The Kingdom of Prussia was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and poor in natural resources. Its territory was disjointed, stretching from the lands of the Duchy of Prussia on the south-east coast of the Baltic Sea to the Hohenzollern heartland of Brandenburg, with the exclaves of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg in the Rhineland. In 1708 about one third of the population of the Duchy of Prussia died of bubonic plague. The plague reached Prenzlau in August 1710 but receded before it could reach the capital Berlin, which was only away. The Great Northern War was the first major conflict that the Kingdom of Prussia was involved in.
1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
Kingdom of Prussia
Kingdom of Prussia | 1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
1708. 1708 1708. 1708
the mitochrondria is the powerhouse of the cell
user
Yes.
assistant
who was the first to discover it?
user
Richard Altmann.
assistant
what exactly is it?
user
It is a semi autonomous double-membrane-bound organelle found in most eukaryotic organisms.
assistant
who is the above-mentioned person?
user
A German pathologist and histologist.
assistant
when did he discover this organelle mentioned above?
user
1890.
assistant
where is he from?
user
Deutsch Eylau in the Province of Prussia.
assistant
where is this province located?
user
Kingdom of Prussia.
assistant
who are the natives of this kingdom?
user
Sorry. I cannot find the answer based on the context.
assistant
which year did it experience a plague?
user
The Kingdom of Prussia was still recovering from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and poor in natural resources. Its territory was disjointed, stretching from the lands of the Duchy of Prussia on the south-east coast of the Baltic Sea to the Hohenzollern heartland of Brandenburg, with the exclaves of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg in the Rhineland. In 1708 about one third of the population of the Duchy of Prussia died of bubonic plague. The plague reached Prenzlau in August 1710 but receded before it could reach the capital Berlin, which was only away. The Great Northern War was the first major conflict that the Kingdom of Prussia was involved in.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
In preparation for the plague, a "Collegium Sanitatis" (health commission) was set up, including physicians from the university and leading civilian and military officials of the town. The plague arrived in August 1709, most probably carried by a Danzig sailor. The provincial government was exiled to Wehlau while the chancellor, von Kreytzen, remained in Königsberg and continued to work as the chairman of the Collegium Sanitatis, which met daily. The city walls were manned by the military, the burghers were conscripted into neighborhood watches, medical and other personnel was hired, dressed in black waxed clothes and housed in separate buildings.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
King Frederick William I inaugurated the Prussian compulsory system in 1717.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
While at first the city authorities downplayed the plague, which had reached a peak in early October and then declined, this approach was abandoned when the death toll again started to rise significantly in November. Without prior public announcement, a cordon sanitaire was implemented around the city, sealing it off completely from the surrounding countryside from 14/15 November until 21 December 1709. When the plague had fully retreated from Königsberg by mid-1710, more than 9,500 townspeople had died, about a quarter of its population.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
By December, 400 people had died in Hohenstein. While the plague faded out during the hard winter, food became scarce due to war contributions and conscription, and the cordon sanitaire and the respective restrictions were lifted by edict on 12 July 1709. In January 1709, the plague reached Pillupönen (now in Kaliningrad Oblast) in the rural Prussian east, and by the end of the winter it reached Danzig (Gdansk). Danzig, at that time a largely autonomous, Protestant and German-speaking town in Polish Royal Prussia, had become one of the greatest towns in the area around the Baltic sea due to its position as a hub between Polish trade (via the Vistula) and international trade (via the Baltic Sea).
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
A few days after a Prussian official in Soldau forwarded the information that on 18 August 1708 the plague had reached the village of Piekielko on the Polish side of the border, the epidemic had crossed into the village of Bialutten on the Prussian side, killing most of its inhabitants within a month. The Prussian authorities reacted by containing the village with a palisade; however, the survivors, led by the local reverend, had already taken refuge in the nearby woods. On 13 September 1708, a Prussian official from Hohenstein reported that the plague had been brought to this small border town by the son of the local hatter returning from Polish service.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
In November 1709, when the Prussian king Frederick I returned to Berlin from a meeting with Russian tsar Peter the Great, the king had a strange encounter with his mentally deranged wife Sophia Louise, who in a white dress and with bloody hands pointed at him saying that the plague would devour the king of Babylon. As there was a legend of a White Lady foretelling the deaths of the Hohenzollern, Frederick took his wife's outburst seriously and ordered that precautions be taken for his residence city. Among other measures, he ordered the construction of a pest house outside the city walls, the Berlin Charité.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Brandenburg
Until the end of May, it seemed that the plague would not be as severe, and the health commission's reports were openly accessible. However, the plague was not contained and spread from the plague houses to the poorer suburbs and surrounding countryside, and starting in early June the death toll rose significantly. The health commission's reports were then declared secret. When the plague faded out by December 1709 never to return to Danzig, the town had lost about half of its inhabitants. The next large town to the east of Danzig was Königsberg in the Prussian kingdom, which had so far profited from the war by taking over some of the Swedish and Polish Livonian trade.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
While the plague eventually spared Berlin, it raged in the northeastern regions of Brandenburg, affecting the New March (Neumark) in 1710 and the Uckermark, where Prenzlau was infected on 3 August 1710. There, the Prussian military enforced a quarantine and nailed up houses where infected people lived. By January 1711, 665 people had died of the plague in Prenzlau and were buried on the city walls, and the quarantine was lifted on 10 August 1711.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Brandenburg
In Warsaw, 30,000 people died in annually recurring plague epidemics between 1707 and 1710. Poznań lost around 9,000 people, about two thirds of its 14,000 inhabitants, to the plague between 1707 and 1709. In 1708, the plague spread north to the war-torn town of Toruń (Thorn) in Royal Prussia, killing more than 4,000 people. When news of the plague in Poland arrived in the Kingdom of Prussia, then still neutral in the war, precautions were taken to prevent it spreading across the border. From 1704, health certificates were compulsory for travellers from Poland. From 1707, a broad cordon sanitaire extended around the border of the former Duchy of Prussia, and those crossing into the Prussian exclave were quarantined.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Spread in Poland–Lithuania after 1706
