The Husaria wore helmets, thick steel breastplates and shoulder and arm guards, or eastern scale armour. The companions also sometimes sported wooden arcs bristling with eagle feathers rising over their heads like two wings from attachments on their shoulders or the back of the saddle. Over one shoulder they wore the skin of a tiger or leopard as a cloak. These served to frighten the enemy’s horses, and the wings had the added advantage of preventing Tatars eager for ransom from lassoing the Polish riders in a mêlée. But the main purpose of these accoutrements was to give an impression of splendour. The companions in the Husaria were young noblemen who liked to show off their wealth. Helmets and breastplates were chased or studded with gold and often set with semi-precious stones. Harnesses, saddles and horsecloths were embroidered and embellished with gold and gems.
For over a century, the Husaria were the lords of the battlefield. Kircholm (1605), where 4,000 Poles under Chodkiewicz accounted for 14,000 Swedes, was little more than one long cavalry manoeuvre ending in the Husaria’s charge. Klushino (1610), where żółkiewski with 6,000 Poles, of whom only two hundred were infantry, defeated 30,000 Muscovites and 5,000 German and Scottish mercenaries, was a Husaria victory, as was the Battle of Gniew (1656), in which 5,500 Polish cavalry defeated 13,000 Swedes. In many other battles, from Byczyna (1588) and Trzciana (1629) to the relief of Vienna (1683), the Husaria dealt the decisive blow.
Though hardly a maritime nation, the Poles did have a navy for a while. In 1560 Zygmunt Augustus licensed a total of thirty privateers to sail under the Polish ensign. He established a Maritime Commission and in 1569 launched a galleon and a frigate of the Polish navy. In 1620 Zygmunt III had a further twenty warships built, and in 1627 the Polish navy fought its only sea battle when it defeated the Swedish fleet off Oliwa. If the Poles did not like paying for an army, they liked digging into their pockets even less for a navy, which seemed an unnecessary luxury since cordial relations with England and Holland meant that Poland had maritime friends in the Baltic. The navy dwindled, and the only sailor of talent Poland produced, Krzysztof Arciszewski, became a Dutch admiral.
Victory was repeatedly achieved at low cost and with little apparent effort, and this had a pernicious effect. Increasingly, when money was needed for defence, voices were raised in the Sejm to the effect that ‘They’re scaring us with Turks and Tatars just to get money out of us,’ in the belief that if any real threat materialised it could be parried easily by the noble Polish knight, armed with the superiority of his political freedom and inspired by God. There was some truth in this, but times were changing.
NINE
‘Poland is like a spectator who stands safely on the seashore, calmly looking on at the tempest raging before him,’ wrote Krzysztof Opaliński, Palatine of Poznań, in 1630. With most of Central Europe caught up in the self-perpetuating butchery of the Thirty Years’ War, Poland did indeed appear remarkably peaceful and stable. When Zygmunt III died in 1632, his eldest son Władysław was elected unanimously in the space of half an hour. The prestige of the Commonwealth and its king rode high, and France repeatedly urged him to take the Imperial crown after the death of the ailing Ferdinand II, offering the necessary funds and military as well as diplomatic support. When his wife died, portraits of no fewer than sixteen princesses were sent in by other courts.
The situation changed drastically when the Thirty Years’ War came to an end in 1648. That same year the Commonwealth was shaken to its foundations by the explosion of formidable tensions that had been building up for over half a century in its southeastern reaches of Ukraine. This area of formerly Kievan lands taken over by Lithuania in the thirteenth century and transferred to Poland before the Union of Lublin in 1569 had been administratively tacked on to the Kingdom of Poland without any regard for its specific nature.