On 27 January 1527 the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Grand Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski caught a Crimean Tatar army returning from a winter raid near the Olshanitsa river, in the Kyiv region, and broke it in a sudden attack. Most of the raiders were killed. The date is given in the Julian calendar.
A winter raid
This raid came in the depth of winter: it began at the end of December 1526. The Crimean army plundered Polesia, the marshy borderland in what is now Ukraine and southern Belarus. Its size is uncertain: the Lithuanian encyclopedia VLE says more than ten thousand men, while the Ukrainian historian Petro Kulakovskyi gives 34,000 and notes that the chronicler Marcin Bielski counted 26,000.1
Konstanty Ostrogski, Grand Hetman of Lithuania, was already famous for his victory over Muscovy at Orsha in 1514, told in our article on the Battle of Orsha. Chroniclers called him the “Ruthenian Scipio”.2
The battle
Ostrogski gathered an army and set off after the raiders. He caught them near the Olshanitsa river in the Kyiv region on 27 January 1527. The VLE puts his force at about 7,000 cavalry. A sudden attack broke the Tatar army, and most of the raiders were killed.3
The fullest early account is a letter by the royal secretary Justus Ludwik Decius. As Kulakovskyi summarizes it, Ostrogski's men attacked at night, and the hetman himself led some 5,000 horsemen against the camp of the khan's young son. The historian Dariusz Milewski has studied how Decius, Bielski, Maciej Stryjkowski and other 16th-century authors turned Ostrogski into a model of the victorious commander.4
Captives and prisoners
The numbers attached to the victory are large and uncertain. According to Decius, as cited by Kulakovskyi, about 20,000 Tatars were killed and about 40,000 Christian captives were freed. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine says instead that 25,000 Tatars were taken prisoner and settled near Ostroh. None of these figures can be checked against a reliable count, and they should be read as the claims of a contemporary and the estimates of later writers.5
Aftermath
Olshanitsa was one of Ostrogski's greatest victories over the Tatars, won when he was in his late sixties. According to the VLE, the defeat, together with other factors, left the Crimean Khanate unable to mount strong raids into the Grand Duchy for some time afterward. Ostrogski died in 1530 and was buried in the Kyiv Cave Monastery. For other victories of Polish and Lithuanian arms against stronger enemies, see Polish victories against the odds.6