From Poland, there had been three incursions of the plague into Silesia (then belonging to the Bohemian Crown within the Habsburg Monarchy) in 1708: first into Georgenberg (Miasteczko), transmitted by a Cracow wagoner but successfully contained; then into Rosenberg (Olesno), where it killed 860 inhabitants out of 1,700; and also into two villages near Militsch (Milicz), from where it spread into the nearby lands of Wartenberg (Syców). After the Swedish defeat at Poltava in 1709, refugees from Poland including part of the Swedish-Polish corps of Joseph Potocki crossed into the Silesian borderlands, but also their Russian pursuers. This resulted in the infection of 25 villages in the Oels (Oleśnica) and Militsch area, and while the plague seemed to have faded out by February 1710, it struck again and even more severe from spring 1710 to winter 1711, killing more than 3,000 inhabitants of Oels and many villagers.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Habsburg Monarchy and Bavaria
During the Great Northern War (1700–1721), many towns and areas around the Baltic Sea and East-Central Europe had a severe outbreak of the plague with a peak from 1708 to 1712. This epidemic was probably part of a pandemic affecting an area from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Most probably via Constantinople, it spread to Pińczów in southern Poland, where it was first recorded in a Swedish military hospital in 1702. The plague then followed trade, travel and army routes, reached the Baltic coast at Prussia in 1709, affected areas all around the Baltic Sea by 1711 and reached Hamburg by 1712.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Introduction
Against the will of the Prussian king, whose troops were occupied in the War of the Spanish Succession, they crossed through the Prussian New March and Prussian Pomerania to reach Damm in Swedish Pomerania with the main army and the Swedish border near Wollin, Gollnow and Greiffenhagen with smaller units on 21 October. Krassow, who on his march was followed and monitored by Prussian officials, denied having infected soldiers in his corps when confronted with suspicions. In a meeting with Prussian official Scheden, he justified his choice to march through infected Damm and probably infected Gollnow by responding that Gollnow was not infected at all, and that the situation in Damm would be dealt with by setting up a military corridor through the town separating the army from the inhabitants; Horn from Krassow's corps added reports that in Damm, after the death of 500 people, none of the remaining 400 inhabitants had died for three weeks.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Pomerania
Starting in 1700, the Great Northern War involved a coalition led by Tsarist Russia against the dominant North European power at the time, the Swedish Empire. Frederick William in 1705 tried to get Prussia involved in the war, stating it "best Prussia has her own army and make her own decisions." His views, however, were not considered acceptable by those in power. It was not until 1713 that Frederick William gained full royal powers. Therefore, in 1715, Prussia, led by Frederick William, joined the coalition for various reasons, including the danger of being attacked from both her rear and the sea; her claims on Pomerania; and the fact that if she stood aside and Sweden lost she would not get a share of the territory.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
In 1712, the plague crossed into Silesia for a last time from Polish Zduny, infecting the village of Luzin near Oels and killing 14 people before it vanished in the beginning of 1713. Contemporary to the plague, there was also a cattle plague in Silesia. The plague also spread to other territories of the Habsburg monarchy, though it was not involved in the Great Northern War. Territories severely affected in 1713 were Bohemia (where 37,000 died only in Prague), and Austria, and the plague also struck Moravia and Hungary. From the Habsburg territories, the plague crossed into the Electorate of Bavaria, infecting in 1713 also the Free Imperial Cities of Free Imperial City of Nuremberg and Ratisbon (Regensburg, then seat of the Perpetual Diet).
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Habsburg Monarchy and Bavaria
By 1702, the armies of Charles XII of Sweden had repelled and taken up pursuit of the armies of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, defeating them in July at Klissow near Pińczów on the Nida in southern Poland. In their military hospital in Pińczów, the Swedish army suffered its first plague infections of soldiers, recorded on the basis of reports from "trustworthy people from that very land" by Danzig (Gdańsk) physician Johann Christoph Gottwald. In Poland, the plague recurred in various places until 1714. During the following two years, plague broke out in Ruthenia, Podolia and Volhynia, with Lviv (Lemberg, Lwów) suffering around 10,000 plague deaths in 1704 and 1705 (40% of all inhabitants).
Great Northern War plague outbreak | 1702–1706: Southern Poland
Prussia only participated in one battle, the Battle of Stresow on the island of Rügen, as the war had already been practically decided in the 1709 Battle of Poltava. In the Treaty of Stockholm Prussia gained all of Swedish Pomerania east of the river Oder. Sweden would however keep Vorpommern until 1815. The Great Northern War not only marked the end of the Swedish Empire but also elevated Prussia and Russia as new powers in Europe. The Great Elector had incorporated the Junkers, the landed aristocracy, into the empire's bureaucracy and military machine, giving them a vested interest in the Prussian Army and compulsory education.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1701–1721: Plague and the Great Northern War
While it had so far avoided participation in the war, the conflict had affected it indirectly by a reduction of its trade volume, rising taxes and food shortages. The city council adopted a dual strategy of actively downplaying the plague to the outside world, especially Danzig's trading partners, thus keeping the city open and allowing international and local trade to continue with few restrictions, while at the same time the restrictions on burials were eased due to a coffin shortage and the deaths of many grave diggers, plague (pest) houses and new graveyards were designated, and a "health commission" to organize the anti-plague measures was implemented to, for example, collect weekly reports from the physicians and provide the plague victims with food.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Prussia
The plague remained in Scania until 1713, probably 1714. In Blekinge, the plague arrived in August 1710 by means of army movements from and to Karlskrona, the central Swedish naval base. By the beginning of 1712, about 15,000 soldiers and civilians had died not only in Karlskrona, but also in Karlshamn and other localities in Blekinge.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Scania and Blekinge
Especially on the eastern coast from Prussia to Estonia, the average death toll for wide areas was up to two thirds or three quarters of the population, and many farms and villages were left completely desolated. It is, however, hard to distinguish between deaths due to a genuine plague infection and deaths due to starvation and other diseases that spread along with the plague. While buboes are recorded among the symptoms, contemporary means of diagnosis were poorly developed, and death records are often unspecific, incomplete or lost. Some towns and areas were affected only for one year, while in other places the plague recurred annually throughout several subsequent years.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Introduction
After the Swedish incursion, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was in a state of civil war between the Warsaw Confederation, supportive of the pro-Swedish king Stanisław I Leszczyński, and the Sandomierz Confederation, supportive of Sweden's adversaries, i.e. the Russian tsar and August the Strong, who was forced to abdicate in 1706 by Charles XII. In 1707, the plague reached Cracow, where according to Frandsen (2009) 20,000 people died within three years, according to Sticker (1905) 18,000 people within two years, most in 1707, and according to Burchardt et al. (2009) 12,000 people between 1706 and 1709. From Cracow, the plague spread to Lesser Poland (the surrounding area), Mazovia (including the city of Warsaw) and Great Poland with the cities of Ostrów, Kalisz (Kalisch) and Poznań (Posen).
