The siege of Jasna Góra lasted from 18 November to the night of 26 to 27 December 1655, during the Swedish invasion of Poland known as the Deluge. While much of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth submitted to King Charles X Gustav of Sweden, the fortified Pauline monastery at Częstochowa, home of the venerated icon of the Black Madonna, refused to open its gates. Prior Augustyn Kordecki and a few hundred defenders, monks, soldiers and local nobles, held out for about forty days against the troops of General Burchard Müller, who finally withdrew. The defense was quickly taken as a sign that the country could resist, and Kordecki's own account and Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel The Deluge turned it into one of the great legends of Polish history.4
In the autumn of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth seemed to be falling apart. The king had fled the country, and magnates and nobles were swearing loyalty to the invader one after another. Then, on a hill above Częstochowa, a handful of monks and soldiers shut their gates and refused to surrender. So began the defense of Jasna Góra, an event that has to be told twice: once as the documents record it, and once as legend remembers it.5
The Deluge
In 1655 King Charles X Gustav of Sweden invaded the Commonwealth, which was already fighting Muscovy and the Cossacks in the east. Officially he was defending himself against a Polish claim to the Swedish throne. In truth, Britannica says, he wanted to check Russia's advance into Poland and tighten Sweden's grip on the Baltic. His first victories forced King John Casimir to flee the country, and many magnates and nobles who disliked their king went over to the Swedes almost without a fight.6
The new order did not bring peace. The plundering of Swedish and German mercenaries, Lutherans at that, stirred up peasants and nobles alike. The historian Adam Kersten noted that men who two months earlier had groveled before the invader were calling for war against him by the end of 1655. Częstochowa stood at the center of that turn.7
The fortress of Mary
The Pauline monastery on Jasna Góra, the Bright Mount, was not a defenseless church on a hill. The decision to fortify it was taken in 1620, during a visit by King Sigismund III Vasa. Work began in 1624, probably to designs by the Italian engineer Andrea dell'Aqua, and in 1639, under Władysław IV, the partly finished fortress received the name Fortalitium Marianum, the Fortress of Mary. By 1655 Jasna Góra had modern bastioned walls and good artillery.8
Prior Kordecki
At its head stood Augustyn Kordecki, born on 16 November 1603 at Iwanowice near Kalisz. He had joined the Paulines in 1633, taught rhetoric and theology and served as prior of several houses before Jasna Góra. In 1655 he was both the monks' superior and the fortress commander. Laymen helped him, among them Stefan Zamoyski, sword-bearer of Sieradz, and Piotr Czarniecki, elder brother of the future hetman Stefan Czarniecki.9
A safe conduct and a hidden icon
This part of the story long had no place in the legend. On 7 November 1655, when a Swedish victory seemed certain, Kordecki chose to recognize Charles Gustav's authority and received in return a royal safe conduct guaranteeing the monastery's inviolability. His letter to the Swedish king survives in the archives in Stockholm. Professor Idzi Panic of the University of Silesia reads it as an obvious attempt to play for time and survive, and places the truth somewhere in the middle.10
At the same time the prior saw to what mattered most. The monks sent away their treasures, among them the miraculous icon of the Virgin, and put a copy in the chapel. According to the Polish History Museum the icon was taken to the castle at Lubliniec. OKO.press says it passed through Lubliniec to the Pauline house at Mochów, and some researchers believe it was also kept in the castle chapel at Głogówek, in Habsburg Silesia. The original was not on Jasna Góra during the siege.11
Forty days
The first troops appeared below Jasna Góra on 8 November. On 18 November, despite the safe conduct, they tried to enter the monastery, and when they were refused the siege began. They were commanded by General Burchard Müller von der Lühnen, and his army was small and Swedish largely in name. OKO.press estimates it at about 2,000 men, Wprost at about 1,600, many of them German mercenaries and Poles who had gone over to Charles Gustav. Older accounts spoke of ten thousand infantry.12
The defenders numbered a few hundred. The Polish History Museum writes of a garrison of 160 soldiers and monks armed with muskets, OKO.press of about 250 armed men, joined by local nobles and volunteers. Week after week the besiegers sent demands to surrender, and Kordecki refused them. The bombardment won them nothing, because, as the historian Ryszard Henryk Bochenek stresses, the decisive contest was an artillery duel and the monastery's guns proved better than Müller's. Near the end the besiegers even demanded payment to go away, and were refused that too.13
