On 5 October 1672 the Polish grand hetman Jan Sobieski rode out of Krasnystaw, near Lublin, with about 3,000 cavalrymen to hunt down the Tatar raiding parties, the chambuls, that were plundering southeastern Poland after the Ottoman invasion. In about ten days of night marches and running fights, from Narol to Komarno and the woods near Kalush, his small force broke up the raiders and freed thousands of captives. The campaign made Sobieski famous a year before his victory at Khotyn and two years before he was elected king.
A kingdom caught unprepared
In 1672 the Ottoman Empire invaded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and took the fortress of Kamieniec Podolski. The Wilanów Palace Museum, which looks after Sobieski's own residence, describes a state caught unready: the Sejm adjourned twice without deciding on defense, the country was close to civil war, and King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki would not enlarge the army for fear of strengthening his rival, Sobieski. After the Turks gave up the siege of Lviv, the Tatar forces left in Red Ruthenia split into smaller bands that killed the inhabitants and drove off captives.1
That was the chance Sobieski had been waiting for, the museum writes. On the pretext that the raiders threatened the king's safety, he set off from Krasnystaw on 5 October 1672.2
Cavalry without baggage
According to the Wilanów account, Sobieski had some 3,000 seasoned soldiers against 15,000 to 20,000 Tatars. He took only cavalry: winged hussars, light companies, and dragoons who could fight on foot. He left behind his guns, his infantry and his wagons, and each man rode with two horses so the column could move as fast as the Tatars themselves. The glow of burning villages showed the way. The troops marched by night along muddy tracks, across rivers and through woods, in frost, and the museum quotes a contemporary description of men hardly sleeping, hardly undressing and hardly eating.3
On 6 October the first two Tatar bands were beaten near Narol, and the main force under the Girey princes began to fall back toward Niemirów, abandoning its plunder. Smaller bands were broken on the way and a few thousand captives freed. The largest Tatar camp lay near Komarno. Sobieski's plan had Stefan Bidziński attack from the north with about 1,000 men while the main body of some 1,500 blocked the retreat across the Wereszyca river. When Sobieski himself appeared, the Tatars panicked and fled, and the pursuit went on late into the night.4
The last of the raiders tried to escape through the Bednarów woods toward Kalush, where local peasants held the forest paths against them. On 14 October Sobieski's men surrounded them near Petranka and broke them; peasants joined in hunting down the fugitives.5
What the raid achieved
By then the soldiers were worn out and, the museum says, half the horses were dead. But the raiders who had ravaged the Lublin region and Red Ruthenia were defeated. Sobieski's own count was that 44,000 captives were set free, a figure that comes from the victor and cannot be checked. The Wilanów account credits him with more than 300 km covered in ten days while fighting almost constantly, and calls the campaign one of the most glorious episodes in the history of Polish cavalry.6
It could not undo the war. On 18 October 1672 the Commonwealth signed the Treaty of Buczacz, ceding territory to the Ottomans and agreeing to pay them, terms Britannica calls disastrous. Sobieski's answer came the next year with his victory over the Turks at Khotyn, told in our article on Khotyn 1673, and in May 1674 he was elected king. His life is in our biography of Jan III Sobieski, and the horsemen who rode with him in our story of the winged hussars.7
