…Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
"Pyatigorsk – Kabardians in the service of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
A Pole in the Image of a Kabardian
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth relied on cavalry in military terms for a number of reasons. It wasn't that there was no infantry there, but there was frankly little, and its quality was more than mediocre. But there were a wagon and a small cart of cavalry types. One of these many were the banners of the Pyatigorsk people…
The Pyatigorsk people (Petyhorcy, Polish) appeared in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) in the 1563th century. How? Well, it's a dark matter: the Poles don't like Russia very much, but they do like the Caucasian rebels, so they piled up a lot of… unreliable information, which began to circulate on the Internet thanks to the Krakow historian M. Krushinsky. If we put aside speculation, the bottom line is that in XNUMX, five Kabardian princes came to Polotsk as part of Ivan the Terrible's army: Kasim Kambulatovich, Gavrila Kambulatovich, Alexander Kudadek, Temryuk Zhumkovich and Soltan Zhumkovich. When the army of Nikolai Radziwill the Red approached Polotsk the following year, the princes defected to the side of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: those close to Ivan Vasilyevich could "go crazy" at any moment (it was not for nothing that Kurbsky had already greased his skis for Lithuania…). There are other versions – the XNUMXth century is not a very well-documented era.
One way or another, since then, the "Pyatigorsk" banners of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth have included the "Pyatigorsk" banners, listed in a separate line. The name comes from the Caucasian "five mountains" – Beshtau. At first, the Pyatigorsk banners settled in Lithuania, but then ended up on the territory of the future Ukraine, which became part of the Polish crown lands in 1569. The armament of the Pyatigorsk banners was typical for Eastern Europe: chain mail with flat rings – "pansyr", an almost flat helmet "misyurka" with a chain mail aventail, bracers "karvashi" from the wrist to the elbow, a sabre, a wicker shield-kalkan of the Tatar type, a bow, a spear or a spear. What were the spear and spear for? It was believed that "a spear is good for a German reiter, a Cossack on foot, a Tatar on horseback", and the spear – "…for the German mercenary, for the Hungarian and Turkish hussars" The difference from the steppe weapons complex was that pistols were sometimes used, but firearms weapons The people of Pyatigorsk didn't like it…"
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Who made them in 28mm or 25mm?
Armand
