Who won the Battle of Zieleńce?
The Poles won. On 18 June 1792, during the war in defense of the Constitution of 3 May, a Russian corps of about 11,000 under General Morkov pushed too hard after Prince Józef Poniatowski's retreating army near Zieleńce in Volhynia and ran into its main body, about 15,500 strong. From dawn to the afternoon the Russians were repulsed and forced to leave the field. It was the first significant Polish victory in 94 years, and four days later King Stanisław August created the Virtuti Militari, still Poland's highest military decoration.5
For a month the young Polish army had done nothing but retreat. Outnumbered several times over, short of food and arms and full of recruits who had never fired a shot, it fell back across Ukraine and Volhynia with Russian columns trying to cut it off. On 18 June 1792, near a village called Zieleńce, one of those columns came on too fast, and the Poles turned and struck back.6
A war for the Constitution
On 3 May 1791 the Commonwealth adopted a constitution meant to reform and strengthen the state. Empress Catherine II saw it as a threat to Russian control of Poland. A group of Polish magnates, the Confederation of Targowica, signed its act in Saint Petersburg on 27 April 1792 and proclaimed it on the night of 18 to 19 May, and between 18 and 22 May Russian armies crossed the border in support of the confederates.7
Armies and commanders
The odds were brutal. ZPE puts the whole Polish army at about 57,000 men against a Russian army almost twice its size. In the south, by Robert Howard Lord's count, Prince Józef Poniatowski and Tadeusz Kościuszko had about 17,000 men to face General Mikhail Kakhovsky's 64,000. The Polish army had been expanded only a few years earlier.8
Poniatowski, the king's 29-year-old nephew, had learned his trade in the Austrian army and commanded the Crown forces in Ukraine. Tadeusz Kościuszko led one of his divisions, and Józef Zajączek and Ludwik Trokin were among his generals. Lord judged Kościuszko the only officer with real genius, but he was subordinate to the cautious prince.9
Retreat through Volhynia
At the start of the campaign Kościuszko proposed concentrating every available man and throwing the whole army at one of the widely separated Russian corps before they could unite. Poniatowski refused. With such inexperienced troops, he argued, a pitched battle was a gamble, and with no reserves behind him a defeat would be fatal. He chose to keep his army intact and his line to Warsaw open.10
The Russians, confident they could outflank and trap him, kept pressing, and he had to give up one strong position after another. He first concentrated in a fortified camp at Połonne and abandoned it when the Russians began to turn his flank, then marched west toward Zasław. Lord calls the campaign a game of hare and hounds in which the Russians more than once let the Poles slip through their fingers.11
The battle
On 18 June the Russian corps of General Irakly Morkov, known in Polish sources as Herkules Morkow, about 11,000 strong, was following the retreating army near the village of Zieleńce. In Lord's words it advanced "too ardently and incautiously" and suddenly found itself facing the bulk of Poniatowski's army. The fight began at dawn.12
For many of the Polish soldiers it was their first time under fire; the army in Ukraine had been raised in a hurry and was largely made up of recruits. The officers who held it together that day are known from the list of those decorated afterward: Generals Zajączek, Michał Wielhorski, Stanisław Mokronowski and Prince Eustachy Sanguszko were all among the first knights of the new order. The Russian attacks failed, and in the afternoon Morkov broke off and withdrew, "rudely repulsed and forced to evacuate the battle-field", as Lord put it.13
The cost was heavy for both sides. Polish accounts reported by dzieje.pl put the dead at about 1,000 Poles and about 2,000 Russians; other estimates are lower, especially for the Russians.14
Holding the field
The Poles held the battlefield, but not for long. Short of supplies and still facing a far larger enemy, Poniatowski resumed his retreat toward Zasław and Ostróg. Lord's judgment is that the prince "failed to follow up his victory, as he should have done, by crushing Markov completely". The Fondation Napoléon likewise notes that the victory could not be exploited.15
Its real value was in morale. dzieje.pl calls it a turning point for the soldiers of the reborn Polish army: it did not decide the war, but it showed that the new regiments could stand up to the Russians.16
The birth of the Virtuti Militari
On the day of the battle Poniatowski asked his uncle for a decoration for his soldiers. In a letter to his nephew the king described what he had in mind: oval medals with his monogram on one side and the words Virtuti Militari, "for military valor", on the other, in silver for the men and gold for the officers. On 22 June 1792 King Stanisław August established the order, and on 25 June the first fifteen were presented at Ostróg on the Horyń, where the army was camped.17
Six of the first recipients were generals: Poniatowski, Kościuszko, Michał Wielhorski, Stanisław Mokronowski, Eustachy Sanguszko and Józef Zajączek. The others were two colonels, a lieutenant colonel, two majors, two lieutenants and a squadron commander. In late August or early September the oval medal was replaced by a cross, the shape that survives today.18
When Poniatowski returned to Warsaw a few months later, the order was given a statute with five classes: the Grand Cross with Star, the Commander's Cross, the Knight's Cross, and the Gold and Silver Medals for lower ranks. All the men decorated at Ostróg were to sit in its Chapter. The king himself became Grand Master and took the Grand Cross. It was a remarkable decoration for its age: an award for courage in battle, open in its medal classes to private soldiers, and, as a letter read at the 225th anniversary in 2017 pointed out, a paradox: the most anti-heroic king in Polish history had founded an order for its greatest heroes.19
Dubienka and defeat
The retreat went on. By early July the army stood behind the Bug, and on 18 July Kościuszko held the crossing at Dubienka for three or four hours with 5,000 to 6,000 men against a Russian corps of 19,000 to 25,000, by Lord's and ZPE's counts, the fiercest battle of the war, before withdrawing under cover of darkness. Lord notes that the army was getting harder and more confident with every week and that 30,000 regular troops were still available behind the Vistula.20
It was the king who gave up. Stanisław August joined the Targowica Confederation, Poniatowski resigned his command on 30 July and left the country, and on 29 August 1792 the confederates banned the wearing of the new order under severe penalties. Kościuszko wrote bitterly afterward that the fighting spirit had been universal and the means of beating the Russians were still in Polish hands: "But we didn't make use of them." The Second Partition followed in 1793.21
Legacy
Zieleńce was a small battle that left a large mark. It made Poniatowski's name, and both he and Kościuszko would lead Poland's armies again. The order born from it survived every attempt to abolish it: banned by Targowica, annulled in 1794, revived under the Duchy of Warsaw, downgraded by the tsar after 1831, restored as the Virtuti Militari by the Sejm in 1919. By the end of Stanisław August's reign 526 people had received it, and it remains Poland's highest military decoration. On the 225th anniversary of Zieleńce, in 2017, the knights of the order were honored at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.22 › Józef Poniatowski: Poland's Marshal of France
