The siege of Glukhov

In November 1663, King Jan II Casimir , the right-bank hetman Pavel Teterya, and the Crimean Tatars of the 130,000th ^[1] combined army launched an invasion of Left-Bank Ukraine. Not having sufficient strength to repulse the offensive, Prince G. Romodanovsky and Hetman I. Bryukhovetsky temporarily retreated to Putivl .

Moving almost unhindered through the territory of the Hetman, the troops of Jan Casimir besieged Glukhov in January 1664, which was defended by the Cossacks of the Kiev colonel V. Dvoretsky and the Russian troops of the governor of the capital, Avraam Lopukhin .

Having besieged the city, the gentry indulged in rampant revelry. The French envoy and officer of the Polish king, Duke Antoine de Gramont Count de Guiche , described these days: “... we were invited to dinner by the army general, Mr. Czarniecki , at which the guests showed no more restraint than at dinner the day before. I even recall that after dinner they pranced on ice, at a distance of a pistol shot from the besieged city, and it could not have done without musket fire. However, no one was injured, and the bacchanalia ended happily and cheerfully. ” ^[1]

Two days after this event, the king ordered to storm the city in view of the fact that the siege of a city of no significance was prolonged . January 29, breaking through several gaps in the walls with the help of artillery and a laid mine, the great crown coronet Jan Sobieski (in the future, the king of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, who repelled the Turks near Vienna ) personally led the troops to storm. Overcoming the strong fire of the garrison, the Polish-Lithuanian troops, breaking into the city and having managed to hoist their banners over the walls, were ambushed. Hiding behind the erected barricades, the Russian-Cossack garrison opened dagger fire from muskets and artillery against the advancing enemy. Having lost 200 officers and 4,000 lower ranks killed and wounded, the Polish-Lithuanian army was forced to retreat.

The Duke of Gramont recalled: “... having endured a very strong fire, moreover, the fire of people who do not coward, ... we met with a beautiful barricade, with a loaded buckshot cannon, which hit along the embankment, and the musket fire was so terrible and so correctly aimed that ... were 500 people were killed on the spot, and the rest had lost their combat capability so much that they had to think about retreating ... The breach ... was very uneven, defended by two thousand tsarist dragoons who performed miracles of courage ... I don’t think that ever the troops showed so many samples before flattery, the Poles on this day in their methods of attack and the Muscovites in his excellent defensive. "

After 8 days, the king ordered the assault to be repeated. On February 8, Polish-Lithuanian troops again managed to break into the fortress, but the garrison, having launched a counterattack, knocked out the enemy from the fortress.

“Two batteries were advanced to the edge of the moat, one of twelve cannons, the other of six. On the eighth day, at six o’clock in the morning, at this signal, two mines were blown up, and all the assigned regiments, supported by the whole cavalry, burst with great courage into both gaps. Already a certain number of Poles and German officers have entered the city, chopping off the heads of all the defenders of the gaps, and our banners have been raised at the top - and we at one time with good reason were sure that the matter was over. But soon we experienced the opposite. The governor, a former man with an outstanding reputation among the Muscovites, having come with his entire garrison, at one moment threw people into the city and knocked them down from the height of the breach, and then, having mastered the hard-to-transmit stamina, opened such a deadly fire on our people and interrupted so many of them that he had to give in and yield to the superiority of the enemy fire, which did not stop at all, despite our eighteen cannons firing continuously at breaches. ”

At this time, Prince Romodanovsky, having finished the gathering of his army, advanced in the direction of Glukhov. At the same time, left-bank cities revolted against the Polish authorities, which until recently surrendered without a fight to the mercy of the king, Right-Bank Ukraine flared . In Lithuania, Prince Khovansky raided his regiment by fettling the troops of the hetman Mikhail Pats , who had already advanced to the aid of the king.

Not wanting to meet with the army of Romodanovsky, in which there were about 45,000 soldiers and Cossacks ^[1] , King Jan Casimir lifted the siege from the city.

Pursued by Russian troops, the Polish-Lithuanian army retreated towards Novgorod-Seversky . “This retreat lasted two weeks, and we thought that we would all perish. The king himself escaped with great difficulty. So great a famine came that for two days I saw that there was no bread on the table of the king. 40 thousand horses were lost, all cavalry and the whole train , and without exaggeration three quarters of the army. There is nothing in the history of past centuries that could be compared with the state of such a rout, ” recalled Gramon ^[1] .

After crossing the Desna River ( Pirogovskaya battle ), the Poles were defeated by the Romodanovsky army, they shot the famous colonel of the times of Khmelnitsky Ivan Bogun in Novgorod-Seversky, who was accused of transferring secret information about the plans of the Polish command to the Glukhov garrison and the army of Romodanovsky.

Glukhov’s defense thwarted the plans of the Polish command to return the left-bank Ukraine to the control of the Polish-Lithuanian Union.

• Malov A.V. Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 Moscow, Tseikhkhauz, 2006. ISBN 5-94038-111-1 .
• Antoine Gramon From the history of the Moscow campaign of Jan Casimir . Yuriev. Typ. Mattisen. 1929