Health Dictionary
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Great Plague of Seville
Introduction
The Great Plague (1647–1652) was a massive outbreak of disease in Spain that killed 60,000 people, up to 25% of Sevilla‘s population.
Unlike the plague of 1596-1602 which initially struck northern and central Spain and AndalucÃa, the Great Plague, which may have gotten its start in Algeria, struck eastern Spain first. Valencia was the first city to be hit, losing an estimated 30,000 people. The disease chewed through AndalucÃa in addition to sweeping the north into Catalonia and Aragon. The coast of Málaga lost upwards of 50,000 people. In Sevilla quarantine measures were evaded, ignored, unproposed and/or unenforced. The result was horrific, if unsurprising. The city of Sevilla and its rural districts were thought to have lost 150,000 people — a full quarter of its total population of 600,000. Sevilla, and indeed the economy of AndalucÃa, would never recover from so complete a devastation. Altogether Spain was thought to have lost 500,000 people, out of a population of slightly fewer than 10,000,000, or nearly 5% of its entire population. In perspective, it would be akin to a nation with a population of 300 million to losing upwards of 15 million men, women and children. This was the greatest — but not the only — plague of 17th century Spain.
Not quite twenty-five years later Spain found itself once again in the grips of a furious plague. For nine years (1676-1685), ebbing and flowing like a great wave, it ravaged all Spain. It struck with especial virulence in the areas of AndalucÃa and Valencia. The poor harvest of 1682-83 brought with it famine conditions which weakened the exhausted population still further. This last plague of the 17th century, plus the famine that followed in its wake, is estimated to have claimed an additional 250,000 Spanish lives.
Three great plagues ravaged Spain in the 17th century. They were:
- The Plague of 1596-1602
- The Plague of 1646-1652 [“The Great Plague of Seville”]
- The Plague of 1676-1685
Factoring in normal births, deaths, plus immigration, historians reckon the total cost in human lives due to these plagues throughout Spain, throughout the entire 17th century, to be a minimum of nearly 1.25 million. As a result, the population numbers Spain scarcely budged between the years 1596 and 1696.
The disease is generally believed to have been bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted via a rat vector. Other symptom patterns of the bubonic plague, such as septicemic plague and pneumonic plague were also present.