On 11 June 1694, during the long war between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, cavalry from the frontier forts of Okopy Świętej Trójcy and Szaniec Panny Marii under Konstanty Zahorowski attacked the vanguard of a Tatar raiding army returning from Ruthenia. Outnumbered, they fell back into the village of Hodów in Podolia and held its buildings and fences against repeated attacks for several hours, until the Tatars gave up and moved on. King John III Sobieski celebrated the stand, and it is now often told as 400 men against 40,000, a figure historians treat with caution.
A raid toward Ruthenia
Since 1672 the fortress of Kamieniec Podolski had been in Ottoman hands. To cut its supply route from Moldavia, John III and Grand Hetman Stanisław Jan Jabłonowski built the small fort of Okopy Świętej Trójcy in 1692 where the Zbruch flows into the Dniester, as the Museum of King John III's Palace at Wilanów explains.1
The historian Zbigniew Hundert writes that in May 1694 the royal court at Żółkiew learned that Tatars were about to raid the Commonwealth. The Crimean Tatars were busy with the main Ottoman army against the Habsburgs, so the raid was entrusted to the Nogai Tatars of the Budjak, who were to bring supplies to Kamieniec and make a diversion. The court feared a force of 30,000, and the raid lasted about four days, from 8 to 11 June.2
Cornered in Hodów
As the horde turned back toward Kamieniec, cavalry banners from Okopy and from the nearby Szaniec Panny Marii under Zahorowski attacked its vanguard. Facing a far stronger enemy, they withdrew into the village of Hodów, where for several hours they beat off attack after attack from behind its buildings and fences, until the Tatars, unable to break the defense, left and continued their retreat. The Museum of Polish History's portal dzieje.pl adds that local villagers helped the soldiers drive off the last attacks.3
The Wilanów museum counts seven banners, about 400 cavalrymen from Okopy and some 200 from Szaniec Panny Marii. Contrary to the popular picture, it notes, most of them were not hussars: at most one man in four was, and a diary of the battle records the death of the hussar captain Guttyter, called Gulcher in the text.4
Victory and propaganda
Hundert shows that the court treated Zahorowski's stand as the key to repelling the spring raid and used it in a propaganda campaign before the Sejm of 1695, without persuading most of the nobility that it was a great success against the Ottomans. In 1695 the king raised an obelisk on the battlefield. Its Latin inscription, as quoted by dzieje.pl, says the Poles under Zahorowski, surrounded among the fences, drove off 70,000 Tatars, and dates the battle to 5 June 1694.5
The figures have grown in the telling. dzieje.pl speaks of about 400 defenders against some 40,000 Tatars, a ratio of one to a hundred, while Hundert warns that the battle has become popular only in modern times, among many who accept without criticism that 400 defenders repelled 40,000 Tatars. The obelisk survived the Soviet period and was restored in 2014. The full story is told in The Battle of Hodów, 1694: the Polish Thermopylae.6
Also on this day
- 1865: Battle of Riachuelo. In the Paraguayan War, Paraguayan gunboats towing floating batteries, helped by guns on shore, attacked the Brazilian squadron on the Paraná near the Riachuelo.
