On 27 June 1629, in Royal Prussia, Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski and the imperial commander Hans Georg von Arnim caught the Swedish cavalry screening King Gustavus Adolphus's march from Kwidzyn toward Sztum and Malbork. A flank charge by the winged hussars broke the Swedish rearguard near the village of Trzciana, and in the running fight that followed the king was nearly taken prisoner. It was the Commonwealth's greatest victory over the Swedes since Kircholm, but it could not undo Sweden's gains, and the war ended that September with the Truce of Altmark.
A war for the Vistula
In 1626 Gustavus Adolphus carried his war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from Livonia into Prussia, aiming to control the mouth of the Vistula and its trade. He took a string of towns, among them Elbląg, Malbork and Puck, and Koniecpolski, given command in Prussia that autumn, spent the next years harrying the Swedes with his cavalry without gaining the upper hand. In 1629 Emperor Ferdinand II sent the Commonwealth a corps under Arnim, which dzieje.pl and HistoryOfWar.org both put at about 5,000 men.1
In June the king decided to move part of his army from Kwidzyn (Marienwerder) to Malbork before the allies could combine against him. Maciej Adam Pieńkowski, writing for Histmag, notes that Swedish works date the battle 17 June on the Julian calendar, and that the date of 25 June found in some Polish writing is a mistake: Koniecpolski's letter to the king of 28 June and a letter of Jan Zawadzki confirm 27 June. Britannica and HistoryOfWar.org also give 27 June; 25 June is the day Arnim and Koniecpolski joined forces, according to HistoryOfWar.org.2
The hussars strike
While the Swedish infantry and baggage took the main road to Sztum, the cavalry covered them on a side road through Trzciana, Straszewo and Pułkowice. Koniecpolski crossed the Liwa and came up with the Swedish rearguard, which HistoryOfWar.org puts at about 2,000 horse. The numbers on the allied side are uncertain too: dzieje.pl, quoting the historians Tadeusz Nowak and Jan Wimmer, gives the hetman 1,300 hussars, 1,200 Cossack-style horsemen and 2,000 imperial reiters and dragoons, while Pieńkowski prefers Arnim's own figure of 3,700 men.3
Light horse and imperial reiters opened the fight in front; the hussars, hidden by the lie of the land, then charged the left flank of the Swedish horse and broke it. The Swedes fled toward Straszewo, where their next column tried to make a stand and was swept away in turn, and the pursuit ran on toward Pułkowice and Sztum. King Gustavus Adolphus came up with fresh cavalry and fought a hard melee before he could pull his men back into Sztum.4
A king by the sword belt
The king was in real danger. His chancellor Axel Oxenstierna left an account, printed in Erik Gustaf Geijer's history of Sweden, in which an enemy horseman caught Gustavus Adolphus by his sword belt and the king slipped it over his head, losing his hat with it; another rider seized him by the arm and was shot from the saddle by Erik Soop. Pieńkowski identifies the first man as an imperial cuirassier and the second as a Polish hussar, and says the belt and hat were given to Prince Władysław. Polish tradition, recorded by dzieje.pl, has a hussar comrade grab the king by his sword hanger.5
The losses are reported very differently. The king wrote to his council that about 200 of his men died, and that the enemy lost no fewer. HistoryOfWar.org says the Poles claimed to have counted nearly 1,500 bodies, and dzieje.pl gives about 1,200 Swedes killed and several hundred captured against about 300 allied dead, half of them imperial troops. Pieńkowski, following the historian Paradowski's comparison of Swedish muster rolls, estimates 500 to 600 Swedes killed and about 200 captured, and no more than 150 killed and wounded among the allies. Both the king's letter and the Polish accounts record ten Swedish leather guns lost.6
A victory without a decision
Trzciana drove the Swedes back into their fortresses, but it did not change the course of the war. The Swedes still held Malbork, Elbląg, Sztum and other strongholds, the Commonwealth was exhausted, and under pressure from the western powers both sides agreed a six-year truce at Altmark (Stary Targ) in September 1629. Britannica notes that the truce left Sweden the dominant power on the southern Baltic coast, and HistoryOfWar.org that it gave Sweden Livonia north of the Dvina and a share of the tolls on Gdańsk's trade. Within a year Gustavus Adolphus had landed in Germany.7
The battle is told in full in our article on the Battle of Trzciana, and the victor's career in our biography of Stanisław Koniecpolski.
Also on this day
- 1743: Battle of Dettingen. In the War of the Austrian Succession, the British, Hanoverian and Austrian Pragmatic Army beat the Duke of Noailles's French near Dettingen on the Main.
