On 24 January 1588, outside the Silesian town of Byczyna, the army of Grand Hetman Jan Zamoyski defeated Archduke Maximilian of Austria, the Habsburg rival of King Sigismund III Vasa for the Polish crown. Maximilian surrendered and became Zamoyski's prisoner, which decided the disputed royal election of 1587.
Battle of Byczyna
24 January 1588 · 438 years ago
A crown with two claimants
After the death of King Stephen Báthory, the free election of August 1587 produced two rival kings. Most of the nobility chose the Swedish prince Sigismund Vasa, a distant relative of the Jagiellonian dynasty, while a faction around the powerful Zborowski family proclaimed Archduke Maximilian Habsburg, a brother of Emperor Rudolf II. Sigismund's leading supporter was Jan Zamoyski, Grand Chancellor and Grand Hetman of the Crown, whose career is told in our article on Jan Zamoyski.1
Maximilian marched on Kraków to have himself crowned, but Zamoyski held the city and the archduke's assault in late November 1587 failed. Sigismund was crowned in Kraków on 27 December 1587. Zamoyski then went after the archduke, who withdrew from Wieluń across the border into Habsburg Silesia and halted at Byczyna to fight.2
The battle outside Byczyna
The armies were small for a contest between two great powers. The historian Piotr Krzyżański, following Marek Plewczyński's study of the battle, gives about 6,000 men for Zamoyski and about 7,000 for Maximilian, counting all his reinforcements. He quotes Zygmunt Boras, who wrote that Zamoyski smashed an army equal to his own in half an hour, and Konstanty Górski, who in 1888 credited the victory to Zamoyski's own reconnaissance of the ground, his firm command and a well-executed flanking maneuver. Włodzimierz Kaczorowski, also cited by Krzyżański, notes that the man actually commanding against Zamoyski was not the archduke but Andrzej Zborowski.3 › Stanisław Żółkiewski
Maximilian was beaten, forced to surrender and taken prisoner by Zamoyski. The sources used here give no reliable figures for the dead on either side.4
A burning town
Byczyna paid a price too. A 2017 edition of an anonymous Polish lament, De Bicinensi Proelio, cites the chronicle of the local pastor Bartholomäus Bentkius, who recorded that the town and nearby villages burned and that soldiers plundered the inhabitants; Krzyżański likewise notes that Polish and Silesian historians have written of the sack of Byczyna by the victorious army. The lament tells the story from the side of the suffering townspeople, far from the triumphant poems written in Poland.5
Why it mattered
The Habsburgs' bid for the throne ended with the Treaty of Bytom and Będzin in early 1589, which a 2019 study of Habsburg policy toward Poland calls a diplomatic defeat for them; the Museum of Polish History dates it to 9 March 1589 and says the Habsburgs recognized Sigismund III as the rightful king. By defeating Maximilian, Zamoyski helped preserve the Commonwealth's independence from the Habsburgs and strengthened Sigismund's rule. Byczyna ranks among the greatest Polish battles and belongs to the long story of the wars of the Polish Commonwealth.6
Battle of Dogger Bank, 1915: the battlecruiser chase that got away
24 January 1915 · 111 years ago
British battlecruisers, warned by decoded German wireless signals, intercepted a German raiding squadron bound for the North Sea's Dogger Bank during World War I. The armored cruiser Blücher was sunk, but confused British signaling let the other German ships escape.
Read the full story of Battle of Dogger Bank, 1915: the battlecruiser chase that got away ›
