1683 - Scutum Sobieski
The great Hetman Stephen Zolkiewski, the "Knight without fear and without reproach", perished at Cecora in 1605. Jan Sobieski who finally accomplished the destructon of the military power of the Turks.
The Polish army reached its meridian splendor under the command of the famous John Sobieski. Under this distinguished general, the army of Poland triumphed successfully over the Russian, the Turk, the Tartar, the Cossack, and the German foe; and, for its numbers, no superior in the field could be found on the eastern continent. This hero introduced into his army the military tactics of France, which were afterwards adopted and improved by Napoleon.
In the reign of John Sobieski, five different kinds of soldiers composed the Polish army. First - The mercenaries, including the Hungarians, Wallachians, Cossacks, Tartars, and Germans, who would have formed the strength and nucleus of the army but for their repeated revolts, which occurred on the least delay in their payments, when they invariably turned their arms against the government. Second - The national troops, to whose maintenance a fourth of the national revenue was devoted. Third - The volunteers, which embraced the levies of the great nobles, with the ordinary guards which they maintained in time of peace. Fourth - The pospolite, which composed the array of the whole free citizens, who, after three summonses from the king, were obliged to come forth under the banners of their respective palatines ; but only to remain a few months in the field, and could not bo ordered beyond the frontiers. This last unwieldy body, however brave, was totally deficient in military discipline, and, in general, served only to reveal the extreme weakness of the republic, and was, therefore, seldom called out except in civil wars. The legions of valets, grooms, and drivers, who encumbered the other armed body, composed the fifth branch of the military force of Poland ; but these hordes of fierce retainers - the most warlike and irascible - injured the army more by their pillage and dissensions than they benefited it by their numbers.
All these different discordant troops were not only deficient in equipment, but were obliged to provide themselves with everything, and to collect their subsistence by their own authority in a great measure, while tbey were encumbered with an incredible quantity of baggage - waggons, destined, for the most part, to carry off plunder rather than to transport provisions. They had no corps of engineers; and the artillery, composed of a few pieces of small caliber, had no other officers than a handful of French adventurers, upon whose adherence to the republic implicit reliance could not be placed. The infantry were few in number, composed entirely of the mercenary and royal troops, and were regarded with contempt by the haughty nobility. The foot soldiers were employed principally in digging ditches, making bridges, and cutting down forests, rather than actual warfare. Sobieski very early became sensible of the importance of having in his camp a considerable force of infantry ; but he never was able to surmount the two great obstacles which prevented it - the prejudices of the country, and the poverty of the royal treasury.
The whole body of the pospolite, including the volunteers, the valets d'armie, and a large part of the mercenaries and national troops, served on horseback. It was the heavy cavalry, in particular, which constituted the strength of the armies; and there were to be found united the riches, splendor, and number of the Polish forces. This formidable body was divided into two general departments, called hussars and cuirassiers. The latter were magnificently clothed in steel, both man and horse, bearing casque and cuirass, lance and sabre, bows and carbines ; while the former were defended only by a twisted hauberk, which descended from the head over the shoulders and breast, armed with a sabre and pistol. Both, however, were distinguished by the splendor of their dress and equipage, the number and costly array of their mounted servants, accoutred in the most bizarre manner with the skins of bears and other wild beasts, surmounted with huge black plumes. The loud and only boast of this fierce body was, that they were composed of men all measured by the same standard of equality - equal in nobility, equally enjoying the rights of obeying only their God and their swords, and equally destined to the throne of the Piasts and the Jagellons. The hussars and cuirassiers were called Towarzirz, or companions, which was their cognomen among themselves, and with their sovereigns, whose motto was, Primus inter pares - the first among equals.
The mind is relieved of all surprise that Poland, with such a motley and discordant force, was unable to compete with the steady, persevering ambition and regular foroes of the surrounding military monarchies ; and the history of Poland reveals nothing more than the usual feature of all societies, where the only principle of their democracy is a reckless aristocratic equality; which is always attended with occasional bursts of aristocratic patriotism, mingled with alternate success, dejection, anarchy, and misrule. Such a government, like a dark and stormy night illuminated only by the occasional flashes of lightning, without ever enjoying the steady radiance of the immutable sun, never recovered from the eclipse of the dark ages.
In November, 1673, John Sobieski, the most distinguished sovereign of the Poles, ascended the throne. The funeral of the deceased king, by the Polish custom, was deferred till his successor had been appointed to succeed him ; for the purpose of avoiding the appearance of an interregnum, - in a country where no one and every one reigned. The imbecility of the Polish crown, and the democratic madness of the people, appear most conspicuously in the history of John Sobieski. This distinguished prince was emphatically the Washington of Poland. His virtues and talents, his public and private acts excelled all his predecessors and successors. His military attainments had no equals at home, and but few abroad.
