City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600-1740

7 Plague and Siege

Vienna's expansive development in the 1660s and 1670s reversed itself suddenly and dramatically in the spring of 1679, when the city fell victim to its worst plague epidemic since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The heavy mortality weakened the monarchy severely, and it had hardly begun to recover its administrative and military resilience when the Turks attacked the city again in 1683, this time with an army they believed large enough to conquer it. These five years produced a climactic testing for both the monarchy and its metropolis. In 1679 the epidemic did not come as a surprise. For several years the government had been following reports that the plague was moving westward up the Danube. After outbreaks in the 1640s, the city had expanded its "plague ordinances" several times. Officials began to regularly examine and register all deaths in the city to make certain that any case of the plague would be recognized at once so that the authorities would then have time to order the appropriate quarantines and take other measures to try to prevent its spread. 1 Dealing with epidemic diseases in the absence of any adequate theory about their spread produced a combination of moral and empirical approaches. Closing down theaters and prohibiting comedians from entertaining crowds may have had some 137 Chapter 7 effect in preventing the gathering of crowds, but the motive for taking such measures was strictly religious. The plague was widely assumed to be the result of human sinfulness, and only victory over that sinfulness could appease the wrath of God. The plague ordinance written earlier by Emperor Leopold's personal physician, Johann Wilhelm Managetta (1588-1666), was replete with scriptural verses and listed in order the human sins which were responsible for the disease. These sections were carried over intact in the new ordinance issued in 1679 by Paul de Sorbait, another private physician t~ the crown who was professor of medicine, rector of the university, and a widely recognized authority on plague matters. Leopold apparently took a very superstitious approach to the epidemic. As early as November 1677, he directed the Lower Austrian government to let it be known to "Them of Vienna " that he was d~eply disturbed by the general misbehavior of the citizens, particularly by their blasphemy. It was not enough that the flames of war still burned everywhere, but now that the plague was appearing in the vicinity, Leopold feared his subjects' sins would bring down upon their lands the wrath of the Almighty and His just punishment.2 Since there was still no accurate understanding of the way the plague spread, the crown and the city did about all that they could to prepare for the onslaught. The new plague ordinance had been published by imperial decree on 9 January 1679, well before the anticipated arrival of the epidemic with warm spring weather.3 Among other things it commanded 'a strenuous effort to enforce sanitation laws and extra measures to prevent the accumulation of manure and other filth in the city. The peremptory character of the ordinances produced a defensive response from the city council, which suggested that some of the details-such as demanding that every house specify one person to be responsible for cleaning the street area in front of it at five each morning and again at four each afternoon by sweeping the street and then washing it down with fresh water-were "impracticable now that everything is frozen solid."4The council protested to the government that "anyone who compared modern times with past times will have to recognize that, praise God, 138 Plague and Siege PLAGUE HOSPITAL SCENE IN VIENNA, 1679. The scene is not one ofa real hospital but rather a series oftableaux showing the stages ofcontagion; treatment in on isolation house by burning incense to dispel the miasma; death; lost rites; and burial in a common grove. (Courtesy Historisches Museum def Stadt Wien) cleanliness has been incomparably better maintained in the last few years than was previously the case."5 There were crude "hospital" facilities where victims could be isolated and given such comfort as there was in the face of virtually certain death. There were special mass grave ditches for the bodies produced by heavy mortality in a short time. Commissions with emergency powers had the right to summarily execute people who violated plague regulations or who tried to enter the city without...