Winged Hussar Lance

Origins

The hussars came to Poland in the fifteenth century as light Serbian and Hungarian horsemen, but under King Stefan Batory, after 1576, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth turned them into heavy shock cavalry, armored in breastplate and helmet and trained for the massed lance charge. The Winged Hussars needed a lance long enough to reach past the pikes of Swedish and Muscovite infantry and the lances of opposing cavalry, yet light enough to handle on a galloping horse. The solution was the kopia, a lance built hollow, which grew longer through the seventeenth century as the hussars refined their tactics.

Design & Construction

A kopia's shaft was made by splitting a long, straight fir or spruce trunk, hollowing each half, and gluing the two back together, then binding the joint with sinew, cord or leather and painting it, often in bright colors. The result could be 4.5 to over 6 meters long but weighed only two to three and a half kilograms, less than many shorter solid lances. A turned wooden ball, the gałka, sat in front of the grip to stop the lance sliding back through the rider's hand on impact, and a small steel head was fixed at the tip. Behind the head flew the proporzec, a long silk pennon of two colors, which fluttered and hissed in the charge and helped frighten horses. The hollow shaft usually broke on impact; a hussar charged with one lance, broke it in the first shock, and then fought with his koncerz (a long, stiff thrusting sword), his sabre, his pistols and his war hammer. Lances were resupplied by the retainers who followed each hussar.

Combat Use

At Kircholm in 1605, some 3,600 Polish-Lithuanian troops, most of them hussars, destroyed a Swedish army of more than 10,000 in a few hours, and at Klushino in 1610 Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski's hussars charged repeatedly — some reportedly as many as ten times — to break a much larger Muscovite and Swedish force, opening the road to Moscow. The long lance let the hussars strike infantry before the pikes reached them, and against unsteady foot the charge was often decisive. The hussars' greatest charge came at Vienna in 1683, when King Jan III Sobieski led the largest cavalry charge in history, with the hussars at its head, down the slopes of the Kahlenberg into the Ottoman siege camp, alongside the Pike and musket of the imperial infantry. Opponents like the Ottomans, whose Janissaries fought as disciplined infantry, and Muscovy's growing firepower gradually eroded the charge's effectiveness.

Legacy

Improved infantry firearms and discipline, and the Commonwealth's political decline, reduced the hussars to a ceremonial role by the eighteenth century, and the formation was abolished in 1776. The kopia survives in only a handful of original examples, mostly in Polish museums, because broken lances were discarded; its memory lives in paintings, in the wings of hussar armor, and in modern reconstructions used by reenactors. Among Spears & Lances, it is the most famous example of a lance designed to break, and a centerpiece of Polish Arms & Weapons.