Stanisław Żółkiewski: the hetman who marched on Moscow

Żółkiewski's life ran from the court of the last Jagiellonian king to the walls of the Kremlin and a lonely death on the Dniester steppe. He won the most famous cavalry victory in Polish history, put a Polish prince on the throne of the tsars by treaty, and saw his own king throw the prize away. Later generations made him a model of the citizen-soldier who died for his country; his contemporaries, the Museum of Polish History reminds us, also saw a quick-tempered and polarizing politician.²

Early life

Stanisław Żółkiewski was born, most likely in 1547, at Turynka near Lwów (Lviv) in the Ruthenian Voivodeship, into a noble family of middling wealth with a long tradition of military service. His father, also Stanisław, held minor offices at first and rose later to be voivode of Ruthenia; he was a client of the Zamoyski family, a connection that would shape his son's whole career.³

Unlike magnates' sons, he did not study abroad. He was educated at the cathedral school in Lwów and read widely on his own, above all in ancient history and military affairs. In 1566 he was sent to the royal court under the care of his relative Jan Zamoyski, five years his senior, and in 1573 he went with Zamoyski to Paris in the delegation that announced the election of Henri of Valois as king of Poland.⁴

In Zamoyski's shadow

Under King Stefan Batory, Zamoyski rose to be grand hetman and chancellor, and Żółkiewski rose with him. He served as a cavalry captain in the war against rebellious Gdańsk in 1577 and fought in Batory's campaigns against Muscovy in Livonia from 1579 to 1582, often in command roles. In 1584 he carried out Zamoyski's order to arrest the outlaw Samuel Zborowski, whose execution became one of the great political scandals of the age.⁵

After Batory's death the Habsburg archduke Maximilian tried to take the throne by force from the new king, Sigismund III Vasa. At Byczyna on 24 January 1588 Zamoyski's army defeated and captured him. Żółkiewski distinguished himself by taking a Habsburg banner but was badly wounded in the leg, and he limped for the rest of his life. His reward was the baton of Crown field hetman, the deputy commander of the Crown army, in 1588, and in 1590 a seat in the Senate as castellan of Lwów.⁶ › Jan Zamoyski

Field hetman

With Zamoyski he intervened in Moldavia in 1595 to install a friendly prince, Ieremia Movilă, and fought the Tatars and Ottomans in the first battle at Cecora (Țuțora), a Polish success. In 1596 he crushed the Cossack rising of Severyn Nalyvaiko in Ukraine. In 1600 he returned to Moldavia with Zamoyski, and in 1602 he followed him north to Livonia in the war against Sweden.⁷ › Battle of Cecora, 1595

Zamoyski's death in 1605 left Żółkiewski the leading soldier of the Crown, but not its political master. When Mikołaj Zebrzydowski led the nobility in armed revolt against the king, Żółkiewski sided with Sigismund and was one of the commanders who defeated the rebels at Guzów (5 July 1607, the date given by the Polish Army Museum), then argued for reconciliation. He was made voivode of Kyiv, but the rebels' supporters never forgave him, which later made it harder for him to hold the army together.⁸

Klushino

In 1609 Sigismund III invaded Muscovy, torn apart by the Time of Troubles, and laid siege to Smolensk; Żółkiewski, who had warned against a war without proper preparation, took command in the field. He wanted to march quickly on Moscow instead of sitting before the fortress, and the siege dragged on for months. When a Russian army under Dmitry Shuisky, brother of Tsar Vasily IV, moved to relieve Smolensk with Swedish mercenaries under Jacob De la Gardie, Żółkiewski persuaded the king to give him a small force and went to meet it.⁹