Inside, unity did not always hold. Wprost, citing the old sources, describes a mutiny in the garrison on 26 November that the prior ended by doubling the soldiers' pay. The last failed assault came at Christmas. On the night of 26 to 27 December 1655, after about forty days, Müller raised the siege.14
Why the besiegers left
Historians point to several reasons. Jasna Góra had good fortifications and solid artillery, and its defenders were prepared. Müller had too few men and too few heavy guns, and his troops, says Idzi Panic, were second-rate, though their commander was able. The Częstochowa Museum notes that the besiegers were more tempted by the loot of the monastery treasury than eager for a fight. Add the December cold, which Wprost points to, and what OKO.press calls a propaganda defeat: the siege of a shrine by an army taken to be Protestant turned the country against the invader.15
From Częstochowa to Lwów
News of the defense spread before the siege was even over. Kersten pointed to a telling detail. A proclamation issued at Sokal on 16 December, while Jasna Góra was still besieged, spoke of the siege in the present tense. On 29 December the nobles gathered in the army at Tyszowce formed a confederation against the Swedes, and its act spoke of the siege in the past tense, as a sacrilege in which several thousand men had stormed the church of Częstochowa.16
John Casimir came home, and on 1 April 1656, in Lwów cathedral, at a Mass said by the papal nuncio Pietro Vidoni, he made his vows before the image of Our Lady of Graces, choosing the Virgin as protector and Queen of his kingdom. He also promised to ease the lot of the peasants, a promise never kept. The war that finally drove the Swedes out was led by commanders such as Stefan Czarniecki.17
History and legend
Much of what we know about the siege comes from one book. Kordecki wrote a memoir on which the Latin Nova Gigantomachia, the New Battle of the Giants against the holy image, was based. Kersten, working from the Jasna Góra archive, found that a fair copy existed by February 1657 and that the first copies came off the press in Kraków only in early March 1658. Wprost notes that the title page carried the date 1655, although the siege had ended only four days before that year was out. The book thus appeared when the outcome of the war was known, and OKO.press reports the suggestion that Queen Louise Marie Gonzaga encouraged it.18
For centuries this account was the picture of the defense. In it the besiegers grew to nine thousand, German mercenaries and Poles in Swedish service became Protestant Swedes, and the deliverance was credited to the miraculous icon, which was not in the monastery at all. In 1969 the historian Edward Jelonek argued that Kordecki's memoir may have been reworked by the polemicist Stefan Damalewicz, and that the changes distorted some events. Later writers added more. Wespazjan Kochowski wrote of a thick mist that hid the monastery from an assault.19
Henryk Sienkiewicz did most of all. In The Deluge, published in 1886, the siege fills several chapters of the second volume, and his hero, Andrzej Kmicic, blows up a great Swedish culverin, which breaks the besiegers' spirit. Kmicic is fictional and so is the terrible culverin. Bochenek writes that Sienkiewicz considerably distorted the real course of the artillery fight. Yet it is his version, built on Kordecki's, that shaped what generations of Poles imagined.20
Was the defense a miracle or hard work? The OKO.press article is titled "Trud, nie cud," hard work, not a miracle, and Wprost calls the legend a miraculous invention. One thing is beyond doubt: a small fortress held out at the very moment when no one seemed to be resisting, and the news moved the country before anyone had written a book about it.21
Kordecki after the siege
John Casimir wanted to make Kordecki prior of Jasna Góra for life and a bishop, but the monk refused, as he also refused the post of vicar general. He died on 20 March 1673 at Wieruszów, during a visitation, and was buried in the crypt at Jasna Góra, where his urn stands in a niche beside the chapel of the miraculous image. In May 1973, on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła spoke of him at Wieruszów as a man in whom humility and magnanimity, humility and heroism were woven together.22
A note on dates
The dates in this article are Gregorian. Sweden still used the Julian calendar, which in the 17th century ran ten days behind, and did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1753. Swedish documents therefore date the same events ten days earlier.23
