Hi, I'm currently at a conference, but this is a topic very dear to my heart, so I will write quickly now and then give you a fuller answer whenever I'm more free.
The initial, light and medium cavalry hussars were in a similar tradition to other Balkan/South-Eastern European horsemen. So they resembled Stradiots or Calarasis. There seem to be two linked but separate hussar traditions that came to Poland: Serbian and Hungarian. There is debate about their armaments, but most of the rolls from the different rotas seem to mark them as armed with p. p. t. d. which stands for "przyłbica, pancerz, tarcza, drzewo", which in turn means "helmet, mail, shield, lance". As you can see, they were not quite the light cavalry depicted in the famous Orsza painting, much more of an actual armoured, charge-in kind of cavalry. The painting is from about a decade after Orsza, so by the time of the Battle of Obertyn (1531) they may have fully transformed into the lighter cavalry you see on the painting. Bows became really popular as well, mostly replacing the native polish mounted shooters. There is also a discussion about the Serbian hussars initially being the unarmoured ones in the vein of those depicted on the Orsza painting while the Hungarians being the armoured variants. In that case, the Serbian variant quickly established itself as the preferred version. Interestingly, after a while, more and more Poles and Lithuanians served armed "hussar-style" instead of the heavy man-at-arms/gendarme-style they used to. The "western knight" heavy cavalry survived till much later in the century, but the proportion of them decreased over time. Than in the 1570s the new king Stefan Batory (himself Hungarian) reorganised the military of the (now United) Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and established hussars as medium armoured heavy cavalry.
In terms of what minis to use, I think your choice isn't that massive. Basically you can stick to Stradiot miniatures which are produced by many companies. Perrys have a set of "westernised Stradiots" that' could do for the medium style armoured "Hungarian" hussars, but to be honest, we don't know exactly what they looked like. I personally just bought Stradiots and will be using them 😂
There are some magnificent books by Michał Plewczyński and Aleksander Bołdyrew, but I won't be back home till next week to access them. I don't think much of that info has been translated into English, but in a spare moment, I can write out some other aspects of the Polisha and Lithuanian armies of the time.
05 December 2015, 06:09:12 PM
