On 7 April 1656 Polish cavalry under Stefan Czarniecki and Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski caught a Swedish relief corps under Frederick, Margrave of Baden, at Warka, south of Warsaw. The Swedes had crossed the flooded Pilica River and partly broken the bridge behind them, but the Poles found a ford, attacked and routed them. It did not decide the war, yet it was the first Polish victory in open battle since the Swedish invasion of 1655, and it showed that Swedish cavalry could be beaten.
A king in a trap
In the summer of 1655 King Charles X Gustav of Sweden invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the start of what Poles call the Deluge. Polskie Radio notes that within months the Swedes held almost the whole country, Warsaw and Kraków included, and that King John Casimir had to leave. By the end of the year looting and abuses by the occupying troops had provoked armed resistance.1
In early 1656 Charles Gustav marched south toward John Casimir, but Polish forces under Czarniecki harried him without giving battle, and the Swedish king ended up hemmed in where the San flows into the Vistula. A relief force set out from Warsaw to rescue him.2
Three days in the saddle
On 4 April Czarniecki and Lubomirski took 6,000 to 8,000 men and rode against the relief corps, leaving the rest of their forces to watch the king. Its commander, Frederick, Margrave of Baden, began to fall back toward Warsaw, moving slowly with a long baggage train. Polskie Radio puts his strength at about 2,500 men, while a report printed in Rome in 1656, later published among the papal nuncios' dispatches, spoke of 5,000 picked soldiers.3
According to Polskie Radio, the Polish cavalry covered 170 kilometers in three days and destroyed the Swedish rear guard on the way. On the morning of 7 April they reached the Pilica at Warka, a few hours after the main Swedish force had crossed. In the words of the historian Władysław Czapliński, quoted by Polskie Radio, the Swedish commander had partly destroyed the bridge, counting on the flooded river to hold the Poles up for a while.4
Over the Pilica
It did not. The Poles left a small party to repair the bridge, found a ford and crossed. Czarniecki dealt easily with the weak detachments left in Warka, while Lubomirski engaged the margrave's main body. At first the fight was even. It was Czarniecki's arrival with the rest of the troops that decided it, and the Swedes broke and fled, many of them falling into the hands of armed peasants.5
The nuncio's report counts about 250 Swedish prisoners, 40 of them officers, and 200 captured wagons. Nearly all the rest of the figures for this battle, from the size of the armies to the dead, vary between accounts.6
What Warka meant
Strategically, Warka changed little. While the Polish cavalry was away, Charles Gustav slipped out of the trap, and the war went on until the Peace of Oliva in 1660. Its value was in morale. The Ministry of Education's history materials call it the first victory of the Commonwealth in open battle during the Deluge, and Polskie Radio describes it as a turning point when Polish hussars proved superior to Swedish reiters.7
Warka still remembers its hetman. The town celebrated the battle's 300th anniversary in 1956, named its market square after Czarniecki, and in 2001 gave his name to the rebuilt bridge over the Pilica. His life is told in our article on Stefan Czarniecki.8
