Siege of Kolding, 1658: Czarniecki's Poles storm a Danish royal castle

It was still dark on a Christmas morning when the Polish soldiers went forward toward the walls of a royal castle in Jutland. They had come hundreds of miles from home to fight the Swedes on Danish soil. Before the day was out they had broken into Koldinghus, and part of the old castle of the Danish kings had gone up in a blast of gunpowder, taking its defenders with it.¹

Who won the siege of Kolding and why?

Czarniecki's Poles won. Fighting for Denmark against the Swedes, they took the Swedish-held castle of Koldinghus by storm at Christmas 1658: they climbed the ramparts at dawn, broke in and fought their way through the castle, and when a dragoon's lit match set off the powder store, part of the castle blew up with its defenders.²

Background: a war carried to Denmark

In 1655 Charles X Gustav of Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the start of the years of war that Poles call the Deluge. By 1657 the war in Poland had bogged down, and Denmark saw a chance to win back what it had lost to Sweden a decade before. In 1657 Frederick III declared war.³ › Siege of Jasna Góra, 1655

It was a disastrous gamble. Charles broke off his war in Poland and turned on Denmark with his main army. He overran Jutland, and in the hard winter of 1658 he marched his army over the frozen straits to the Danish islands and forced the peace of Roskilde in February 1658, which cost Denmark Skåne, Blekinge, Bohuslän, Bornholm and Trondheim. In the summer of 1658 he attacked again, this time to destroy Denmark altogether, and laid siege to Copenhagen.⁴

This time Denmark was not alone. Copenhagen held out. In October a Dutch fleet beat the Swedish fleet in the Sound and broke the blockade, and an allied army of Brandenburg, Polish and Imperial troops marched north to drive the Swedes out of Jutland.⁵

Armies and commanders

The Polish contingent was led by Stefan Czarniecki, the voivode of Ruthenia and the most celebrated Polish commander of the war against the Swedes. His division numbered about 4,500 horsemen according to Jerzy Ronikier's lexicon of Polish battles, about 5,000 men according to Wirtualna Polska's account, which draws on the historian Adam Kersten. The two sources also differ on when it set out: in September 1658 according to Wirtualna Polska, in November according to Ronikier.⁶ › Stefan Czarniecki

On the other side stood Charles X Gustav, a warrior king above all, whose winter march across the frozen straits had astonished Europe. The allies facing him were not entirely comfortable together. The Brandenburg elector, Frederick William, had fought on the Swedish side until 1657 and changed sides only in return for Polish recognition of his sovereignty in Ducal Prussia, and the Poles did not forget it.⁷

One of Czarniecki's soldiers, the gentleman Jan Chryzostom Pasek, wrote the most famous account of the campaign in his memoirs. They are vivid and, in Wirtualna Polska's words, no doubt heavily embellished.⁸

The crossing to Als

The campaign's best-known moment came on 14 December 1658, when the allies attacked the Swedes on the island of Als. Pasek described the voivode crossing himself and riding into the water first, his regiments after him, each man with his pistols tucked into his collar and his powder pouch tied round his neck. How exactly the Poles crossed is still argued. The Museum of Polish History allows that they may have swum their horses or ridden them through the shallows, or both; Wirtualna Polska cites another eyewitness, Jakub Łoś, who thought swimming impossible in such cold, and the Swedish colonel Rutger von Ascheberg, who wrote that the Poles came over in boats. The Swedes on Als were beaten and Sønderborg was taken.⁹

Czarniecki's choices

The first problem was food. Czarniecki had to keep a cavalry division fed in a country the Swedes had already stripped. Wirtualna Polska notes that the Poles regarded Schleswig as Swedish, and therefore enemy, country, where they felt free to take revenge for what the Swedes had done in Poland; Pasek, who served in the king's own regiment, remembered the winter raids on the villages around them in the same spirit, as revenge for the wrongs his nation had suffered at home.¹⁰

Kolding was a harder task for horsemen. Pasek, who took part, believed that Czarniecki could have borrowed artillery and infantry from the Brandenburg elector, who was camped nearby, but would not ask, because he wanted the glory of the capture for himself. Wirtualna Polska warns that Pasek's memoirs are colorful and no doubt embellished, so his account is best read as one soldier's memory.¹¹

