There are several waves of plague that have hit Pristina throughout history. Only some of them have been documented in notes so far. The earliest we can talk about the plague in Pristina is in 1622 when Pjetër Mazreku reports on it. A wave is reported in 1687 by Edward Brown, who says that the inhabitants did not worry at all about the disease. Then the plague of 1689 is well known, from which Pjeter Bogdani also died. Another wave of plague in Pristina was reported in 1702, when despite the efforts of the authorities to control the city after numerous riots, the epidemic seemed to make any development difficult. A better documented wave of the plague is also from 1781, for which some documents from the archives of Kotor give us some details. Among all these, the most serious seems to have been in 1838 when a French travel writer reports about 6,000 dead in Pristina, which constituted two thirds of the entire population of the city. A figure that even the reporter himself admits must be exaggerated. However, this last wave of disease had a devastating effect on the city anyway, since in the population census made in 1844, the city appears greatly reduced in terms of the number of inhabitants, with only 779 families. In the preliminary census of 1831, Pristina had 1,828 families. Many years after this moment, Prishtina as a city plunges into political and social crisis, which were not overcome until 1878 when it became the capital of the Vilayet of Kosovo, which affected economic and demographic recovery.