Battle of Okhmativ, 1644: Koniecpolski stops the Tatars at the border

Crimean Tatar raids were the scourge of the Commonwealth's south-east. Professor Jolanta Choińska-Mika, speaking on Polish Radio, explains their purpose: not conquest but loot, and captives who could be sold in Istanbul. Usually the Polish army could only chase the raiders as they went home weighed down with plunder.²

In 1643 trouble was building. The historian Maciej Adam Pieńkowski, writing for Histmag, describes a Crimea ruined by bad harvests and war under Khan Mehmed IV Giray, and voices in Bakhchysarai calling for a raid. King Władysław IV warned his grand hetman, Stanisław Koniecpolski, that winter was no obstacle to the Tatars. In July a raid of 4,000 was beaten back by Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, and in Istanbul the sultan told the Polish envoy that the khan was his own blood and would seek redress if the customary gifts were not sent.³

Waiting for the horde

Koniecpolski had good spies and correspondents among the princes of Moldavia, and expected the attack in December or early January. Not knowing which trail the Tatars would take, he covered the whole frontier: Wiśniowiecki held the Dnieper with the registered Cossacks, and the crown guard Jan Odrzywolski watched the Kuczman and Black trails. The hetman himself had about 10,000 men.⁴

The Tatars, led by Tuhaj Bey of Perekop, crossed the Dnieper near Khortytsia on 23 January 1644. Their numbers are uncertain. The diarist Stanisław Oświęcim, who rode with the Polish army, put them at 20,000, which Pieńkowski thinks an exaggeration; the historian Bohdan Baranowski estimated 8,000 to 12,000. They had been on the march for 45 days in severe frost, Polish Radio notes.⁵

Koniecpolski moved from Bar to Vinnytsia and, learning where the horde had been sighted, marched for Ochmatów to cut it off. The Tatars were already attacking small towns; the townspeople of Ochmatów fired on them with their cannon. Misled by a prisoner into thinking the Polish army was small and unready, Tuhaj Bey decided to rest his horses and attack at dawn.⁶

Fog over the ponds

The field was surrounded by ponds whose ice was not yet thick. Koniecpolski sent his wagons over a dike and his troops over the ice, while skirmishers kept the Tatars busy. As the army formed for battle, a thick fog came down and hid its movements. Then a column was seen approaching from the north. For a moment the Poles took it for Tatars and began to turn their guns, until it proved to be Wiśniowiecki's division, which had come about 80 kilometers from Korsun.⁷

With Wiśniowiecki, the hetman had the largest force he had ever commanded. Oświęcim's diary lists 2,900 men of the standing army, 4,650 registered Cossacks and 13,580 in the private retinues of the magnates, more than 19,000 men in all, with 22 guns; Choińska-Mika notes that most of them were magnates' private troops.⁸

The charge across the dike

Tuhaj Bey sent some 6,000 men to hold the dike. They were swept away by hussars under Stefan Czarniecki of Stanisław Lubomirski's regiment, and the army began to cross. When the dike jammed, Wiśniowiecki sent the left wing straight over the ice. Tuhaj Bey ordered a retreat, leaving 7,000 men to cover his baggage train, but they could not hold. Polish cavalry, backed by guns and muskets, broke them.⁹

The pursuit lasted until dark. If the sun had stayed up two hours longer, Oświęcim wrote, the horde would not have escaped. On 31 January 5,000 volunteers under the Cossack commissioner Mikołaj Zaćwilichowski rode after the Tatars and caught their camp on the Sina Woda river; Choińska-Mika adds that the ice gave way under some of the fugitives. One group that tried to take Chyhyryn was beaten by the Cossacks of the Cherkasy regiment.¹⁰

A rare triumph

Tatar losses are uncertain. Pieńkowski thinks they were no more than 3,000 to 4,000; Polish Radio speaks of at least a third of the raiders over the whole expedition. The Polish army lost very few men and no officer of note. Koniecpolski reported to the king that the bey of Perekop had been carried back to Crimea barely alive on a stretcher.¹¹

Choińska-Mika calls Ochmatów the Commonwealth's greatest success against the Tatars in the whole seventeenth century, and for the first time the horde was beaten on the border before it could plunder. Accounts of the battle were printed in Italy and Germany. Pieńkowski notes that the victory encouraged Władysław IV's dreams of a great war against the Ottomans, and that the khan who had sent the raid was soon overthrown. The Polish Army Museum in Warsaw lists the battle among the landmarks of Polish military history.¹²

Tuhaj Bey survived, and Polish readers know him well: as Polish Radio points out, he is a character in Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy.¹³