Who won the Battle of Trzciana?
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its imperial allies. On 27 June 1629 (17 June in the Julian calendar used in Swedish accounts), in Royal Prussia, Field Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski's cavalry, including the winged hussars, and imperial horse under Hans Georg von Arnim caught the Swedish cavalry covering King Gustavus Adolphus's withdrawal from Kwidzyn and routed it in a running fight across several villages. The king himself was nearly captured. The victory forced the Swedes onto the defensive in Prussia, although the war ended three months later with the Truce of Altmark, which favored Sweden.6
Gustavus Adolphus would become one of the greatest commanders of his age. But in the summer of 1629, in the fields of Royal Prussia, he met Polish hussars under Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski, lost his hat to an enemy horseman, and came within a hair of being dragged off as a prisoner.7
War for the Baltic
The war was part of Sweden's drive for mastery of the Baltic, and King Sigismund III Vasa's claim to the Swedish throne gave his cousin Gustavus Adolphus a pretext. On 6 July 1626 the Swedes landed at Pillau and quickly took a string of towns in Royal and Ducal Prussia, among them Braniewo, Elbląg, Malbork and Tczew, from which they could tax the trade of the Vistula. In the autumn an inconclusive battle at Gniew stopped them short of a siege of Gdańsk, but forced Sigismund to break off his own counteroffensive.8
Koniecpolski against the Lion
In November 1626 the king handed the war in Prussia to Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski, a commander schooled in fighting Tatars and Cossacks on the southeastern frontier. For three years, usually outnumbered and short of pay and infantry, he kept the Swedes from taking the whole province. He besieged Puck, forced a Swedish relief force to capitulate at Czarne in April 1627, and held Gustavus Adolphus off at Tczew that August. At sea the same war brought the Commonwealth's navy its most famous victory, at Oliwa off Gdańsk on 28 November 1627.9› Battle of Oliwa, 1627
Koniecpolski's letters to the king complain constantly of unpaid soldiers, an ineffective tax system and a nobility that cared little for a war on the Baltic. The Sejm voted new taxes in late 1627, but they came in slowly, and the cavalry, the Commonwealth's main strength, could do little against Swedish fortresses.10
1629: Arnim arrives
The year began badly. On 12 February 1629 the Swedish field marshal Herman Wrangel defeated Stanisław Potocki at Górzno. A truce until 1 June gave the Commonwealth time to raise money, and Sigismund accepted help from the Emperor: in April about 5,000 imperial troops under Hans Georg von Arnim marched into Prussia. Gustavus Adolphus tried to stop them before they could join Koniecpolski, failed, and with the balance of forces now against him decided to pull back from Kwidzyn (Marienwerder) toward Sztum and Malbork. Arnim's cavalry met the Poles at Szynwałd on 26 June.11
The armies
The figures are uncertain. Histmag's authors estimate the Swedish field army at about 9,000, and the plan for the march out of Kwidzyn assigned it a vanguard of about 2,100 horse under the Wrangels, a main body of 600 horse, and a rearguard of about 1,950 horse, with the infantry, the baggage and most of the guns on a separate road. Cavalry made up about four fifths of the force, an unusual ratio for a Swedish army.12
Koniecpolski's pursuit force was smaller. The chronicler Paweł Piasecki gives about 1,300 hussars, 1,200 Cossack-style light horse and 2,000 imperial cavalry; Arnim himself counted 700 hussars and 1,000 Cossacks besides his own 2,000. That makes between about 3,700 and 4,500 horsemen. Among the hussar banners were those of the hetman, of Prince Władysław and of Łukasz Żółkiewski.13
The hussars strike
On 27 June the Swedish infantry and baggage took the main road to Sztum, while the cavalry took a side road through Trzciana (Honigfelde), Straszewo and Pułkowice. Koniecpolski crossed the Liwa near Ośno after a skirmish at Sadowo, left dragoons to hold the crossing, and caught the Swedish rearguard near Trzciana. He put the imperial cavalry and the Cossacks in front to fix the enemy, and hid his hussars in a small valley. While the light horse skirmished, the hussars swung round and struck the Swedish flank before the musketeers and gunners could fire a volley.14
The Swedish horse fell back to Straszewo, where the main body of about 600 horse stood. Some of the riders fired their pistols, but many broke before the lowered lances and fled on toward Pułkowice, where Gustavus Adolphus came up with the vanguard. About 7 kilometers from Trzciana the allied cavalry and the Swedes met at close quarters, and Koniecpolski joined the fight in person. Wrangel threw in more squadrons without changing the outcome. The fighting went on, Piasecki wrote, from noon until night.15
A king in danger
The king led his cavalry in person, and in the melee he nearly fell. According to his chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, “one of the enemy caught king Gustavus Adolphus by the pendant, but the king slipped it over his head and left his hat along with it”. Another horseman caught him by the arm and was about to drag him off when the officer Erik Soop rode up and shot the attacker from his saddle. Histmag's reconstruction makes the first man an imperial cuirassier and the second a Polish hussar, who did not know whom he had seized; the sword belt and the hat ended up with Prince Władysław. HistoryOfWar adds that the king was wounded in the back.16
Gustavus Adolphus said nothing of his own danger in his account of the battle, which, he explained, he wrote “to stop the mouths of those who might babble of worse”. He claimed to have saved his troops and driven the enemy back. In fact only the sacrifice of Wrangel's infantry let the beaten Swedes shelter in Sztum and slip away by night to Malbork.17
Losses
The sources disagree widely. Gustavus Adolphus admitted the loss of 700 men in one report and 200 dead in another; Polish accounts claimed up to 1,200 or even nearly 1,500 Swedish dead. Histmag's authors estimate 500 to 600 Swedish horsemen killed and about 200 captured, along with ten cornets (cavalry standards) and a number of the light leather guns of the Swedish army. Allied losses were light: no more than 150 killed and wounded by one estimate, about 300 dead, half of them imperials, by another. Koniecpolski complained above all about his exhausted and wounded horses.18
Altmark and after
The military historians Nowak and Wimmer call Trzciana the Commonwealth's greatest victory since Kircholm, but it did not decide the war. The allies could not take Sztum or Malbork; the imperial infantry arrived too late, the Commonwealth had too little siege artillery, and Arnim's troops behaved in Prussia as if in a conquered country, which led to constant quarrels with the Poles. English and French diplomats, led by Sir Thomas Roe, pressed both sides to make peace.19
On 26 September 1629 (Gregorian) the two sides signed a six-year truce at Altmark (Stary Targ). Sweden kept its conquests in Livonia, gave the duke of Courland back his capital Mitau, and kept the Prussian coast from the Pasłęka to the Vistula with Braniewo, Tolkmicko and Elbląg, as well as a share of the tolls on Gdańsk's trade. The Polish historian Henryk Wisner called it a defeat for both the king and the Commonwealth. Free of the Polish war, Gustavus Adolphus landed at Peenemünde in July 1630 and entered the Thirty Years' War, where the lessons of Prussia served him well.20
Memory
The battlefield lies around the villages of Trzciano, Straszewo and Pułkowice, on the old road from Kwidzyn to Sztum. A brick chapel built in 1882, on the site of an earlier wooden one, and a stone obelisk mark the place, and local legend has it that the fleeing king dropped his marshal's baton in a lake, taken as a sign of his total defeat.21› Wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
