Battle of Warsaw, 1656: how Sweden and Brandenburg won the three-day battle

For three summer days in 1656 the fields north of Praga, across the Vistula from Warsaw, held the largest battle of the Deluge, the Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth within the Second Northern War. A small, mobile army of Swedes and Brandenburgers attacked a far larger force of Poles, Lithuanians and Crimean Tatars, beat it, and took the capital back. The Swedes called it the three-day battle; Polish historians call it the battle of Warsaw, and it is remembered above all for one charge of Lithuanian hussars. (It is not the Battle of Warsaw of 1920.)²

Background: why Charles X Gustav fought at Warsaw in 1656

Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the summer of 1655, and Charles X Gustav entered Warsaw without a fight in September. Within months the country rose against the occupation. Charles chased the Polish forces deep into the south in the winter, was nearly trapped at the junction of the Vistula and the San, and broke out in early April 1656, while a relief force sent from Warsaw was destroyed at Warka. The Poles then cleared the Vistula valley behind him.³

John II Casimir came back to his capital in June with the army and the noble levy. Warsaw, held by a Swedish garrison under Arvid Wittenberg, was stormed and surrendered on 1 July 1656. Charles was too weak to relieve it, and his position was darkening on every side: a Dutch fleet was entering the Baltic to relieve Danzig, and Muscovy had declared war on Sweden in May.⁴

Charles turned to Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, whose duchy he already held as a Swedish fief. By the Treaty of Marienburg (Malbork) of 25 June 1656 the elector entered a close military alliance with Sweden, in return for the promise of the provinces of Greater Poland. Kubala writes that the elector had some 20,000 men ready, more than Charles could still put into the field himself.⁵

Armies and commanders: who fought at Warsaw?

The allies. The Swedish king and the elector joined forces north of Warsaw in late July; Kubala notes that they took food for only three days. Frost counts about 18,000 men, Bain the same. What is striking, Frost notes, is their make-up: sixty cavalry squadrons, about 12,500 men, against only about 5,500 infantry. The Brandenburg contingent of about 8,500 was nearly half of the whole army.⁶

The Commonwealth. John Casimir had gathered a much larger force, but of uneven quality. By Frost's count it held 24,000 to 25,000 regulars, 10,000 to 13,000 men of the noble levy and 2,000 Crimean Tatars, about 40,000 in all, of whom only about 4,500 were infantry. The levy was already melting away: Kubala describes whole palatinate contingents going home before the battle, anxious for their estates.⁷

Two plans. The king wanted a decisive battle in the open field. Stefan Czarniecki, the commander who had harried Charles all spring, argued against it: the Swedish firepower, he said, should be worn down by raids and hunger, the war of harassment that had already cost the enemy dearly. John Casimir overruled him. Czarniecki was sent with a cavalry force up the left bank of the Vistula to guard against a crossing there, and he took no part in the battle; Frost puts his force at 2,000 horse, Kubala at 4,000 to 5,000.⁸

The Polish army crossed to the right bank and dug in before the Lithuanian camp at Praga, while the Tatars, allies of the Commonwealth in this war, arrived from the east. For the allies, the plan was simple: march up the right bank, attack the Lithuanians in their camp, cut the bridge and then deal with the rest.⁹

Day one, 28 July: the attack along the Vistula

On 28 July the allies marched down the right bank, the Swedes leading. The road ran through a narrow strip of open ground between the Białołęka forest and the river, and across it the Poles had built earthworks and placed most of their infantry. Charles attacked frontally. Kubala describes the leading Swedish squadrons, pushed forward by the regiments behind them, standing within musket range of the redoubts until late at night under fire from the earthworks and even from guns across the river, and the king himself leading several squadrons to throw back a sortie.¹⁰

The attack failed. By nightfall the allies were still pinned in the corridor beside the Vistula, unable to break the Polish line, and the Poles had reason to think the day was theirs.¹¹

Day two, 29 July: the flank march and the hussar charge

The next morning the allies did something only a largely mounted army could attempt. Instead of renewing the frontal assault, they wheeled left through the Białołęka forest, the infantry screened by the cavalry, and moved their whole force onto the open plain on the Polish right, toward Bródno. It was a slow and risky march over marsh and scrub, with Lithuanian and Tatar horsemen attacking all the way. By the afternoon the allied army stood in battle order on the plain, its infantry in the center and its cavalry on the wings.¹²

Only then did the Poles strike. Aleksander Hilary Połubiński, the Lithuanian field clerk, led his hussars not at the allied infantry in the center but at the cavalry flanking it, and they crashed into the Swedish Uppland and Småland regiments. They broke through the first line and into the second before they were halted and driven back. Recent Polish research, Hundert and Majewski note, shows that only Lithuanian hussars charged, and far fewer than once thought; Frost puts the maximum at 800.¹³

The charge broke the first allied line. It failed because nothing followed it.

