Great Northern War plague outbreak

During the Great Northern War (1700–1721), many towns and areas of the Circum-Baltic and East-Central Europe have a severe outbreak of the plague with a peak from 1708 to 1712.

This epidemic is probably part of a pandemic affecting an area from Central Asia to the Mediterranean.

Most probably via Constantinople, it spreads to Pińczów in southern Poland, where it is first recorded in a Swedish military hospital in 1702.

The plague follows trade, travel and army routes, reaches the Baltic coast at Prussia in 1709, affects areas all around the Baltic Sea by 1711 and reaches Hamburg by 1712.

Therefore, the course of the war and the course of the plague mutually affect each other: while soldiers and refugees are often agents of the plague, the death toll in the military as well as the depopulation of towns and rural areas sometimes severely impacts the ability to resist enemy forces or to supply troops.

This plague is the last to affect the Circum-Baltic, which has experienced several waves of the plague since the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

However, for some areas, it is the most severe.

People die within a few days of first showing symptoms.

Especially on the eastern coast from Prussia to Estonia, the average death toll for wide areas is up to two thirds or three quarters of the population, and many farms and villages are 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 are poorly developed, and death records are often unspecific, incomplete or lost.

Some towns and areas are affected only for one year, while in other places the plague will recur annually throughout several subsequent years.

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 is unknown to contemporaries, with speculations reaching from religious causes over "bad air" to contaminated clothes, the only means of fighting the disease is containment, to separate the ill from the healthy.

Cordons sanitaire are established around infected towns like Stralsund and Königsberg; one is 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.

"Plague houses" to quarantine infected people are established within or before the city walls.

An example of the latter is the Charité of Berlin, which is spared from the plague.

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