Epidemics Resulting from Wars. Friedrich Prinzing
in Eisleben there were 1,598 deaths (including the outsiders) in the year 1636. Halle and vicinity, in the summer of 1636, had an outbreak of ‘spotted fever with dysentery’ and bubonic plague; the number of deaths was not less than 3,440.
In Thuringia a plague raged extensively in the years 1636–7. In Hildburghausen there were 648 deaths due to a plague in the year 1636, in Jena 691 (not including the outsiders), while in the year 1637 there were 307 deaths in Arnstadt and 525 in Zeitz. In many smaller places dysentery and bubonic plague broke out, having been borne there by soldiers and wandering beggars.
In Saxony (present kingdom) pestilences reappeared after the invasion of Banner in the year 1637. In Leipzig a great many homeless people took refuge; within three months 2,500 persons died there, and in the entire year 4,229 out of 15,000 inhabitants succumbed to various diseases. Pestilences also broke out with renewed strength in near-by cities and towns; by September 1,000 natives and 2,000 outsiders died in Grimma. In Leisnig, fever, ‘head-disease’, and diarrhoea appeared. After the burning of the city by the Swedes, a plague broke out and carried away 2,200 persons in six months, including the outsiders. Colditz, which had suffered great losses in the last six years, had 352 deaths; the population so dwindled away that in the year 1638 it amounted to only 28. In Döbeln there were 674 deaths, in Oschatz 2,000 (including the outsiders), and in Mügeln more than 1,000. The near-by cities, belonging to the governmental district of Merseburg, also had a very high mortality; in Belgern there were 765 deaths, in Delitsch 881 deaths, while in Eilenburg 8,000 natives and outsiders are said to have died. In Dresden, where in the year 1635 only 79 persons had died in consequence of plague, there were 1,097 deaths in the year 1637. In the following years, moreover, cases of plague continued to appear. A high mortality prevailed even in the Saxon Erzgebirge, caused for the most part by typhus fever.
In Brandenburg a severe pestilence raged in the years 1637–8. Berlin was repeatedly attacked in 1637 and again in 1639. In Spandau it raged very extensively, and lasted well into the following year. In Luckau 500 inhabitants died in the year 1637. The pestilence was conveyed to Neu-Ruppin by an infected soldier, and in the church register of that town 600 deaths are recorded. In Gransee a pestilence broke out in May 1638, and in a short time carried away 1,000 persons. Four neighbouring villages were completely wiped out. In Wittstock 1,599 persons succumbed in the year 1638 to bubonic plague and other diseases, and in Pritzwalk 1,500 people died (not including the soldiers and fugitive country-people). In Lychen (district of Templin) numerous fugitives and two-thirds of the native inhabitants died. In Angermünde, but 40 out of 700 families were left, and in Prenzlau a pestilence likewise raged furiously.
Pomerania, while the war was going on between the Swedes and Imperialists, fared no better. In Massow 400 persons succumbed to a plague. In Ueckermünde, in consequence of a plague caused by the capture of the city by the Swedes, only eight men and seven widows are said to have survived the year 1638.
Mecklenburg suffered terribly in the years 1637–8 from the quartering of Swedish troops there. Thousands succumbed in a short time to dysentery and bubonic plague, especially in the months of August and September 1638. Güstrow, in the year 1637, is said to have lost 2,000 persons (most of them doubtless fugitive country-people). Sternberg, the population of which was completely wiped out by the pestilence, stood empty for half a year. In New Brandenburg, where many country-people had taken refuge, 8,000 people died in the year 1638, according to the church register. Bützow had 261 deaths.
