On 22 October two battles from very different wars share the date. At Buxar on the Ganges in 1764, a British East India Company army of about 7,000 men, most of them Indian sepoys held together by a brutal show of discipline, faced a far larger army of the Mughal emperor, the Nawab of Awadh and the deposed Nawab of Bengal. Its victory, won on 22 or 23 October depending on the account, led within a year to the diwani, the Company's right to collect the revenues of Bengal and Bihar. At Filipów in 1656, during the Deluge, a Swedish and Brandenburg force caught the Lithuanian division of Wincenty Gosiewski at a marshy crossing, broke it with a few cannon shots and freed Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł, taken prisoner two weeks earlier at Prostki.
Buxar, 1764: the Company against an emperor
The East India Company had won at Plassey in 1757, but in 1764 its hold on Bengal was still contested. Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal the Company had deposed, joined forces with Shuja-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Awadh, and with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. After failing to take Patna from the Company, their army fell back on Buxar on the Ganges, at the border of Awadh and Bengal, and dug in: the river covered its left, the Torah nala stream its right, and earthworks its front.1
The Company's new commander, Major Hector Munro, first had to deal with his own army. When a sepoy battalion mutinied in 1764, Munro had the ringleaders tried and blown from the mouths of cannon: twenty men according to one account, twenty-four in G. B. Malleson's. Malleson, writing in the 1880s, records that four grenadiers stepped forward and claimed the right to die first, as they had held the post of honor in battle. It was a savage way to restore discipline, and the discipline it bought decided the battle that followed.2
23 October: squares, a marsh and a broken bridge
Munro left Bankipur near Patna on 9 October and came in sight of the allied camp on 22 October. His army was small. Malleson counts 857 Europeans, 5,297 sepoys and 918 Indian cavalry, a total of 7,072, against some 40,000 allies; Mark Cartwright, in World History Encyclopedia, gives the allies around 50,000. According to Cartwright, the emperor's French infantry commander, Jean Baptiste Gentil, begged him to strike at once: "now that they are all busy putting up their tents, now is the moment to attack!" The advice was not taken.3
The allies came out of their lines at dawn. A marsh lay between the armies, and Afghan and other cavalry rode around it, fell on the British rear and seized the baggage. The Company's infantry, sepoys included, formed squares and held. Accounts of the decisive moment differ: Cartwright describes a counterattack with disciplined musket fire against the allied left, while Malleson describes a bayonet attack that carried a grove on the British right and a mistaken allied charge that was beaten off. In Malleson's account, Munro then rode to the head of his men, thanked them, took off his hat and gave three cheers before ordering the general advance.4
The allied army broke. The emperor's men fled across the Torah nala, and Company riflemen shot those wading the stream until the water was choked with bodies. Malleson writes that Shuja-ud-Daula crossed with his treasure and his regular troops and then had the bridge of boats destroyed behind him, leaving his rear and camp followers to struggle across; a contemporary Indian chronicler claimed that a bridge of corpses three hundred yards long formed in the stream.5
The cost at Buxar
Malleson gives 847 killed and wounded on the Company's side, 101 of them Europeans, and more than 2,000 allied dead left on the field, with 133 guns captured. Cartwright gives about 850 Company dead, wounded or missing and allied dead of perhaps as many as 5,000, while noting that more conservative historians estimate about 2,000; he puts the guns taken at about 130. This page lists Buxar under 22 October, the day Munro reached Buxar and the first day of Cartwright's 22 to 23 October; Malleson and Sonal Singh date the fighting to the 23rd.6
The diwani: a trading company becomes a ruler
After the battle Mir Qasim fled west, Shuja-ud-Daula submitted, and Shah Alam went over to the British. In August 1765, at an imperial durbar in Allahabad, Robert Clive received an imperial firman dated 12 August that granted the Company the diwani, the right to collect the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, presented as a "free gift". In return, Cartwright writes, the emperor was to receive 2.6 million rupees a year. In a separate treaty, Shuja-ud-Daula agreed to pay the Company 50 lakh rupees, five million, for the costs of the war, while Shah Alam kept Kora and Allahabad.7
The grant was partly a fiction. As Sonal Singh points out, Bengal and Bihar had been effectively independent of Delhi since the 1740s, and Orissa was largely in Maratha hands; the grant over Orissa was nominal. But the revenues of Bengal now paid for the Company's armies and its further expansion. Historians see the diwani as the first step toward British rule in India, and Cartwright concludes that the foundations of the Company's empire were laid at Plassey and, above all, Buxar. For the full story, see our article on the Battle of Buxar.8
