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I shall skip various minor pestilences, and only mention the great 

 plague epidemic that hit the Roman Empire during the reign of Em- 

 peror Justinian in the sixth century. Procopius has left us a dramatic 

 account of the situation in Byzantium, where the death rate rose to 

 10,000 persons a day, so that it became impossible to bury all the 

 corpses. Frequently these were placed on board ships which were 

 then abandoned to the waves. In numerous Italian provinces the soil 

 remained uncultivated, and under the threefold pressure of pestilence, 

 famine, and the advancing Lombards the Roman Empire perished. 



One also finds in Zinsser's book a wealth of data on campaigns and 

 wars, during which the commander of the conquerers won great ac- 

 claim, although in reality the battles were determined by disease 

 among the conquered; I shall merely indicate a few of these instances. 



Firstly I want to mention the important role played by typhus in the 

 siege of Naples in 1528, where the remnants of the Spanish army that 

 had previously and triumphantly plundered Rome, and made Pope 

 Clement VII a prisoner, had taken refuge against the victoriously ad- 

 vancing French army. Philbert, Prince of Orange, who was in command 

 of the Spaniards, wrote to Charles V that the situation was desperate, 

 and that the garrison would not be able to hold out for a month. 

 This would have been of decisive influence on the history of Europe ; 

 both Italy and Clement VII would gladly have accepted Francis I 

 as liberator and preserver of the faith. But in the meantime typhus 

 broke out among the besieging French troops, and this to such an 

 extent that within a month only 4,000 men remained of the initial 

 25,000. The result was that the besieged launched an attack, and 

 destroyed the remnants of the French army. Charles V had conquered 

 decisively; Italy fell completely under Spanish domination; and Cle- 

 ment VII surrendered. In 1530 he crowned Charles as Holy Roman 

 Emperor in Bologna; the virus of typhus had willed it so. 



Zinsser furthermore remarks that the thirty-year war can best be 

 characterized as the most gigantic epidemiological experiment ever 

 perpetrated on mankind. Europe exhibited the picture of a continu- 

 ous series of outbreaks of every imaginable infectious disease. For 

 thirty years armies wandered about in the realm; smaller gangs, 

 fugitives, deserters roamed around at large. Famine was the result, 

 and entire populations migrated in hords, in search of food and shelter. 

 And wherever man went, everywhere was he followed by disease. It 



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