Great Plague of Vienna (1679): Epidemic in the Habsburg Capital

The Great Plague of Vienna was an outbreak of bubonic plague that swept through the capital of the Habsburg monarchy in 1679. It killed a large part of the population, emptied the imperial court from the city, and left behind one of Europe’s most famous plague monuments, the Baroque column on the Graben.

Background

Plague had returned to Europe again and again since the Black Death of the 14th century. In the 1660s and 1670s it moved through the continent in waves: London suffered the Great Plague of 1665, and outbreaks hit the Low Countries, Germany and Hungary in the following years.

Vienna in the 1670s was a crowded fortress city. The walled inner city held the court, churches and noble palaces, while poorer people lived in fast-growing suburbs outside the walls. Housing was dense, sanitation poor, and the city stood on busy trade routes along the Danube that connected it with Hungary and the Balkans, where plague was also active.

Course of the epidemic

The disease seems to have appeared first in the spring of 1679 in the suburbs, particularly in the Leopoldstadt, a district on the Danube island that had been renamed after the emperor in 1670. By the summer it had spread across the suburbs and into the inner city. Death rates rose sharply in August and September and remained high into the autumn.

City authorities applied the standard measures of the day. Infected houses were marked and closed, the sick were taken to pest houses outside the walls, and the dead were buried in mass graves called plague pits. Watchmen tried to control movement, and trade with infected areas was restricted. The physician Paul de Sorbait, a leading figure in the university’s medical faculty, drew up plague regulations and organised care, though medicine of the time had no effective treatment.

Many who could afford it fled. Emperor Leopold I and his court left Vienna as the outbreak spread and stayed away for months, chiefly in Prague, which was itself hit by plague in 1680. The epidemic slackened with the arrival of colder weather late in 1679.

Death toll

The number of victims is uncertain. The figure most often repeated, roughly 76,000 deaths, goes back to contemporary accounts, including writings associated with the court preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara. Modern historians generally regard this as too high, since Vienna and its suburbs probably had only around 100,000 inhabitants or somewhat more.

Lower estimates in the range of about 12,000 to several tens of thousands are also cited. Whatever the exact number, the epidemic was a demographic catastrophe that struck the poor suburbs hardest.

The legend of Augustin

One of Vienna’s best-known stories comes from this year. Marx Augustin, a ballad singer and bagpiper who performed in taverns, is said to have collapsed drunk in the street and been thrown by the corpse-bearers into a plague pit. He woke the next morning among the dead, climbed out and suffered no illness.

Augustin was a real person who died in 1685, but the tale and the folk song “O du lieber Augustin” are only recorded long after the event. Historians treat the story as legend. It remains popular because it captures the black humour with which Viennese culture remembers the plague.

The Plague Column on the Graben

During the epidemic Leopold I vowed to build a monument in thanks for the city’s deliverance. A wooden column dedicated to the Holy Trinity was set up on the Graben, a broad street in the inner city, soon afterwards. Work on a permanent stone version started in 1682 and was interrupted by the Ottoman siege of 1683.

Several artists contributed. The sculptor Matthias Rauchmiller produced the early design, and after his death in 1686 others, including Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Lodovico Burnacini and Paul Strudel, completed it. The column was consecrated in 1693. It shows the kneeling emperor praying, a figure of Faith casting down the plague, and a cloud-like pyramid of angels rising to the Trinity. It inspired many similar plague and Marian columns across central Europe.

Timeline

• 1679, spring: First plague cases reported in Vienna’s suburbs, especially the Leopoldstadt area.
• 1679, summer: The epidemic spreads into the inner city; the court leaves Vienna.
• 1679, August to October: Peak mortality; mass burials in plague pits.
• 1679, late autumn: The outbreak subsides with colder weather.
• 1680: Abraham a Sancta Clara publishes his sermon-book on the plague, Merk’s Wien!
• 1683: Vienna withstands the Ottoman siege, ending in the Battle of Vienna.
• 1693: The stone Plague Column on the Graben is consecrated.

Why it matters

The plague of 1679 was one of the last great plague epidemics in central Europe, a reminder of how vulnerable early modern cities were. Its memory lives on in the Graben column, a landmark of Viennese Baroque art, and in the folk figure of dear Augustin.