Plague in time of war: the example of the seventeenth-century Hungarian-Ottoman frontier

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ABSTRACT The Black Death has been intensively studied but early modern plague waves remain largely understudied in East Central Europe despite their tremendous importance in the demographic and economic life of the region. The area in the early modern period was the site of numerous conflicts including the lasting Ottoman-Habsburg wars and the Thirty Years’ War. Both the military campaigns and the significant permanent military presence at the frontiers made the region a hotspot for epidemics. This paper looks at the Kingdom of Hungary to understand the interrelation of three factors, plague, wars, and weather. In doing so apart from looking at letters, chronicles, and other sources it asks if there is any way to trace the spread of the plague in early modern Hungary (and Transylvania). It provides a survey of the largest waves of plague epidemics in the seventeenth century and attempts to trace the routes of their spread.