Ottoman-Polish War 1620–1621
| date | 1620-1621 |
|---|---|
| place | Chocim , Poland-Lithuania, today Ukraine , Romania and Republic of Moldova |
| output | Polish-Ottoman armistice and peace treaty based on the status quo ante bellum |
| consequences | Favorable treaty in favor of the Ottoman Empire, Poland withdraws behind the Dniester, the Ottomans renew their sovereignty over the Danube principalities |
| Peace treaty | Treaty of Chocim |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Commander | |
 Sultan Osman II. Crimean Khan Canibek Giray Iskander Paşa Khan Temir Murza Grand Vizier Ali Paşa Grand Vizier Hüseyin Paşa Grand Vizier Dilaver Paşa |
.jpg) King Sigismund III. Wasa Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski Prince Gaspar Gratiani Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz Wojew. Stanisław Lubomirski Prince Władysław IV. Wasa Ataman Sahaidachnyj |
| Troop strength | |
| up to 22,000 men (1620); up to 300,000 men (at least 250,000 men, including 100,000 men in the entourage, 1621); |
up to 9,000 men (1620); up to 76,000 men (1621); |
| losses | |
|
low (1620); up to 60,000 men (1621); |
high (1620); up to 15,000 men (1621); |
The Ottoman-Polish War 1620–1621 was fought between the Ottoman Empire and Poland-Lithuania for suzerainty over the Danube principalities , especially the Principality of Moldova , to which both sides claimed. The war began in 1620 and ended in 1621 with the Treaty of Chocim , in which Poland-Lithuania waived its claims.
background
Relations between Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire were mostly peaceful or even friendly in the 16th century. From the last decade of the 16th century , however, there were disagreements:
On the one hand, with the approval of the king , Polish magnates increasingly tried to interfere in the internal affairs of the Principality of Moldova (an Ottoman vassal state ) and to secure the gospodar throne for the boyar family Mohyla (Roman. Movilă ) . The Polish Grand Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski was politically involved in the conflict in Moldova in 1612, 1616 and 1617 , which was temporarily ended on November 22, 1617 with the Treaty of Busza on the Dniester with Iskander Paşa, the Sultan's representative in the Greater Silstrian Province .
There were also mutual raids in the Polish-Ottoman border area by the Crimean and Nogay -Tataren, the vassals of the sultan were, and below the Polish crown Zaporozhian Cossacks . During their raids, these two groups had repeatedly penetrated far into the areas of the Rzeczpospolita or the Ottoman Empire and, among other things, had sacked Sinop in 1614 and the banks of the Bosporus in 1615 .
Thirdly, it was about the campaigns of the Protestant prince Gábor Bethlen of Transylvania , which he undertook since 1619 against the rule of the Habsburgs over Hungary and their policy of recatholization . He took advantage of the involvement of Emperor Ferdinand II in the Thirty Years War and penetrated as far as Vienna . The Polish King Sigismund III. Wasa sent troops (so-called "Lisowski Cossacks", Polish "Lisowczycy") to support the Catholic camp. They defeated the Transylvanians under Georg I. Rákóczi in 1619 near Humenné in what was then Upper Hungary and forced Bethlen to give up his siege of the imperial capital Vienna. He in turn turned to his suzerain , the Ottoman sultan, and asked for military assistance against the Poles.
In this situation Gaspar Gratiani, ruler of the Vltava, allied himself with Poland and stood openly against his Ottoman liege lord. Thereupon the young Sultan Osman II sent an army of 22,000 men to the Danube. Since the Polish king did not succeed in persuading the Sejm to approve funds for an intervention force ( Szlachta did not see the interests of the Rzeczpospolita in this conflict and was at the same time against unilateral support for the Catholic camp), a private army was established under the elderly Żółkiewski (8,000 men) erected. This was financed by magnates interested in the conflict.
The campaign of 1620
On September 10, the Polish army encountered Ottoman and Tatar forces at Cecora (today Țuțora in Iași County in Romania) near the Prut River , which were supposed to support Gábor Bethlen in the fight against the Habsburgs . In view of their numerical inferiority, the Poles dared not attack and took up a defensive position. With a surprise attack by the Tatars on September 17th, in which numerous prisoners were taken, a battle that lasted several days began and continued until October 7th. In view of the clear numerical superiority of the Ottoman army, most of the Moldovan soldiers (in any case, instead of the 25,000 men promised by Gratiani, not even 1,000 had appeared in the Polish camp) and attacked the Polish armed forces. Although the Poles were already defeated by September 19, Koniecpolski tried to maintain order and thus prevent the collapse of his army.
