Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII:2 (Autumn, 2016), 139–170. - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XLVII:2 (Otoño, 2016), 139–170.

Daniel R.. Curtis

Was Plague an Exclusively Urban Phenomenon?
Plague Mortality in the Seventeenth-Century Low
Countries Much current scholarship argues that in early mod-
ern northwestern Europe, plagues not only were less severe than the
seventeenth-century plagues that ravaged Italy; they were also far
less territorially pervasive—remaining mainly in the cities and not
spreading easily into the countryside. Such a view connects to a long
historiography about early modern plague in northwestern Europe
that largely establishes the disease as an urban phenomenon, a nar-
rative that is still dominant.

This view adds further weight to the “urban graveyards” notion
that depicts early modern cities as death traps. Desde esta perspectiva,
extreme rural cases of plague, such as the famous examples of
Colyton (Devon) en 1645/6 or Eyam (Derbyshire) en 1665/6 en
Inglaterra, look exceptional, unrepresentative of general epidemiolog-
ical trends. Scholars are more likely to attribute high early modern
rural mortality rates to more environmentally speciﬁc diseases, semejante
as malaria or intestinal infections from the marshlands, as causes than
plague. Only recently has a counter-argument appeared, hinting at
plague’s capacity to hit isolated areas of the countryside in north-
western Europe—for example, the rural Highlands of Scotland—
yet systematic research on the subject is still lacking.1

Daniel R.. Curtis is Assistant Professor of History, Universidad de Leiden. He is the author of Cop-
ing with Crisis: The Resilience and Vulnerability of the Pre-Industrial Settlements (Burlington, Vt.,
2014); “Danger and Displacement in the Dollard: El 1509 Flooding of the Dollard Sea
(Groningen) and Its Impact on Long-Term Inequality in the Distribution of Property,"
Environment and History, XXII (2016), 103–135.

This article is part of an Innovational Research Incentives Scheme (VENI) proyecto, “Why
Do Some Epidemics Lead to Hatred?” funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientiﬁc
Investigación (NOW), grant no. 275-53-014. The research was also partly funded by a European
Research Council (ERC) proyecto, “Coordinating for Life,” at Utrecht University (grant no.
339647), under the direction of Bas van Bavel. The author thanks Bram van Besouw, Joris
Roosen, Guido Alfani, Jessica Dijkman, Ronald Rommes, and the anonymous referees for
helpful comments.

© 2016 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª, doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00975

For the more territorially pervasive Italian plagues, see Guido Alfani, “Plague in
1
Seventeenth-Century Europe and the Decline of Italy: An Epidemiological Hypothesis,"

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140

| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

This article tests the validity of the long-established claim that
northern Europe’s experience with early modern plague was largely
an urban affair. It employs a new database of mortality informa-
tion taken from hundreds of burial records across the seventeenth-
century Low Countries. Understanding the nature and extent of this
phenomenon is important, since a putative reason for northwestern
European cities’ resilience in the wake of plague epidemics was the
reservoir of rural people available to replenish the depleted cities.
The seventeenth-century Low Countries are an appropriate labora-
tory for testing these views since, aside from the availability of source
material for the cities and countryside, the Low Countries had sharp
contrasts between areas of high urbanization, such as Holland, y
areas of relatively low urbanization and commercialization. By em-
ploying a regional comparison within the Low Countries, this article
shows that plague epidemics in the core commercial and urban zones
were not as severe as those in the regions that were far less-developed.

Systematic comparisons between burial
THE BURIALS DATABASE
records in the seventeenth-century Low Countries remain limited
and restricted to small regions, or even to individual plague eruptions
or cities. Even the premier book about early modern plague in
Holland—“De Gave Gods”: De pest in Holland vanaf de late middeleeuwen

European Review of Economic History, XVII (2013) 408–430; for early modern plague as urban, Ian
GRAMO. Doolittle, “The Effects of Plague on a Provincial Town in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” Medical History, XIX (1975), 340; Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart
Inglaterra (Londres, 1985), 99, 110, 152, 159; mi. Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schoﬁeld, El
Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Londres, 1981), 668; Jean-Noël Biraben,
Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays Européens et Méditerranées (París, 1975), I, 299–302;
William G. Naphy and Andrew Spicer, The Black Death: A History of Plagues 1345–1730 (stroud,
2001); for the high-mortality regime of early modern cities, Robert Woods, “Urban-Rural Mor-
tality Differentials: An Unresolved Debate,” Population and Development Review, XXIX (2003),
29–46; Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, “Urbanization, Mortality, and Fertility in Malthusian
Inglaterra,” American Economic Review, XCIX (2009), 242–247; Nico Voigtländer and Hans-
Joachim Voth, “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War and Urbanization in Early
Modern Europe,” Review of Economic Studies, LXXX (2013), 774–811; for the extreme rural
examples of Colyton and Eyam, Schoﬁeld, “An Anatomy of an Epidemic: Colyton, Novem-
ber 1645 to November 1646,” in Slack (ed.), The Plague Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1977), 95–
126; Leslie Bradley, “The Most Famous of All English Plagues: A Detailed Analysis of the
Plague at Eyam 1665–6,” ibid., 63–94; for high rural mortality associated with other diseases,
Mary Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997); para
rural plague in the Highlands, Richard D. Oram, “‘It Cannot Be Decernit Quha Are Clean and
Quha Are Foulle’: Responses to Epidemic Disease in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Escocia,” Renaissance and Reformation, XXX (2006/7), 13–38.

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| 141

P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S
(Bergen, 1988) by Leo Noordegraaf and Gerrit Valk—concentrated
more on culture, religión, and popular attitudes than on eco-
nomic or demographic effects. Although it ventured rough estimates
of plague deaths in its appendixes, it contained no systematic use
of the burial records. Scholars may have avoided the burial records
because of their ﬂaws, which make the calculation of aggregate,
absolute mortality ﬁgures virtually impossible. En efecto, church burial
records did not routinely record every death. Relatives did not
always have the ﬁnances to pay for a church or cemetery burial; en
times of plague particularly, when many household members died
quickly and unexpectedly, procuring the necessary funds could be
a struggle. The scattered church accounts that recorded people bur-
ied in churchyards or cemeteries separately from those listed as re-
ceiving only the basic rights of a “church bell toll” are revealing in
this respect. Por ejemplo, in the town of Harderwijk from 1598 a
1622, solo 708 gente (44 por ciento) out of 1,628 with rights to the
bells had paid for a grave. In the plague years of 1601 a 1604, el
number decreased to less than 40 por ciento, and many of those only on
the bells list were explicitly recorded as paupers. Many of the people
who died in special plague houses ( pesthuizen) were buried neither in
nor around the church.2

2 The main regional demographic material about plague in the Low Countries includes
Ronald Rommes, “Pest in perspectief: Aspecten van een gevreesde ziekte in de vroegmoderne
tijd,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, XVI (1990), 244–266; Claude Bruneel, La mortalité dans les
campagnes: le duché de Brabant aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Louvain, 1977); Hans Van Werveke, “La
mortalité catastrophique en Flandre au XVIIe siècle,” in Paul Harsin and Etienne Helin (editores.),
Actes du Colloque International de Démographie Historique: Problèmes de mortalité (París,1965), 457–
464; Helin, “Recherches sur la mortalité dans la région liégeoise (XVe–XIXe siècles),” ibid.,
155–184; METRO. Arnould, Mortalités et épidémies sous l’Ancien Régime dans le Hainaut et quelques régions
limitrophes (Liège, 1965); Erik Thoen and Isabel Devos, “Pest in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden
tijdens de Middeleeuwen en de Moderne Tijden,” in De Pest in de Nederlanden (Bruselas,
1999), 109–133; Ad van der Woude, “Demograﬁsche ontwikkeling van de Noordelijke
Nederlanden 1500–1800,” in Dirk Peter Blok (ed.), Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden
(Haarlem, 1982), V, 123–139; A. C. METRO. Kappelhof, “Pest en rode loop in de Baronie van Breda
in de tweede helft van de 17e eeuw (1660–1680),” Jaarboek van de Geschied- en Oudheidkundige
Kring van Stad en Land van Breda, XXVI (1973), 75–90; for individual cities, Rommes, “Op het
spoor van de dood: De pest in en rond Utrecht,” Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht (1991), 93–120; Jorge
Alter, “Plague and the Amsterdam Annuitant: A New Look at Life Annuities as a Source for
Historical Demography,” Population Studies, XXVII (1983), 23–41; Jacques Charlier, La peste à
Bruxelles de 1667 à 1669 et ses conséquences démographiques (Bruselas, 1969); Jozef Geldhof, “De
pestepidemie in Brugge, 1665–1667,” Biekorf, LXXV (1974), 305–328; GRAMO. Mentink and van
der Woude, De demograﬁsche ontwikkeling te Rotterdam en Cool in de 17e en 18e eeuw (Rotterdam,
1965); Willem Frijhoff, “Gods gave afgewezen: Op zoek naar genezing van pest: Nijmegen 1635–
1636,” Volkskundig Bulletin, XVII (1991), 143–164; j. Klinkenberg, “‘Die quade sieckte’: De