IV. The War Years (1641–8)
After the death of Bernhard von Weimar and of Banner, all centralized warfare in Germany ceased, and there began an endless series of futile marches across the country. The great depopulation of Germany, the difficulty of properly nourishing the few that had survived, and the wide prevalence of camp-fever, made it impossible to carry out any more large enterprises. Severe pestilences scarcely ever occurred, for the simple reason that there were so few people to contract and spread diseases. Typhus fever had become epidemic everywhere. ‘In Germany,’ says Schnurrer,[45] ‘where fighting had been going on for twenty-two years, and where soldier-life had almost supplanted civil and rural life, a certain war-plague revealed itself in places where there were soldiers, and where the war had left its vestiges. This war-plague was characterized by a mucous fever, began with a chill, accompanied by coughing, diarrhoea, and, in the case of women, by increased and irregular menstruation; at the same time the tongue became dry, headache and insomnia ensued, and at the crisis either the brain or the throat became inflamed, or else petechiae or purpura (then for the first time observed in Lower Saxony) broke out. Moreover, this war-plague, if it appeared to have passed a crisis on the fourteenth or twenty-first day, manifested a remarkable tendency to relapse. It was quite as infectious as bubonic plague, and was called by several names—Hungarian fever, head-disease, and soldiers’ disease.’ We distinctly see in this description a mixture of various diseases (especially typhoid fever, typhus fever, and others). Schnurrer’s authority was Lotichius, a Frankfurt physician.
The continuation of the war was disastrous to Austria, for the reason that the Swedish general, Torstensen, pressed on to Moravia and Lower Austria. As early as the year 1642 he had undertaken an expedition through Silesia to Moravia and Bohemia; in the year 1644 he advanced again, defeated the Imperialists at Jankau in Bohemia in the spring of the year 1645, and besieged (unsuccessfully) both Vienna and Brünn. In the year 1645 he was hard pressed by the Austrians and compelled to evacuate Moravia and Bohemia. Torstensen’s campaigns resulted in the outbreak of severe pestilences throughout all Austria.
Bohemia had suffered as much as Germany from the hardships of the Thirty Years’ War, while Austrian Silesia, and at times those parts of Austria which bordered on Bavaria, had not been spared. Only in the year 1634 was Austria itself attacked by pestilences, obvious consequence of the fact that both Saxony and Bavaria were badly infected. The incursion of Banner into Bohemia, in the year 1639, had likewise caused a widespread epidemic.
As far back as the year 1644, and hence before Torstensen’s invasion of Austria, severe plagues broke out in Hungary, Croatia, Upper and Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Görz. People who contracted the disease usually died in the first three days. Torstensen’s invasion caused the pestilence to spread very extensively. In Vienna it broke out in August 1645, having been borne thither by Rakoczi’s troops, and carried away from thirty to forty people daily. Tuln, St. Pölten, and New Vienna are also mentioned as places that were attacked. Styria was particularly afflicted in the year 1646; the district of Cilli is said to have lost 10,000 inhabitants, while the city of Cilli alone had some 400 deaths. In Graz, as in all Upper Styria, the loss of human life was not so great.
V. War Pestilences in non-German States during the Thirty Years’ War
1. The Netherlands. In the summer of the year 1623 there raged in Mansfeld’s camp in East Friesland an epidemic of typhus fever, which soon spread among the Netherlandish troops and over the Netherlands. Antwerp, Brussels, Ypres, Leyden, Delft, and Amsterdam were all severely attacked. In Leyden 9,897 persons died between October 1623 and October 1624. In Amsterdam 32,532 people died in the year 1624, 11,795 of them in consequence of the pestilence. In the year 1625, Breda, which for eight months had been defended by Flemish and Walloon troops in conjunction with the English and French, fell into the hands of the Spaniards; famine, pestilence, and scurvy had raged so furiously in the besieged city that 8,000 people died there, whereas the well-nourished Spaniards did not suffer at all from pestilence.[46]
In the years 1635–7 typhus fever and bubonic plague again made their appearance in the Netherlands. An epidemic of the latter occurred in Leyden in the months August-November 1635, and carried away 20,000 people in the course of the entire year. The pestilence caused great devastation in Nimeguen during the siege of the city by the French and Dutch; in the summer of 1635 dysentery and typhus fever broke out there, and in November bubonic plague appeared and slowly extended its area in the course of the winter.