The reason, both Frost and Kubala argue, was that the charge was never supported. The other banners went in late and piecemeal, the pancerni in reserve did not press home the attack, and the allied cavalry, drawn up in three lines, had the depth to absorb the blow. Kubala quotes the verdict later put before the Sejm: one banner of Lithuanian hussars had thrown both the king and the elector into such confusion that, had it been supported, the battle could have been won.¹⁴

The most famous moment of the charge is still argued over. Polish narrative sources say a hussar reached Charles X Gustav himself and struck at him with his lance; they disagree on his name. A resolution of the Warsaw nobility of 1672, published by Hundert and Majewski, names two men who rode at the king together, Wojciech Lipski and Jakub Kowalewski, and says both died. The Polish historian Wojciech Krawczuk, following Samuel Pufendorf, the Swedish court historian, has argued instead that it was Crimean Tatars who endangered the king, and that the hussar story is postwar propaganda. Hundert and Majewski argue that the 1672 resolution, a formal record, refutes this.¹⁵

The Tatars did reach the allied rear that afternoon. Kubala describes them falling on the baggage and the reserve near Bródno, and the Swedish king riding in with his guard to drive them off, at one point caught among a handful of Tatar horsemen. Hundert and Majewski note that Krawczuk based his view on Pufendorf's account of the Tatar threat to the king.¹⁶

Day three, 30 July: the retreat across the Vistula

The allies had held. Judging the battle lost, John Casimir began that night to send his baggage, guns and infantry back across the single bridge to the left bank, and the cavalry was to join the Tatars. Kubala describes the confusion this caused in the dark, and much of the noble levy slipping away in the river fog at dawn on 30 July. The allies then rolled forward across the plain, took the woods before Praga and closed on the Lithuanian camp, while the Polish infantry fell back to the bridge. The Polish and Lithuanian horse escaped north and south along the Vistula, and John Casimir gave up his capital for the second time in twelve months.¹⁷

Who won the Battle of Warsaw in 1656?

Sweden and Brandenburg won, and they reoccupied Warsaw. But Bain, the British historian of Scandinavia, called it a brilliant feat of arms that was altogether fruitless, and the Polish History Museum's calendar stresses that the Polish army was not destroyed and withdrew across the Vistula. Frost calls it a famous victory from which the Swedes derived little benefit.¹⁸

Frost reads the battle as a lesson in how warfare had changed in eastern Europe. The allies won with cavalry, as the Poles had once won at Kircholm; the Poles, with their dug-in infantry, tried to fight a western-style battle. In his words, the Poles had been beaten at their own game. He rejects the Swedish writer Peter Englund's picture of the hussar charge as the end of the Middle Ages: the winged hussars, he argues, were a modern answer to modern war, beaten here by the depth of the allied lines and by their own small numbers.¹⁹

How many died at the Battle of Warsaw?

Exact losses are unknown. Kubala, drawing on the French envoy Antoine de Lumbres and on the Scottish officer Patrick Gordon, gives about 2,000 Polish and Lithuanian dead in the three days, and he notes that rumors spread at the time of 8,000 dead and of the king taken prisoner. Frost calls the Polish-Lithuanian losses insignificant and notes that John Casimir quickly regrouped at Lublin. For the allies these sources give no total; Kubala writes only that few Swedes fell in the field.²⁰

What happened after the Battle of Warsaw?

The alliance began to come apart at once. The allies pushed south as far as Radom, but Frederick William had no wish to win more of Poland for Sweden, and with his garrisons in Greater Poland he refused further cooperation. Without the Brandenburgers, Charles had too few men for a sustained campaign and withdrew north to Royal Prussia. Bain adds that Czarniecki's new successes and the elector's suspicious attitude soon pushed the king to seek talks.²¹

The Commonwealth struck back quickly. On 8 October 1656, at Prostki in Ducal Prussia, the Lithuanian field hetman Wincenty Gosiewski, with Crimean Tatars at his side, destroyed a smaller Swedish and Brandenburg force and took Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł prisoner. Two weeks later Gosiewski was beaten at Filipów, but, Frost notes, folk memories of the Tatar raid into the duchy lasted into the 20th century.²²

To keep his ally, Charles paid with sovereignty. By the Treaty of Labiau of 20 November 1656 Sweden released Frederick William from feudal dependence and recognized him as the sovereign ruler of Ducal Prussia. In December Charles found another ally in George II Rákóczi of Transylvania. Then, in 1657, with Charles gone to fight Denmark, the elector changed sides: by the treaties of Wehlau (19 September) and Bromberg (6 November) John Casimir too renounced his overlordship of Prussia, and the Peace of Oliva in May 1660 confirmed it.²³

Why the Battle of Warsaw mattered

For Brandenburg it was a beginning. The German national biography says that in the three-day battle for Warsaw the Brandenburg army proved itself for the first time, and its 19th-century predecessor calls it a brilliant victory in which the elector first tested his forces. In the bargaining that followed he won full sovereignty over Ducal Prussia, first from Sweden and then from Poland. Krzysztof Lik notes that Frederick William long cherished the memory of the shared victory.²⁴

For Sweden, it showed what Charles X Gustav's cavalry army could do on the field and how little it could achieve without enough men to hold the country. For the Commonwealth, it was a defeat without ruin. The hussar charge became one of the most famous episodes of the Deluge, and Hundert and Majewski note that the hussar who rode at the Swedish king lives on in literature as Roch Kowalski in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel The Deluge. Read more about Stefan Czarniecki, who argued against fighting this battle at all, and the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.²⁵

Where was the Battle of Warsaw fought?

The battle was fought on the right bank of the Vistula, north and northeast of Praga, then a separate town opposite Warsaw: along the river toward Żerań on the first day, and on the plain between the Białołęka forest and the village of Bródno on the second. All of these places now lie within Warsaw, and Kubala noted already a century ago that the battlefield had changed beyond recognition.²⁶