This last sentence expresses briefly and emphatically the fate of the population. The whole town was burnt, except the cathedral, the convent of Notre Dame, with a few houses about it, and about a hundred and thirty fishermen’s cottages on the banks of the Elbe. The number of the slain cannot be distinctly ascertained, for we have no certain knowledge of the population of the city; but the slaughter seems to have been almost universal. It is said, however, that according to the computation of those who were appointed to clear the streets, 6440 bodies were thrown into the Elbe; and this does not include those, probably much the greater number, who were massacred in their houses, and buried under the ruins, or consumed in the general conflagration. One author says that 30,000 persons perished; Harte, that of 40,000 inhabitants, scarce 800 it was thought escaped: but contemporary authors vary in their numbers, which indeed in these cases can hardly ever be ascertained with certainty. The only lives expressly said to have been preserved, are those of 400 persons who took refuge in the cathedral; and in the Florus Germanicus, published only ten years later (a book written in the Imperial interest), it is asserted that none other were spared, and these only from respect to the sanctity of the place. The author, however, reduces their number to a hundred. Others must have been saved, like those whose narratives are given above, by chance, or individual compassion; but it is plain that indiscriminate destruction was the order of the day. This massacre will be an everlasting blot upon Tilly’s reputation. He remained without the town; and when solicited by those who had witnessed the horrors acted within, to stop the indiscriminate slaughter, he replied, “The town must bleed; it has not yet made sufficient expiation. Let the soldiers persist another hour, and then we will reconsider the matter.” According to another story, he said that the soldiers must have some recompense for so much time and trouble. Yet, say the historians of his own party, when on the third day he rode over the crackling ashes, and through piles of corpses, he wept as he quoted some lines of Virgil, relative to the destruction of Troy.[31] There was no want of prodigies to foretell the fate of Magdeburg, by monstrous births, the fall of towers, and other circumstances of equal moment; several of which the curious reader will find mentioned by Harte, and many more minutely described by Lotichius, as above quoted. Such follies must have been deeply implanted in men’s minds when a Christian writer, in the seventeenth century, has thought it worthwhile to corroborate one of these omens by quoting a similar one from Valerius Maximus. [Illustration: PLAN OF ZARAGOZA.—(Copied by permission from Napier’s History of the Peninsular War.)