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Spread in Poland–Lithuania after 1706
Approximately one-third of East Prussia's population died in the plague and famine of 1709–1711, including the last speakers of Old Prussian. The plague, probably brought by foreign troops during the Great Northern War, killed 250,000 East Prussians, especially in the province's eastern regions. Crown Prince Frederick William I led the rebuilding of East Prussia, founding numerous towns. Thousands of Protestants expelled from the Archbishopric of Salzburg were allowed to settle in depleted East Prussia. The province was overrun by Imperial Russian troops during the Seven Years' War. In the 1772 First Partition of Poland, the Prussian king Frederick the Great annexed neighboring Royal Prussia, i.e., the Polish voivodeships of Pomerania (Gdańsk Pomerania or Pomerelia), Malbork, Chełmno and the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia, thereby connecting his Prussian and Farther Pomeranian lands and cutting the rest of Poland from the Baltic coast.
East Prussia | Kingdom of Prussia
In August 1709, the plague arrived in the small Swedish Pomeranian town of (Alt-)Damm (now Dąbie) on the eastern bank of the Oder river, rapidly killing 500 inhabitants. Stettin (now Szczecin), the capital city of Swedish Pomerania located on the opposite bank of the river, reacted by isolating the town with a guarded cordon sanitaire. Precautions taken in Stettin since the arrival of the plague in Danzig included restrictions for travellers, especially soldiers' families returning from Swedish-occupied Poland after the lost Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709), and a ban on fruits in the town's markets, since fruits were believed to transmit the disease.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Pomerania
Dresden was affected in 1680, Magdeburg and Halle in 1682. In Halle, a mortality of 4,397 out of a population of about 10,000 was recorded. Many North German city populations fell in these years. By 1683, the plague disappeared from Germany until the epidemic of 1707.
Great Plague of Vienna | Regional outbreak
The plague also broke out in neighboring Bremen-Verden, whose capital, Stade, became infected by early July 1712 and on 7 September capitulated to the Danish forces who had entered Bremen-Verden on 31 July. The plague, as in formerly Swedish Livonia and Estonia, was a main reason for the defendants' surrender. In the spring and summer of 1712, the plague also broke out in Gröpelingen on Bremish territory. The city council downplayed the plague cases in order not to impair trade, but set up a health commission and a pest house for quarantine measures. Isolation of the infected did not prevent the plague from spreading into Bremen, but reduced the resulting deaths, which in 1712 were "only" 56 in Gröpelingen, which had a population of 360, and 12 in Bremen, which had a population of 28,000.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Bremen, Bremen-Verden, Hamburg and Holstein
Famine and the plague further reduced the Pomeranian population. In 1688, only 115,000 people lived in Pomerania proper. The most devastating plague epidemics lasted from 1709 to 1711, leaving up to one third dead. In Stettin, the population was reduced from 6,000 to 4,000 during this outbreak.
Pomerania during the Early Modern Age | Famine and the plague
From Stockholm, the plague in August and September 1710 spread to various other places in Uppland, including Uppsala and Enköping, and to Södermanland. The court was evacuated to Sala in August, the riksrådet to Arboga in September. While in Uppland the disease seemingly faded out in the winter, it continued, though with less intensity, to ravage the Uppland countryside throughout the whole year of 1711, infecting for instance Värmdö, Tillinge and Danmark parish. From Uppland, the plague spread southward. Jönköping lost 31% of its inhabitants in 1710 and 1711. Besides "bad air" (miasma), animals were believed to transmit the disease, and people were forbidden to keep domestic animals inside the built-up areas and ordered to kill stray pigs.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Finland, Gotland and Central Sweden
the Great Plague of London 1666–68) and, in the 18th century final recurrences in the rest of Europe (e.g. the plague during the Great Northern War in the area around the Baltic sea, the Great Plague of Marseille 1720–22 in southern Europe, and the Russian plague of 1770–1772 in eastern Europe), being thereafter confined to less severe outbreaks in ports of the Ottoman Empire until the 1830s.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Background
However, the plague returned to Bremen in 1713, killing another 180 people,
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Bremen, Bremen-Verden, Hamburg and Holstein
In some areas, a disproportionally high death toll is recorded for children and women, which may be due to famine and the men being drafted. As the cause of the plague was unknown to contemporaries, with speculations reaching from religious causes over "bad air" to contaminated clothes, the only means of fighting the disease was containment, to separate the ill from the healthy. Cordons sanitaire were established around infected towns like Stralsund and Königsberg; one was also established around the whole Duchy of Prussia and another one between Scania and the Danish isles along the Sound, with Saltholm as the central quarantine station.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Introduction
Yet the border was long and wooded, and not all roads could be guarded; thus bridges were demolished, lesser roads blocked, and orders were given to hang people avoiding the guarded crossings and burn or fumigate all incoming goods. There were, however, many exemptions for people with cross-border estates or occupations, who were allowed to pass freely.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Spread in Poland–Lithuania after 1706
At the time of the Great Northern War, the northwest of the Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork with the Swedish dominion of Bremen-Verden located between the largely autonomous cities of Bremen and Hamburg, bordered to the south by the Electorate of Hanover, whose prince-elector George Louis became king of Great Britain in 1714, and to the north by the Duchy of Holstein, divided into Holstein-Glückstadt, ruled by the Danish king, and Holstein-Gottorp, whose duke Charles Frederick, a cousin and ally of Charles XII of Sweden, resided in Stockholm while Danish forces had occupied his share of the duchy only disturbed by Stenbock's march from Wakenstädt to Tønning in 1713.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Bremen, Bremen-Verden, Hamburg and Holstein
In the years 1710 and 1711, 190,000 People were infected half of which died. The main Lithuanian city, Vilnius suffered from the plague from 1709 to 1713. Between 23,000 and 33,700 people died in the city in 1709 and 1710; that number continued to rise in the following three years, when many of the starving from the Lithuanian countryside, which was ravaged by hunger and other diseases, took refuge within its walls. In Swedish Estonia and Swedish Livonia (both of which capitulated to the Russian tsar in 1710), the death toll between 1709 and 1711 was up to 75% of the population.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
Hamburg and Bremen were crowded with refugees of war, and Bremen in addition was suffering from a smallpox epidemic that had caused the deaths of 1,390 children in 1711. From Copenhagen, the plague had infected several places in Holstein, and while it is unclear whether Danish ships first brought it to Friedrichsort, Rendsburg or Laboe, and whether Schleswig and Flensburg were infected separately, it is established that it was the Danish army that brought the plague to Holstein. In addition to the ports, infected towns included Itzehoe, Altona, Kropp and Glückstadt, in Kiel, the plague was limited to the castle and spared the town.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Bremen, Bremen-Verden, Hamburg and Holstein
In the Netherlands, there was a plague in 1667–1669, but there are no definite notices of it after 1672. France saw its last plague epidemic in 1668. In the years 1675–1684 a new plague wave originated in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey and areas of the Balkans). It moved into North Africa, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Saxony, progressing generally northward. The island of Malta lost 11,000 people in an epidemic in 1675–76. The plague of Vienna in 1679 was very severe, causing at least 76,000 deaths. Other urban centers in this area of Europe had similar levels of casualties. For instance, Prague in 1681 lost 83,000 due to plague.
