THE POLISH GRAIN TRADE 221
(1500) (1600) (1660) (1800)
Cultivated area 100 110 65 (1685) 94
Grain Production:
Peasants 100 100 30 63
Folwark 100 125 45 118
Total 100 104 27 63
Livestock 100 86 60 67
Fallow land 13% (1517) 5% 40% (1685) 26%(1787)
According to this sample, the only sector which recovered at all was that of fol-
wark grain production.^22 Most seriously, the grain yields reverted to medieval
levels. Rye yields of 1:3, and wheat yields of 1:3^1 / 2 , which were common around
1750, contrast with 1:3^1 / 2 or 1:5 respectively in 1600.^23 The mass of the popula-
tion toiled harder and harder, and earned less and less to eat.
The Grain Trade suffered likewise. Although different researchers use differ-
ent systems of measurement, the pattern is the same. Following the peak
of 1618—19, the figures never recover. The war decades of the 1650s, 1700s,
and 1730s witness slumps sinking to one-quarter of the 1618 level. In between,
ever more infrequent peak performances never surpass two-thirds of their early
seventeenth-century equivalents. Maczak's figures for Danzig grain passing
through the Danish Sound are typical:
1618 85,000 lasts^24
1644 59,000 lasts
1669 47,000 lasts
(1680-90) annual average 48,000 lasts
(1700-20) annual average 20,000 lasts
1724 54,000 lasts
(1731-50) annual average 20,000 lasts
1751 50,000 lasts
Other sources confirm that in 1751 the Republic crossed the magical barrier of
100,000 lasts of exported grain for the first and only time since 1619. It was the
final success of a dying trade.
Wars undoubtedly caused immense damage to the Vistula Trade. In particu-
lar, in the years between 1648 and 1660, when the Republic was submerged by
wave after wave of invaders, losses were inflicted as calamitous as those of the
Thirty Years War in Germany. The Republic as a whole lost one-quarter of its
population, eliminating at a stroke the entire natural increase of the previous
century. In Royal Prussia, mortality was as high as 60 per cent, in the towns of
Mazovia 70 per cent. In 1655, Danzig alone lost 9,000 souls from plague and
siege. At Oswiecim (Auschwitz), the Swedes left 15 houses standing out of 500.
In the countryside, estates were sacked and razed, or ruined by confiscation of
all their stock. Similar horrors recurred during the Great Northern War, the
Wars of the Polish and Austrian Successions, the Seven Years War, and the Wars
of the Three Partitions. At such moments, sailing down the Vistula with rafts
laden with food was not a viable proposition.