While plague was a suddenly devastating illness, chronic infectious diseases also
took great tolls. Smallpox was so endemic in Europe by the sixteenth century that it
was assumed that everyone would get it; mortality was high in domestic popula-
tions and often catastrophic in colonial possessions. Smallpox devastated the
Americas after the Spanish arrived in the Caribbean and Mexico; the same can
be said for Russian expansion into Siberia. Ambiguous references to disease in
European Russia before the seventeenth century might be smallpox; in addition to
chronic smallpox, virulent pandemics broke out about once everyfive to seven
years, with mortality of 10 to 30 percent. Thefirst unambiguous references to the
disease in the Russian empire concern Siberia. From early in the seventeenth
century, devastating smallpox epidemics, probably coming from Russia, raced
across Siberia. It spread quickly among the Ostiaks and Samoeds in western Siberia
in the 1630s, crossing the Yenisei by the 1650s to decimate 80 percent of the Iakut
and Tunguz peoples by the end of the century. It is estimated that half of the
Siberian native population died of smallpox in the seventeenth century. Other
devastating diseases imported into Siberia included venereal disease, measles, scarlet
fever, and typhus.
Locally limited outbreaks of malaria and typhus are also recorded. Ivan IV was
said to have suffered typhus in 1558; thefiancé of Tsar Boris Godunov’s daughter,
Prince Johann of Schleswig-Holstein, died of the disease in 1602. It was a particular
scourge in the armies, accounting for more of the mortality in the 1690s Azov
campaign than battlefield injury; thereafter it ravaged Russian armies through the
eighteenth century.POPULATION
In spite of epidemic, demographic growth characterizes these centuries. Europe
west of a line from Trieste to St. Petersburg (including Scandinavia) was particu-
larly dynamic. In the 1400s the European population was recovering from the
devastation of bubonic plague in the mid-1300s, when a third of the west European
population had died. At about 1400 the population of western Europe is estimated
at 52 million, a number that grew steadily to about 1700, when the population
numbered about 85.5 million, about 14 percent of the world’s total population at
that time. But many factors slowed growth in the seventeenth century. One was a
lower fertility rate attributable to the“European marriage pattern”in England,
France, the Netherlands, and parts of the Germanies; it entailed late marriage and a
good percentage of unmarried. Another was a Malthusian check: in many areas
population out-stripped available resources. A third was external factors—famines
and plagues in the Mediterranean, the Thirty Years War in central Europe. Fertility
declined, mortality rose, and population stagnated until the early eighteenth
century, but growth thereafter was impressive. Between 1750 and 1800, the
populations of Europe’s major countries increased between 50 and 100 percent
(reaching 122.20 million), due to new food crops (such as the potato), more
Land, People, and Global Context 29