹³

Turning point: the rout at the river

The attack on the wood broke the Ottoman army. Panic spread, and the grand vizier could not rally his men; he crossed the Rymnik himself and left his camp to the allies. At the river the flight turned into a disaster, as horse and foot plunged into the water and many drowned.¹⁴

The losses are uncertain. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia puts the allied loss at about 700 men and the Ottoman loss, by different estimates, at 6,000 to 20,000 killed and wounded; Laverne gives 10,000 to 12,000 killed or drowned and a great many wounded. Both agree that the Ottomans lost their camp, their baggage and all their artillery, and the Deutsche Biographie's older entry on Coburg speaks of immeasurable booty.¹⁵

Aftermath

The victory's effect spread along the whole front. In the weeks that followed, Bender surrendered to the Russians and Belgrade to the Austrians under Laudon, on 8 October by Emecen's date.¹⁶

The rewards were generous. Catherine II made Suvorov a count of the Russian empire with the surname Rymniksky, and Joseph II made him a count of the Holy Roman Empire.¹⁷

Two calendars and two names

The battle has two dates and two names. Russia still used the Julian calendar, which in the 18th century ran eleven days behind the Gregorian, so Russian accounts give 11 September 1789 and Austrian and Western ones 22 September. Russians named the battle after the Rymnik river, a tributary of the Siret, while the Austrians called it after the village of Martinești on its bank.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Rymnik made Suvorov a household name. His later victories at Ismail in 1790 and in Italy and Switzerland in 1799 made him, in Longworth's words, a hero to the enemies of the French Revolution, and he died a generalissimo in 1800. A Viennese print published that very year shows the allied infantry drawn up in hollow squares across the plain.¹⁹› Battle of the Trebbia, 1799

Speed and the bayonet won Rymnik, and they are also the themes of the treatise Suvorov later wrote for his soldiers, The Science of Victory, which Britannica singles out for its emphasis on speed and mobility and on the use of the bayonet.²⁰