Polish Winged Hussars -- Victory

The winged horsemen known as the hussars were a uniquely Polish kind of cavalry sometimes called ‘one of the world’s most efficient units’ due to their spectacular victories. Thanks to their unparalleled skills, carefully-designed lances and uniquely-devised tactics, they won against most opponents, even when heavily outnumbered. But their seeming invincibility couldn’t last forever.

The hussars were born in the 16th century, had their heyday in the 17th and a period of demise in the 18th centuries. Their uniqueness lied, primarily, in them preferring melee weapons at a time when European armies were becoming more and more reliant on firearms. When it was becoming standard to employ not only infantry but also riders to shoot, the hussars would charge enemy soldiers, impaling them on deadly, intricately designed lances and making entire units flee from the battlefield. Thanks to their incredible horseback riding skills, tactics and gear during the first two centuries of their existence, they would usually win against most kinds of enemies sustaining minimal casualties against shooters as well as melee fighters.

François Paulin Dalerac, a French courtier of Polish King Jan III Sobieski, commander of the famous Battle of Vienna during which the hussars played a key role, writes in the 1699 book Les Anecdotes de Pologne:

The hussars never halt, they ride their horses at full speed, breaking through everything that’s in front of them.

The hussars – very elite troops – would often win despite being heavily outnumbered. This gave their victories a special kind of glory, and is one of the reasons their status in Polish history is near legendary. Basically every Pole has heard of them, sort of like most people in Europe have heard of the Roman legions.

The origins of the ultimate cavalry

Even though the hussars are a uniquely Polish phenomenon, their roots are said to lie abroad, namely in Serbia. The story goes that after the 1389 Battle of Kosovo when Serbia suffered a heavy defeat from the Ottoman Empire, Serbian knights (supposedly called usars or gusars in Serbian) sought vengeance on the Turks wherever it could be found. That’s how they made their way to Poland, which had its own disagreements with the Ottomans. From the 16th century, mentions of Serbs serving as hussars in the Polish military start to appear, although in reality they probably acted as mercenaries rather than avengers.

It was, however, only after Stefan Batory became King of Poland in 1576 that the new unit adopted its uniquely Polish form. The tricky part is that this elected king was Hungarian and with him he brought to Poland a number of Hungarian military practices (such as the use of specific helmets for riders). So although the newly-created type of cavalry was Polish, its roots were international.

The Cambridge-educated Fynes Moryson visited Poland in 1593:

The Polonians are a warlike nation, valiant, and actiue, but all their strength consists in their horse. (…) Of these horsemen, some are called Hussari, who are armed with long spears, a shield, a Carbine or short gunn, and two short swords, one by the horsmans syde, the other fastned vnder the left syde of his sadle.

Length matters
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Eventually the hussars dropped the shields, substituting them with armour. Throughout their existence though, the rest of their gear remained very similar to what Moryson wrote about: they carried a lance, sword and sometimes pistols. Of these arms, the lance was most the important as it made the unit’s trademark attack – the charge – possible.

The highly advanced hussar lance was the main weapon of the hussars, the base of their great triumphs.

That’s how the historian Dr Radosław Sikora describes the weapon in his incredibly detailed 2013 book Fenomen Husarii (editor’s translation: The Phenomenon of the Hussars). To fully understand the uniqueness of the lance one needs a bit of context.

One of the reasons that European armies were turning to firearms and away from cavalry charges was the appearance of pikemen or infantry equipped with two-handed pikes that made the charges of lance-bearing knights largely obsolete. A knight’s one-handed lance (the other hand had to steer the horse) couldn’t be as heavy as the pike and therefore had to be shorter. Consequently the knights couldn’t reach beyond the pikes, so charging was out of the question.

But the winged horsemen found a way to get around this, a quite crafty one. They devised a hollow lance, something revolutionary at the time. Not only was it way lighter than a traditional one, but it also broke less easily. That’s right – according to the laws of physics, a hollow lance is more robust than a full one.

Also, thanks to the lower weight, the length could be extended. Suddenly the hussars’ lance could be over 6 metres long – longer than a pikeman’s pike (which averaged about 5 metres in length). This clever weapon was most probably glued from the hollowed pieces of a pole cut in half lengthwise. To make it more resilient it would sometimes be wrapped in hemp fibre. At the end of the hussar lance, called affectionately by the hussars ‘the sapling’, there was a steel tip.

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