Great Northern War plague outbreak

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.

[14] 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.

[6] 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.

[25] 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.

[21] 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.

[31] 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.

[21] In preparation for the plague, a Collegium Sanitatis (health commission) was set up,[21] including physicians from the university and leading civilian and military officials of the town.

[35] The provincial government was exiled to Wehlau while the chancellor, von Creytzen [de], remained in Königsberg and continued to work as the chairman of the Collegium Sanitatis, which met daily.

[34] 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.

[36] 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.

[46] About 128,000 people died in the ämter (rural districts) of Insterburg, Memel, Ragnit and Tilsit,[42] and the number of villages populated completely by Lithuanians sank from 1,830 before the plague to 35 thereafter.

[50] While the plague eventually spared Berlin,[51] it raged in the northeastern regions of Brandenburg, affecting the New March (Neumark) in 1710[52] and the Uckermark, where Prenzlau was infected on 3 August 1710.

[53] 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.

[54] 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.

[55] 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.

[57] 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.

[6] 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.

[65] The primary city of Swedish Estonia, Reval (Tallinn), was approached by a Russian force of 5,000 commanded by Christian Bauer in August 1710, and due to a decision by the local officials and nobles, capitulated on 30 September without actually being attacked.

[68] The rest had either fled elsewhere, or in the case of the surviving Swedish troops and some citizens, had been allowed to leave by ship after the surrender,[68] carrying the plague to Finland.

[75] 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[76] (two thirds of the population),[77] and Borgå (Porvoo), where 652 people from in and around the town died.

[79] 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,[80] 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.

[81] 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.

"[86] There are however no doubts concerning the outbreak of the plague in late November 1710 in the small village of Lappen just north of Helsingør, populated by fishermen, ferrymen and nautical pilots.

[95] 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.

[97] 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.

[110] Among the dead was the plague doctor Majus, who belonged to those physicians who wore a beak-shaped mask containing a vinegar-soaked sponge to protect him against the miasma.

"[112] When in August 1713 the plague broke out again,[112] it was much more severe than what Hamburg's inhabitants had experienced in 1712,[111] and the meanwhile returned Danish army established a cordon sanitaire around the city.

[112] 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 Kraków wagoner but successfully contained; then into Rosenberg (Olesno), where it killed 860 inhabitants out of 1,700;[132] and also into two villages near Militsch (Milicz), from where it spread into the nearby lands of Wartenberg (Syców).

[133] 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.

[133] 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.