Great Plague of Vienna | Regional outbreak
From 1705 to 1706, occurrences of plague in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were also recorded in Kołomyję (Kolomyja, Kolomea), Stanisławów (Stanislaviv, Stanislau), Stryj (Stryi), Sambor (Sambir), Przemyśl, and Jarosław.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | 1702–1706: Southern Poland
According to Zapnik (2006), the returning soldiers' wives who had contact with the plague-stricken areas around Poznań were most likely the transmitters of the plague to Pomerania. After the outbreak in Damm, the mail route connecting Stettin with Stargard in the adjacent Prussian province of Pomerania via Damm was relocated to Podejuch. Despite the precautions, the plague broke out in Warsow, just north of Stettin, and by the end of September also inside Stettin's walls, transmitted by a local woman who had provided food to her son in Damm. As in Danzig (see above), the city council downplayed the plague cases to not impair Stettin's trade, but also set up a health commission and pest houses and hired personnel to deal with the infected.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Pomerania
From Livonia and Estonia, refugees brought the plague to Central Sweden and Finland, at that time still an integral part of Sweden. In June 1710, most probably via a ship from Pernau, the plague arrived in Stockholm, where the health commission ("Collegium Medicum") until 29 August denied that it was indeed the plague, despite buboes being visible on the bodies of victims from the ship and in the town. The plague raged in Stockholm until 1711, affecting primarily women (45.3% of the dead) and children (38.7% of the dead) in the poorer quarters outside the Old Town. Of Stockholm's approximately 55,000 inhabitants, about 22,000 did not survive the plague.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Finland, Gotland and Central Sweden
The Great Plague of 1738 was an outbreak of the bubonic plague between 1738 and 1740 that affected areas in the modern nations of Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria. Although no exact figure is available, the epidemic likely killed over 50,000 people. In February 1738 the plague hit the Banat region, having been spread there by the Imperial Army. According to the 1740 Hungarian Diet, the Great Plague claimed 36,000 lives.
Great Plague of 1738 | Introduction
Over 60% of Norway's population died from 1348 to 1350. The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654. In Russia, where the disease hit somewhere once every five or six years from 1350 to 1490. In 1654, the Russian plague killed about 700,000 inhabitants. In 1709–1713, a plague epidemic followed the Great Northern War (1700–1721), between Sweden and the Tsardom of Russia and its allies, killing about 100,000 in Sweden, and 300,000 in Prussia. The plague killed two-thirds of the inhabitants of Helsinki, and claimed a third of Stockholm's population. This was the last plague in Scandinavia, but the Russian plague of 1770–1772 killed up to 100,000 people in Moscow.
Second plague pandemic | Northern Europe
Refugees from Dünamünde also carried the plague to Ösel, where the fortress of Arensburg was depopulated by the disease.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
Great Plague of 1738 was a pandemic of plague lasting 1738–1740 and affecting areas in the modern nations of Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria.
Second plague pandemic | Eastern Europe
The largest city there was Riga, guarded by a garrison of 12,000, which after the Battle of Poltava was targeted by the forces of the Tsardom of Russia under Boris Sheremetev. A siege was raised by November 1709; however, when the plague broke out in the city in May 1710, it soon spread from the defendants to the Russian siege forces, causing the latter to retreat behind a cordon sanitaire. When the plague spread to Swedish Dünamünde upstream on the Düna (Daugava) river, thwarting Riga's defendants' hopes for relief, and plague and hunger became so widespread in the city that only 1,500 men of the garrison were still alive, on 5 (O.S.) / 15 July they surrendered the city to Sheremetev, who reported to the tsar 60,000 deaths in Riga and 10,000 deaths among his own forces.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
Already in 1708, the Danish "Politi- och Kommercekollegium" proposed shielding the Danish islands with a marine cordon sanitaire, with dedicated ports for inspection of incoming ships from the Baltic Sea and a quarantine station on Saltholm, a small island in the Sound between Copenhagen on Zealand (Sjælland) and Malmö in Scania. These measures were not implemented immediately, as the plague had not yet reached the Baltic coast. On 16 and 19 August 1709, however, the king ordered the implementation of a revised plan, and a quarantine station was built on Saltholm for goods and crews of ships coming to Denmark from the infected ports of Danzig and Königsberg, while their ships were meanwhile cleansed in Christianshavn; Dutch traders sailing from infected ports to the North Sea were to pay the Sound Dues on a special boat off the coast at Helsingør.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Zealand
Contrary to Krassow's assurances, part of his corps was indeed infected with the plague, and the retreat from the infected Polish territories was carried out in disorder. According to Zapnik (2006), "hordes of unrestrained soldateska, without adequate supplies and driven by fear of pursuit by their adversaries, behaved in a way more resembling their treatment of enemy territory when they had entered Swedish Pomerania."
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Pomerania
Letters from postal offices were also fumigated. Between 1710 and 1713, 100,000 people in Sweden succumbed to the plague, of which 20,000 were in Stockholm. Thousands of people died in Scania, mainly in Göinge and the northeastern parts of the region, while neighboring villages were free from plague-related deaths.
Magnus Stenbock | Plague outbreak
In Scania (Skåne), the plague arrived on 20 (O.S.)/ 30 November 1710, when an infected Västanå boatman returned home from the navy. Scania had not yet fully recovered from the Scanian War when its population was further weakened by a measles epidemic in 1706, a crop failure and the outbreak of smallpox in 1708–1709, an invasion of the Danish army in 1709, the expulsion of this army after the battle of Helsingborg, followed by conscriptions into the Swedish army and an outbreak of typhus in 1710. While Scania was protected from an infection from the north by a cordon sanitaire between it and Småland, the plague came by sea and made landfall not only in Västanå, but also in January 1711 in Domsten in Allerum parish, where the locals had ignored the ban on contact with their relatives and friends on the Danish side of the Sound, most notably in the infected area around Helsingør (Elsinore); the third starting point for the plague in Scania was Ystad, where on 19 June an infected soldier arrived from Swedish Pomerania.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Scania and Blekinge
Therefore, the course of the war and the course of the plague mutually affected each other: while soldiers and refugees were often agents of the plague, the death toll in the military as well as the depopulation of towns and rural areas sometimes severely impacted the ability to resist enemy forces or to supply troops. This plague was the last to affect the area around the Baltic, which had experienced several waves of the plague since the Black Death of the 14th century. However, for some areas, it was the most severe. People died within a few days of first showing symptoms.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Introduction
The town became a part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701 and Germany in 1871. Between 1757 and 1762 it was occupied by Russians. From 1709-11 eastern Prussia suffered from a plague. The deceased were replaced by Germans from Brandenburg, Pomerania, Magdeburg, Halberstadt, the Electorate of the Palatinate, and Nassau, as did Swiss and Lithuanians. In 1732 Protestants expelled from Salzburg also resettled the area. In the 19th century Gołdap's population consisted mainly of Poles, Lithuanians and Germans, mostly Protestants. Lutheran services took place in all three languages. In 1831, the Polish pastor's house was burnt down. In 1807, Polish troops of General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski were stationed in the town.
