English to German Science History

Geschichtsbuch/Biografie; Kontext: "..Hungry people and animals became vulnerable to diseases, a problem exacerbated when foreign soldiers, carrying diseases fatal to humans and to animals, marched through on their way to Europe's battlefields or invaded on behalf of the rival great powers. No wonder that Swiss and Bündner mountain boys sought careers in the armies crossing Europe, or moved to the lowlands of Switzerland where war profiteering supported agricultural expansion, especially in horses, a high-value military commodity.
Such, then, was the landscape that faced our protagonist: caught up in tangled and overlapping political authorities, riven by religious and regional differences, and suffering from agricultural crisis and multiple plagues. Crisis and destruction brought with them a loosening of rules that in turn could lead either to rigid conservatism or to increased questioning of tradition. Most often, it was the bold and the brutal who succeeded in these years, as underlying social and cultural patterns began to shift. Experiencing the trials of his time, struggling within the rigid roles dictated by his pre-modern society before eventually transcending them as a self-made man, Jenatsch and the course that his life took illustrate the structures that shaped who he was, even as they also reveal how vulnerable those structures were..." Mein Problem ist eigentlich der gesamte Satz, der mit "crisis and destruction" beginnt. Wäre einmal mehr sehr dankbar für Vorschläge.