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142

| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

The value of the burial records, sin embargo, is that they permit
the comparison of burials during crisis, or plague, years with burials
from previous years. The number of burials in previous years is
calculated by skipping back a year and taking an average of the
burial ﬁgures (dropping the highest and lowest) for ﬁve consecu-
tive years past. The burial ﬁgure of the year in question is then
divided by the average burials ﬁgure for the previous years, mul-
tiplied by 100, and subtracting 100 from the result, to determine an
overall increase or decrease in burials by percentage. A ﬁgure of 50
percent is an increase of half, a ﬁgure of 100 percent a doubling,
and a ﬁgure of 900 percent a tenfold increase over the previous
años. This technique gives an indication of plague severity for var-
ious locations within the seventeenth-century Low Countries. Es
preferable to methods pioneered and elaborated by a tradition of
(principalmente) French historical demographers and rural historians for
tres razones: (1) It has recently acquired a high proﬁle; (2) él
accords well with the purposes of seventeenth-century burial re-
cords, which tend to have gaps and missing years; y (3) it re-
quires no information apart from the burial data.3

The database of the seventeenth-century burial records draws
de 904,615 burials in 201 different settlements in the Low
Countries (100 settlements in the Dutch Republic and 101 en
the Spanish Netherlands; see Tables 1–3). Some ﬁgures are taken
from secondary literature or printed transcriptions, though the
main sources are archival manuscripts from multiple areas through-
out the Low Countries in an attempt to achieve an equitable

pest in Maastricht in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, XVI
(1990), 267–286; Harm Nijboer, “De Slaande Ingel gie om de Aldehou: Eat oer de pest yn
Ljouwert,” De Vrije Fries, LXXV (1995), 61–78; for the premier work about plague in the early
modern Low Countries, Leo Noordegraaf and Gerrit Valk, De Gave Gods: de pest in Holland
vanaf de late Middeleeuwen (Bergen, 1988); for the Harderwijk example, NG Overledenen,
1592–1625, No. 838.1, Gelders Archief Arnhem (hereinafter GAA).
3 The method comes from Lorenzo Del Panta and Massimo Livi Bacci, “Chronologie,
intensité et diffusion des crises de mortalité en Italie: 1600–1850,” Population, XXXII
(1977), 401–445, recently resurrected in Alfani, “Plague.” For French historical-demography
approaches to mortality crisis, see Jean Meuvret, “Les crises de subsistances et la démographie
de la France d”Ancien Régime,” Population, IV (1946), 271–278; Jean-Michel Chevet, “Les
crises démographiques en France à la ﬁn du XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle: un essai de mesure,"
Histoire and Mesure, VIII (1993), 117–144; Jacques Dupâquier, “Lʼanalyse statistique de crises
de mortalité,” in Hubert Charbonneau and André Larose (editores.), The Great Mortalities: Meth-
odological Studies of Demographic Crises in the Past (Liège, 1979) 83–112.

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P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S

| 143

Mesa 1

Structure of the Burials Database, Dutch Republic

NUMBER OF
SETTLEMENTS
WITH DATA

CATEGORY

SETTLEMENTS
(%)

NUMBER OF
BURIALS

BURIALS
(%)

AVERAGE BURIALS
PER SETTLEMENT
PER YEAR

CRISIS YEARS
1624/5
1635–166(8)
1664–166(9)
URBAN-RURAL
Rural
Urban
Total

69
102
162

157
44
201

21
31
49

78
22
100

21,217
27,683
21,294

199,006
705,609
904,615

30
39
30

22
78
100

285
275
156

20
256
70

A single increase or decrease in burials was sufﬁcient justiﬁcation to
include data for any one seventeenth-century mortality crisis.

The settlements that did not qualify for the database, a pesar de
offering burial information, were those in which the time series
presented serious gaps within the relevant years, according to the
completeness tests that Wrigley and Schoﬁeld used for their data
in The Population History of England 1541–1871. This problem be-
came more acute during plagues; the clerics who recorded burials
often died themselves or ﬂed, leaving series that stop before an out-
break and resume just after the worst effects had subsided. Calcu-
lated increases or decreases in burials were performed only for
settlements in those years with a minimum of six burials recorded.4

WHEN WERE THE PLAGUES? Cifra 2 shows the consolidation of
the average annual increases and decreases in burials (%) en el
Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands according to the en-
tire seventeenth-century burial-records database. Because the re-
covery of accurate and reliable seventeenth-century population
ﬁgures for every settlement in the database was not feasible, el
averages have been weighted against each settlement’s average an-
nual number of burials in the seventeenth century as a proxy. El

For the completeness tests, see Wrigley and Schoﬁeld, Population History, 19–23.

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P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S

| 145

Fig.1

Geographical Distributional of the Settlements in the
Seventeenth-Century Burials Database

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main mortality peaks in the Dutch Republic occurred in 1601–
1604, 1624/5, 1635/6, 1664–1666, 1679/80, with minor ones in
1613/4, 1652, and to a lesser extent, 1691 y 1699. Peaks in
the Spanish Netherlands occurred at similar points, albeit in greater
numbers—1613–1616, 1623–1625, 1635–1638, 1645–1647, 1667–
1669, 1676, and 1691–1694, with minor ones in 1653, 1658, y
1677/8 (after the initial harsh shock of 1676). In truth, the period
1601–1604 was likely a period of raised mortality in the Spanish

146

| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

Fig.2

Average Annual Increase/Decrease in Burials from Previous
Years across Low Countries, Seventeenth Century

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Países Bajos, just as in the Dutch Republic, but it does not appear
En figura 2 because of the lack of burial data for the south during
the early seventeenth century.

How do we know which peaks were caused by plague? Primero
de todo, although plague from the second pandemic lingered in a
number of areas in Europe (often port towns) during the eigh-
teenth and even early nineteenth centuries, plague certainly began
to disappear from the Low Countries in the ﬁnal third of the sev-
enteenth century. The high mortality of 1676 in the Spanish
Países Bajos (roughly encompassing the modern-day territory of
Bélgica), especially in the Duchies of Brabant and Limburg,
was caused by a terrible dysentery epidemic (a by-product of the
Franco-Dutch War); the term rode loop or rode melisoen (bloody
diarrhea) frequently appeared in the burial records. The resolutions
of the Council of the State make explicit reference to the mortality
caused by dysentery in the Brabant Generality, where the leases on
farms and mills had to be renewed on account of tenants’ deaths. A
less intense peak came later in the Dutch Republic (roughly en-
compassing the modern-day territory of the Netherlands) alrededor
1679/80, though mainly (though not exclusively) in the coastal
areas, suggestive of an environmentally speciﬁc disease, como

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P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S

| 147

malaria or agues. Por ejemplo, the exceptionally hot spell in the
summer of 1679, together with a lack of wind, produced putrid
stagnant water on the River Zaan (north of Amsterdam), leading
to fever-related deaths from August to October.5

The mortality spike in the early 1690s was undoubtedly due
to the harvest failures caused by a particularly cold and wet period
in northwestern Europe, creating nutritional deﬁciencies that re-
sulted in diseases like typhus, especially among the landless and the
poor. The signiﬁcance of this shock was well known with regard
to France, where the total death toll was an estimated 1.3 millón
gente, apenas 6 percent of the population (an underestimation
given burial-record under-registration). In the Low Countries,
sin embargo, increased mortality was more signiﬁcant for the Spanish
Países Bajos, possibly because the Nine Years’ War, which had
key battles fought on southern soil, occurred at the same time.
Parts of the Dutch Republic seemed to be affected more moder-
ately; the average weighted burial increase for the previous years
was just 47 percent in Holland from 1691 a 1694.6

We still have to account for the mortality peaks in the ﬁrst
two-thirds of the seventeenth century. The spike of 1645–1647
that occurred only in the Spanish Netherlands most likely was
not a result of the plague. In only two of the burial records con-
sulted so far for this period has the term pest appeared, whereas it
appears in the positively identiﬁed plague periods described below
much more frequently. Similarmente, no plague ordinances were
passed during the mid-1640s in the Spanish Netherlands, y

