The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors.  The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive.  The harlots of their camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and tears.  The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto.  The precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away.  The churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the streets.

The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the booty.  He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery.  After the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand doubloons.  This population had, during the siege and sack, been reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon.  He and his family had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and, after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to the Emperor.  The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the capital; and the Empress sent Carlo’s wife ten thousand zecchini, with which they returned at length to Mantua.  It is melancholy to read how his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution:  how the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated lands.  His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought, of poison.

Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle’s death, the princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority.  Carlo II. early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his reign was not distinguished by remarkable events.  He was of imperial politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the French desolated his dominions more or less.  In the time of this Carlo