From Jassy the disease was conveyed to Botoshany, which also lies in northern Moldavia, and there it soon developed into a severe epidemic and carried away more than 800 out the town’s 2,500 inhabitants; the rest fled to Carpathia. ‘The patients,’ says Hecker,[76] ‘lay in tents, and without care or medical help awaited an almost certain death. The city itself afforded a sight of complete disorder; the houses were deserted and stood with open windows and doors, the air was poisoned with the odour of accumulated refuse, and the general devastation bore silent witness to the most extreme misery. In addition to that, there were multitudes of savage, ravenous dogs, which dug up the dead and menaced the sick.’
Conditions were just as bad in Jassy when Orraeus arrived there on May 10; of the inhabitants and of the Russian garrison more than half had died, while many streets were entirely depopulated. Since the persons infected with the disease were placed out in a near-by forest, where they were left without care, many patients were concealed inside the houses and their bodies afterwards secretly buried in gardens and cellars. There was no medical help, since both of the Greek physicians had fled from the city. On May 20 the Russian troops, at the instigation of Orraeus, withdrew from Jassy; a convent was converted into a hospital, and soon after that the pestilence began to subside. By June 22 it had disappeared.
In Wallachia the disease broke out somewhat later than in Moldavia, and with considerably less severity. In Bucharest it lasted until May.
In Bender, situated in Bessarabia on the Dniester, there was a mild epidemic of bubonic plague after the city had been stormed on September 16, 1770. The carrying-off of war-booty caused new pestilences in the army and in the population of Podolia and Little Russia. For a short time in the last part of September the main army also suffered from plague in its fixed quarters on the Pruth.
The Turkish army, which passed the winter in Bulgaria, was severely attacked by plague, but no further information about this outbreak is available.
In February 1771, Moldavia and Wallachia suffered very little from plague, although there were occasional outbreaks here and there (for example, in Bucharest) until the year 1773; but these were always of short duration.