Filipów, 1656: after the Deluge's victory at Prostki
In the Second Northern War, the Swedish invasion of Poland-Lithuania known as the Deluge, Sweden's ally was the Elector of Brandenburg, who was also Duke of Prussia. In the autumn of 1656, after the Swedish and Brandenburg victory at Warsaw that summer, the Lithuanian field hetman Wincenty Gosiewski led his division into Ducal Prussia. According to the historian Sławomir Augusiewicz, it was meant as the first stage of a move to Samogitia, and the division, with about 1,000 Crown troops and about 1,000 Tatars, numbered almost 8,000 men, far fewer than the 12,000 to 15,000 given in older Polish works.9
On 8 October Gosiewski routed a Brandenburg and Swedish force of just over 4,000 men at Prostki, and Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł, the Lithuanian magnate fighting for the Elector, was taken prisoner. Then the victory came apart. According to prisoners questioned by the Swedes, the Tatars quarreled with the Poles and Lithuanians over the prize prisoner Radziwiłł, whom they had to hand over, and rode away, though Augusiewicz doubts this was the reason; Polish units and part of the Lithuanian ones left too. Augusiewicz has long argued that the Tatar raid on Prussia, remembered locally as a catastrophe, was more limited than legend made it. Field Marshal Gustaf Otto Stenbock's diary still records what his army saw on the march: a village where many people had been burned, dead people young and old by the road, and a little girl sitting by a fire whose parents the Tatars had taken; Stenbock ordered her brought along, and the army's washerwoman took her in.10
Mieruniszki, 22 October: two signal shots
Stenbock gathered the Swedes and the Brandenburgers who had escaped Prostki under Count Georg Friedrich of Waldeck and went after Gosiewski. A Swedish account of the battle, kept in the Riksarkivet in Stockholm and published by Augusiewicz in 2018, tells the rest. Stenbock left his baggage behind and took most of his cavalry and some infantry through a forest on deep, narrow roads. His vanguard, under the Brandenburg colonel Joachim Ernst von Görtzke, surprised Lithuanian foragers at the village of Mieruniszki, a quarter of a German mile (about 2 km) from Filipów, where a bad pass, a great marsh and poor bridges lay across the road.11
Görtzke's horsemen crossed as fast as they could. Stenbock brought up six small field guns, placed two on a hill and posted dragoons behind the village fences. When the Lithuanians moved to attack the vanguard, the two guns fired as signal shots, and the Lithuanian ranks began to waver. As the Swedish left wing came over the pass, a few more rounds threw them into confusion and they fled, before the right wing under the Count Palatine of Sulzbach had even got through the woods. The Swedish account claims about 500 Lithuanians killed, perhaps more, and records standards and two pairs of kettledrums taken. Andrzej Rachuba counts two Lithuanian cavalry captains lost: S. Korotkiewicz, killed, and Konstanty Wacław Pokłoński, taken prisoner. The fight began in the afternoon, and night and tired horses ended the pursuit.12
Bogusław Radziwiłł, held in the Lithuanian camp since Prostki, was freed in the confusion and reached Stenbock's quarters that same night. The next day, from near Sejny, Gosiewski wrote to the nobility of Podlasie that because the Tatar horde had not come and his men had ridden home with their Prussian booty, the handful left in camp could not hold off the enemy and had to scatter in different directions, "though not with as great a loss in men as rumor tends to make it".13
Why Filipów mattered, and the numbers game
Rachuba, summarizing Augusiewicz, judges Filipów a Lithuanian defeat with no operational significance, mattering for prestige and propaganda. According to the same summary, Gosiewski tried to regain the initiative in early November, failed, and accepted a short truce that favored the Elector. Erik Dahlbergh's engraving, published in Samuel Pufendorf's history of Charles X Gustav, dates the battle 12 October by the Julian calendar the Swedes used, and its title boasts of ten thousand Lithuanians cut down and put to flight. The Swedish account itself puts Gosiewski's force at 7,000, on prisoners' reports, and Rachuba calls the attached Swedish list of 118 Lithuanian and Polish banners a great exaggeration that may describe Prostki rather than Filipów.14
Gosiewski's career ended badly. Taken prisoner by the Muscovites at Werki in 1658 and released only in April 1662, he was murdered by confederated Lithuanian soldiers on 29 November 1662. For another commander of the Deluge, see our article on Stefan Czarniecki.15
Also on 22 October
In 1777, at Red Bank on the Delaware, about 1,200 Hessians under Colonel Carl von Donop stormed Fort Mercer, held by some 500 to 600 Americans under Colonel Christopher Greene. The assault failed with more than 500 Hessian casualties, and Donop was mortally wounded. The forts on the river were meant to stop British ships from supplying Philadelphia, which the British had taken that September; for the campaign, see our article on Germantown.16
Also on this day
- 1656: Battle of Filipów. At Filipów, Lithuanian Field Hetman Wincenty Gosiewski fought a Swedish and Brandenburg army led by Stenbock and the Prince of Waldeck during the Deluge.
