foreign potentates withdrew them from the customary justice of the State.  Bedmar’s conspiracy in 1617-18 revealed to Venice the full extent of the peril which this harborage of ruffians involved; for though grandees of the distinction of the Duke of Ossuna were involved in it, the main agents, on whose ambition and audacity all depended, sprang from those French, English, Spanish, and Italian mercenaries, who crowded the low quarters of the city, alert for any mischief, and inflamed with the wildest projects of self-aggrandizement by policy and bloodshed.  Nothing testifies to the social and political decrepitude of Italy in this period more plainly than the importance which folk like Lodovico Dall’Armi acquired, and the revolutionary force which a man like Jaffier commanded.

Brigands, Pirates, Plague.

After collecting these stories, which illustrate the manners of the upper classes in society and prove their dependence upon henchmen paid to subserve lawless passions, it would be interesting to lay bare the life of the common people with equal lucidity.  This, however, is a more difficult matter.  Statistics of dubious value can indeed be gathered regarding the desolation of villages by brigands, the multitudes destroyed by pestilence and famine, and the inroads of Mediterranean pirates.  I propose, therefore, to touch lightly upon these points, and especially to use our records of plague in different Italian districts as tests for contrasting the condition of the people at this epoch with that of the same people in the Middle Ages.

Brigandage, though this was certainly a curse of the first magnitude to Central and Southern Italy, cannot be paralleled, either for the miseries it inflicted, or for the ferocity it stimulated, with the municipal warfare of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  In those internecine struggles whole cities disappeared, and fertile districts were periodically abandoned to wolves.  The bands of an Alfonso Piccolomini or a Sciarra Colonna plundered villages, exacted black mail, and held prisoners for ransom.[231] But their barbarities were insignificant, when compared with those commonly perpetrated by wandering companies of adventure before the days of Alberigo da Barbiano; nor did brigands cost Italy so much as the mercenary troops, which, after the Condottiere system had been developed, became a permanent drain upon the resources of the country.  The raids of Tunisian and Algerian Corsairs were more seriously mischievous; since the whole sea-board from Nice to Reggio lay open to the ravages of such incarnate fiends as Barbarossa and Dragut, while the Adriatic was infested by Uscocchi, and the natives of the Regno not unfrequently turned pirates in emulation of their persecutors.[232]

[Footnote 231:  See Mutinelli, Storia Arcana, vol. ii. p. 167, for the pillage of Lucera by Pacchiarotto.]

[Footnote 232:  Sarpi’s History of the Uscocchi may be consulted for this singular episode in the Iliad of human savagery.  See Mutinelli, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 182, on the case of the son and heir of the Duke of Termoli joining them; and ibid. p. 180 on the existence of pirates at Capri.]