After The Deluge:
Poland-Lithuania
and the Second Northern War

Book Review

by Old Duffer

Robert Frost for CUP.

Forty quid of academic book and a sad disappointment. The topic is the failed response of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Charles X of Sweden and Alexis of Muscovy. Unwilling to defend themselves (one cannot say unable) the Commonwealth engaged in internecine disputes in which regalist, magnate and szlachta refuse to help each other because it would reduce their freedoms. As a result no-one would pay the taxes and serve in the armies under the king's control, but equally without his support could do little themselves. Meanwhile the Muscovites nibble away at the east, Chelmnitski (the model of Gogol's Taras Bulba) raises hell in the Ukraine and the Swedes tour around knocking seven bells out of the noble levy who have heaps of cavalry but no infantry. Where to get the foot-sloggers? There are the untrustworthy Brandenburgers who felt Swedish wrath but a decade before or the exhausted Austrians whose armies irritate the Poles without fighting the Swedes. Eventually Charles X got tired of trying to rule so unruly a people and went off to bash the Danes (a hobby of Vasa kings). The Polish response which we wait for throughout the book is to... well do very little indeed. This book could have been called "A Chronicle of a Partition Foretold". The text is pretty leaden and has more interest in whether the Queen was or was not pro-French. It misses the opportunity to be a very great deal more analytical about the whole Baltic power-zone.

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