The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its Cossack allies won a defensive victory at Khotyn on the Dniester in autumn 1621, holding for over a month against a vast Ottoman invasion led by Sultan Osman II. The failed campaign so humiliated the young sultan that it cost him his throne and his life.
In the autumn of 1621, a Polish-Lithuanian and Cossack army dug in near Khotyn on the Dniester and held for over a month against a vast Ottoman invasion led in person by the young Sultan Osman II1. The Ottomans could not break them, and the failed campaign so humiliated the sultan that it cost him his throne and his life, a rare case of a battle abroad triggering a regicide at home.
The Ottoman storm
Flush from a victory over the Poles the year before2, and provoked by Cossack raids on the Black Sea coast, Sultan Osman II gathered an enormous army, well over a hundred thousand strong, to invade the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Against this the aged hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, victor of Kircholm3, took command of a much smaller Polish-Lithuanian force, joined by a large body of Cossacks.
The fortified camp
Chodkiewicz chose to fight a defensive battle from a fortified camp beside the Dniester, near the castle of Khotyn. For over a month the Ottomans hurled assault after assault at the entrenchments, supported by their artillery, while the defenders, and above all the Cossack infantry, beat them back again and again. Chodkiewicz himself died during the siege, but the line held.1
The sultan checked
As autumn wore on, the Ottoman army was worn down by casualties, disease and the coming cold, unable to storm the camp or starve it out. With winter closing in and his troops exhausted, Osman II agreed to a peace that essentially restored the old border4. The great invasion had achieved nothing, and the sultan returned home empty-handed.
The price of failure
The humiliation was fatal to Osman II. Blaming the janissaries and planning to reform them, the young sultan provoked a revolt of the very troops he intended to curb. In 1622 the janissaries deposed and murdered him4, the first regicide of a reigning Ottoman sultan5. Khotyn checked Ottoman expansion in the north and became a celebrated moment in Polish memory.
Sahaidachny and the Cossacks
Khotyn was won as much by the Cossacks as by the Polish army. Tens of thousands of Zaporozhian Cossacks under Hetman Petro Sahaidachny2 held their own sector of the camp and repeatedly counterattacked the Ottoman lines, often at night. Sahaidachny was wounded during the campaign and died6 the following year. After Chodkiewicz's death in the camp, command passed to Stanisław Lubomirski, who saw the defence through to the peace. In Ukraine, Khotyn is remembered as one of the great feats of the Cossack host.