Sobieski, after his election, resolved to defer the coronation ceremony until after he had conquered the Turks; and that he might retain the office of grand-general for a time. He fought the Tartars and Turks with the stimulus and ambition of personal animosity; and, as every Moslem who was laid low by his arms might have been the murderer of his uncle or brother, they were, in his estimation, so many libations of atonement to appease the ghosts of his slaughtered relations.
Sobieski was compelled to take the field against the Moslem foe in September, 1676. The Turks were compelled to make peace on the terms dictated by the Polish sovereign. In this treaty two thirds of the Ukraine were given up to Poland; the other third was to remain in the hands of the Cossacks, under the protection of the Sultan; and Podolia was restored, except Kamienieo. After concluding this treaty, John returned to Poland with the honors of having obtained a complete victory over his worst enemy.
In the beginning of May, 1683, the Moslem army commenced its march for Vienna, with nearly three hundred thousand men. The king of Poland, now fifty-four years old, and in such feeble health as to require aid to mount his charger, was the only man in the world to whom the German empire could look for protection. The Turks, who readily understood that the advancing king of Poland was a signal for them to fight or run, immediately roused from their slumbers, their licentiousness, and midnight origies, and began to think of victory or death.
This eminent defender of Christendom, starting with only fifteen thousand men to defend his country from Mohammedan invasion, by his herculean efforts, previous to the battle of Chocim, found himself at the head of forty thousand troops, not one half of them disciplined; and with this feeble force he attacked eighty thousand Turkish veterans, strongly intrenched, well armed and disciplined, and, battling with this fearful odds, gained the greatest victory ever achieved by Christian arms since the battle of Ascalon. The victorious troops which this hero led to the deliverance of Vienna, consisted of only 18,000 native Poles, and the whole Christian army numbered only seventy thousand soldiers on duty ; yet with this comparatively feeble force, stimulated by his mighty genius, he routed an army of three hundred thousand Turks, and by this shivering blow, subdued the Mussulman power so effectually, that for the first time, during a period of three centuries, the glory of the Mohammedan crescent began to wane ; and from that period, history dates the decline of the Ottoman empire.
Notwithstanding all these glorious triumphs, the former democratic tyranny and savage equality of the Poles again returned; the old veto quarrels and domestic strifes were revived; the republic was paralysed, the defence of the frontier was again in the hands of a few undisciplined horsemen ; and the Polish nation, demented by their barbaric levelling system-a national egotism-added to their long and black catalogue of offences, the meanest and foulest of all crimes-the sin of ingratitude to their heroic king- the deliverer of Christendom. They basely permitted him to be besieged for months, with only fifteen thousand men, by innumerable hordes of barbarians, before the sleeping, equality-dreaming pospolite advanced to his relief.
With the death of king Sobieski, the Polish army began rapidly to decline, and, under Augustus, during the incursions of Charles, the king of Sweden, in 1717, the Polish army was reduced to eighteen thousand men, under the pretence of curbing the influence of the two grand generals. This was a death-blow to the independence of Poland, for the reason that the defence of the country was left almost entirely to the pospolite, who were unable to compete with the large standing armies which were kept in the field by their hostile neighbors. By this improvident step, Poland allowed itself to be disarmed at the very moment when the worst dangers threatened on all sides; a fatal error, from which the nation was never able to retrieve itself. The ungovernable pospolite soon neglected all military exercises, and became a mere mass of men, without arms, without discipline, and equally incapable of commanding and obeying.
In vain were all the efforts of Stanislas to restore the army to its former standing; and the herculean efforts of the immortal Kosciusko were equally ineffectual. The Polish army was in reality dead ; and it is a well settled principle in the history and philosophy of nations, as well as armies, that resurrections are few and far between. An army, or a nation, once destroyed, is possibly destroyed for ever.
It is conjectuied that the figures in the signs of the zodiac are descriptive of the seasons of the year, and that they are Chaldean or Egyptian hieroglyphics, intended to represent some remarkable occurrence in each month. The Greeks displaced many of the Chaldean constellations, and placed such images as had reference to their own history in their room. Scutum Sobieski - The Shield Of Sobieski - was so named by Hevelius, in honour of John Sobieski, king of Poland. Scutum Sobieski, one of the constellations instituted by Hevelius, between Antinous and the Serpent's tail, in the Milky-way. It may be found by a small triangle, formed by three small stars, which is intersected by a line drawn from x, in the knee of Antinous to £, in the left knee of Ophiuchus. At a little distance from this triangle, towards the Eagle, are several small stars. Hevelius was a celebrated astronomer, bora at Dantzick ; his catalogue of fixed stars was entitled Firmamentum Sobieskianum, and dedicated to the king of Poland.
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