Gołdap | Plague and Resettlement
There were not less than 700,000 persons in East Prussia, up to 300,000 of them resided in the Lithuanian Province and the Labguva district prior to the plague of 1709–1711. About 160,000 Lithuanians died in Lithuanian Province and Labguva district, which was 53 percent of the population of the latter area. About 110,000 people died in the other areas of East Prussia, which overall lost about 39 percent of its population during the plague.
Lithuania Minor | Plague of 1709–1711 and the aftermaths
The situation was aggravated in October 1709, when the Swedish army corps commanded by the Swedish Pomeranian Ernst Detlev von Krassow entered Pomerania. Krassow's corps, together with units of the Polish king Stanislaw I, had failed to reinforce the army of king Charles XII of Sweden in Poltava as their eastward advance was blocked by Russian and Polish-Lithuanian forces near Lemberg (Lviv, Lwow). When Charles was defeated at Poltava, many Polish-Lithuanian magnates switched from supporting Stanislaw I to supporting Augustus the Strong, and under pursuit by Russian and Saxon forces, Krassow's corps retreated westward through plague-stricken Poland, taking with them the abandoned Polish king as well as his court and wife.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Pomerania
Although accurate statistical data does not exist, it is thought that 1.4 million died in England ( of England's 4.2 million people), while an even higher percentage of Italy's population was likely wiped out. On the other hand, north-eastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary are believed to have suffered less, and there are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans. It is conceivable that Russia may not have been as affected due to its very cold climate and large size, hence often less close contact with the contagion. The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries.
Epidemiology of plague | Second pandemic: from 14th century to 19th century
Stenbock's field army garrisoned in the Scanian cities and villages, in order to defend against Danish marines, who looted the coastal villages between Kullen and Barsebäck during the spring. In the summer of 1710 Sweden was hit by a bad harvest, and starving soldiers in Scania were forced to steal food from the peasants. Stenbock could not maintain their discipline and demanded food deliveries from other parts of the Kingdom. At the same time, he received news from Stockholm and Blekinge about strange deaths. On 10 September the Privy Council sent a message to all governors around the Kingdom that Stockholm was suffering from a severe infection that was killing people by the hundreds.
Magnus Stenbock | Plague outbreak
As a result of the Plague, the population shrank greatly even before the Thirty Years' War broke out. According to the "Huberweistum", a 1630 "Weistum" (a "Weistum" – cognate with English "wisdom" – was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times), there were then only 30 families still living in the village. That same year, Imperial troops plundered Altenglan. As in the whole swathe of countryside around Kusel, especially because of the wartime events of 1635, very few people in Altenglan survived this frightful war, and almost all the houses had been destroyed.
Altenglan | Modern times
From 1626 Hohenschönhausen was affected by the Thirty Years' War. Apart from the Swedish forces who were passing through the area, the troops of Albrecht von Wallenstein also plundered the area and its surroundings, with only the village church remaining undamaged. The result of this was a large-scale desertion of the area by its inhabitants and widespread famine. In the following years, The Plague and other epidemics were reported, including a plague of locusts in 1651. As a result of these factors, the village had lost 58% of its inhabitants by the mid-17th century.
Alt-Hohenschönhausen | Thirty Years' War
After the declaration of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701, the situation in the Neumark began to improve. King Frederick I initiated new waves of colonization. Many French Huguenots, forced to flee from religious persecution in France, arrived as settlers. The textile industry also began to develop in the Neumark. The Seven Years' War caused the region to regress in its development, as high contributions were exacted from the population for the war effort and the Neumark was the setting for battles such as at Kunersdorf. Under Frederick II, increased land reclamation and economic consolidation resulted from the drainage of the Warta and Notec areas.
Neumark | Kingdom of Prussia
According to Biraben, plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671. The was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667; subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century). According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to plague in the epidemic of 1628–31." In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of pre-incident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300, and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million.
Epidemiology of plague | Second pandemic: from 14th century to 19th century
The kingdom was in the midst of the Year Without Summer and plagued by crop failure. To help her new subjects, Catherine threw herself into relief programs and humanitarian projects. As a result, Catherine earned the respect and admiration of the common people. In early 1819, Catherine, sick with a cold, lanced a blister on her lip. The blister became infected and rapidly led to her death by stroke.
Württemberg Mausoleum | History
The Black Death reached Northern Germany in the early summer of 1350 when it arrived in Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Lübeck and Hamburg. The plague appears to have reached the Northern port cities in different time periods, likely because it was spreads by sea rather than land: the inland cities of Northern Germany, significantly, was affected at a later date in 1350 than the port cities along the North coast. It finally reached Prussia and from there to the Baltics in 1351, and from there to Russia.
Black Death in the Holy Roman Empire | Northern Germany
Saltholm was to be manned and equipped again, and the quarantine requirement was extended to ships from other infected ports. It is unclear whether at that time the plague had already arrived in Zealand's northeastern port of Helsingør (Elsinore), where the Sound Dues were collected from entering ships and where a suspicious series of deaths was reported by the local health commission, allegedly starting with the death in the town on 1 October 1710 of a Dutch passenger arriving from Stockholm. According to Persson (2001), it is "difficult to determine whether their cases have actually been a matter of plague, even if the progress in my eyes seems very suspicious;" while Frandsen (2009) says that "I will risk my neck and postulate that the disease in Elsinore in the autumn of 1710 was not the plague but (as the barbers indicate) a form of typhus or spotted fever."
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Zealand
Somewhere between 1559 and 1565, Count Froben Christoph von Zimmern included a version in his "Zimmerische Chronik". This appears to be the earliest account which mentions the plague of rats. Von Zimmern dates the event only as "several hundred years ago" ("vor etlichen hundert jarn" ), so that his version throws no light on the conflict of dates (see next paragraph). Another contemporary account is that of Johann Weyer in his "De praestigiis daemonum" (1563).
