1. THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR OF 1828–9 On April 28, 1828, Russia declared war against Turkey; the fighting took place partly in the Balkan Peninsula, in Wallachia and Bulgaria, and partly in Transcaucasia. In the western scene of the war, the Russians, after the capture of Varna and the futile siege of Schumla in the campaign of the year 1828, were obliged to retire to the left bank of the Danube; in the second campaign (1829) Diebitsch defeated the Turks at Kulevtchi, marched across the Balkan Peninsula, and appeared unexpectedly at Adrianople, which the Turks surrendered to him without resistance. An unusually severe epidemic of bubonic plague accompanied this campaign. In the year 1828 plague had spread from Asia Minor to European Turkey and Wallachia; as early as 1825 and 1826 it appeared in Bucharest, while sporadic cases of the disease occurred in Wallachia in the summer of 1827 and in the winter of 1827–8.[185] On April 30, 1828, the first Russian troops made their appearance in Bucharest; they were quartered in the city itself and in the surrounding villages. On May 13 seven cases of plague appeared in a private house, but the Bucharest physicians did not hold the disease to be plague. Orders to disinfect the houses were issued, but intercourse with the surrounding villages was not stopped. Some thirty inhabitants succumbed to the pestilence in May, and at the end of that month three Russian soldiers were allowed to enter the city. Since the number of cases in the city was increasing, the troops stationed there were quartered in the village of Fundeni, where, however, several more people soon contracted the disease. During the month of May, plague broke out in other villages of Wallachia, and in the course of the summer and autumn it spread throughout the entire country. In regard to the origin of this epidemic of plague, Simon[186] says: ‘All Wallachia was infected from the year 1826; but had it not been for the war and the consequent afflictions of all kinds, the disease would not have developed in the year 1828 into such a furious and extensive epidemic. The arrival of the Russians was responsible for this widespread outbreak, since they carried the infection contracted from the inhabitants to a thousand different places.’