After Żółkiewski had ordered an orderly retreat (under permanent enemy influence), the breakthrough through the Turkish ranks succeeded on September 29. Numerous attacks by the Nogai Tatars under their Khan Temir and the Janissaries to which the Polish army was exposed in the days that followed were able to be repulsed, but increasingly signs of disintegration became apparent. A massive Turkish attack on October 6th ultimately resulted in most of the magnates and nobles fleeing with the cavalry , abandoning the infantry and entourage . Their desertion resulted in the Polish army being almost completely wiped out. The majority of Polish soldiers were killed or taken prisoner. The prisoners also included Stanisław Koniecpolski, the son-in-law of the commanding Grand Hetman, and Bohdan Khmelnyzkyj , who later became the leader of the Great Cossack Uprising of 1648–1654. Żółkiewski himself fell, the Turks sent his head in triumph to Istanbul . Only a few managed to escape across the Dniester, including Gratiani, who was murdered shortly afterwards by Moldovan boyars for fear of reprisals from the Turks. The onset of winter prevented the successful Ottoman campaign from continuing immediately.
The campaign of 1621
The Cecora disaster motivated the Sejm to give up its resistance to the military plans of the king and the magnates. In December 1620, the aristocratic parliament approved the funds for an army of up to 40,000 men for the necessary defensive battle, without which Ukraine would have been open to military intervention by the Turks. Depending on the source, between 32,510 and 35,105 men came together who were under the command of Crown Prince Władysław Wasa and the Lithuanian Grand Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz. In contrast to the previous year, the Zaporozhian Cossacks also took part in the war with up to 40,000 fighters under their ataman Petro Konaschewytsch-Sahaidachnyj . The British historian Norman Davies estimates that there were a total of 65,000 men on the Polish-Lithuanian side. On August 20, 1621, this force crossed the Dniester and built a fortified camp near Chocim (today Chotyn in Chernivtsi Oblast in Ukraine). The city and the fortress itself were not retaken by the Turks until 1620. Shortly afterwards an Ottoman armed force arrived there, consisting of at least 150,000 "Turks" (including the elite troops of the Janissaries and Sipahi ), Crimean and Nogai Tatars, Moldavians and Wallachians , and which Sultan Osman II personally commanded, followed by one A train of up to 100,000 men. The army of the Ottoman Empire outnumbered the Polish-Cossack army almost by a factor of three, but the loyalty of the Wallachians and Moldovans, who were assigned as auxiliary troops, was only limited. The Turks carried out several assaults on the camp, the fortification works were not yet completed. Since these were repulsed, they besieged the camp for five weeks and advanced over a quickly built bridge to Podolia in order to cut off the Polish-Lithuanian supplies from the fortress Kamieniec Podolski . According to legend, there was only one barrel of gunpowder left in the Chocim camp . Two commanders fighting on the Polish side fell as a result of the war: Ataman Konaschewytsch-Sahaidachnyj was so badly injured that he succumbed to his wounds six months later, Hetman Chodkiewicz died on September 24th in the Chocim camp. He was followed by Stanisław Lubomirski as military leader ( regiment doctor ), who managed to maintain the morale of the trapped against the overwhelming power of the Turkish besiegers. Because the janissaries finally refused to obey another storm on the camp, Sultan Osman II broke off the siege on September 28th.
Armistice and Peace
On October 9, 1621, Sultan Osman II and Crown Prince Władysław signed a peace treaty in Chocim that restored the status quo ante bellum and essentially repeated the provisions of the 1617 Treaty of Busza: the Dniester was affirmed as the border between the two empires, Poland -Lithuania refrained from further interference in the internal affairs of the Danube principalities and undertook to pay Khan Temir an annual "gift". In return, the Tatars promised to renounce their regular raids, and Poland-Lithuania received the right to have a permanent envoy at the Sublime Porte .
consequences
The treaty did not bring peace. Poland-Lithuania had been promised that the Tatar raids would stop, but nineteen more raids by the Nogaier horde were counted in the years 1622 to 1629 alone. The raids by the Cossacks also continued, so the monasteries around Sozopol and Ahtopol were robbed several times. In 1633 the Ottoman Beylerbey of the Greater Silstrian Province, Abaza Mehmed Pascha , undertook a campaign against Poland-Lithuania which did not interrupt the de jure state of peace between the two empires, because there was no official declaration of war on the part of the Ottoman sultan. Nevertheless, both empires were de facto in a state of war . This is referred to by some authors as the Ottoman-Polish War 1633–1634 . In the Ottoman-Polish War 1672–1676 and the Ottoman-Polish War 1683–1699 , the armed conflicts between Poland and the Ottoman Empire continued until the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699 finally ended the conflict.
For Osman II the campaign ushered in the end of his rule. When, after the mutiny of the Janissaries in front of Chocim, he was thinking about setting up a troop of Arabs who were loyal to him against this notoriously headstrong elite unit, the Janissaries heard about this, who then murdered him and his mentally handicapped uncle Mustafa I for the second time as obvious incapable but manageable sultan installed.
reception
The victory of Chocim was celebrated throughout Europe: for the first time since the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Ottoman Empire was stopped on land. Pope Gregory XV decided on a festival of thanksgiving lasting several days, and the Polish-Lithuanian victory was glorified for a long time in heroes' songs and paintings.
