page_title: Great Northern War plague outbreak
section_title: Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
hierarchical_section_title: Great Northern War plague outbreak / Spread in the area around the Baltic sea 1708–1713 / Lithuania, Livonia, Estonia
caption_attribution_description: Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎: Вільня (Vilnia). Мор
context_page_description: During the Great Northern War, 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. 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.
context_section_description: 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. 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. 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. Refugees from Dünamünde also carried the plague to Ösel, where the fortress of Arensburg was depopulated by the disease.
  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. Behind its walls was a population of ~20,000 people in August, composed of the regular inhabitants, soldiers, refugees and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, which had been demolished by the defendants on 18 August. By mid-December, about 15,000 of them had died of the plague, and the number of inhabitants was reduced to 1,990 inside the walls and 200 in the adjacent villages. 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, carrying the plague to Finland.
caption: Painting of the plague in Vilnius depicts Virgin of Mercy holding broken arrows of God's wrath. It hangs inside the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Vilnius.
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