33 FLUXES, FEVERS AND FIGHTING MEN. WAR AND DISEASE IN ANCIEN REGIME EUROPE 1648-1789.pdf

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Almost three quarters of soldiers who died in European wars between the end of the
Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution succumbed to bacteria rather than
bullets. Field armies doubled in size and usually endured sieges rather than battles,
so this was an era of massive and protracted encampments: the Christian army that
sat down before Belgrade in 1717 had more mouths than any city within 500 miles
but lacked basic urban amenities like regular markets, wells, privy pits, and night
soil collectors. Yet the impact of sickness on military operations has been neglected.
Crucially, this study will quantify how many soldiers sickened and died and will
do so by consulting the reports, registers and returns, generated by the new state-
contract armies which displaced the mercenary hordes of the Thirty Years War.
As plague began to recede from Europe, this study explains what exactly were
these ‘fluxes and fevers’ that remained to afflict European armies in wartime and
argues that they formed a single seasonal continuum that peaked in late summer.
The isolation and incarceration of the military hospital characterized the response
of the new armies to ‘disorder’ and to revivified notions of contagion. However,
the hospital often prolonged the late summer morbidity/mortality spike into mid-
winter by generating ‘hospital fever’ or typhus, the lice-borne disease that erupted
whenever the cold, wet, hungry, transient, and unwashed huddled together. The
cure was the disease.
This scope of the study includes French army operations in Roussillon (1674),
north Italy (1702 and 1734), the Rhineland (1734), and, further afield, Bohemia
(1742). The study also includes case-studies involving the British Army that include
Ireland (1689), Portugal (1762), Dutch Brabant (1748), and the Rhineland (1743). The
outliers are studies of Habsburg operations in and around Belgrade (1717 and 1737)
together with the Russian siege of Riga in 1709-10 and invasion of Crimea in 1736.
Pádraig Lenihan is a lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland Galway.
He has researched and written on Irish history in the 17th century and on military
history in the 17th and 18th centuries.
His books on military topics include Battle
of the Boyne 1690
(2003) and
Confederate Catholics at War 1642-49
(2003). His articles on military subjects
include ‘The Irish Brigade’ in
Eighteenth-Century Ireland Iris An Dá Chultúr
(2016),
‘Namur Citadel, 1695: A Case Study in Allied Siege Tactics’ in
War In History
(2011),
‘Unhappy Campers: Dundalk (1689) and After’ in
Journal of Conflict Archaeology
(2007) and ‘War and Population’ in
Irish Economic And Social History
(1998)
He has co-edited, with Keith Sidwell,
Poema de Hibernia, a Jacobite Epic on the
Williamite Wars
(2017), and, with David Edwards and Clodagh Tait,
The Age of
Atrocity
(2007) and edited
Conquest and Resistance: Irish Warfare in the Seventeenth
Century
(2001).
Fluxes, Fevers, and Fighting Men
War and Disease in Ancien Régime Europe
1648-1789
Pádraig Lenihan
Helion & Company

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