For the Brabantine dysentery of 1676, see Bruneel, La mortalité; Kappelhof, “Pest”; para
5
farm vacancies through dysentery mortalities, Resoluties Raad van State, 178, No. 220, para.
435v., Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum (hereinafter BHIC); for fevers and agues in
1679–1680, jorge c.. Kohn, “European Malaria Epidemic of 1678–82,” in idem (ed.), En-
cyclopaedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present (Nueva York, 2008), 118; para
coastal-speciﬁc diseases, Otto S. Knottnerus, “Malaria rond de Noordzee,” in Gerold Wefer
et al. (editores.), Climatic Development and History of the North Atlantic Realm (Berlina, 2002), 339–353;
for the stagnant Zaan, Bert Koene, De Caeskopers: een Zaanse koopmansfamilie in de Gouden
Eeuw (Hilversum, 2011), 65.
For the cold and wet 1690s, see John A. Eddy, “‘The “Maunder Minimum’: Sunspots and
6
Climate in the Reign of Louis XIV,” in Geoffrey Parker and Leslie M. Herrero (editores.), El
General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Londres, 1998), 226–269; for the 1690s famine as a
phenomenon of northwestern Europe, Cormac Ó Gráda and Chevet, “Famine and Market in
Ancien Régime France,” Journal of Economic History, LXII (2002), 706–733; for French mor-
tality ﬁgures, Marcel Lachiver, Les années de misère: La famine du temps du Grand Roi, 1680–1720
(París, 1991), 453.

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| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

few medical treatises or religious/moral pamphlets emerged. El
seasonal burials from 1645 a 1647 no lo hizo (generally) follow pat-
terns associated with diseases like plague—the high-mortality in-
tensity in the late summer to early autumn period, cual es
evident in a comparison of Figure 8 with Figures 5 a 7 y 9 ser-
bajo. Además, increased burials were not even a general fea-
ture of the Spanish Netherlands; they mainly (though not entirely)
concentrated in the County of Flanders, especially by the coast.
This ﬁnding suggests that such environmentally speciﬁc diseases
as malaria, agues, fevers, and intestinal infection (dysentery turns
up in some 1647 burial records) were more likely. Local increases
in mortality may have been exacerbated by the ﬁnal throes of the
Thirty Years’ War in the Spanish Netherlands.7

The 1650s also remain curious. Increased burials were seen in
some places across the Low Countries in the early 1650s, a pesar de
plague is seldom mentioned explicitly in the sources. A man in
the criminal records at Oirschot (Brabant), who was punished
for vagrancy, begging and thievery, was said to have had the “Roije
Millesoen” (dysentery) in 1653—just one example of what could have
led to raised mortality. De nuevo, in Namur, people were prohibited
from making the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Hal, on account
of an epidemic raging in the city (as well as in Brussels and Nivelles).
None of the evidence, sin embargo, justiﬁes attributing that epidemic
to plague. Not until overall burials declined during the mid-1650s
did plague begin to receive explicit notice in the records, accompa-
nied by the re-opening of plague houses, the drafting of plague or-
dinances, and the registration of plague deaths in orphanages. Estos
mentions of plague are odd in the broader context of northwestern
Europa, since plague was absent from England, Francia, and neigh-
boring parts of Germany during the 1650s. More curiously, plague
once again vanished from the Spanish Netherlands in 1657, Alabama-
though burials increased again there in 1658 for reasons that remain
mysterious.8

7
For mention of plague in burial records in 1647, when dysentery also occurred, ver
Roeselare, Parochie Sint-Michiel, Overlijdens- en begrafenisakten, Rijksarchief te Brugge
(hereinafter RTB); (not in burials database) Mannekensvere, Parochie Onze-Lieve-Vrouw,
Overlijdensregisters, RTB.
For early 1650s mortality, see Jurjen Vis, 650 jaar ziekenzorg in Alkmaar 1341–1991 (Hilversum,
8
1991), 69; Rommes, “Plague in Northwestern Europe: The Dutch Experience, 1350–1670,”
Popolazione e Storia, XVI (2015), 47–71; for the man in the criminal records with dysentery,

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| 149

Plague, if present in the Low Countries during the 1650s,
probably occurred in the middle of the decade, surrounded by in-
creased mortality due to other diseases and events at the beginning
and end of the decade. But this outbreak was limited in its geo-
graphical scope (the worst of it apparently conﬁned to Holland
and Utrecht), resulting in no signiﬁcant increase in burials within
the consolidated ﬁgures. Its severity in the individual places likely
afﬂicted by it in 1655/6, such as Utrecht or Amersfoort, must have
been weak—if it was, En realidad, a plague epidemic at all—the weak-
est and most localized of the seventeenth-century Low Countries.9
The period from 1601 a 1604 was likely a period of plague in
the Low Countries, as conﬁrmed by regional and local studies. C.A-
cording to the physician Theodorus Velius in 1604, alrededor 5,000
people died of plague in the town of Hoorn, as much as 40 por-
cent of the population. A remembrance sign outside a church at
Muiden, a small town close to Amsterdam, notes that 650 del
900 inhabitants died in 1602. The ﬁrst few years of the seventeenth
century produced a number of “eyewitness” accounts of the plague
from Amsterdam, including some famous rhetorical literature,
such as Zacharias Heyns’ Pest-Spieghel (1602). Raised mortalities
were also discernible from 1613 a 1616, especially in the south,
where local literature and a number of plague ordinances suggest
that the impact in Hainaut and Artois was especially severe. Ambos
of these mortality crises have been omitted from the database for
this article, sin embargo, because not enough settlements in the
seventeenth-century Spanish Netherlands have burial ﬁgures that
date so early. In the Dutch Republic, only cities tended to have

Criminele Processtukken, 165-01, No. 1823, Archief van de Bossche Schepenbank, Stadsarchief
Den Bosch; for the aborted pilgrimage in Namur, F. Jacquet-Ladrier, “Les épidémies de peste aux
XVIe–XVIIe siècles: l’exemple de Namur,” Cahiers de Sambre et Meuse, IV (2007), 127.
For mentions of plague in 1655/6, see Rommes, “Op het spoor”; j. Steendijk-Kuypers,
9
Volksgezondheidszorg in de 16e en 17e eeuw te Hoorn (Rotterdam, 1994), 221; Frank Huisman,
Stadsbelang en standsbesef: Gezondheidszorg en medisch beroep in Groningen 1500–1730 (Rotterdam,
1992), 281; W.. F. METRO. van Rootselaar, De pest in Amersfoort in 1655 (Amersfoort, 1895); h. GRAMO.
h. brunner, “Pest-epidemiëen van de 15e tot de 17e eeuw te Rotterdam,” Nederlandsch Tijdschrift
voor Geneeskunde, XC (1946), 622. Direct mentions of “pest” in the burial records are rare for the
mid-1650s, though they are found for Zalk-Veecaten in Overijssel. See DTB Zalk en Veecaten,
Begraafboek NG 1503–1833, No. 576, Historisch Centrum Overijssel Zwolle (HCOZ). Magistrates
mention plague in the late 1650s, but evidence is not widespread. See C. l. j. Leuris, “De pest in
Hapert, Hoogeloon en Casteren (1656–1659),” Campinia, III (1973/4), 176–177; oh. Versebroeven,
“Toen de pest heerste te Deurne en Borgerhout in de Jaren 1657–1661,” Heemkundig Handboekje
voor de Antwerpse Randgemeenten, V (1958), 10–14.

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| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

150
such early burial ﬁgures, permitting no systematic comparison of
urban and rural environments.10

After the removal of all mortality peaks that either were def-
initely not from plague or were too incomplete for systematic
comparative research, the remaining spikes—1624/5, 1635/6
(1635–1638 in the Spanish Netherlands) and 1664–1666 (9)—were
certainly due to plague. The indirect evidence in these cases points
to plague, or at least to other vector-borne epidemics; little evidence
suggests that the mortality peaks from 1600 a 1670 in the Low
Countries derived from dearth or harvest failure. At the very least,
we can be assured that mortality due to subsistence issues was lim-
ited during this time.

A long historiography attests to the fact that harvest failures
played little role in these seventeenth-century mortality crises in
the Dutch Republic (even the episode of the early 1690s was mod-
erate). Amsterdam’s favorable connection to international grain
markets, especially from the Baltic, may well have been a factor.
Notwithstanding questions about the role of the international grain
comercio, recent research shows that severe famines began to disappear
from the Republic during the ﬁnal third of the sixteenth century,
not returning until the very end of the seventeenth century.

