"Daer uit het Poolsch geberght de Wijsselstroom koomt ruisschen..." Joost van den Vondel en het Poolse vraagstuk

Samenvatting

Joost van den Vondel gives in the fifth act of his Gysbreght van Aemstel the words of archangel Raphael who in the name of God tells Gysbreght to leave the besieged Amsterdam and to go “to the fat [= rich] land of Prussia where from the Polish mountains the Vistula river comes noising…” He did possibly mean the medieval ‘Preußisch Holland,’ today’s Pasłęk, a city not far from the Polish Gdańsk in Pomerania. The Netherlandic poet did mention Poland not only once – he had written more texts about Polish and Baltic connections with the Netherlands: the French wife of a Polish king, the Polish-Swedish wars, the Polish nobility… His point of view in the ‘Polish question’ and its historical contexts are discussed here.