The long-standing estimated calculation of the number of famine victims in Estonia for the period 1695–1697 was presented by Otto Liiv in the 1930s. According to him, 70–75,000 people, or around 20 per cent of the population, perished during the Great Famine in Estonia. This has been the widely repeated death toll ever since. However, Liiv provided evidence from the sources for only about 23,500 deaths. The rest is only an approximation. This death toll is probably not entirely wrong, but the problem is that it is too specific to be verified. Reliable sources have survived for only a small part of the country. Nevertheless, together with some careful speculation, the primary sources allow us to arrive at the conclusion that the death toll in the Estonian territory was between 60,000 and 80,000 people (i.e. around a sixth of the population). Thus, the demographic cataclysm due to the famine was remarkable anyway considering its suddenness in peacetime and without an accompanying plague epidemic. This raises the question of the main causes of the mortality during these famine years.

In 1698, royal commissions were formed in Estland and Livland to evaluate the famine losses of the previous three years 1695–1697. A surviving volume of this commission’s reports that presents the results of the investigation of famine losses on the crown estates of Estland from 1698-1700 is one of the main sources of the present article for answering the question raised about the causes of rural mortality. Other sources are much more traditional and have been studied more – these are first of all parish church registers of burials.

It can be concluded that the elevated mortality in 1696–1698 was first of all a result of the spread of contagious diseases, diarrhoea in particular (dysentery, typhus, “fevers”), that were obviously partly linked with hunger and famine foods. Of course, it is widely accepted that a famine does not comprise only the component of direct starvation, and that all excess deaths during a famine crisis ought to be included in its impact. In the Estonian territory, the spread of fatal diseases was widely reported in 1696–1697 (also partly in 1698). Mortality was highest from March to June of 1697 in the Baltic provinces. However, it is striking how passive the interest of the provincial governments was regarding the spread of infectious diseases at the end of the seventeenth century. The pastors were also still very unsystematic in registering deaths from diseases. It seems that the Swedish administration did acknowledge the serious crop failures as a danger to its cameral interests, but the ravages of disease were accepted rather meekly. This is also why data on the outbreaks and spread of infectious diseases were not systematically gathered. Thus there is a lack of sources for estimating the proportion of disease victims among total deaths or burials in the Baltic provinces in 1696–1698.

Since the population had reached a density never before seen in Estonia by the 1690s, deserted farmsteads were settled surprisingly quickly during and after the famine, so that by 1699–1700 the number of emptied fields was already rather low. This is not comparable to the situation at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the famine and plague of 1602–1603 hit an already devastated country still suffering the consequences of wars going back to 1558.