Dying of the Plague in the City: A Series of Standardized Datasets of the “Protocol of Plague Deaths” from Hermannstadt, 1738-1739
Dying of the Plague in the City: A Series of Standardized Datasets of the “Protocol of Plague Deaths” from Hermannstadt, 1738-1739

Summary/Abstract: As opposed to Western Europe, in East-Central/Southeastern Europe the plague still raged throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 1738-1739 plague, which hit the Southeastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire, was instrumental in designing and implementing successful quarantine measures to prevent the ulterior spread of this disease from Ottoman territories during wartime. Nevertheless, very little quantitative substantial work on the impact of plague in these areas has been carried out, owing to inaccessibility of archival sources, limited information concerning population numbers, and the dearth of fundamental data-driven research aiming at creating datasets suitable for widescale, comparative research. The current paper seeks to remedy this gap by describing the creation and contribution of a dataset stemming from a historical plague register, kept by the urban authorities of the city of Hermannstadt/Sibiu, between 1738 and 1739. This source chronicled all deaths due to plague which occurred in the city, providing detailed social-economic information at individual, household, and neighborhood level. Standardized datasets were created to enable analysis of plague events recorded per household, as well as individual deaths, and were deposited on the public repository Zenodo (Sorescu-Iudean 2025a).

• Details
• Contents