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.