When was the Battle of Filipów?

On 22 October 1656, during the Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth known as the Deluge.

Who fought at Filipów?

The Lithuanian division of Field Hetman Wincenty Gosiewski against a Swedish and Brandenburg army under Gustaf Otto Stenbock and Georg Friedrich of Waldeck.

How is Filipów connected to Prostki?

Two weeks earlier, on 8 October 1656, Gosiewski and his Tatar allies had won at Prostki. Filipów reversed that success after the Tatars left him.

What happened to Bogusław Radziwiłł at Filipów?

Ronikier says the Swedes recovered him from the Lithuanians; Augusiewicz, as reported by Rachuba, suggests he escaped, perhaps with Gosiewski's help.

Battle of Filipów, 1656: Gosiewski's defeat on the Prussian border

Q: Who won the Battle of Filipów?

The Swedes and Brandenburgers. Gosiewski withdrew before he could be surrounded, which kept his losses moderate.

Erik Dahlbergh's view of the battle of Filipów, 22 October 1656, published in Samuel Pufendorf's history of Charles X Gustav, 1696. Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Quick answer

Who won the Battle of Filipów?

The Swedes and Brandenburgers. On 22 October 1656 the army of Gustaf Otto Stenbock and Georg Friedrich of Waldeck attacked the Lithuanian division of Field Hetman Wincenty Gosiewski at Mieruniszki and Filipów, on the edge of Ducal Prussia. Gosiewski pulled his men out before they were surrounded, so his losses were moderate, but he lost part of his baggage and the field.¹

Filipów came two weeks after one of the best days the Commonwealth had in the Deluge, and it took most of the shine off it. On 8 October 1656 Gosiewski had beaten a Brandenburg and Swedish force at Prostki. On 22 October a new Swedish and Brandenburg army caught his division near the same border and drove it off.²

The Deluge and Ducal Prussia

In 1655 Charles X Gustav of Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was already at war with Muscovy and the Cossacks; Poles remember it as the Deluge. Ducal Prussia was a Polish fief, but its duke, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, sided with Sweden; in 1656 he recognized Charles X Gustav as his overlord and sent troops to fight beside the Swedes at Warsaw that summer.³

Dark locator map with a gold star in a glowing circle marking the approximate site of Battle of Filipów, the coasts, rivers and lakes of the region, and a small world map inset with the area boxed — Battle of Filipów: the star marks the approximate site, and the inset shows the area on a world map. Drawn for this article from Natural Earth data, with no modern borders. Location map: © Echoes of Battle (data: Natural Earth, public domain)

The answer from the Commonwealth was a punitive raid into Ducal Prussia by its Crimean Tatar allies with a Lithuanian division under Field Hetman Wincenty Gosiewski. It began well. At Prostki on 8 October the Lithuanians and Tatars won, and among their prisoners was Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł, the magnate who had gone over to the Swedes.⁴

Gosiewski's mistakes

Andrzej Rachuba, reviewing Sławomir Augusiewicz's study of the campaign, is blunt about what came next. Gosiewski lingered in Prussia without a clear aim, wasted time and lost the chance to act, and quarreled with the Tatars, above all over the valuable prisoner Radziwiłł. The Tatars left him, and so did Polish units and part of the Lithuanian ones. Against this weakened division the Swedes and Brandenburgers mounted a new offensive under Field Marshal Gustaf Otto Stenbock.⁵

22 October: Mieruniszki and Filipów

Stenbock and Count Georg Friedrich of Waldeck caught Gosiewski on 22 October near Filipów, in today's Suwałki district. The local history of Mieruniszki describes a surprise attack on the Lithuanian rear guard at Mieruniszki, with the Swedes and Brandenburgers holding the initiative from the start. Facing the risk of being outflanked, Gosiewski broke off and withdrew to the north.⁶

Erik Dahlbergh's engraving of the battle, published in 1696 in Samuel Pufendorf's history of Charles X Gustav, shows the Swedish and Brandenburg battalions on the plain and the Lithuanian army drawn up in a crescent on the hills. Dahlbergh, a Swedish officer and engineer, was in Poland during the war, and he drew it for the winning side.⁷

Losses and the fate of Radziwiłł

Ronikier, in the lexicon Bitwy polskie, puts the armies at about 8,500 Lithuanians against about 9,000 Swedes, and says the Lithuanians avoided heavy losses only by pulling out in good order. Gosiewski, writing to the nobility of Podlasie the next day from near Sejny, admitted that his men had scattered in different directions, but insisted the losses were smaller than rumor made them; he blamed the failure of the Tatars to arrive and the men who had ridden home with their Prussian loot. Rachuba notes that he still lost two cavalry captains, Korotkiewicz killed and Konstanty Pokłoński taken prisoner.⁸

What happened to Radziwiłł is disputed. Ronikier and the Mieruniszki local history say the Swedes recovered him at Filipów, along with part of the Lithuanian baggage. Augusiewicz, as Rachuba reports, suggests instead that Radziwiłł escaped from captivity, perhaps with Gosiewski's own help. The Mieruniszki history adds that the town of Filipów itself was taken and burned in the fighting, citing a German local study of 1906.⁹

Why Filipów matters

Rachuba's verdict is that the defeat had little effect on operations but real weight for prestige and propaganda. Gosiewski soon had to accept a short truce with the Elector on terms better for Brandenburg. The record is still being worked out: Augusiewicz's 2018 edition of Swedish sources, including Stenbock's campaign diary from the Riksarkivet in Stockholm, adds new details, and notes that a surviving list of Gosiewski's regiments may describe Prostki rather than Filipów. The battle belongs among the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; on the same date in 1764, far away in Bengal, the East India Company won at Buxar.¹⁰