“Then the Husaria broke into a wild g allop and the heavy mass of men and horses cascaded over the Turkish ranks, bowling over the first, slicing through the second… The Grand Vizir leapt onto a horse and made his own escape moments before the winged riders thundered up to the tent and the banner was struck.”

Adam Zamoyski’s account of the relief of Vienna on Sept. 12, 1683, adds that the Turks’ Tartar allies fled without striking a blow the moment they sighted the Poles’ dreaded armored cavalry. They had fought the Husaria 10 years earlier at Chocim and they had no desire to meet these foes again. Accounts by Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz suggest that whenever hostile troops were unfortunate enough to be on terrain where the Husaria could get at them, their prospects for organizational (and individual) survival ranged from grim to nonexistent. The Husaria, and indeed the entire army of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, used many organizational and technological principles that we now recognize as characteristics of lean enterprises.

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