A little before the sack of Rome, Odo di Foix, lord of Lautrec and general of France avenged the defeat of his sovereign at Pavia by capturing this city and subjecting it to an eight day’s pillage. The edifices were so ruined and the population so thinned that Leandro Alberti writes;--“The sight of it excited compassion.” It is melancholy satisfaction to write, that, of the crowds of foreigners who poured into Italy to plunder and ravage, very few returned to their native lands. The Peninsula became their sepulchre--of the French particularly--who to speak truth, seldom committed those excesses which were common to the Spaniards and Germans. It may be added, too, that it has always been the misfortune of France to make useless conquests in Italy. Her army which, after the destruction of Melfi, advanced to the siege of Naples, counting more than twenty-five thousand men, was so thinned by pestilential fevers that two months afterwards it did not contain four thousand men fit for duty. The frightful plague did not spare Lautrec, and after the treaty of Antwerp only a few skeletons were permitted to set foot on the soil of France. The army which deluged Rome with blood met with a more calamitous fate. Shut up in Naples under the Prince of Orange, governor of that city, it was attacked and mowed down by a pestilence which was at once the consequence and punishment of its insane license. Even Francis Bourbon, count of San Polo, who, the _Bisogni_ having left nothing to plunder, put the villages and hamlets through which he passed to fire and sword, was totally defeated and made prisoner in Landriano (1529) by the ferocious Antonio di Leyva, the scourge of Lombardy.