As seen in Table 4, most years with high prices occurred only in
years without strong mortality peaks. Only the moderate 1652 mor-
tality peak can be convincingly linked to a prior period of high prices,
de 1649 a 1651. Although several scholars have suggested that
subsistence crises may have been worse for the Spanish Netherlands,
few of the mortality peaks in Figure 2 correspond with the main years
of high prices that other scholars have cited. Of all of the years in which
Bruneel found price increases in Brabant—1625/6, 1630/1, 1639/40,
1648–1651, 1661/2, 1684–1686, 1692–1694, and 1696–1698—only

For a local study of the 1601–1604 plague, ver J. Kannegieter, “Pest te Amsterdam in
10
1602,” Maandblad Amstelodamum, LI (1964), 197–205; for plague in Hoorn, F. Kwaad (ed.),
Kroniek van Hoorn uit 1604 door Theodorus Velius (Hoorn, 1979); for the rememberance sign at
Muiden, Rommes, “Plague”; for eyewitness accounts and popular rhetorical literature, j. camioneta
Toorenenbergen (ed.), “Herinneringen uit eene pest-epidemie te Amsterdam (1601–1602),"
Amsterdamsch Jaarboekje (1898), 13–27; Noordegraaf, “‘Zacharias Heyns’ Pest-Spieghel uit
1602,” in Willem de Blécourt, Frijhoff, and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (editores.), Grenzen van gen-
ezing: Gezondheid, ziekte en genezen in Nederland, zestiende tot begin twintigste eeuw (Hilversum,
1993), 155–171; for the severe impact of plague from 1613 a 1616 in the far south, Arnould,
“La peste de 1615 à Lessines,” Annales du Cercle Archéologique de Mons, LXII (1950–1953), 337–
342; Karl Petit, Saint Macaire et la Peste Mons en 1615 (Gembloux, 1946).

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| 151

Mesa 4 Price Rises in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

WEST

NORTH

EAST

SOUTH

METRO
A
D
R
mi
t
S
METRO
A

71
28
81
77
95
91
85
101

t
h
C
mi
R
t
Ud.

59
28
66
66
114
60
78

norte
mi
D
I
mi
l

25
58
101
126
110
63
103

norte
mi
GRAMO
norte
norte
oh
R
GRAMO

norte
mi
D
R
oh
V
mi
oh
C

norte
mi
PAG
METRO
A
k

92
157
78
88
94

211
110
141
137

71
83
168

METRO
mi
h
norte
R
A

94
16
109
87
124
72
92
134

norte
mi
GRAMO
mi
METRO

j
I

norte

98
24
74
82
121
94
128
164

t
h
C
R
t
S
A
A
METRO

65
171
24
58
155
182
109
104

D
norte
oh
METRO
R
mi
oh
R

68
26
105
119
142
119
154

A
D
mi
R
B

122
53
61
74
117
83
110
130

YEARS OF
HIGH PRICES

1622–23
1626
1630
1649–51
1661–62
1675–76
1692–94
1698–99

NOTES Percentage increases above the previous years were calculated as a nine-year moving
promedio, skipping highest and lowest ﬁgures. For periods of high prices covering more than
one year, the ﬁgures for the year with the most severe increase are provided. Increases of a
doubling or more over the normal rate are in bold.
SOURCES Adapted from Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Eric Vanhaute, and Thijs Lambrecht, “Fam-
ines in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, 14th to 19th C,” in Guido Alfani and Cormac
Ó Gráda (eds), Famines in Premodern Europe, 14th to 19th Centuries (Nueva York, 2016). Prices
were compiled by Jessica Dijkman.

1625/6 coincided with a major mortality spike before 1670. Similarmente,
in West Flanders, the years of high prices (1651/2 y 1661/2, para
ejemplo) do not match up with the mortality peaks in Figure 2.11
Four types of direct evidence tie these three mortality spikes
in the Low Countries to plague: (1) The spikes align with the
main years of plague in other parts of Western Europe—1664–
1666 in England and Germany and 1624/5 y 1635/6 practically

11
For the absence of famine in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, ver J. A. faber,
Dure tijden en hongersnoden in pre-industrieel Nederland (Ámsterdam, 1976); Noordegraaf, Hollands
welvaren? Levensstandaard in Holland 1450–1650 (Bergen, 1985); ídem, “Dearth, Famine and Social
Policy in the Dutch Republic at the End of the Sixteenth Century,” in Peter Clark (ed.), El
European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History (Londres, 1985), 67–83; Rudolf Dekker,
Holland in beroering: oproeren in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Baarn, 1982), 22, 28; for recent conﬁrmation of
chronology, Curtis et al., “Famines in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, 14th to 19th C,"
in Alfani and Ó Gráda (editores.), Famine in European History (próximo, 2017); for the Baltic grain
trade and Amsterdam, Milja van Tielhof, The “Mother of All Trades”: The Baltic Grain Trade in
Amsterdam from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 2002); for price increases
in the Spanish Netherlands, Bruneel, La mortalité, 577–598; D. Dalle, De bevolking van Veurne-
Ambacht in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Bruselas, 1963), 165–176.

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| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

Mesa 5 Publication Years of Plague Ordinances, Theological Tracts, Medical
and Moral Pamphlets, and Instructions to Plague Masters in the
Seventeenth-Century Low Countries

NUMBER OF DOCUMENTS

DOCUMENTS (%)

Appeared in 1601–4,
1613–6, 1624/5,
1635–8, 1664–9

Appeared other times in

the seventeenth
siglo

Total
Appeared other times in

the seventeenth century
(sin 1655/6)

83
10

100
12

NOTE The references to plague come from a sample of eighty-three ordinances and tracts, pero
many more remain to be found in the various archives across the Low Countries.

everywhere but most signiﬁcantly in France, Inglaterra, y alemania.
(2) For the periods 1624/5, 1635/6 (8), and 1664–1666 (9) (también
as the 1601–1604 and 1613–1616 periods), burial records often
explicitly identiﬁed plague victims with the word peste or simply
a p after their names, sometimes also noting other diseases, como
rode loop and pokken (pox). In few other years did burial records refer
to plague (see Appendix 2 for the rare instances at https://leidenuni.
academia.edu/DanielCurtis). The term pest never appears in the
burial records after 1670. (3) Plague ordinances and instructions for
plague houses, as well as theological and medical commentaries
about plague, were most common during plague years; these docu-
ments were less revealing in the seventeenth-century Low Countries
(ver tabla 5). Even if they happened to occur in places without an
ostensible outbreak of plague, such writings were most likely signs
that plague had emerged as a threat somewhere else. The fact that
no literary or ofﬁcial sources mention plague after 1670 suggests that
by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contemporaries
had learned not to mistake other diseases for it. (4) In these singularly
high-mortality years, the death of family members in quick succes-
sion was a pattern redolent of plague, exacerbated by the practice of
policing, isolating, and even boarding up infected households.12

For plagues recorded in regions near the Low Countries—for example, en 1625, 1636,
12
y 1665/6 London—see Cummins, Morgan Kelly, and Ó Gráda, “Living Standards and
Plague in London 1560–1665,” Economic History Review, LXIX (2016), 3–34; para 1636

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P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S

| 153

Another strong piece of evidence is the seasonality of death in
the high-mortality years. Most burials in these plague years oc-
curred from August to October; this seasonal clustering was com-
mon to the vector-borne epidemic diseases prevalent in both the
rural settlements (Figures 5–7) and large cities (Figures 3–4) de
northern Europe for the plague years 1624/5, 1635/6 (8), y
1664–1666 (9), as seen from a sample of settlements from the
burials database presented in the ﬁgures below. These results can
be contrasted with the seasonality of death in the famine of the
early 1690s (Cifra 10), which does not show an autumnal spike,
and the many winter burials, which were due to diseases of nutri-
tional deﬁciency.13

Even if plague was the main cause of mortality during these
seventeenth-century mortality peaks in the Low Countries, cómo-
alguna vez, deaths from other causes may have occurred at the same time
in some places. En efecto, the patterns associated with household
contagion and the seasonality of deaths are good evidence for
epidemic disease but not necessarily for plague per se, since other
diseases such as dysentery and typhus could display similar char-
caracteristicas (see the 1676 dysentery seasonality in Figure 9). Many
instances of plague cannot easily be separated from those of other
diseases. Por ejemplo, the terrible plague in Tilburg and Namur in

