On 18 November 1655, with much of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth already in Swedish hands, the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa refused to let a Swedish force in. The siege that followed lasted forty days, until the Swedes withdrew in the night of 26 to 27 December. Prior Augustyn Kordecki's small garrison held out, and the defense became one of the great symbols of Polish resistance.
A monastery refuses
By the autumn of 1655 the Swedes held Kraków and the king had fled the country. According to the Museum of Polish History, on 7 November Kordecki recognized Charles X Gustav's authority in return for a letter of protection for the monastery; his letter to the king, kept in the Stockholm archives, offers its submission for a guarantee that it would not be touched. The historian Idzi Panic, quoted by the Museum of Polish History's news service dzieje.pl, reads it as a ploy to play for time. At the same time the prior had the venerated icon of the Black Madonna taken out of the monastery and a copy hung in the chapel; the museum's calendar says the original went to the castle at Lubliniec, and OKO.press that it went on to the Pauline house at Mochów in Silesia.1
On 18 November the Swedes tried to enter the monastery, and the monks' refusal began the siege. OKO.press dates the arrival of the first Swedish troops before Jasna Góra to 8 November, and the removal of the icon to the day before.2
Forty days
General Burchard Müller had, according to OKO.press, about two thousand men, many of them hired German soldiers and Poles in Swedish service, not the ten thousand of later legend. The museum's calendar puts the garrison at 160 soldiers alongside the armed monks, against an enemy ten times stronger. Panic told dzieje.pl that the Swedes sent second-rate troops, though under a capable commander, with too little artillery, and were surprised by the defense. The monastery's guns proved stronger than the besiegers', and the Swedes' last demand, a payment for their withdrawal, was refused too. They lifted the siege in the night of 26 to 27 December.3
The Museum of Polish History calls the defense a symbolic event that gave hope of further victories and the high point of the Deluge, one that roused the will to resist. The siege, the legend and what historians make of it are told in our article on the siege of Jasna Góra.4
Also on this day
- 1803: Battle of Vertières. Rebels led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and François Capois attacked French troops under General Rochambeau at Vertières, near Cap-Français, in the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution.
