Topic: Battles
For various reasons I have not posted since November. I'll try and improve upon that during the coming months.
Recently I found myself in a discussion focused on the Poltava battlefield. Some ten years ago a group of Swedish archaeologists went to Poltava in order to "solve" the many remaining questions once and for all. At the time I expressed considerabler skepticism, being under the impression that too much had happened to the battlefield since 1709 for such a project to be successful.
As far as I can tell from written reports the investigations yielded very limited results. The only real cluster of ammunition was for example retrieved in an area which traditionally has been seen as the western part of the fortified Russian camp. Most of the retrieved ammunition was judged to have been Russian, but the presence of a couple of "Swedish looking" musket balls resulted in the conclusion that the Russian camp was smaller than it's shown on most plans and looked more like it appears on the well-known Husson plan .
The Husson plan is indeed among the oldest, as it was printed in the Netherlands already in 1709. From some letters found by Anna Croiset van der Kop it would seem that the Russian envoy Andrey Matveyev was involved in the publication, i.e. it had some sort of Russian source. But where does that leave the official Russian plan?