Newcastle, Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague (Nuevo
Haven, 2012); para 1665/6 Eyam, Bradley, “Most Famous”; para 1624 Reims, Robert Benoit,
Vivre et mourir à Reims au Grand Siècle (1580–1720) (Arras, 1999); para 1624/5, 1636, y 1668/9
Amiens, Pierre Deyon, Amiens capitale provinciale, étude sur la société urbaine au 17e siècle (París,
1967), 21–40; para 1669 Rouen, mi. Plantrou, “La peste à Rouen 1348–1669,” unpub. Doctor. diss.
(Univ. of Rouen, 1980); para 1668/9 Haute Normandie, A. PAG. Trout, “The Municipality of
Paris Confronts the Plague of 1668,” Medical History, XVII (1973), 418–423; for 1666–1670
northern France, Jacques Revel, “Autour d’une épidémie ancienne: la peste de 1666–1670,”
Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, XVII (1970), 953–983; for 1623–1625 and 1666–
1668 Bremen, Klaus Schwarz, Die Pest in Bremen: Epidemien und freier Handel in einer deutschen
Hafenstadt 1350–1713 (Bremen, 1996); for the distinction between diseases and recognition of
signs and symptoms in the seventeenth century, Noordegraaf, De Gave Gods, 27; for household
mortality patterns and plague, Samuel Cohn and Alfani, “Households and Plague in Early
Modern Italy,” Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XXXVIII (2007), 177–205; Schoﬁeld, “The last
Visitation of the Plague in Sweden: The Case of Bräkne-Hoby in 1710–11,” Economic History
Revisar, LXIX (2016), 600–626. The data in this article support previous suggestions that roughly
half of the families with plague had only one death in the household. See Bruneel, La mortalité,
491–492; Lia van Zalinge-Spooren, “Die contagieuse sieckte der peste is grasserende . . . De pest
in Helmond in 1636,” Helmonds Historisch Jaarboek: De Vlasbloem, XIV (1994), 78.
13
in Tudor and Stuart England (stanford, 1978), 95–108.

For the seasonality of deaths in North European climates, see Andrew Appleby, Famine

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Fig.3

Seasonality of Burials in Plague Years 1624 y 1635, Leiden

Fig.4

Seasonality of Burials in Plague Years 1637 y 1668,
Valenciennes

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Fig.5

Seasonality of Burials in Plague Year 1625

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Fig.6

Seasonality of Burials in Plague Year 1635

Fig.7

Seasonality of Burials in Plague Years 1666–1669

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Fig.8

Seasonality of Burials in High Mortality Years 1646/7 (en
Spanish Netherlands)

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156

| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

Fig.9

Seasonality of Burials in Dysentery Year 1676

Fig.10

Seasonality of Burials in Famine Years 1691–1694

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1624/5 closely followed a bout of dysentery in 1622/3, and dys-
entery sometimes trailed plague during the late 1660s, especially in
Limburg and Brabant. Spanish soldiers were said to have brought
rooden loop to Antwerp from Holland in 1666. The urban and rural
burial records sometimes offered different disease classiﬁcations in
close proximity. In the far northeastern village of Midwolda in the
Oldambt of Groningen, Por ejemplo, the plague deaths of 1636/7
came right after the pox cases of 1634/5. Elsewhere it was vice-ver-
sa: In the Betuwe village of Zoelen, the plague cases of 1626 pre-
ceded the children’s pox (kinderpox) de 1628; in the Overijssel
village of Goor, the plague of 1665 preceded the kinderpox. En

P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S

| 157

the Brabantine village of Eersel, plague and pox cases were men-
tioned together in 1636; in the village of Korbeek-Dijle, plague
and dysentery occurred simultaneously.14

Some of the non-plague diseases were spread by troops ﬁght-
ing in the Dutch Revolt, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Second
Anglo-Dutch War. The arrival of soldiers into villages raised burial
ﬁgures even higher, since non-residents were also listed in the
burial records. Por último, this article has no practical solution
for this mixing of diseases, since we cannot systematically separate
those who died from plague from those who did not in periods
when plague was raging. El problema, sin embargo, is not completely
insurmountable. The point remains that the mortality rises of
1624/5, 1635/6, and 1664–1666 affected almost every region in
the Low Countries. These periods of high mortality could hardly
have been the product of environmentally speciﬁc diseases origi-
nating in the coastal, marsh, or inland zones. Nor could they have
estado, decir, cases of typhus or smallpox, at the time; these illnesses
would have had merely localized effects. With its wide geograph-
ical reach and well-aligned timing between settlements, solo
plague epidemics can explain the mortality peaks in these speciﬁc
periods (even if individual settlements could feasibly have suffered
additional deaths through local outbreaks of other diseases).

THE SEVERITY AND EXPANSE OF THE PLAGUE The ﬁrst order of busi-
ness is to classify plague by its severity. One recent suggestion is
that plague had discernible effects for a particular community
whenever “a short-term perturbation of mortality reduce[d] el
dimensions of the generations so much that they [eran] unable
to reproduce themselves entirely even when making full use of
their potential for recovery.” Thus, a community that could not
return to its former size, despite the rise in nuptiality that often

For cases of dysentery and plague together, see Luud de Brouwer, “‘De aenclevende
14
sieckte’: De pest in Tilburg voor 1630,” Tilburg, XIII (1995), 3–13; Parochie Sint-Bartholomeus,
Overlijdens- en Begrafenisakten, 1633–1674, Rijksarchief te Leuven, Korbeek-Dijle (Bertem);
Jacquet-Ladrier, “Les épidémies," 128; A. Van Schevensteen, “Over pestepidemie te Antwerpen
in vroeger tijden,” Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Akademie voor Taal- en
Letterkunde (1932), 1087; for cases of “pox” and plague together, Kerkeboek 1596–1811,
Midwolda, 124, No. 294, Groninger Archieven; Zoelen NG, DTO boek, No. 1858C; HCOZ,
Kerkeboek Goor, 1656–1807, Overlijden/Begraven 1656–81, GAA; Eersel RK Begraafboek
1602–46, 8034, No. 1, BHIC.

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158

| D A N I E L R . C U RT I S

followed the shock, had suffered a mortality crisis. According to
Del Panta and Livi-Bacci, a rise in burials 50 percent or higher
than the previous years was enough to prevent the generation
born in the crisis year to replenish the population. Por eso, su
ﬁrst category—the absence of a mortality crisis—denotes an in-
crease of less than 50 percent in burials per settlement due to
plague; their second, moderate plague, an increase of 50 a 299 por-
centavo; their third, severe plague, an increase of 300 a 899 por ciento;
and their fourth, extreme plague, an increase of 900 percent or more.
All of these classiﬁcations are based on the shock that plague’s
short-term mortality had on the medium- and long-term rep-
roductive capacities of societies to regenerate. Other scholars sug-
gested that a 20 percent increase in burials was sufﬁcient to indicate
a genuine mortality effect, albeit without a developed rationale
like Del Panta and Livi-Bacci’s. More to the point, if we were
to use a classiﬁcation based on the 20 percent marker, Cifra 2
would show a mortality crisis almost annually!15

Tables 6 y 7 show that plagues were not all the same and
did not exhibit universal features. Curiously, the Dutch Republic
exhibited a harsher seventeenth-century epidemiological pattern
of plague than did the Spanish Netherlands: 23 por ciento de la
plagues there were severe or worse, whereas only 15 por ciento
reached the same status in the south. Contrary to recent literature
about plague in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London,
outbreaks in the Low Countries did not have the same virulence.
The weakest of them were the last ones of the 1660s: Solo 11
percent of plagues were severe or extreme in the Dutch Repub-
lic for this ﬁnal round, whereas a meagre 7 percent of plagues
had the same status for the Spanish Netherlands. A plague with
a 900 percent increase in burials was nowhere to be found from
1667 a 1669.

The most damaging eruption in the Low Countries during
the seventeenth century were those of 1624/5 y 1635/6 en
the Dutch Republic. El 37 percent of places in the Republic
that suffered a severe or extreme shock in 1624/5 approaches

For the long-term effects of mortality shocks, see Alfani, “Plague," 418; para el 50%
15
increase in mortality rationale, Del Panta and Livi-Bacci, “Chronologie”; for suggested rates
de 20%, see Rudolph Ladan, Gezondheidszorg in Leiden in de late middeleeuwen (Hilversum,
2012); Thoen and Devos, “Pest.”

