THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN MILITARY IN THE REIGN OF KING STEFAN BATHORY (1576–1586)

Dariusz Kupisz

In 1569 Poland and Lithuania concluded a full union on the strength of which they shared sovereignty, a Sejm (parliament), currency, and for- eign policy. Th ey retained separate government offi ces, treasuries, and armies. Th e state, henceforth named the Commonwealth of Two Nations (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow), comprised about 800,000 square kilometers in area and was inhabited by nearly eight million people. Its borders stretched from Gdansk, Pomerania, and Greater Poland in the west to the Smolensk region and the lands along the Dnepr in the east. To the south the Commonwealth abutted upon the Carpathians and the Dnestr River, and to the north it reached Estonia. Within the borders of the Commonwealth could be found towns that in present day serve as the capitals of fi ve European states (Warsaw, Vilnius, Kiev, Minsk, and Riga). In terms of territorial expanse in Europe the Polish-Lithuanian state was surpassed only by Russia and the Ottoman Empire and in respect to population was behind only France, Spain, and the German Empire. In 1576 Stefan Bathory acceded to the throne of the Commonwealth. He possessed considerable experience at war, experience won in the civil wars waged in Hungary and in confl icts with the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. His barely ten-year reign left a clear mark on Polish- Lithuanian military organization. Th e new ruler quickly perceived its strengths and defects and carried out a whole range of changes and innovations in regard to the organization of the armed forces. Not all changes were of his making; a number of reforms were carried over from the reign of Zygmunt II August, the last of the Jagiellonian kings, while others had emerged from an evolutionary process, from the Polish army’s adaptation to certain aspects of modern warfare. But the extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty in 1572 had signifi cantly cur- tailed the development of the armed forces. Th ey were not in the con- dition to defend the frontiers eff ectively against the Crimean Khanate and Muscovy. In 1577 Tsar Ivan IV “the Terrible” occupied a large part of Infl anty (Livonia), driving the small Polish-Lithuanian garrisons from their castles. For the new ruler, King Stefan Bathory, it was clear 64 dariusz kupisz that defeating this enemy and recovering the lost provinces required greater military power.

Changes in the Organizational Structure of the Armed Forces

When Bathory took the throne the armed forces of the Commonwealth relied fi rst of all upon the levee en masse of the nobility and gentry (pospolite ruszenie) and secondly upon mercenary forces. Th e pospolite ruszenie originated in medieval knights’ service obligations, and its foundation was the principle of nobiliary military service duty. In Poland every nobleman (szlachcic, pl. szlachta) had to appear in person for campaign with his own equipment and his own train (poczet) of retainers. Th e numerical strength of the pospolite ruszenie depended upon the number of landed proprietors in the districts participating in the levee. Th e towns provided infantry and wagons for the pospolite ruszenie in proportion to the number of their households. Practice in Lithuania was similar, where the obligation to render military service to the realm was owed by all holding district lands: the szlachta, Tatars, cossacks and new colonist townsmen and peasants. Th e assessment of military service obligations was carried out on the basis of land units called “services” (dworzyszcza, zagrody), and so the Lithuanian variant of the pospolite ruszenie was oft en called the landed military service (służba ziemska). From 1566 every ten zagrody units had to provide one fully-armored cavalryman; if someone held less land than this he still had to appear for campaign according to his means, even on foot. In the Kingdom of Poland the pospolite ruszenie was optimally about 50,000 men, although in practice the number of armed szlachta never approached this.1 A register from 1567 showed around 28,000 służby ziemskiej in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, of which 24,400 were cav- alry and 3,600 were foot.2 But the Union of 1569 incorporated Podlasie, Volhynia and Ukraine into the Kingdom of Poland, reducing the terri- tory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by half; so in Bathory’s reign one could count at most several thousand Lithuanians obliged to serve in the pospolite ruszenie.3

1 M. Kukiel, Zarys historii wojskowości w Polsce (London, 1949), 29. 2 I. I. Lappo, Velikoe kniazhestvo Litovskoe vo vtoroi polovine XVI st. (Iur’ev, 1911), 579–580. 3 M. Liubavskii, Litovsko-russkii seim (Moscow, 1900), 639–640.