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 populations 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 every five to seven years, with mortality of 10 to 30 percent. The first 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; the fiance 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 particularly 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 intensive cultivation techniques, and more complex regional distribution systems in some areas.
The empires of Eurasia also exhibited population growth, boosted by natural growth more than in Europe since no systematic contraceptive practices were afoot. The demographic record of the early modern Russian empire is harder to reconstruct than that of its peers, lacking sources. Working backwards from the 1678 survey of households, demographers estimate that at 1500 the parts of European Russia controlled by the grand princes of Moscow had recovered from a fourteenth-century onslaught of plague and had reached a population of around 6 million; the population grew steadily thereafter; estimates for c. 1678 by Ia. E. Vodarskii and B. N. Mironov, using a survey of households, propose a population of 10.5 or 11.2 million. Eighteenth-century statistics, grounded on a head tax, are somewhat more reliable: the population rose from around 15.6 million at 1719-24 to 23.2 million in 1762 and 37.4 million in 1796. Such growth was aided by territorial expansion but primarily reflects natural increase. As discussed in Chapter 17, there were regional variations: the Russian center, particularly northwest of Moscow and in Belarus'an lands, and Ukrainian lands suffered land deficit from overpopulation, while epidemics kept the growth ofthe native Siberian population slow.
Russian demographic growth was part of a Eurasian phenomenon. In the sixteenth century core lands of the Ottoman empire in southeastern Europe and Anatolia grew by about 60 percent (1520-80), with major cities increasing by as much as 83 percent. Across its vast realm in the late sixteenth century, the Ottomans controlled a population of nearly 7.5 million in the Balkans and Anatolia, about 8.5 million in North Africa and 12 million in the Near East. After a general Mediterranean decline in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman empire's population rose across the eighteenth century reaching about 25 to 32 million by 1800. Few statistics document the Chinese population, but indirect indications show population expansion. In the Yuan and Ming dynasties (1279-1644), for example, China included between 1,127and 1,173 counties, each of which was calculated to have a population ofbetween 50,000 and 500,000 people. Population growth was somewhat stymied by unrest and regime change in the seventeenth century, but in the relatively peaceable eighteenth century an estimated population of more than 200 million in 1762 doubled by 1834.
Not only quantity but density is relevant in assessing the significance of early modern population. Dense population settlement offered opportunities for urbanization and economic diversification, but also posed perils of famine and natural, Malthusian checks if population outstripped resources. Much of western Europe was far more densely settled in these centuries than Russia. According to P. Malanima, around 1500 Belgium was Europe's most densely settled area with 43 people per square kilometer; Italy 30, the Netherlands 29, France 28, Britain 23, the Germanies 20, and the Habsburg lands 18. At the same time, Poland averaged 8.3 and European Russia 2.8 people per square kilometer. After the demographic boom of the eighteenth century, around 1800, Belgium registered 97 people per square kilometer, the Netherlands 63, England 61, Italy 60,
France 53, the Germanies 45, the Habsburg lands 39, Poland 18, and European Russia 6.5.
Urbanization paralleled population growth in western Europe: in the sixteenth century the number of towns with populations over 40,000 nearly doubled from 26 to 40, and a few had populations of 150,000 (Constantinople, Naples, Paris, London, Milan, Antwerp, Palermo). By the seventeenth century, 40 percent of the population of the Dutch Republic was urban, 25-30 percent of Italy, while in France and England 20 percent. By 1700 Europe had 43 cities with at least 40,000 inhabitants, and the number of cities with populations over 100,000 had climbed to 12 (Vienna in 1790 numbered 270,000). Nevertheless, across Europe and particularly in eastern Europe, "small towns" (2,000-3,000 or less) prevailed, particularly where the agrarian population was enserfed and exchange of goods was limited. So, for example, in Hungary by the seventeenth century, the largest city, Pressburg/Bratislava, had a population of only 29,000. Statistics from 1790 in Bohemia show that of244 towns, only Prague and Pilsen numbered over 10,000 in population. We will see this pattern of small towns in Russia as well.
In the vaster Russian, Ottoman, and Chinese empires, statistics about population density are hard to find and regional diversity characterized this issue. Boris Mironov's figures for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrate how varied population density in the Russian empire was. In 1646, when half of Siberia was under Russian suzerainty but before significant acquisitions in Ukraine and Belarus', Mironov finds an overall population density of 0.5 persons per square kilometer in an overall population of 7 million. Density then grew very gradually (0.8 in 1678; 1.1 in 1719; 1.6 in 176; 2.3 in 1796) with imperial acquisitions, but some regions were more densely settled than others. Overall, the population density ofcombined new territories acquired after 1646 (Siberia, steppe, and the Ukrainian and Belarus'an lands) stayed about the same (around 5-5.4) through 1796, but the disaggregated figures for European Russia indicate how much more urbanized, agriculturally productive, and manufacturing focused these areas were. Here, density grew from 1.7 in 1678 to 3.5 in 1719, 5.2 in 1762 and 7.5 in 1796 (after the partitions of Poland). Mironov found that population density soared in the forest-steppe region in this era of dynamic population growth (from 4.1 per square km in 1678, to 7.7 in 1719, to 25.8 in 1856) and in the black earth lands (from 0.3 in 1678, to 0.4 in 1719, 7.1 in 1856). Nevertheless, aglance at European and Ottoman population density figures for c. 1600 shows how sparsely settled the Russian empire was, even at its best.