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| 159

Mesa 6 Plague Severity in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (D.R.)

and Spanish Netherlands (S.N.)

PLACE AND

PLAGUE YEARS

D.R., 1624/5
D.R., 1635/6
D.R., 1664–1666
Total
S.N., 1624/5
S.N., 1635–16388
S.N., 1667–1669
Total
Total D.R. and S.N.

NUMBER OF
SETTLEMENTS

WITH DATA

BURIAL INCREASES

< 50 % 50–299 % 300–899 % 900 + % 43 47 76 166 26 55 86 167 333 5 2 10 21 25 33 37 22 7 27 8 15 10 12 25 15 62 19 25 23 43 91 15 31 70 116 207 58 49 57 55 58 56 81 70 62 13 10 3 26 1 15 6 22 48 30 21 4 16 4 27 7 13 14 3 4 5 12 3 1 0 4 16 7 9 7 7 12 2 0 2 5 the 44 percent recently recorded for northern Italy from 1629 to 1630, which Alfani described as the harshest by far in early modern Western Europe. In 1635/6, 30 percent of the plagues were severe or worse in the Dutch Republic, though, as Table 7 shows, the Republic had the highest average burial increase based on the data from all of the settlements, duly weighted. The plague of 1624/5 may have hit more settlements severely in the Dutch Republic than did any other seventeenth-century outbreak (the most settle- ments and the worst outbreaks of anywhere in the Low Countries at the time), though the 1635/6 bout seems to have hit the more populous settlements harder. Table 7 Plague Severity in the Low Countries (Calculated through Weighted Averages in Burial Increases) PLACE PLAGUE PERIOD YEAR WITH HIGHEST FIGURE WEIGHTED AVERAGE IN BURIAL INCREASE PLAGUE SEVERITY RANKING Dutch Republic Spanish Netherlands Dutch Republic Spanish Netherlands Dutch Republic Spanish Netherlands 1624/5 1623–1625 1635/6 1635–1638 1664–1666 1667–1669 1624 1625 1635 1636 1666 1668 234 119 324 122 87 88 2 4 1 3 6 5 NOTE For the number of burials and settlements per plague period, see Tables 1–3. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 160 | D A N I E L R . C U RT I S Given that an average annual death rate in normal times is roughly 4 percent of the population, an average burial increase of 324 percent in 1635/6 over the previous years should have led to an average death rate of 17 percent of the population. In reality, this ﬁgure could have been higher: To take just one exam- ple, in the small village of Ciergnon in the County of Namur, the average number of burials from 1620 to 1635 was only two per year before the burials suddenly shot up to seventy-four in 1636. No increase or decrease in burials could be calculated for 1636, how- ever, because, as stated already, a minimum of six burials is re- quired for inclusion in this study. Small hamlets were frequently in this predicament. Interestingly, although the intensity of the epidemic in the Spanish Netherlands was not as high as in the Dutch Republic, which had short, sharp shocks of one to two years, the plague incidents in the south tended to have a moderate, less-intense effect that lingered for as many as four years.16 The disastrous effect of plagues was not measured solely by severity. What was so distinctive about the plagues from 1629 to 1630 and from 1656 to 1658 in Italy, for example, was their ability to reach the most isolated corners of the countryside. We can use the same system to calculate expanse as we did to assess severity. Any place that did not witness an increase in burials of 50 percent or more in a plague year avoided the signiﬁcant effects of the plague; that is, it did not experience a mortality crisis during a plague year. Accordingly, a ratio for likelihood of being spared is calculable for a particular geographical area. Given what has been written about plague in early modern northwestern Europe as an urban phenomenon, we might expect this ratio to have been espe- cially high for the Low Countries. Indeed, Slack set the chances of a settlement in the English County of Devon being able to escape the plague from 1565 to 1666 at 44 percent.17 16 For the similar severity of plague outbreaks in early modern London, see Cummins, Kelly, and Ó Gráda, “Living Standards,” 1; for the severe plague of 1629–1630 in Northern Italy, Alfani, “Plague.” Van der Woude, “Demograﬁsche ontwikkeling,” 144–145, suggested a “normal” mortality rate in Holland of 3.5% of the population, but earlier he had suggested a higher 4.5%. See Mentink and idem, De demograﬁsch ontwikkeling te Rotterdam, 54. This article uses a rough compromise of 4%. For the Ciergnon case, see RP, Actes de Décès/Sépultures, Ciergnon (Houyet), Paroisse Saint Martin, 9999/998, no. 0394, Archives de l’Etat à Namur. For the wide territorial spread of seventeenth-century Italian plagues, see Alfani, “Plague”; 17 for the Devon ﬁgures, Slack, Impact of Plague, 109. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S | 161 Table 8 Territorial Extent of Plague in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (D.R.) and Spanish Netherlands (S.N.) PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS D.R., 1624/5 D.R., 1635/6 D.R., 1664–1666 Total D.R. S.N., 1624/5 S.N., 1635–1638 S.N., 1667–1669 Total S.N. Total D.R. and S.N. NUMBER OF SETTLEMENTS WITH DATA NUMBER OF CONFIRMED PLAGUES LIKELIHOOD OF BEING SPARED (%) 43 47 76 166 26 55 86 167 333 41 37 51 129 19 47 76 142 271 5 21 32 22 27 15 12 15 19 What Table 8 shows, however, is that settlements in the Low Countries found it difﬁcult to avoid the signiﬁcant effects of a plague during the seventeenth century; their likelihood of doing so was just 19 percent when every recordable plague outbreak and every settlement is taken into account. A settlement’s chances of avoiding the plague entirely during the seventeenth century were probably little better than zero. As the plagues’ levels of severity differed, so too did their spread and pervasiveness. Whereas 32 percent of settlements in the Dutch Republic were able to escape the worst effects from 1664 to 1666, only 5 percent of settlements there in 1624/5 escaped. Even the plague bouts of the same period diverged between geographical areas: The 32 percent of settlements spared in the 1664 to 1666 outbreak in the Republic was substan- tially higher than the 12 percent seen in the Spanish Netherlands from 1667 to 1669. If the overall database had more data from the earlier two plagues than the later, weaker, one in the 1660s, the likelihood of being spared may have been as low as 10 to 12 per- cent. To provide some context for this ﬁgure, Alfani cited his ﬁgure of 9 percent for the likelihood of being spared from the plague of 1629/30 in northern Italy as evidence for “high territorial pervasiveness.” Ultimately, the ﬁndings in this section about the severity and extent of the plague lead into the claim of the next section, that the disease had a greater effect upon rural societies in early modern northwestern Europe than scholars have hitherto acknowledged. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 162 | D A N I E L R . C U RT I S PLAGUE INTENSITY BETWEEN CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE To demon- strate the fact that early modern plague in northwestern Europe was not always an urban phenomenon, we need to separate the severity and territorial pervasiveness of plagues in the Low Coun- tries between city and countryside. In this article, urban applies to settlements that had more than 2,000 inhabitants by c. 1600. Al- though this ﬁgure has an element of arbitrariness about it, it is the lowest one suggested in recent signiﬁcant work; Clark’s study of European urbanization cites it as the lower limit for early modern small-town status in northwestern Europe.18 As Table 9 shows for the three main plague outbreaks in the Low Countries during the seventeenth century, more urban set- tlements failed to register a discernible mortality effect than did rural settlements; the likelihood of a city being spared was 21 per- cent and the countryside 17 percent. Virtually no rural settlement could avoid at least one encounter with plague during the seven- teenth century, and many settlements experienced many more than one. But the plague did not just pay a slight visit to the coun- tryside. Separating the severity of the plague between cities/towns and rural areas of the seventeenth-century Low Countries reveals that plagues attacked the countryside with a vengeance. As the data set for the Low Countries as a whole shows in Table 10, mor- tality crises in plague years were much alike in the cities and the countryside—20 percent of rural plagues being severe or extreme and 19 percent being so in urban environments. In the Dutch Re- public (Table 11), this difference in severity between city and countryside proved to be less discernible, however, than in the Spanish Netherlands (Table 12), where this difference was more pronounced—18 percent of rural plagues being severe or worse, compared to 7 percent in cities and towns. Over-emphasis of any differences between urban and rural plague severity detected in this article would be ill-advised. After all, they may be due, at least in part, to the exclusion rates of the cities’ burial registers. Because cities sometimes had separate re- cords for plague-house burials, the number of deaths listed in their For population estimates regarding the Dutch Republic, see Jan de Vries, European 18 Urbanization 1500–1800 (New York, 1984); for the Spanish Netherlands, Paul Klep, “Population Estimates of Belgium, by Province (1375–1831),” in Historiens et populations: Liber Amicorum Etienne Hélin (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1991), 485–508; for the 2,000 small towns, see