Qualla: Battle of Orsha

Battle of Orsha: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. There is a painting in the National Museum in Warsaw, anonymous, painted around 1530 - five hundred figures, blue rivers, glittering armor, a battle frozen at three different moments on the same canvas. It is one of the great early-Renaissance battle paintings of any country, and it depicts a fight that almost no Western European has heard of. On 8 September 1514, near the town of Orsha on the Dnieper in what is now eastern Belarus, an allied Lithuanian-Polish army under Grand Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski destroyed a Muscovite army that had been sent to take advantage of the recent fall of Smolensk. The numbers in the old chronicles are wildly inflated. The painting in Warsaw is not.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Battle of Orsha: The fortress that fell

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Memnon335bc, CC BY 3.0. Smolensk was the easternmost fortress of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - the great wooden bastion guarding the road to Vilnius from the Russian side - and for years it had repelled every attack the Grand Princes of Moscow had thrown at it. In July 1514 the Muscovite army of Vasili...

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Image: Memnon335bc | CC BY 3.0

Battle of Orsha: A feint, a forest, a trap

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Shortly after dawn on 8 September, the Muscovite commander Ivan Chelyadnin ordered an attack designed to envelop both Lithuanian flanks. The flanks held - they were manned by Polish cavalry, Lithuanian light hussars, and Tatars - and Chelyadnin's pincers snapped shut on empty air...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Battle of Orsha: Counting and remembering

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bulka UA, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sigismund von Herberstein, the German diplomat whose Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii became the main Western source on the battle, reported that 40,000 Muscovites died at Orsha. The actual number was probably a small fraction of that. The Polish historian Tomasz Bohun has argued...

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Image: Bulka UA | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Orsha: An awkward anniversary

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pavlo Ostrovskyi, CC BY-SA 4.0. How a battle is remembered tells you as much as the battle itself. In Lithuania, Orsha is celebrated every year by the Ministry of Defense with concerts, conferences, and parades. In Ukraine, the National Bank issued a commemorative coin in 2014 for the five-hundredth anniversary...

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Image: Pavlo Ostrovskyi | CC BY-SA 4.0