Pied Piper of Hamelin | 16th- and 17th-century sources
In the years 1711–1712, the bubonic plague swept through the town and wreaked havoc upon its population. In 1792, by the initiative of the city's representative in the Great Sejm, Józef Dominik Kossakowski, King Stanisław August Poniatowski renewed the town's municipal rights and gave it its current coat of arms.
Ukmergė | Early history
What has become known as the "Great Plague of Vienna", was actually only a subset of a much larger outbreak across Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and neighboring regions. This epidemic appears to have been carried into the region from two opposing directions. It had been raging in Western Europe for many years, traveling East by trade routes. The Great Plague of London of 1665–1666, which is believed to have originated from the Netherlands in the 1650s, killed around 100,000 people, and was the first major epidemic in a series of outbreaks. In 1666 a severe plague raged in Cologne and on the Rhine, which was prolonged until 1670 in the district.
Great Plague of Vienna | Regional outbreak
In 1618, East Brandenburg became part of Brandenburg-Prussia after the electors' inheritance of the Duchy of Prussia. During the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) both Swedish and Imperial troops plundered, ravaged and burnt the land, while plague epidemics in 1626 and 1631 killed much of the populace. While occupied by Swedish troops the region had to contribute 60,000 thalers and 10,000 "Wispel" of rye.
Neumark | Brandenburg-Prussia
As the actual cause of the plague was unknown, counter-measures included flight, dissection of buboes and the lighting of huge fires to reduce the air's humidity, which was thought to reduce the chance of being affected by the plague's "bad air."
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Finland, Gotland and Central Sweden
In 1656, a plague nearly eradicated the population of Naples, Italy. It was prevented by forcible quarantine of the poorer districts, and the efforts of a Martinus Ludheim, a visiting physician from Bavaria, Germany. Santa Maria del Pianto was built to commemorate it in 1657.
Naples Plague (1656) | Introduction
Complying with an order of King Frederick I of Prussia from 14 November 1709, the hospital was established north of the Berlin city walls in 1710 in anticipation of an outbreak of the bubonic plague that had already depopulated East Prussia. After the plague spared the city, it came to be used as a charity hospital for the poor. On 9 January 1727, Frederick William I of Prussia gave it the name Charité, French 'charity'. The construction of an anatomical theatre in 1713 marks the beginning of the medical school, then supervised by the "collegium medico-chirurgicum" of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Charité | History
The Black Death would return regularly, but with fewer death victims, until the 18th century. Sweden was reached also by the second and third European Black Death epidemic of 1359–1360 and 1368–1370. The second wave of Black Death in Sweden in 1359 is known to have caused the death of the Crown Prince, his consort Beatrice of Bavaria, and their children. The plague also returned in repeated national epidemics in 1413, 1421–22, 1439–40, 1451, 1455, 1464–65, 1472–74 and 1495. Of these, the plague of 1413, 1420–22 and 1464-66 are described as particularly severe. After the Middle Ages, the plague returned in 1548–49, 1565–66, 1572, 1576, 1580, 1603, 1623, 1629–30, 1638, 1653 and 1657, before the Great Northern War plague outbreak in 1710–1713, which was to be the last outbreak of Bubonic plague in Sweden.
Black Death in Sweden | Recurrences
While Hirschhorn was not involved in the German Peasants' War, major changes were brought about by the Thirty Years' War. After the Lords of Hirschhorn had died out with the demise of Frederic III in September 1632 - he had fled to Heilbronn in order to escape the turmoil of the war - the castle and the town passed to the archdiocese of Mainz. The Plague of 1635 decimated the population. After the end of Swedish occupation in 1636, Hirschhorn was mortgaged to an official at the court of the Elector of Cologne, Rudolf Raitz von Frentz. The population, which had already been afflicted by the war, had to suffer exploitation and impoverishment.
Hirschhorn (Neckar) | Decline in the Thirty Years' War
The village suffered particularly badly during the Thirty Years' War under occupation by foreign troops, and the Plague struck the village, too. Great harm was done by the Spanish troops who passed through the Glan valley in May 1632. In the autumn of that same year, the Plague claimed 38 lives within one month. In schoolteacher Schwarz’s family alone, six people died: his wife and five of their children. Only slowly did the village recover from these losses after the war, only to be stricken with further setbacks in French King Louis XIV’s wars of conquest. Until the time of the French Revolution, Herren-Sulzbach remained under the lordship of the Counts of Grumbach.
Herren-Sulzbach | Modern times
In September 1710, ships from Reval (Tallinn) carried the plague across the Gulf of Finland to Helsingfors (Helsinki), where it killed 1,185 inhabitants and refugees (two thirds of the population), and Borgå (Porvoo), where 652 people from in and around the town died. Ekenäs (Tammisaari) and Åbo (Turku), then the largest town on the Finnish coast, with a population of 6,000, were also infected in September 1710. 2,000 inhabitants and refugees died of the plague in Åbo by January 1711. The plague then spread northwards and between 1710 and 1711 infected the towns of Nystad (Uusikaupunki), Raumo (Rauma), Björneborg (Pori), Nådendal (Naantali), Jakobstad (Pietarsaari), Gamlakarleby (Kokkola) and Uleåborg (Oulu) as well as an abundance of rural communities up to a line between Uleåborg and Cajana (Kajana, Kajaani).
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Finland, Gotland and Central Sweden
In the summer of 1349, the plague spread from Basel in Switzerland North toward Strasbourg. The plague reached Strasbourg from Colmar 8 July. During the summer and autumn of 1349, the plague spread West from Strasbourg toward Mainz, Kassel, Limburg, Kreuznach, Sponheim and finally (in December) to Cologne; and East toward Augsburg, Ulm, Essingen and Stuttgart.
Black Death in the Holy Roman Empire | Southern Germany
In 1665 – 1666 the Great Plague struck England. It wrought devastation in London, then spread across the country. Hepworth was the most northerly point that it reached. According to local legend it is supposed to have come in on cloth brought from London. In an effort to save the village the residents split the village into two parts at Barracks Fold. Those that were infected remained, isolated from the world, in one half. Thirteen of the residents died from the disease, which was a considerable percentage of the population in such a small village and thirteen trees were planted to remember them.
Hepworth, West Yorkshire | The Great Plague
During the Horsemen's War in 1520, the castle was unsuccessfully besieged by troops of the Polish Kingdom, who devastated the settlement. Preußisch Eylau received its civic charter in 1585. In 1709–1711, the bubonic plague killed 2,212 inhabitants of the Eylau area. The Battle of Eylau (7–8 February 1807) during the Napoleonic Wars involved the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Russian troops of General Bennigsen, and the Prussian troops of General Anton Wilhelm von L'Estocq. Only 3 inhabitants of Eylau died in the battle, but 605 persons died due to hunger and diseases in 1807 (with the average death rate in "normal" years being around 80-90).
