for the annual expenses of keeping up the Spanish army in the Low Countries at that time reached 7,000,000 florins! (Philippson, loc. cit., p. 240). Yet the Republic had never made such an effort before, and if the money paid in had reached the amount calculated on, it would have been amply sufficient. But it was far from doing that. Nevertheless, Batory, who had bent the Diet to his will, managed to find money. He had no personal expenses, and was thus able to pass all the income from his own lands into his war-chest. He obtained credit abroad, and once he had the money, he was able to get the men.
III.—The Polish Army.
The Polish nobles provided him with a splendid body of cavalry, which had lately proved its prowess at Wenden. But the Muscovites seemed more than likely to profit by their late experience, and await the Polish attack under the shelter of their fortress walls. The historian Dlugosz gives us reason to conclude that Poland had possessed infantry troops as early as in the beginning of the fifteenth century, but this body of men—a small one, numbering not more than 2,000—was only armed with pikes. Batory provided a more modern armament—muskets, swords, and battle-axes—and trebled the strength of his infantry by calling out the peasants on the crown lands. Those who enlisted of their own freewill were forgiven all they owed. The volunteers were many, and distinguished themselves by their bravery : some of them performed prodigies of valour. Besides these men, the King had a body of Hungarian infantry, some 5,000 strong, another of Polish infantry equipped in the Hungarian style, and consisting of the serving-men attached to the army, and a third recruited among the nobility. These he reinforced by divers bodies of auxiliaries belonging to the same arm of the service—Germans, who formed themselves into huge squares, Scotsmen, and Cossacks. Into his cavalry he introduced German and Polish arquebus-men.
The total number of troops, including the Lithuanian contingent, does not seem to have exceeded 20,000 men. It is worth remarking that in this war, certain separatist tendencies notwithstanding, Lithuania, or at all events the nobility of the country, which was still half Russian and half Orthodox, was heart and soul with Batory. This fact is acknowledged by the Russian historians themselves (Lappo, 'The Grand Duchy of Lithuania,' 1569–1586, St. Petersburg, 1901, p. 179). The sister nation gave all she could—a few thousand horsemen, who proved most invaluable, during the winter season especially, when, better able to endure the terrible climate and less distant from their own homes, they made up, to some extent, for the
