The Genoese monks hastened to make spiritual capital out of the wanderers’ desolate condition: children, starving, were baptized in return for a morsel of bread. Those who survived want, illness, and conversion, and finally left the mole of Genoa, were doomed to fresh distress. Their own co-religionists declined to receive them at Rome for fear of competition, and attempted to procure a prohibition of entry from Innocent’s successor by a bribe of one thousand ducats. The Pope, however, though not remarkable for tenderness of heart, was so shocked at the supreme barbarity of the exiles’ brethren that he issued a decree banishing the latter from the city. The Roman Jews, in order to obtain the repeal of the edict, were obliged to pay two thousand ducats, and to receive the refugees into the bargain. Another contingent reached Naples under equally ghastly conditions. Their voyage from Spain had been a long martyrdom. A great many, especially the young and the delicately reared, had succumbed to hunger and to the foul atmosphere of the narrow and overcrowded vessels. Others had been murdered by the masters of the ships for the sake of their property, or were forced to sell their children in order to defray the expenses of the passage. Those who escaped the terrors of the sea, and reached the two harbours mentioned, brought with them an infectious disease, derived from the privations which they had endured. The infection lurked in Genoa and Naples through the winter; but when Spring came, it burst forth into a frightful plague, which spread with terrible rapidity, swept off upwards of twenty thousand souls in the latter city in one year, and then extended its wasting arms over the whole of the peninsula. There can be little doubt that the people, who had elsewhere been made the scapegoats for epidemics with the origin of which they had nothing to do, would have been subjected to severe persecution for a visitation which could certainly be traced to their agency. But it so happened that the attention of the Italians was this year, and for many years after, absorbed by other calamities.