Bagrationovsk | History
In 1706, both Bauska Castle and palace were partially blown up by the retreating Russian troops. It was no longer restored and eventually fell into ruins. During the war, two-thirds of the city buildings were also destroyed. The early winter of 1708 cut short the harvest and led to a famine. At the same time, the Great Northern War plague outbreak began. On July 3, 1709, church services were banned in Bauska in order to prevent the plague from spreading, and the dead were buried outside the burial grounds of churches. After the winter of 1708/1709, only one-third of the pre-war population of Bauska had survived the plague epidemic and famine.
History of Bauska | Wars and plague
Florence's tax records suggest that 80% of the city's population died within four months in 1348. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. The disease bypassed some areas, with the most isolated areas being less vulnerable to contagion. Plague did not appear in Douai in Flanders until the turn of the 15th century, and the impact was less severe on the populations of Hainaut, Finland, northern Germany, and areas of Poland. Monks, nuns, and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death. The physician to the Avignon Papacy, Raimundo Chalmel de Vinario (), observed the decreasing mortality rate of successive outbreaks of plague in 1347–48, 1362, 1371, and 1382 in his 1382 treatise "On Epidemics" ().
Black Death | Deaths
In July 1422, the Emperor Sigismund and the Teutonic Knights devoted resources to a war against the Hussites, who attacked and devastated large parts of Germany. The pope called for strong measure to 'get rid of this plague'. Vytautas and Jogaila used the preoccupation with defense against the Hussite raids by attacking Prussia and the Order. Teutonic Grand Master Michael Küchmeister von Sternberg was forced to resign in March. His successor Paul von Rusdorf released most of the hired mercenaries; the Order was left with very few soldiers to defend itself. Joint Polish and Lithuanian forces marched north to Osterode, Teutonic forces retreated to Löbau.
Gollub War | The war
When the plague did not arrive in Denmark, though, Saltholm effectively fell out of use by 3 July 1710, when only three people were left in the station. The main problem then was rather the lost Battle of Helsingborg and the aggressive type of typhus that the retreating Danish soldiers carried to Zealand from Scania. When in the course of the Russian conquest of Livonia refugees carried the plague to Finland and Central Sweden, and on the southern shore of the Baltic the plague had arrived in Stralsund, the worried council of Lübeck sent alerting letters to the Danish government, which after a discussion lasting from 21 October to 7/8 November resulted in a government decision to renew the quarantine requirement.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Zealand
The Prussian troops were marching from Moravia towards Trnava and there were numerous fights going on. A great number of the dead were not buried which resulted in cholera being spread gradually all around Záhorie. About 149 people died in Sološnica as a result of being infected with cholera from August 29 to November 14, 1866. In the spring of 1909, there was a severe landslide in the land area called "Na Jamách" and "Nížiny". Another landslide also occurred in 1936.
Sološnica | Natural disasters
It wiped out whole villages and great swathes of land and had a profound effect on mediaeval people's view of the world, and on economic life. The high point in the Plague's ravages in Briedel/Pünderich came between June/July 1635 and late August 1636. Pünderich lost only 5.3% of its population. The losses were far worse in some nearby places (Briedel 26%; Zell 27.3%; Kaimt 36.2%; Alf 36.6%; Bremm 55%; Ediger 44.2%). The Plague wrought particular havoc in the "Cochemer Krampen", a 24-kilometre-long stretch of the Moselle made up of many winding bows beginning downstream of Pünderich at Bremm, and running downstream from there to just beyond Cochem.
Pünderich | 16th to 18th century
The few areas that escaped included Poland, Hungary, Rouergue in France, Liège in Belgium, and the county of Béarn in the Pyrenees. It has been suggested that these areas were spared due to the predominance of O-Blood type, which had only recently taken root in the heartlands of Europe, although this hypothesis has yet to be proven. The pandemic, which began in central Asia, was first reported in Europe in the summer of 1346. The Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea was besieged by the Tartars, who catapulted plague-ridden corpses into the city. The defenders carried the disease back to Italy; in October 1347 it reached Messina in Sicily, in December a ship carried the plague into Marseille, and by January 1348 it was in Genoa.
1340s | The Black Plague
The legend is a distorted account of the actual plague. There was an outbreak of plague in Oberammergau, but it took place from September 1632 to March 1633, when there were a total of 84 deaths from all causes. Deaths followed an epidemic curve instead of ending suddenly. There was one death in September 1632, rising to 20 deaths in March 1633, and ending with one death in July 1633. There is also no record of a man named Kaspar Schisler. Only two couples got married in Bad Kohlgrub in 1634, instead of only two couples surviving the plague. There were 39 marriages in Bad Kohlgrub in 1635, so hundreds of villagers must have survived.
Oberammergau Passion Play | Vow
While Frandsen (2009) dismisses the number for Riga as "most likely a heavy exaggeration" and instead gives a rough estimate of 20,000 deaths by the end of the plague in October, Sheremetev's number of Russian plague deaths seem to be "closer to the truth." Dünamünde surrendered on 9 (O.S.) / 19 August, when only some officers and 64 healthy and ~500 sick ordinary soldiers were left. The contemporaries believed that the plague in Riga continued because, when the Russian forces lifted the siege, the influx of fresh air swirled and further distributed the plague's bad air throughout the city. Some Russian measures, however, really contributed to the spread of the plague: Sheremetev allowed 114 Swedish government officials to leave for Dünamünde and from there for Stockholm with all their families and households, taking the plague with them; also captured sick soldiers were sent to the isle of Ösel (Øsel, Saaremaa) off the Estonian coast, while the healthy were integrated into Sheremetev's corps.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
Cattle plagues recurred throughout history, often accompanying wars and military campaigns. They hit Europe especially hard in the 18th century, with three long panzootics, which although varying in intensity and duration from region to region, took place in the periods of 1709–1720, 1742–1760, and 1768–1786.
Rinderpest | 18th century
German and French troops carried the plague to the city of Mantua in 1629 as a result of troop movements associated with the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Venetian troops, infected with the disease, retreated into northern and central Italy, spreading the infection. In October 1629, the plague reached Milan, Lombardy's major commercial center. Although the city initiated effective public health measures, including quarantine and limiting the access of German soldiers and trade goods, the plague smoldered. A major outbreak in March 1630 resulted from relaxed health measures during the carnival season. This was followed by a second wave in the spring and summer of 1631.
1629–1631 Italian plague | Outbreaks
The Great Plague of Vienna struck the Holy Roman Empire in 1679.
