Armies -- Medical and sanitary affairs; Epidemics -- History; Medicine, Military -- History; Military hygiene
In Rhineland and Westphalia pestilences broke out only sporadically
in the years 1630–4, but in 1635 they became more general. In the
year 1630 Münster was attacked, in 1631 Arnsberg, and in 1632 a
pestilence raged furiously in the Berg country—in Lennep, for
example, where the Imperialist troops were for a long time
quartered. In Mühlheim-on-the-Rhine a pestilential disease broke out
after the departure of the Nassau-Lorraine garrison in 1631. In the
year 1632 the Imperialist and Swedish armies stood facing each other
in Westphalia for six weeks, and the result was an outbreak of
pestilence; 600 people succumbed to it in Bielefeld. In 1635 a
pestilence raged furiously along the Rhine; in St. Goar 200 people
died in the course of the summer. In that year Westphalia was the
scene of warlike events and pestilences; Arnsberg, the villages on
the Ruhr, Soest, Unna (near Hamm), Horstmar, and Kroesfeld were
attacked. The Governmental District of Düsseldorf (on the left bank
of the Rhine) was severely attacked by pestilence; many people died
in Geldern, while there were 389 deaths in Strälen, 256 in Nieukert,
and 700 in Lobberich.
2. _South Germany_
_(a) Bavaria and Upper Swabia_
After the battle of Breitenfeld (September 17, 1631) Gustavus Adolphus
passed through Halle and Erfurt to Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, and
Frankfurt-on-the-Main. Tilly had marched through Halberstadt, Fulda, and
Miltenberg to Würzburg, in order to relieve that city, which had been
captured by the Swedes, and then turned south. Thus the principal scene
of the war was transferred to Bavaria, which from 1631 to 1634 suffered
terribly from the ravages of the soldiers passing back and forth. No
part of the country was spared. ‘The Thirty Years’ War’, says
Lammert,[34] ‘was particularly fatal and disastrous to Bavaria from the
year 1632 on; it converted the country into an uninhabited waste,
especially because it was followed by pestilence. Like the Imperialist
army under Tilly in the autumn of 1631, so the Swedish army on its
marches consumed everything it found, and wherever it went in the years
1632–5 it spread ‘hunger typhus’ and ‘war typhus’ and bubonic plague;
all the places along the Main lost at least one-half of their
population.’ In September 1632, when Gustavus Adolphus withdrew from
Nuremberg, Wallenstein turned south, and there on November 6, 1632,
Gustavus Adolphus was killed in the battle of Lützen. After that
Wallenstein returned to Bohemia, while the Swedes under Bernhard von
Weimar marched back into Bavaria. The acme of misery was reached here in
the year 1634. It is impossible to enumerate all the places that were
infected by the brutalized, wandering soldiers; the most out-of-the-way
and indigent regions, such as the Spessart and the Odenwald, were
visited by them, and inasmuch as they brought pestilence wherever they
went, the unfortunate villages were subjected to merciless devastation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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