On 24 January 1588, outside the small Silesian town of Byczyna (Pitschen in German), the army of Grand Hetman Jan Zamoyski defeated the forces of Archduke Maximilian of Austria, a Habsburg who claimed the Polish crown. The battle was short and bloody. Maximilian surrendered, and a brother of the Holy Roman Emperor became a prisoner of the Polish chancellor. The victory settled a disputed royal election in favor of Sigismund III Vasa.
A crown with two claimants
After the death of King Stephen Báthory, the free election of 1587 produced two rival kings. Most of the nobility chose the Swedish prince Sigismund Vasa, a distant relative of the Jagiellonian dynasty, while a faction led by the powerful Zborowski family proclaimed Archduke Maximilian Habsburg. Sigismund's leading supporter was Jan Zamoyski, Grand Chancellor and Grand Hetman of the Crown, whose career is told in our article on Jan Zamoyski.1
Maximilian marched on Kraków to have himself crowned, but Zamoyski defended the city and an assault in late 1587 failed (the Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne edition of a period text dates it to 23 November 1587). Sigismund was crowned in Kraków on 27 December 1587. Zamoyski then pursued the archduke, who withdrew from Polish territory into Silesia, then part of the Habsburg lands. According to the same edition, Maximilian halted at Byczyna on 23 January 1588.2
The battle outside Byczyna
The two armies were roughly equal in size. The historian Piotr Krzyżański, following Marek Plewczyński's 1971 study of the battle, gives about 6,000 men for Zamoyski and about 7,000 for Maximilian, counting all his reinforcements. National Geographic Polska describes Maximilian's army as somewhat larger but less well trained.3
Accounts of the fighting itself are brief. Krzyżański quotes the historian Zygmunt Boras, who wrote that Zamoyski smashed an army equal to his own in half an hour. He also summarizes Konstanty Górski's 1888 study, which credited the victory to Zamoyski's personal reconnaissance of the ground, his firm command and a well executed flanking maneuver; the Polish side was stronger in cavalry, Maximilian's in infantry. Włodzimierz Kaczorowski, also cited by Krzyżański, notes that the man actually commanding against Zamoyski was not the archduke but Andrzej Zborowski.4
A Rzeczpospolita article on the battle notes that the outcome wavered at one point and credits the victory to Zamoyski's iron will and the daring of Stanisław Żółkiewski, who was badly wounded. More on him in our profile of Stanisław Żółkiewski.5
Surrender and a burning town
After the battle the archduke surrendered and became the hetman's prisoner. The sources used here give no reliable figures for the dead on either side.6
The town paid a price too. A modern edition of an anonymous lament, De Bicinensi Proelio, published in Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne in 2017, cites the chronicle of the local pastor Bartholomäus Bentkius, who recorded that the town and nearby villages burned and that soldiers plundered the inhabitants. The lament tells the story from the side of the suffering townspeople, far from the triumphant poems written in Poland.7
Why it mattered
The dispute ended with the Treaty of Bytom and Będzin of 9 March 1589, in which the Habsburgs recognized Sigismund III as the rightful king; the archduke was forced to give up his claim to the Polish crown. Byczyna ended Habsburg hopes for the Polish throne in this period and kept the Commonwealth independent of Vienna. It ranks among the greatest Polish battles and belongs to the long story of the wars of the Polish Commonwealth.8
Also on this day
- 1915: Battle of Dogger Bank. British battlecruisers, warned by decoded German wireless signals, intercepted a German raiding squadron bound for the North Sea's Dogger Bank during the First World War.
