Pandur

Pandurs were a type of light infantry raised in Central Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, named after the security guards who had kept public order in the counties of Croatia. The first formation to carry the name was Trenck's Pandurs, which served the Kingdom of Hungary from 1741 and fought in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Silesian Wars. Later pandur forces followed the same pattern under different masters. Tudor Vladimirescu set up a pandur militia during the Wallachian uprising of 1821, and the Croatian Military Frontier and, in the nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Dalmatia used pandurs as frontier guard infantry. In the later eighteenth century the Republic of Venice also employed pandurs as a local militia against bandits in Dalmatia. In Wallachia the word could describe a legally recognized social status, held whether or not a man belonged to a specific unit, which helps explain the part pandurs played in the 1821 rising. This page treats pandurs as a family of irregular and frontier units rather than a single army.