As in cases of witchcraft, the first accusation was founded upon gossip and delation. The judicial proceedings were ruled by prejudice and cruelty. Fear and physical pain extorted confessions and complicated accusations of their neighbors from multitudes of innocent people.[241] Indeed the parallel between these unfortunate smearers and no less wretched witches is a close one. I am inclined to think that, as some crazy women fancied they were witches, so some morbid persons of this period in Italy believed in their power of spreading plague, and yielded to the fascination of malignity. Whether such moral mad folk really extended the sphere of the pestilence to any appreciable extent remains a matter for conjecture; and it is quite certain that all but a small percentage of the accused were victims of calumny. After taking brigandage, piracy, and pestilence into account, the decline of Italy must be attributed to other causes. These I believe to have been the extinction of commercial republics, the decay of free commonwealths, iniquitous systems of taxation, the insane display of wealth by unproductive princes, and the diversion of trade into foreign channels. Florence ceased to be the center of wool manufacture, Venice lost her hold upon the traffic between East and West.[242] Stagnation fell like night upon the land, and the population suffered from a general atrophy. [Footnote 240: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. pp. 51-65.] [Footnote 241: Cantu's _Ragionamenti sulla Storia Lombarda del Secolo XVII._ Milano, 1832. The trial may also be read in Mutinelli, _Storm Arcana_, vol. iv. pp. 175-201. Mutinelli inclines to believe in the _Untori_. So do many grave historians, including Nani and Botta. See Cantu, _Storia degli Italiani_, Milano, 1876, vol. ii. p. 215.] [Footnote 242: Mr. Ruskin has somewhere maintained that the decline of Venice was not due to this cause, but to fornication. He should read the record given by Mutinelli (_Diari Urbani_, p. 157), of Venetian fornication in 1340, at the time when the Ducal Palace was being covered with its sculpture. The public prostitutes were reckoned then at 11,654. Adulteries, rapes, infanticides were matters of daily occurrence. Yet the Renaissance had not begun, and the expansion of Venice, which roused the envious hostility of Europe, had yet to happen.] _The Proletariate_.