Military Migration as a Social Consequence of War. On the Example of the Hvizdets-Obertyn Campaign of 1531

Since the end of the Middle Ages, most of the wars fought by the Jagiellons were fought by enlisted soldiers, while every year they served in the permanent defence system (Polish: obrona potoczna) in the Ruthenian lands. As a result, several thousands, tens of thousands, and sometimes even tens of thousands of men left their place of residence and moved to another area, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away. As their destination was most often the Ruthenian lands, and the largest percentage of recruits with a known territorial affiliation came from Lesser Poland, it can be assumed that the distance oscillated, on average, around 290 km (in a straight line from Kraków to Lviv) and another 225–250 km from Lviv (the traditional place of concentration of troops) to the region of Kamianets-Podilskyi or Medzhybizh, i.e. to the area of fairly frequent military operations.


Thus, the question arises, to what extent the phenomenon of the migration of soldiers (permanent or temporary) is perceptible in the source material? Having the treasury and military registers, it is possible to compile data directly concerning individual soldiers with knowledge about their territorial origin and activity in a specific territory during the war expedition. Given the bulk of the preserved source material, certain exclusions have to be made in this study. The entirety of the surviving archives requires thorough and lengthy research. Thus, this paper is a test survey, based on sources related to Hetman Jan Tarnowski’s Moldavian expedition of 1531. At that time, Tarnowski commanded around six thousand soldiers, which seems to be a sufficiently large research sample. We aim to show the sheer regularity of soldier movements/migrations, especially as this issue is essentially absent from Polish military-historical literature.