The Battle of Berestechko (Polish: Bitwa pod Beresteczkiem; Ukrainian: Берестецька битва, Битва під Берестечком) was fought "after a two-year truce", between the Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, aided by their Crimean Tatar allies, and a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth army under King John II Casimir.
Fought over three days from 28 to 30 June 1651, the battle took place in the Polish province of Volhynia, on the hilly plain south of the Styr River. The Polish camp was on the river opposite Berestechko and faced south, towards the Cossack army about two km away, whose right flank was against the Pliashivka (Pliashova) River and the Tartar army on their left flank. It was, very probably, the world's largest land battle of the 17th century.
This description of the battle comes from Wikepedia and the actual report contains superb order of battle diagrams I show below thus, please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berestechko though I should go on to unroll the entire battle here ~
The number of Polish troops is uncertain. One of the senior Polish commanders on the day, Duke Bogusław Radziwiłł, wrote that ~
The Polish army had had 80,000 soldiers, which included "40,000 regulars and 40,000 nobles of the levy en masse, accompanied by roughly the same number of various servants, footmen, and such." Modern historians Zbigniew Wójcik, Józef Gierowski, and Władysław Czapliński have reduced this figure to 60,000-63,000 soldiers.
The Cossack army totaled 80,000 men, including 28,000-33,000 Tatars and an uncertain number of Ukrainian peasants or as much as 100,000 men, most of them low-grade foot troops, plus 40,000 to 50,000 allied Crimean Tatar cavalry and a few thousand Turks and Vlachs, for a total of 200,000.
Both sides had about 40,000 cavalry. Fighting was close, with the core of excellent Cossack infantry making up for the weakness of their cavalry; much of the decisive fighting was by the infantry and dismounted dragoons of each side.
To be continued...
