Frederick I has a strange encounter with…

Tōdai-ji (Eastern Great Temple) is a Buddhist temple complex located in the city of Nara, Japan, initially constructed in the 750s.

Its Great Buddha Hall, the largest wooden building in the world, houses the world's largest bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana, known in Japanese simply as Daibutsu.

The Great Buddha Hall (Daibutsuden) has been rebuilt twice after fire.

The current building is finished in 1709, and although immense—fifty-seven meters long and fifty meters wide—it is actually thirty percent smaller than its predecessor.

The ethnic make-up of the Prussian province will change with the settlement of mostly German-speaking immigrants, largely Protestants seeking refuge from religious prosecution ("Exulanten"), although indigenous, including Lithuanian, populations will be included in the subsequent repopulation measures.

Especially hard-hit are regions with a substantial non-German population: Masuria in the south as well as the eastern counties with a substantial Lithuanian peasant population.

About one hundred and twenty-eight thousand people die in the ämter (rural districts) of Insterburg, ...

...Memel, ...

...Ragnit, and ...

...Tilsit.

The next large town to the east of Danzig is Königsberg in the Prussian kingdom, which has so far profited from the war by taking over some of the Swedish and Polish Livonian trade.

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

The plague arrives in August 1709, most probably carried by a Danzig sailor.

The provincial government is exiled to Wehlau while the chancellor, von Kreytzen, remains in Königsberg and continues to work as the chairman of the Collegium Sanitatis, which meets daily.

The city walls are manned by the military, the burghers are conscripted into neighborhood watches, medical and other personnel are hired, dressed in black waxed clothes and housed in separate buildings.

While at first the city authorities downplay the plague, which reaches a peak in early October and then declines, this approach is abandoned when the death toll again starts to rise significantly in November.

Without prior public announcement, a cordon sanitaire is implemented around the city, sealing it off completely from the surrounding countryside from November 14/15 until December 21, 1709.

The plague arrives in the small Swedish Pomeranian town of (Alt-)Damm (now Dąbie) on the eastern bank of the Oder river in August 1709, rapidly killing five hundred inhabitants.

Stettin (now Szczecin), the capital city of Swedish Pomerania located on the opposite bank of the river, reacts by isolating the town with a guarded cordon sanitaire.

Precautions taken in Stettin since the arrival of the plague in Danzig include restrictions for travelers, especially soldiers' families returning from Swedish-occupied Poland after the lost Battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709), and a ban on fruits in the town's markets, since fruits were believed to transmit the disease.

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 is relocated to Podejuch.

Despite the precautions, the plague breaks 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, the city council downplays the plague cases to not impair Stettin's trade, but also sets up a health commission and pest houses and hires personnel to deal with the infected.

Poznań loses around nine thousand people, about two thirds of its fourteen thousand inhabitants, to the plague between 1707 and 1709.