April – June 1349
Vienna and the Danube, spring 1349
The plague crosses the Alps into Carinthia and Styria in the summer of 1348, by way of towns such as Villach. The chronicle of Neuberg Abbey in Styria, the main source for Austria, dates its outbreak in the duchy to St Martin’s day, 11 November 1348. In May 1349 the plague reaches Vienna, the city of Albert II, Duke of Austria, and it stays until September. A chronicler writes that 500 to 600 people die in Vienna every day in the summer and autumn. The cemeteries fill, and the dead are buried in pits outside the walls. Albert leaves the city with his court, and the rich leave the towns wherever they can.
Albert II, Duke of Austria, in a stained-glass window of the 14th centuryWikimedia Commons, public domain
Albert II prevents attacks on the Jews in his lands. Across the Empire most Jewish communities are destroyed in 1348–1350, and those of Austria are among the few that survive.
Louis I of Hungary has left Naples in May 1348, when the plague arrived there. The historian András Vadas finds that 1349 is the year in which the plague strikes Hungary hardest. Louis’s wife, Margaret of Bohemia, a daughter of Charles IV, dies at Visegrád in the autumn of 1349, aged about 14, probably of the plague.
Upstream on the Danube, Bavaria has known the plague since 29 June 1348, when, by tradition, it struck Mühldorf am Inn, the first German-speaking town to be hit. At Regensburg in 1349, Konrad of Megenberg, a canon of the cathedral, begins his Book of Nature, the first natural history written in German, and he speaks out against blaming the Jews for the plague. In the west, the plague moves from Lake Geneva to the Swiss towns. It reaches Bern and Zürich in 1349, and Basel in April or May, a few months after Basel has burned its Jews.
Sources
- Continuatio Novimontensis (chronicle of Neuberg Abbey, 14th century), in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 9.
- “Mortalitas magna: the plague epidemic of 1348–9”, habsburger.net.
- András Vadas, “The Black Death in the Kingdom of Hungary: Sources, Limitations, Interpretations”, Historical Studies on Central Europe 4 (2024).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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