Second plague pandemic | Holy Roman Empire
After the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807, Prussia lost about half of its territory, including the land gained from the Second and Third Partitions of Poland (which now fell to the Duchy of Warsaw) and all land west of the Elbe River. France recaptured Prussian-occupied Hanover, including Bremen-Verden. The remainder of the kingdom was occupied by French troops (at Prussia's expense) and the king was obliged to make an alliance with France and join the Continental System.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1801–1815: Napoleonic Wars
After Holk's troops raided the village in 1632 there came the next year a further, much worse threat to the villagers. The year's first Plague death was Jacob Junghans. It was not, as commonly claimed, the retreating troops’ doing, but rather Jacob Junghans himself had brought the Black Death to town. He came back from a trip to Freiberg in March of that year and then died within three days. What followed was by far the village's worst ever epidemic. All together, by December, 33 people had died of the Plague; among them, whole families were wiped out. To thwart the epidemic's further spread, the dead were no longer buried at the graveyard, but rather in the woods.
Raschau | The Plague
It would seem that the village was not stricken with the Plague, for death rates in Wahnwegen during the worst Plague years were not particularly high. On the other hand, the Thirty Years' War struck the village particularly hard. While before the war there had been up to five births noted in the Kusel church books for Wahnwegen each year, from 1632 until the war ended in 1648, only one wedding was recorded, and only two births. Deaths were no longer being registered at all. Even for the decades following the war, the church books only record the odd entry about Wahnwegen.
Wahnwegen | Modern times
The year 1760 brought yet more Prussian disasters. The general Fouqué was defeated by the Austrians in the Battle of Landshut. The French captured Marburg in Hesse and the Swedes part of Pomerania. The Hanoverians were victorious over the French at the Battle of Warburg, their continued success preventing France from sending troops to aid the Austrians against Prussia in the east.
Seven Years' War | 1759–60
"Plague houses" to quarantine infected people were established within or before the city walls. An example of the latter is the Charité of Berlin, which was spared from the plague.
Great Northern War plague outbreak | Introduction
The villagers complained of the new deaths to oberstleutnant Schnezzer, the Austrian military commander in charge of the administration. The latter, fearing an epidemic of pestilence, sent for Imperial Contagions-Medicus (roughly, Infectious Disease Specialist) Glaser stationed in the nearby town of Paraćin. On 12 December 1731, Glaser examined the villagers and their houses. He failed to find any signs of a contagious malady and blamed the deaths on the malnutrition common in the region as well as the unhealthy effects of the severe Eastern Orthodox fasting. However, the villagers insisted that the illnesses were caused by vampires. At the moment, two or three households were gathering together at night, with some asleep and others on the watch.
Arnold Paole | The investigation
A gate was erected in 1555 which divided the city centre from its western suburbs; this gate was demolished in 1793. Lüchow suffered from an outbreak of the Plague in 1537, and barely half a century later, in 1589, was largely destroyed by fire. Another fire in 1608 destroyed much of what had been rebuilt. The worst fire, in 1811, destroyed even the city hall and the Schloss.
Lüchow | Geography
Wars inhibited the city's economic prosperity, which had undergone a deep crisis during the devastation of the Thirty Years' War and was further impeded by the new Swedish-Brandenburg-Prussian frontier, cutting Stettin off from its traditional Farther Pomeranian hinterland. Due to a Plague during the Great Northern War, the city's population dropped from 6,000 people in 1709 to 4,000 in 1711. In 1720, after the Great Northern War, Sweden was forced to cede the city to King Frederick William I of Prussia. Stettin was made the capital city of the Brandenburg-Prussian Pomeranian province, since 1815 reorganised as the Province of Pomerania.
Szczecin | 17th to 19th centuries
Under a decree issued by Frederick, Duke of Palatinate-Simmern (who would soon also become Frederick III, Elector Palatine) on 16 July 1557, the Reformation was introduced into the Principality of Simmern. This automatically changed the subjects’ faith to make it the same as their ruler's. In the Thirty Years' War, first the Spaniards, and then later the Swedes plundered and starved the region around Nieder Kostenz. Oral lore has it that there was a great famine in the area between 1635 and 1642. Moreover, many people fell victim to the Plague. King Louis XIV's French troops occupied the Palatinate and the Hunsrück in 1673, resulting in further plundering and laying waste.
Nieder Kostenz | The Reformation and the Thirty Years' War
The Scots willingly received them all, and took care to supply them with daily food without cost, as also to furnish them with books for their studies, and teaching free of charge.
Plague of 664 | Introduction
In 1609, another "Oberamt" of Lichtenberg ecclesiastical visitation protocol yielded, among other things, the oldest known list of Pfeffelbach's inhabitants; there were 217. After the Plague had made itself felt in the village and the surrounding countryside in 1596 and 1597, 188 people died in the grim epidemic in Pfeffelbach and the neighbouring villages of Schwarzerden and Reichweiler in 1612 alone. To add to these woes, a fire broke out in Pfeffelbach the following year, destroying several houses including the rectory, barns and stables. Churchwarden Preuel wrote in a report dated 10 August 1613: "Last Friday, a great fire raged, in which the rectory, the barn, the stable and other buildings in the village were destroyed." In 1618, the Thirty Years' War broke out, bringing the village its share of great hardship and woe.
Pfeffelbach | Modern times
Although the Kingdom's funds were largely pushed towards the war, building projects among the more wealthy continued, with, for example, the completion of Pembroke College in this year. The French city of Marseilles recognized the plague on 1 September and by 1 November it had spread to Aix-en-Provence. The earliest recorded invasion of the plague into Spanish territory was in Majorca in December 1347, probably through commercial ships. Three years of plague began in England.
1347 | Western Europe
In 1801 24,000 Prussian soldiers invaded, surprising Hanover, which surrendered without a fight. In April 1801 the Prussian troops arrived in Bremen-Verden's capital Stade and stayed there until October of the same year. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland first ignored Prussia's hostility, but when it joined the pro-French coalition of armed "neutral" powers such as Denmark–Norway and Russia, Britain started to capture Prussian sea vessels. After the battle of Copenhagen the coalition fell apart and Prussia again withdrew its troops. At Napoleon's instigation, Prussia recaptured British Hanover and Bremen-Verden in early 1806. On August 6 of the same year, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved as a result of Napoleon's victories over Austria.
Kingdom of Prussia | 1801–1815: Napoleonic Wars
After the outbreak of the plague, the immigration of German settlers was promoted. From 1744 to 1751 Baron Franz Wesseleny invited 30 families from Baden-Durlach and Switzerland to his property in Kriegsdorf (Hadad). In subsequent years, more immigrants came from German-speaking regions to Kriegsdorf. In 1880 Kriegsdorf counted 479 German inhabitants.
Hodod | Until 1940