Round 1: Hannibal vs. Gustavus Adolphus

Quote:

Originally Posted by Innocentius

@cegorah: I stand corrected by you in most matters concerning Swedish-Polish wars (:bow:) but I think you are exaggerating the importance of the myths and misconceptions regarding the Swedish-Polish wars in Sweden. In fact, the Swedish-Polish wars are not treated as very important at all, unless you study history at the university and such, and there are a lot of Swedes who don't even know of them. Sad, yes, but these wars were never as defining moments for Swedish history as for example the campaigns of Gustav II Adolf in Germany 1630-1632 and thus they don't get the same amount of attention.

Exactly like in Poland, though the later 'Deluge' is a very important event, but and in general well-researched, only its Russian part was obscured by myths, but hey it was censored before 1989 so no wonder - though recently I have seen or bought at least 10 books about this newly researched area.:beam: : :beam:

In general it will take at least 20-30 years to give the history of the entire Central-Eastern Europe its fair share of reliable historical works in English or other languages. Even it will take a while... :turtle

To give a word about the quality of the majority of more recent historical books here in Poland - recently I was shocked by a guy from Czech Republic who told me that 'here we don't have anything like this' when I shown him latest book about the early phase of the TYW - mainly CZECH rebellion.:laugh4:

And he DID have some knowledge about the published works in his country.

The war in the Vistula's delta is more a problem, but the strange thing is that earlier works dominating amoung Polish historians were in general biased in favour of Sweden...
It was a part of general policy to criticise the Commonwealth as 'imperialistic, anti-Russian and anarchic' in comparision with the earlier 'people's' Piast dynasty and 'good' wars against Germany and the Order.
The direct consequence was to explain all failures as a clear sign of the 'bad quality' of Commonwealth's army and its soldiers taking everything completelly out of context.
To some degree the latest, hopefully the last 'child' of that policy is suprisingly the 'Winged Hussar' Osprey book which fails miserably in several cases.

Fortunatelly the newer works are not biased in the opposite direction, but generally (some exceptions exist) reliable and neutral.:yes:

I do hope these will be folowed by works translated or written in English, so easier to acquire for the foreigners, but for now there is an explosion ( I got 37 books from XVIth and XVIIth century Polish military in time of ONE year) of such works, but directed to the Polish market, but the right time will come.:egypt:

@KrooK

I mean the style, not the knowledge and certainly I do appreciate the effort.:applause:

I might be arrogant, self-centred little bastard when arguing, but in general I can afford that because of the painstaking research and lots of money I spent on historical books. As Goethe once said 'great people shouln't be modest' - though I am not claiming this... for now...~;)