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Archiver > HERBARZ > 2001-03 > 0983571712


From: "Leon Stevens" <>
Subject: Gear at Grunwald
Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2001 17:21:52 -0500


In 1597 Marcin Bielski wrote a chronicle in which he describes the Battle of Grunwald, and accompanies his text with an illustration of the battle. Granted the document was penned more than a century and a half after the event, his woodcut is nevertheless most intuitive. He portrays the Teutonic knights and their horses uniformly clad in full Western plate armor and the horsemen wielding medieval swords. In stark contrast, he depicts the Polish light cavalry with Hungarian "wing" shields, much like those shown in the painting of the 1514 Battle of Orsza. In both illustrations the shields, these "wing" shields bear no coats of arms. (A surviving Hungarian example also does not.) The cavalry wears "szyszaki" of the Tatar type, and round bossed "kalkan" shields. Some individuals on the Commonwealth side flash "palasze." A "palasz" is a heavier version of the saber, perhaps preferred by those who did not yet trust the strength lighter sabers, which were just making thei!
r debut. Bielski's palasze are very similar to one worn by a soldier in the scene of Christ's arrest in Wit Stworz's famous altar. Most of the Polish-Lithuanian combatants wear relatively little armor and conical helmets.. Some Lithuanian participants wear the distinctive "kuczma" with its broad upturned brim split in front (usually made of fur). In any case, Bielski makes the point, that the Order was burdened by expensive, heavy, and outdated equipment, whereas the economic circumstances of the Polish, and especially Lithuanian nobility, early compelled it to defer to "the mother of invention." As regards the introduction of oriental curved swords, Wlodzimierz Kwasniewicz says in Dzieje szabli w Polsce (Dom Wydawniczy Belllona, Warsaw, 1999) p.27 that an attendee at the wedding of Jadwiga Jagielonka with a Bavarian Prince in Landshut noted that, the Polish guests wore "sabers in silver sheaths...as was the custom in their country." Alexander Gorski writes in Historia!
Piechoty (Cracow, 1892) pp. 209-220, that in the second half of the 1
regiment of 466 soldiers, 186 were equipped with sabers.

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