Jakub Sobieski (1590–1646), the father of the future Polish King John III. Sobieski , wrote a detailed account of his experiences during the Battle of Chocim in Latin . These " Commentariorum chotinensis belli libri tres " were published in Gdansk in 1646 and were widely distributed beyond Poland. The Baroque poet Wacław Potocki (1621–1696) used it as a main source for his ten-part heroic poem Wojna chocimska (The War of Chocim), which was written around 1670. In it Potocki offers a historically reasonably reliable, rhymed chronicle of the siege, but mixes it with an idolization of the Grand Hetman Chodkiewicz, in which he "saw the ideal of the Christian knight shine for the last time ". This is interrupted by numerous sottises , pasquills and satires on the magnate oligarchy of his presence, which, in Potocki's opinion, was to blame for the decline of the Rzeczpospolita , which makes the composition of the work appear chaotic and amorphous. Nevertheless, the Wojna chocimska is considered “the most celebrated epic poem in Polish literature”.
The Battle of Chocim was also repeatedly depicted in the painting. The Dutch painter Jan van Huchtenburgh († 1733), who had accompanied Prince Eugene's Balkan campaigns in the early 18th century and glorified it in large-format tableaus, also painted a battle at Chocim , which he followed in the same tradition of defending the Christian West against the threat of the Turks saw. The Polish history painter Józef Brandt († 1915) dealt with the first Ottoman-Polish War with a completely different intention : For him, this war was proof that his fatherland, even if it was not a sovereign one at the time of the division of 1795–1918 Was allowed to form a state, the kingdom of Prussia , the House of Austria and the Russian Empire at least as important, if not superior, because it had saved them from the further advance of the Turks.
See also
- Turkish Wars
- History of Poland
- History of Lithuania
- History of turkey
- Ottoman-Polish War 1633–1634
- Tatar-Cossack-Polish War 1666–1671
- Ottoman-Polish War 1672–1676
- Ottoman-Polish War 1683–1699
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Józef Szujski: Dzieje Polski podług ostatnich badań. Volume 3, Lwów 1866, p. 218.
- ↑ Léonard Chodzko: Histoire populaire de la Pologne. Collection Georges Barba, Paris 1864, p. 152.
- ↑ a b Tomasz Święcki, Kazimierz Józef Turowski: Opis starożytnej Polski. Volume 1, Krakow 1861, p. 193.
- ↑ They got their nickname after the family name of their first commander, who was called Lisowski .
- ↑ Paweł Jasienica: Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Srebrny wiek, Volume 1, p. 331.
- ^ Henryk Wisner: The Noble Republic and the Thirty Years War. In: Heinz Duchhardt, Eva Ortlieb (ed.): The Westphalian Peace. Diplomacy, political caesura, cultural environment, history of ideas. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1998, p. 410.
- ^ A b c Simon Millar, Peter Dennis: Vienna 1683. Christian Europe Repels the Ottomans. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2008, p. 8.
- ↑ a b c Stephen R. Turnbull: The Ottoman Empire 1326–1699. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2003, p. 84.
- ↑ Leszek Podhorodecki: Chocim 1621. 1988, p. 16.
- ↑ Serhii Plokhy: The Cossacks and religion in early modern Ukraine. P. 35.
- ^ Norman Davies : God's Playground. A History of Poland, Volume 1: The Origins to 1795. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981, p. 347.
- ↑ Ethnic Turks from Anatolia and subjugated by the Turks Balkan peoples , for example, Albanians and Bosnians .
- ↑ Léonard Chodzko: Histoire populaire de la Pologne. P. 152.
- ↑ Josef Engel (ed.): The emergence of modern Europe (= manual of European history.) Ed. v. Theodor Schieder . Volume 3, Union Verlag, Stuttgart 1971, p. 1047; Norman Davies : God's Playground. A History of Poland, Volume 1: The Origins to 1795. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981, p. 347.
- ↑ Wolfgang Gust : The Empire of the Sultans: A History of the Ottoman Empire. 1995, p. 186; Leszek Podhorodecki : Wojna polsko-turecka 1633–1634. r. 27, in “Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości”, T. 20, Warszawa 1976; “Studia i Materiały do Historii Wojskowości”, Volume 19, Issues 1–2, 1973, p. 12; Janusz Sikorski : Polskie tradycje wojskowe. Volume 1, p. 479.
- ↑ Ernst J. Krywon: Wojna Chocimska. In: Kindlers Literature Lexicon . Kindler Verlag, Zurich 1964, Volume 12, p. 10263.
- ^ Norman Davies: God's Playground. A History of Poland in Two Volumes. Volume 1: The Origins to 1795. Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 347.
literature
- Carl Brockelmann : History of the Islamic Peoples and States. Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 1977. (= reprint of the first edition from 1939)
- Norman Davies: God's Playground. A History of Poland. Volume 1: The Origins to 1795. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1981.
- Josef Engel (Hrsg.): The emergence of modern Europe (= manual of European history. Volume 3). Union Verlag, Stuttgart 1971.
- Simon Millar, Peter Dennis: Vienna 1683. Christian Europe Repels the Ottomans. Osprey Publishing, Oxford 2008.
- Stanford Jay Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw: History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire 1280-1808. Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Web links
- Polish Warfare: 1618–1621 War with Turkey , on portal: jasinski.co.uk (English)