The battle in phases

The castle. From Als the Poles turned on Kolding, on the east coast of Jutland, where a Swedish garrison held Koldinghus, the old castle of the Danish kings. The castle had been founded in the thirteenth century as a fortress on the kingdom's southern border, and over the next four centuries it grew into one of the largest and most important castles in Denmark, a Renaissance palace and royal residence, with a great tower added by Christian IV around 1600. For the attackers it was a formidable target: thick walls on a height above the town and the fjord.¹²

The first attempts. Ronikier writes that Czarniecki attacked on 23 December and meant to take the castle by surprise. At dawn, under cover of fog, his men crept up to the ramparts and climbed them by lifting one another up, but the sentries saw them and raised the alarm in time, and both this assault and the next were thrown back. Pasek, who took part, tells the story differently: a single assault at first light on Christmas morning, with the dismounted horsemen climbing the snowy rampart under heavy fire.¹³

The last assault. Ronikier counts a third assault, the one that succeeded. Pasek, who led a party of dismounted men in it, remembered going forward at first light on Christmas Day with his men singing a hymn, under orders to cross the moat and run for the foot of the walls, where the defenders above could no longer aim at them easily.¹⁴

The break-in. Both accounts agree on what came next. The Poles got over the rampart, broke into the castle and fought their way in, and fierce fighting followed inside. In Pasek's own memory, his party hacked its way in through the wall below a barred window.¹⁵

The explosion. In the struggle, a dragoon reached the castle's store of gunpowder with a lit match. The powder went up, part of the castle blew up with the Swedes defending it, and the Poles took the rest. Pasek, who was inside, described the walls cracking and the marble flying, and the garrison's commander and the men with him thrown into the air from the tower where they had taken refuge.¹⁶

Counting the losses

No source we could check gives a count. Ronikier says only that part of the castle went up together with the Swedes defending it and that the Poles took the rest; Pasek, who was inside, describes the blast in the same way. The size of the Swedish garrison and the losses on either side are not recorded in either account.¹⁷

Turning point: Christmas Day 1658

By Christmas Day 1658 the old royal castle was in Polish hands. Pasek remembered that the year ended well with the taking of Kolding. The Polish dates are those of the Gregorian calendar, which Poland, like other Catholic countries, had used since 1582. Denmark kept the older Julian calendar until 1700, and in the seventeenth century the Julian calendar ran ten days behind, so Danish and Swedish records give earlier dates for the same events.¹⁸

Aftermath

Frederick III thanked Czarniecki and decorated him for his conduct in the Danish campaign. The Poles fought on in Denmark well into 1659. The Poles wintered around Hadersleben, and the town and the country around it suffered from their raiding: Pasek describes the raiding parties sent out from the winter quarters, and Wirtualna Polska lists Hadersleben among the larger places plundered by the Poles.¹⁹

The campaign had a darker side. Short of food in a land already stripped by the Swedes, Czarniecki allowed his men to requisition supplies, and the requisitioning turned into plunder, burning and violence against Danish villagers. Pasek himself wrote freely of the raiding parties that ranged through the villages. Kersten, as quoted by Wirtualna Polska, judged that the worst stories came largely from Danish writers who contrasted the Poles with the other allies, and that measured against other European armies of the day the Polish troops behaved fairly decently. Czarniecki punished offenders, Pasek recalled, by having them dragged behind horses around the camp.²⁰

The war itself ended the next year. Charles X Gustav died in February 1660, and peace followed. At Oliva Sweden made peace with Poland, Brandenburg and the emperor, and by the peace of Copenhagen Denmark recovered Bornholm and Trondheim, while Skåne and the other provinces won at Roskilde stayed Swedish.²¹ › Battle of Nyborg, 1659

Legacy and memory

In Poland the Danish expedition is remembered above all through the crossing to Als, which passed into the national anthem in the line about Czarniecki returning across the sea to save the homeland. Wirtualna Polska sums up the expedition as a clear military success that helped bring the Deluge to an end, though it also cooled relations between the Commonwealth and its allies, who resented the Polish troops' conduct.²²

Painters returned to the campaign too. Józef Brandt painted Czarniecki at Kolding in 1870, and TwojaHistoria illustrates Ronikier's entry on the siege with it.²³

Visiting Kolding today

Koldinghus still stands over the town, though not as Czarniecki saw it. A catastrophic fire in March 1808, while troops of the Napoleonic wars were quartered there, left the castle in ruins. It was restored from 1972 into the early 1990s by the architects Inger and Johannes Exner, who preserved the ruin inside a new structure, and it is now a museum run by the Royal Danish Collection, with Christian IV's great tower open for the view.²⁴