Stanisław Koniecpolski: the hetman who stopped Gustavus Adolphus

Two of his battles have their own pages here: the Battle of Trzciana (1629), where his hussars broke the cavalry of Gustavus Adolphus, and the Battle of Okhmativ (Ochmatów, 1644), his last great victory over the Crimean Tatars. The Prussian campaign around Trzciana is part of the Polish-Swedish War of 1600 to 1629. Before all that he was captured at Cecora in 1620 and spent about three years as a prisoner of the Ottomans.²

How did Koniecpolski become a hetman?

The year of his birth is uncertain: the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 9 February 1591, Britannica about 1591, and the Polish Biographical Dictionary (PSB) 1593 or 1594. He came from a magnate family and first went to war in the Smolensk campaign of 1610 and 1611, where his younger brother Przedbór died during the siege in June 1611.³

He then served in the standing army in Ukraine under Stanisław Żółkiewski and became his deputy. The PSB and the art historian Zbigniew Bania date his appointment as Field Hetman of the Crown, the second command in the Crown army, to April 1618; Britannica and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine give 1619. His first operations as hetman, the PSB notes, went badly.⁴

Was Koniecpolski taken prisoner by the Turks?

Yes. In 1620 Żółkiewski led the army into Moldavia and was defeated by Ottoman and Tatar forces at Cecora (Țuțora) on the Prut. Żółkiewski was killed during the retreat in early October, and Koniecpolski, his deputy, was taken prisoner and ended up in Turkish hands. The PSB praises his courage in the battle.⁵

He was held in Istanbul, in the Castle of the Seven Towers (Yedikule). The Wilanów Palace Museum and Britannica both count about three years of captivity (Szymon Wachoń puts it at almost two and a half); he was freed in 1623 through the embassy of Krzysztof Zbaraski.⁶

How did Koniecpolski fight the Tatars and Cossacks?

No new grand hetman was appointed after Żółkiewski's death, so the defense of the south-eastern frontier fell to Koniecpolski as field hetman. In June 1624 a large Tatar army under Kantemir raided deep into the country. Koniecpolski let it pass, then caught it on its way back, laden with captives, and routed it at Martynów on 20 June.⁷

In 1625 he marched against a Cossack rising with about 8,000 men and, after hard fighting, concluded the Treaty of Kurukove beside Lake Kurukove in November (on the 5th by the Encyclopedia of Ukraine's date, the 6th by the PSB's). It raised the register of paid Cossacks to 6,000.⁸

How did Koniecpolski fight Gustavus Adolphus?

In 1626 Gustavus Adolphus landed in Royal Prussia. Sigismund III first led the Polish army against him in person, and after a series of setbacks called in Koniecpolski, who arrived with Crown troops in November 1626 and took command. Outnumbered, he undertook no major operations that winter; in the spring of 1627 he took Puck and forced newly recruited Swedish troops to capitulate at Czarne (Hamersztyn).⁹

On 17 and 18 August 1627 he faced the king himself at Tczew (Dirschau). The two-day battle ended without a decision, but it kept Gustavus from striking at Gdańsk. Jakub Pokojski, author of the first monograph on the battle, grants that the Swedes forced the hussars back on the first day but rejects the Swedish claim that Tczew was their first victory over the Polish hussars. The fighting was broken off when Gustavus Adolphus was badly wounded.¹⁰

Lack of money shaped the rest of the war. In his letters to the king and senators, as Szymon Wachoń has shown, Koniecpolski complained of the inefficient tax system and the nobility's lack of interest in the war. In 1628, facing Swedes who avoided battle in the open behind their fortifications, he was forced onto the defensive. In the spring of 1629 an imperial corps of about 5,000 men under Hans Georg von Arnim joined him.¹¹

He caught the withdrawing Swedish army near Trzciana in late June 1629: the Polish History Museum gives 25 June, Britannica and Wachoń 27 June. His horsemen broke the Swedish rearguard and then the cavalry Gustavus Adolphus sent against them, and the king himself nearly fell into Polish hands when a horseman seized him by his baldric. The Swedish cavalry was destroyed, but the infantry took refuge in Stuhm (Sztum) and slipped away to Malbork by night.¹² › Battle of Trzciana, 1629

The six-year Truce of Altmark, signed on 26 September 1629, still ended the war on terms unfavorable to the Commonwealth, for Koniecpolski could not take the fortresses the Swedes still held.¹³

What did Koniecpolski do as Grand Hetman?

Sigismund III named him Grand Hetman of the Crown, commander in chief of the Crown army, in April 1632, days before the king's own death. In 1633 he routed a Tatar raid at Sasowy Róg, and on 22 October he met the Turkish and Tatar army of Abaza Pasha from a fortified camp at Kamieniec Podolski. Abaza withdrew from the Commonwealth's territory, and in 1634 the war with Turkey ended in an agreement.¹⁴

Against the Cossacks he was hard. In 1630 he fought a rising led by Taras Fedorovych at Pereiaslav; after a three-week siege of the Cossack camp he settled on 8 June for renewing the Kurukove terms with the register raised to 8,000. In 1635 he backed and helped pay for the fortress of Kudak (Kodak) on the Dnieper, meant to keep the Cossacks in check. The risings of 1637 and 1638 were put down in the field by the field hetman, Mikołaj Potocki.¹⁵

His last great victory came on 30 January 1644 at Ochmatów, where Crown forces under Koniecpolski, joined by the troops of Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, broke a Tatar invasion led by Tugay Bey before it could plunder the country. The victory fed King Władysław IV's plans for a war against Turkey and the Crimea. Koniecpolski was cautious: he argued for a limited campaign against the Crimean Tatars and made an alliance with Muscovy its condition, a view he set down in his Discourse on the Destruction of the Tatars.¹⁶ › Battle of Okhmativ, 1644

What was Koniecpolski famous for?

Władysław Czapliński, in the PSB, writes that in his lifetime he was famous as the repeated conqueror of the Tatars and a worthy opponent of Gustavus Adolphus, and was counted an expert on the Tatars, the Crimea and Turkey. His method on the steppe, visible at Martynów, was to let a raid pass and catch it on the way home, slowed by its captives.¹⁷

He was also one of the largest landowners in Ukraine. He made Brody his residence and fortified the town with a citadel and bastions, begun in the early 1630s and probably laid out by the French engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan; at Podhorce (Pidhirtsi) he built a fortified palace in the later 1630s. Czapliński calls him a magnate in every inch, deeply religious but no fanatic, and a cruel and severe opponent of the Cossacks, whom he saw as enemies of the social order.¹⁸

How did Koniecpolski die?

He died suddenly at his residence in Brody in March 1646, on the eve of the war against Turkey and the Crimea that Władysław IV was preparing. The PSB, Mirosław Nagielski and Zbigniew Bania give 11 March; Britannica and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine give 12 March. His heir was his son Aleksander.¹⁹

The most visible monument he left stands in Warsaw. In 1643 he began a palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście, designed by Constantino Tencalla, which his son Aleksander completed in 1656. Rebuilt many times since, it is today the Presidential Palace.²⁰