The Lipka rebellion: the Muslim cavalry who left Poland, came back, and saved its king

Poland has had Muslim soldiers for more than 600 years. Most people outside Poland don't know that, and plenty of people inside Poland forget it. In 1672 those soldiers walked out on the country. What happened next is one of my favourite stories in Polish history, because nobody behaves the way you expect.

Who the Lipka Tatars were

The Lipka Tatars arrived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the end of the 14th century. In 1397 Grand Duke Vytautas gave asylum, land and noble status to Tatars who had lost a power struggle in the Golden Horde. "Lipka" most likely comes from the old Crimean Tatar name for Lithuania.

The deal was simple: land and freedom of religion in exchange for military service. They kept Sunni Islam and their own customs, built mosques, and fought for their new country. Tatar horse archers were at Grunwald in 1410, the great battle against the Teutonic Knights. A Polish Muslim writing in Istanbul in the 1550s counted about a hundred Tatar settlements with mosques in the country.

Over time they stopped speaking Tatar and switched to the languages around them, but they kept writing them in Arabic script. For three centuries they were known as some of the most loyal troops the Commonwealth had.

Why the loyalty broke

The middle of the 17th century was a catastrophe for the Commonwealth: the Cossack uprising, a Russian invasion, the Swedish Deluge. Tatar estates were burned and looted like everyone else's.

Then the state turned on them. In 1667 the Sejm stripped Tatar privileges, limited their promotion to command, banned new mosques in the south-eastern provinces, and decided their soldiers would get only a quarter of the pay they were owed. King Jan Kazimierz cancelled those laws a year later, just before he abdicated. The wages were never paid.

So by 1672 you had professional cavalry who had not been paid for years and who had just been told what the country thought of their religion.

1672: over to the Sultan

That summer the Ottoman Empire invaded and took the great fortress of Kamieniec Podolski. Several Tatar regiments of the Crown army, somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 riders, went over to the Sultan. Nobody knows the exact number. The Tatar units of the Lithuanian army stayed loyal, and some of them fought the Ottomans at Chocim the following year.

The men who crossed over knew every road and ford in Podolia, so they served the Ottoman army as guides and scouts. Some raided villages wearing their old Polish uniforms. Their leader, a cavalry captain called Aleksander Kryczyński, was rewarded with the fortress town of Bar, in today's Ukraine, and the title of bey.

The secret letter

It soured within months. The officers had done well. The ordinary riders had swapped one master who didn't pay for another who gave them poor land wrecked by war.

In the same month that Kamieniec fell, some of Kryczyński's own captains wrote in secret to the Polish commander, Hetman Jan Sobieski. The letter listed ten conditions under which they would come home. Sobieski said no.

In 1673 the rank and file in Bar rioted, seized Kryczyński and killed him.

Sobieski takes them back

Sobieski captured Bar in 1674. The Tatars defending it were the men who had deserted him in the middle of a war. He didn't punish them. He let them return to service.

It wasn't sentimentality. He had commanded a Tatar cavalry regiment of 2,000 during the Swedish wars and knew exactly what they were worth. Most of the rebels fought for the Commonwealth for the rest of the war. The last holdouts were taken back in 1691.

Elected king, he went further. In 1679 the Sejm restored the Tatars' privileges and their freedom of worship. The unpaid wages were settled in land, some of it from the king's own estates, in the regions of Brest, Kobryn and Grodno, to be held forever in return for military service. Ordinary soldiers got small farms and officers got more. One of the returned rebels, Samuel Mirza Krzeczowski, received the village of Kruszyniany.

A local legend says Sobieski told another officer, Olejewski, that he could keep as much land as he could ride around in a day. It's a legend, but it tells you how the Tatars remembered him.

Vienna, 1683

When Sobieski marched to break the Ottoman siege of Vienna, Lipka Tatars rode with him. There were Crimean Tatars on the other side, in the same kind of dress, so the Polish ones tucked a sprig of straw into their helmets to avoid being cut down by their own allies.

A few weeks later, at Párkány in what is now Slovakia, the Polish cavalry was ambushed and routed and the king nearly didn't get out. Polish tradition says it was Krzeczowski and his riders who cut down the men closing in on him. Some accounts credit one of Sobieski's courtiers instead, and in that chaos it may well have been both.

Either way, a man who had ridden away from Poland eleven years earlier helped keep its king alive.

What's left today

The Tatars kept their side of the deal for another 250 years. They fought in the Kościuszko uprising and in the 19th-century risings against Russia. In 1919 the reborn Polish army formed a Tatar cavalry regiment, and in 1939 a Tatar squadron of the 13th Wilno Uhlans was among the last Polish units still fighting.

After the borders moved in 1945, only two historic Tatar villages were left inside Poland: Kruszyniany and Bohoniki, both near the Belarusian border, each with a wooden mosque you can visit. In the 2011 census, 1,916 people in Poland declared Tatar ethnicity.

The novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, who had distant Tatar roots himself, built the third part of his Trilogy around this rebellion. And the father of the American actor Charles Bronson was a Lipka Tatar.

When someone tells me Islam has no history in Poland, this is the story I tell them. The mosque in Kruszyniany stands on land a Polish king gave to a Muslim officer as back pay.