He left a few Cossacks to mask his departure from a besieged Russian fort at Tsaryovo-Zaymishche, marched through the woods overnight with mostly cavalry and a couple of small guns, and on 4 July 1610 attacked the enemy camp at Klushino. The odds are reported differently: the Sejm resolution of 2019 speaks of about 3,000 horse, mostly hussars, against more than 30,000 Russians and Swedes; the Museum of Polish History calls the enemy army almost five times his size. In a long morning's fighting the hussars broke the Russian and Swedish cavalry, and the abandoned mercenary infantry surrendered. The victory, the Museum's article says, was won "with extraordinary energy."¹⁰ › Battle of Klushino, 1610

Moscow and the lost crown

Klushino opened the road to Moscow and brought down Vasily Shuisky, whom the boyars forced to give up the throne. Żółkiewski reached the capital and signed an agreement with the boyars under which Sigismund's son, Prince Władysław, was proclaimed tsar, on condition that he accept Orthodoxy. Polish troops occupied the Kremlin. Britannica calls this the moment the boyars elected Władysław tsar.¹¹

Sigismund refused to accept the treaty: he would not send his young son to Moscow and wanted the crown for himself. Britannica judges that the king's veto wasted the opportunity and left a residue of Russian hatred of Poland. Żółkiewski gave up his command and went home, taking the deposed tsar and his brothers with him; on 29 October 1611 he presented them before the king and the Sejm in Warsaw, where they paid homage to Sigismund. He then wrote his own account of the war, The Beginning and Course of the Muscovite War, critical of the king's policy. The Polish garrison in the Kremlin surrendered in November 1612.¹²

The last years

Back in the south, Żółkiewski spent his last decade defending the frontier against the Tatars and steering policy toward Moldavia and the Ottoman Empire. He kept the Commonwealth out of open war with the Ottomans and negotiated settlements with them, one of them in 1617. In 1618 he finally received the offices Zamoyski had held, grand hetman and chancellor of the Crown. The dates differ by source: the Encyclopedia of Ukraine dates the grand hetmancy from 1613.¹³

That same year a campaign against Tatar raiders ended in humiliation at Orynin, when commanders refused to join his camp and the raiders escaped with their captives. His authority was fading, and he was over seventy.¹⁴

Command style

Żółkiewski was bold to the point of rashness: at Klushino a surprise march and attack against a much larger enemy won the day. He was a cavalry commander above all. He read widely in ancient military history and saw war as a matter of preparation: he warned the king against starting the Muscovite war without money or political groundwork.¹⁵

His constant problem was money and obedience. Royal troops were too few and too rarely paid, so the hetman often paid soldiers out of his own pocket and had to rely on private armies of magnates who were not bound to obey him. Both Museum of Polish History articles see this as his weakness: unlike Zamoyski, he lacked the political touch to hold such a coalition together, and it contributed to his final defeat.¹⁶

Death at Cecora

In 1620, as tension with the Ottoman Empire grew, the old hetman led a poorly prepared army into Moldavia on a pre-emptive expedition and camped at Cecora, where he had fought twenty-five years before. The army was badly beaten there, and Żółkiewski tried to lead it back toward the Polish border, but during the retreat it fell apart. He was killed on the night of 6 to 7 October 1620 (the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 7 October).¹⁷

His head was sent to Constantinople as a trophy. His body was brought home and buried in the collegiate church of his family town, Żółkiew (Zhovkva).¹⁸

Legacy and memory

The death of a seventy-three-year-old hetman fighting to the end turned Żółkiewski into a national hero. Later generations held him up as a model of civic virtue, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries his death became a favorite subject of painters such as Walery Eljasz-Radzikowski. In 2019 the Polish Sejm declared 2020 the Year of Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski, naming him among the most outstanding commanders in Polish history.¹⁹

Modern historians paint a more rounded picture. Without denying his talent, the Museum of Polish History describes a commander who was also a shrewd and sometimes self-interested politician of his time and class, ridiculed by his enemies in his last years.²⁰

Read about his mentor Jan Zamoyski, his contemporary Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, the victor of Kircholm, or the other greatest Polish commanders.