Yet even these injuries may be reckoned light, when we consider what Italy had suffered between 1494 and 1527 from French, Spanish, German and Swiss troops in combat on her soil.  The pestilences of the Middle Ages notably the Black Death of 1348, of which Boccaccio has left an immortal description, exceeded in virulence those which depopulated Italian cities during the period of my history.  But plagues continued to be frequent; and some of these are so memorable that they require to be particularly noticed.  At Venice in 1575-77, a total of about 50,000 persons perished; and in 1630-31, 46,490 were carried off within a space of sixteen months in the city, while the number of those who died at large in the lagoons amounted to 94,235.[233] On these two occasions the Venetians commemorated their deliverance by the erection of the Redentore and S. Maria della Salute, churches which now form principal ornaments of the Giudecca and the Grand Canal.  Milan was devastated at the same periods by plagues, of which we have detailed accounts in the dispatches of resident Venetian envoys.[234] The mortality in the second of these visitations was terrible.  Before September 1629, fourteen thousand had succumbed; between May and August 1630, forty-five thousand victims had been added to the tale.[235]

[Footnote 233:  Mutinelli, Annali Urbani di Venezia, pp. 470-483,549-550.]

[Footnote 234:  Mutinelli, Storia Arcana, vol. i. p. 310-340, and vol. xiv. pp. 30-65.]

[Footnote 235:  It is worth mentioning that Ripamonte calculates the mortality from plague in Milan in 1524 at 140,000.]

At Naples in the year 1656, more than fifty thousand perished between May and July; the dead were cast naked into the sea, and the Venetian envoy describes the city as ’non piu citta ma spelonca di morti.’[236] In July his diary is suddenly interrupted, whether by departure from the stricken town, or more probably by death, we know not.  Savoy was scourged by a fearful pestilence in the years 1598-1600.  Of this plague we possess a frightfully graphic picture in the same accurate series of the State documents.[237] Simeone Contarini, then resident at Savigliano, relates that more than two-thirds of the population in that province had been swept away before the autumn of 1598, and that the evil was spreading far and wide through Piedmont.  In Alpignano, a village of some four hundred inhabitants, only two remained.  In Val Moriana, forty thousand expired out of a total of seventy thousand.  The village of San Giovanni counted but twelve survivors from a population of more than four thousand souls.  In May 1599, the inhabitants of Turin were reduced by flight and death to four thousand; and of these there died daily numbers gradually rising through the summer from 50 to 180.  The streets were encumbered with unburied corpses, the houses infested by robbers and marauders.  Some incidents reported of this plague are ghastly in their horror.  The infected were treated with inhuman barbarity, and retorted with savage fury, battering their assailants with the pestiferous bodies of unburied victims.