ABSTRACT

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse cut a deep swathe through the lands of the Baltic during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Hard on the heels of the great famine which afflicted the eastern Baltic region in 1696–7 followed the ravages of war and pestilence. Almost two-thirds of the peasant population of Estonia and Livonia perished during the plague, which, spreading northwards from Constantinople, reached Poland in 1708–9 and the shores of the Baltic a year later. Once it had taken hold, there was little that could be done by the handful of doctors, with only the most rudimentary knowledge of the causes and treatment of the disease. Between September 1709 and April 1710, 9,368 people, a quarter of the population of Königsberg, died of the plague and related illnesses: mortality rates in Riga and Reval were even higher, whilst in the smaller towns of Livonia and Estonia, the population was reduced to a mere handful. The pestilence crossed the Baltic to Sweden in 1710, carrying off as many as 40,000 people in the capital, and entered Denmark in November 1710 in spite of quarantine measures. Helsingør lost 40 per cent of its population, Copenhagen a third.