Leprosy, however, still prevailed, and was, moreover, complicated with strange and unknown epidemics which spread terror everywhere and depopulated the cities of the West. It was then that Providence raised up a few saintly women and holy confessors who, amidst sickness and death, pursued their charitable mission--such as St. Catherine of Sienna (1347–1380); St. Bernardin of Sienna, who was born in the same year that Catherine died (1380–1446); St. Frances, a Roman matron; St. Juliana of Florence, and many others, who taught men that God only sent them trials in order to render them more worthy of Him. St. Catherine, from her youth, was a member of the Order of St. Dominic; she distributed amongst the poor the patrimony which her father had left her, and devoted herself to teaching and preaching to the salvation of souls. When she took upon herself the further task of tending the sick, she selected the most painful cases, those in which the sores were so contagious and so fearful to behold that no one had the courage to come near them. During the great plague at Florence (1374), her heroism was something sublime; divine inspiration made up for a want of medical skill, and she cured a great number of the plague-stricken; she saved, perhaps, even more of those who were hardened in sin--a double miracle of nature and of grace. [Illustration: Fig. 274.--Orphan of the Venice Hospitals in the Sixteenth Century.--From the work of Cesare Vecellio: octavo, 1590.] In spite of the terrible vicissitudes to which Europe and Asia were exposed for two centuries, the Order of St. Lazarus never lost, either in the West or in the East, its essentially _hospitable_ character. This it preserved, notwithstanding the impediments placed in its way by the rivalry of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and the avowed preference of the Court of Rome for the latter--a preference which was due to the fact that the Popes, who had never given up all hope of recovering the Holy Land, were vexed to see the Lazarists renouncing altogether their military functions to devote themselves exclusively to the poor, the infirm, the sick, and the pilgrims. It was, however, their purely charitable mission which obtained for them the security, the protection, and the privileges which were everywhere accorded them. [Illustration: Fig. 275.--The Great Hospital at Milan, founded in 1456 by Duke Francis Sforza and his Wife.]