Peter Clark, European Cities and Towns 400–2000 (New York, 2009). l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Table 9 Territorial Pervasiveness of Seventeenth-Century Plague in Urban and Rural Settlements of the Dutch Republic (D.R.) and the Spanish Netherlands (S.N.) PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS NUMBER OF SETTLEMENTS WITH DATA NUMBER CONFIRMED PLAGUES LIKELIHOOD OF BEING SPARED (%) PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS NUMBER OF SETTLEMENTS WITH DATA NUMBER CONFIRMED PLAGUES LIKELIHOOD OF BEING SPARED (%) Rural D.R., 1624/5 Rural D.R., 1635/6 Rural D.R., 1664–1666 Total Rural D.R. Urban D.R., 1624/5 Urban D.R., 1635/6 Urban D.R., 1664–1666 Total Urban D.R. Total Rural Low Countries 26 31 51 108 17 16 25 58 246 25 26 34 85 16 11 17 44 205 4 16 33 21 6 31 32 24 17 Rural S.N., 1624/5 Rural S.N, 1635–1638 Rural S.N., 1667–1669 Total Rural S.N. Urban S.N., 1624–5 Urban S.N., 1635–8 Urban S.N., 1667–9 Total Urban S.N. Total Urban Low Countries 20 44 74 138 6 11 12 29 87 14 39 64 117 5 8 12 25 69 30 11 14 15 17 27 0 14 21 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Table 10 Plague Severity in Rural and Urban Settlements of the Low Countries during the Seventeenth-Century PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS Total Rural Low Countries Total Urban Low Countries NUMBER OF SETTLEMENTS WITH DATA BURIAL INCREASES < 50 % 50–299 % 300–899 % 900 + % 246 87 44 18 18 21 154 53 63 61 36 12 15 14 12 4 5 5 Table 11 Plague Severity in Rural and Urban Settlements of the Dutch Republic during the Seventeenth-Century PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS Rural, 1624/5 Rural, 1635/6 Rural, 1664–1666 Total Rural Urban, 1624/5 Urban, 1635/6 Urban, 1664–1666 Total Urban NUMBER OF PLAGUE YEARS WITH DATA BURIAL INCREASES < 50 % 50–299 % 300–899 % 900 + % 26 31 51 108 17 16 25 58 1 5 17 23 1 5 8 14 4 16 33 21 6 31 32 24 15 17 29 61 10 6 14 30 58 55 57 57 59 38 56 52 8 7 1 16 5 3 2 10 31 23 2 15 29 19 8 17 2 2 4 8 1 2 1 4 8 7 8 7 6 13 4 7 Table 12 Plague Severity in Rural and Urban Settlements of the Spanish Netherlands during the Seventeenth-Century PLACE AND PLAGUE YEARS Rural, 1624/5 Rural, 1635–1638 Rural, 1667–1669 Total Rural Urban, 1624/5 Urban, 1635–1638 Urban, 1667–1669 Total Urban NUMBER OF PLAGUE YEARS WITH DATA BURIAL INCREASES < 50 % 50–299 % 300–899 % 900 + % 20 44 74 138 6 11 12 29 6 30 5 11 10 14 21 15 1 17 3 27 0 0 4 14 10 25 58 93 5 6 12 23 50 57 78 67 83 55 100 79 1 13 6 20 0 2 0 2 5 30 8 15 0 18 0 7 3 1 0 4 0 0 0 0 15 2 0 3 0 0 0 0 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 | 165 P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S church burial records were not deﬁnitive; many rural villages had no such separate listings. City populations were also more transient and ﬂuid in their social composition than was the countryside, with more recent migrants; the death of those who lived in abject poverty, without strong familial or friendship networks, were more likely to be unrecorded in the burial records. Another po- tentially signiﬁcant factor is the smaller number of burials in the rural settlements, the logic being that fewer burials per year made deviations from previous years’ ﬁgures more likely. This factor, however, turns out not to be meaningful: Calculation of a cor- relation coefﬁcient between average number of burials per settle- ment per year and highest increase in burials during plague periods does not show a strong negative correlation; in fact, it shows no correlation—+0.03 for the Dutch Republic and −0.01 for the Spanish Netherlands. Notwithstanding the limitations inherent in the sources and the exercise of due caution regarding conclu- sions, the unmistakable ﬁnding herein is that rural societies in the Low Countries were strongly afﬂicted by plague (not to mention other diseases) during the seventeenth-century, just like cities were. EXPLAINING RURAL PLAGUES IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LOW COUNTRIES The notion that plague did not touch the country- side likely derives from a research tradition in economic, social, and demographic history that favors urban over rural history, as well as by a research tradition in rural history that focuses in- ordinately on small localities. Yet, the idea that the rural Low Countries could escape the effects of early modern plague is counter- intuitive, given recent literature emphasizing plague’s contagious- ness and the possible role of transmission between people.19 Many parts of the Low Countries were not only largely urban but also densely populated; the distance between rural settlements, as well as between villages and towns, was usually short. The movement and interaction of people, often considered responsible for spreading epidemic diseases such as plague, was easily facilitated 19 For the limitations of rural social and economic history in the Low Countries, see Curtis, “Trends in Rural Social and Economic History of the Pre-Industrial Low Countries: Recent Themes and Ideas in Journals and Books of the Past Five Years (2007–2013),” Low Countries Historical Review, CXXVIII (2013), 60–95. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 166 | D A N I E L R . C U RT I S by excellent road and water transport. Indeed, many of the agricul- tural regions of the Low Countries had become highly commercial- ized compared to other regions of Western Europe. By the late Middle Ages, large tenant farms were already established in Frisia, coastal Flanders, the Dutch River area, and other places where farmers exploited the demand for produce in the Flemish and Dutch towns. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw people migrat- ing long distances (often from the east) to take seasonal work as agricultural laborers. According to the physician Pieter van Foreest, the plague that came to Delft in 1557 originated with the farmers from the surrounding countryside who supplied the town with pro- duce. Diary extracts from 1598 report that because of the plague’s severity in the countryside of the Over-Betuwe (Dutch River area), not enough laborers were left to take in the harvest on time.20 Rural commercialization, migration, and close links between city and countryside all point toward a commerce- or trade-based explanation of the pervasiveness of plague in the countryside, but they do not shed any light on why rural plagues exhibited levels of severity that were similar (or sometimes even greater) than those in the cities. Commercial relations might be able to explain the dif- fusion of plague into the countryside, but the large urban centers should have been more susceptible, at least theoretically, to severe outbreaks because of their international connections. The constant departures and arrivals of ships, whether those of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to and from East Asia or grain shipments to and from the Baltic, would seem to have made many of the sig- niﬁcant port towns and harbors an easy target for the spread of new bacteria. Nor did this danger escape contemporaries. In 1563, Amsterdam imposed quarantine measures on English ships because of plague fears, and a year later, Kampen, another port town, aimed preventive measures at ships from plague-stricken Gdansk. The situation was reversed a century later when foreign governments quarantined Dutch ships to guard against the plague epidemic that struck Amsterdam in 1664. Remember also that urban growth (both relative and absolute) in seventeenth-century For early and substantial rural commercialization in the Low Countries, see Bas van 20 Bavel, Manors and Markets: Economy and Society in the Low Countries, 1500–1600 (New York, 2010); for the Delft example, Ralph Burri (ed.), Die Delfter Pest von 1557 nach den Beobachtungen von Petrus Forestus (Zurich, 1982); for the Over-Betuwe example, Gisb Brom and L. A. Van Langeraad (eds.), Diarium van Arend van Buchell (Amsterdam, 1907), 474. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 | 167 P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S Holland was not the result of natural increase but largely inﬂu- enced by migration from afar—the Spanish Netherlands, France, Germany, and even further aﬁeld. Many of the new migrants became poor laborers, often herded into cramped, crowded, and insalubrious neighborhoods.21 To explore the impact of rural commercialization on the sever- ity and the expanse of plague outbreaks in seventeenth-century rural areas of the Low Countries, we perform systematic regional compar- isons. In its comparison of plague outbreaks by settlement in four different areas of the Low Countries, Table 13 shows that the most commercialized region of Holland had the least severe. Even when taking into account only the worst seventeenth-century outbreak in each settlement there, only 19 percent of these towns suffered a mor- tality rate of severe or extreme in Holland. The number of places with severe plagues or worse in the far north (Groningen, Frisia, and Drenthe) was 60 percent, in the east (the Duchy of Guelders and the Brabant Generality) 47 percent, and in the south (the Campine, Upper Guelders, and the Duchy of Limburg) 30 percent. Even for rural settlements only, the trend did not change—20 per- cent in Holland, 51 percent in the far north, 40 percent in the east, and 30 percent in the south. The only exception to the generally moderate plague in Holland was the case in Leiden in 1635/6, which exhibited a more than tenfold increase in burials during this period. Since inland regions such as the Campine and the Duchy of Guelders were hardly beacons of commerce, the easy equation of Low Countries trade with seventeenth-century plague does not hold as an explanation.22 None of the top ten places with the most damaging plagues in the database were located in any core commercialized regions of 21 For trade, commerce, and urbanization as the favored explanation of repeat plague epi- demics, see Noordegraaf and Valk, De Gave Gods, 224; for the quarantine in Amsterdam, ibid., 201; for the quarantine in Kampen, W. ten Kate, “De pestkeuren te Kampen,” Nederlandsch Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, LXVI (1922), 1657; for the quarantine of Dutch ships in 1664, Rommes, “Plague, ” 7. 