Four centuries of Christian devotion in a small Bavarian town …
Without treatment, the bubonic plague — which is spread mainly by infected fleas carried by small rodents — kills between 40 and 60 percent of its victims, and sometimes even more.
When it swept through Europe, Asia and Africa as the notorious Black Death in the mid-14th century, no really effective treatment for it was known — and somewhere between a quarter and two-thirds of the population of Europe died. Altogether, the entire population of the world may have dropped from an estimated 450 million to around 350-375 million. Some estimates, in fact, put the global death toll as high as 200 million.
Over the next several generations, the disease was a recurrent and terrifying visitor to Europe. During 18 horrific months in 1665 and 1666, for example, approximately a quarter of the population of the English capital died as a result of the Great Plague of London.
Thus it’s scarcely surprising that, when the plague appeared in the southern German duchy of Bavaria in 1632, widespread concern and even panic ensued. In 1634, the disease killed approximately 15,000 residents in Bavaria’s capital, Munich. (That may have been a majority of Munich’s population.)
Between a returning resident of the Bavarian village of Oberammergau inadvertently bringing the disease into his hometown that same year, soon dying of it, and other villagers becoming infected with the plague and dying from its effects, the little town was desperate. Nearly every family in the village had lost at least one victim, and some families had been essentially wiped