5 The Bubonic Plague

5

The Bubonic Plague

External to the bulb market, one extraordinary event in the period 1634–1637 may have driven the speculation. From 1635 to 1637, the bubonic plague ravaged the Netherlands, killing 17,193 people in Amsterdam alone in 1636 (one-seventh of the population). It also caused 14,502 deaths in Leiden in 1635 (33 percent of the 1622 population); and it killed 14 percent of the population of Haarlem, the center of the tulip speculation, from August to November 1636, the moment when the trading in common and cheap varieties took off.

The plague had marched westward with the dynamics of the armies in Germany starting in 1630.8 Plague also broke out from 1623 to 1625, from 1654 to 1655, and from 1663 to 1664, killing in Amsterdam oneninth, one-eighth, and one-sixth of the population, respectively.

Van Damme (1976) quotes C. de Koning, who states that the plague began in 1635 and forced the city authorities to take drastic health measures:

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These and other precautions could not prevent the progress of the outbreak that caused 5723 to die during August, September, October and November, 1636, so many that the number of graveyards was too small. So great was the misery and sorrow of citizens and inhabitants that the best description would only be a weak image of the great misery of those unhappy days, which is why we will end the story by thanking the almighty God for saving us from this great terror from which our forefathers suffered so much. In the midst of all this misery that made our city suffer, people were caught by a special fever, by a particular anxiety to get rich in a very short period of time. The means to this were thought to be found in the tulip trade. This trade, so well known in the history of our country, and so well developed in our city should be taught to our fellow citizens as a proof of forefatherly folly. (Pp. 129–130)

Of the plague in Haarlem, Van Damme notes that “one can presume that the tulip futures speculation reached its peak when the plague was worst.” De Vries (1976) claims that the plague outbreak of 1635–1636 “perhaps by spreading a certain fatalism among the population kicked off the most frenzied episode of the mania” (226).

The population of the Netherlands faced an increased probability of imminent death, either from plague or Spanish invasion, from 1635 to 1637, coincident with the tulip speculation, and a decline in the probability afterward. Although the plague outbreak may be a false clue, it is conceivable that a gambling binge tied, as we will see, to a drinking game emerged as a response to the death threat.