[Footnote 236:  Mutinelli, op. cit. vol. in. pp. 229-233.  Botta has given an account of this plague in the twenty-sixth book of his History.]

[Footnote 237:  Mutinelli, op. cit. vol. ii. pp. 287-307.]

To the miseries of pestilence and its attendant famine were added lawlessness and license, raging fires, and what was worst of all, the dark suspicion that the sickness had been introduced by malefactors.  This belief appears to have taken hold upon the popular mind during the plague of 1598 in Savoy and in Milan.[238] Simeone Contarini reports that two men from Geneva confessed to having come with the express purpose of disseminating infection.  He also gives curious particulars of two who were burned, and four who were quartered at Turin in 1600 for this offense.[239] ‘These spirits of hell,’ as he calls them, indicated a wood in which they declared that they had buried a pestilential liquid intended to be used for smearing houses.  The wood was searched, and some jars were discovered.  A surgeon at the same epoch confessed to having meant to spread the plague at Mondovi.  Other persons, declaring themselves guilty of a similar intention, described a horn filled with poisonous stuff collected from the sores of plague-stricken corpses, which they had concealed outside the walls of Turin.  This too was discovered; and these apparent proofs of guilt so infuriated the people that every day some criminals were sacrificed to judicial vengeance.

[Footnote 238:  See Mutinelli, op. cit. p. 241 and p. 289.  We hear of the same belief at Milan in 1576, op. cit. vol. i. pp. 311-315.]

[Footnote 239:  Ibid. p. 309.  See also vol. iii. p. 254 for a similar narration.]

The name given to the unfortunate creatures accused of this diabolical conspiracy was Untori or the Smearers.  The plague of Milan in 1629-30 obtained the name of ‘La Peste degli Untori’ (as that of 1576 had been called ’La Peste di S. Carlo’), because of the prominent part played in it by the smearers.[240] They were popularly supposed to go about the city daubing walls, doors, furniture, choir-stalls, flowers, and articles of food with plague stuff.  They scattered powders in the air, or spread them in circles on the pavement.  To set a foot upon one of these circles involved certain destruction.  Hundreds of such untori were condemned to the most cruel deaths by justice firmly persuaded of their criminality.  Exposed to prolonged tortures, the majority confessed palpable absurdities.  One woman at Milan said she had killed four thousand people.  But, says Pier Antonio Marioni, the Venetian envoy, although tormented to the utmost, none of them were capable of revealing the prime instigators of the plot.  So thoroughly convinced was he, together with the whole world, of their guilt, that he never paused to reflect upon the fallacy contained in this remark.  The rack-stretched wretches could not