22 For the commons-dominated, less commercial regions of the Campine, see M. De Keyzer, “The Common Denominator: The Survival of the Commons in the Late Medieval Campine Area,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Antwerp, 2014); E. Van Onacker, “Leaders of the Pack? Village Elites and Social Structures in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Campine Area,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Univ. of Antwerp, 2014); for caution regarding commercial explanations of plague mortality and spread, Ann Carmichael, “Plague Persistence in Western Europe: A Hypothesis,” Medieval Globe, I (2014), 157–191. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 168 | D A N I E L R . C U RT I S Table 13 Regional Divergences in Plague Severity in the Low Countries during the Seventeenth Century PLACE Holland Far north The east The south Holland (rural only) Far north (rural only) The east (rural only) The south (rural only) NUMBER OF SETTLEMENTS WITH DATA BURIAL INCREASES (IN MOST SEVERE CASES OF PLAGUE) < 50 % 50–299 % 300–899 % 900 + % 27 10 36 34 15 8 25 33 5 0 2 7 3 0 2 7 19 0 6 21 20 0 8 21 17 4 17 17 9 4 13 16 63 40 47 50 60 50 52 49 4 2 13 6 3 1 8 6 15 20 36 18 20 13 32 18 1 4 4 4 0 3 2 4 4 40 11 12 0 38 8 12 the Low Countries (Leiden in 1635/6 narrowly missing). In the list were villages or near poorly commercialized, commons-dominated areas of the Campine, such as Zundert, Rijsbergen, Minderhout, or Lille; villages in the eastern reaches of the inland Republic, such as Arcen, Zalk-Veecaten, and Coevorden; and villages in the isolated far north of Groningen, such as Kropswolde or Midwolda. The plagues that devastated the populations in these areas were not due to trade interactions so much as to incessant conﬂicts—the Dutch Revolt, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War, all of which affected rural communities more than they did towns. The purely military casualties were low, but exposure to new bacteria led to the spread of plague, dysentery, and typhus, as well as other diseases. For example, the town accounts of Helmond from 1635/6 explicitly note that lodging soldiers under the command of Jan van Nassau brought plague to the house of Thomas de Kuijper.23 Why did the mobility and interaction of new people via trade and commerce fail to generate the strong plagues that the mobility of 23 For the stronger impact of warfare on rural areas than on cities in the early modern Low Countries, see Myron Gutmann, War and Rural Life in the Early Modern Low Countries (Princeton, 1988); Marjolein ‘t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence: Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands, 1570–1680 (London, 2014); Leo Adriaenssen, Staatsvormend geweld: Overleven aan de frontlinies in de meierij van Den Bosch, 1572–1629 (Tilburg, 2007); for the Helmond example, Van Zalinge- Spooren, “Die contagieuse sieckte,” 64. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 P L A G U E I N T H E LO W C O U N T R I E S | 169 troops did? At present, we can answer only with educated guesses. Deﬁnitive conclusions will have to await further research. Yet, a promising avenue of research concerning the relationship between living standards and plague has produced speculation that the stress caused by the Great Famine of 1315–1322 might have exacerbated people’s vulnerability to the Black Death of 1347–1352. Could the devastation of agricultural land, the usurpation of goods, the up- rooting of families, the forced lodging, and the heavy taxes that continuous warfare brought to the Low Countries during the sev- enteenth century have had a deleterious effect on the rural popu- lations’ physical capacity to resist plague?24 Furthermore, urbanization and trade may have conferred on townspeople a degree of resistance to the spread of outside bacte- ria. By contrast, the sudden shock of new troops appearing in less- cosmopolitan communities, not inured to such exposure, may have weakened people’s resistance to plague and other serious ep- idemic diseases. This hypothesis demonstrates that the ﬁndings in this article do not necessarily contradict the well-established view of the larger cities of Holland as “urban graveyards.” Rather than sharp spikes in burials, what Holland actually evinces in the seven- teenth century are numerous small spikes, indicative of destitute people crowded into unhealthy urban neighborhoods where en- demic, recurring diseases (of a lower intensity) were a common feature. This constant exposure to pathogens may have helped people to acquire an immunity that limited the scale of plague epidemics that were much more intense elsewhere in the Low Countries. Thus could Holland exhibit some of the highest gen- eral death rates in normal times but some of the shallowest epi- demic spikes in times of crisis.25 For the potential connection between stress and plague resistance, see Paul Slavin, “The 24 Great Bovine Pestilence and Its Consequences in England and Wales, 1318–50,” Economic History Review, LXV (2012), 1263; Sharon DeWitte and Slavin, “Between Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black Death: Evidence from Paleoepidemiology and Manorial Accounts,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIV (2013), 37–60; DeWitte, “Setting the Stage for Medieval Plague: Pre-Black Death Trends in Survival and Mortality,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, CLVIII (2015), 441–451. For the possibility of (temporary) acquired immunity from plague, see Cohn, “Epide- 25 miology of the Black Death and Successive Waves of Plague,” Medical History, XXVII (2008), 85; Stephen R. Ell, “Immunity as a Factor in the Epidemiology of Medieval Plague,” Review of Infectious Diseases, VI (1984), 866–879; Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan, Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations (New York, 2001) 45; for the possibility of plague l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 170 | D A N I E L R . C U RT I S The plagues in Holland did not hamper the province’s devel- opment; from the ﬁnal third of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century, the cities and towns of the region grew through migration processes that were exogenous to the epidemi- ological regime. The number of immigrants to Holland’s cities from the Spanish Netherlands, France, Germany, and further away was more than four times that from its rural hinterlands. No other cities and towns of the Low Countries, however, could rely on this exogenous immigration during the seventeenth century. Most of the immigrants to these places came from the surrounding countryside, where this article locates the most damaging plague epidemics to have occurred—the likes of the Duchy of Limburg, the Brabant Generality, and the Duchy of Guelders. These regions also experienced the greatest contraction of their urban popula- tions across the seventeenth century. The severe and pervasive na- ture of the seventeenth-century plagues there destroyed the rural migrant base necessary to replenish the nearby cities, and, in effect, may have inadvertently exacerbated a widening inequality be- tween the booming and the stagnant urban economies of the Low Countries.26 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / j i / n h a r t i c e - p d l f / / / / 4 7 2 1 3 9 1 7 0 6 6 9 6 / j i n h _ a _ 0 0 9 7 5 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 8 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 resistance being connected to different environmental factors, diet, and other economic con- ditions, Fabian Crespo and Matthew Lawrenz, “Heterogeneous Immunological Landscapes and Medieval Plague: An Invitation to a New Dialogue between Historians and Immunol- ogists,” Medieval Globe, I (2014), 229–258; for the original work on “urban graveyards” in Holland, van der Woude, “Population Developments in the Northern Netherlands (1500– 1800) and the Validity of the ‘Urban Graveyard’ Effect,” Annales de Démographie Historique (1982), 55–75. For immigration to Holland’s cities from outside, see Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van 26 Zanden, “Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800,” in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Working on Labor (Leiden, 2012), 237–245; for the greatest urban contraction in the listed areas, de Vries, European Urbanization; Klep, “Population Estimates”; ‘t Hart, “Town and Country in the Dutch Republic, 1550–1800,” in Steven Epstein (ed.), Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 (New York, 2001), 80–105. Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XLVII:2 (Otoño, 2016), 139–170. imagen

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