No medical contemporary has described the nature of this violent disease, and historians have on this point preserved only general outlines, which do not afford sufficient materials to ground an investigation. Certain it is, that in the year 1528, a very malignant _petechial fever_ extended throughout Italy, and in the proper sense of the word prevailed so decidedly, that it even followed the Italians abroad in the same way as the Sweating Sickness did the English, as is proved by the case of the learned Venetian Naugerio, who, being dispatched on an embassy to Francis the 1st, died at Blois on the Loire, of this very disease, with which the French had yet no acquaintance[505]. Contemporaries assure us, that this epidemic committed great ravages in the country, already distracted by wars and feuds, and it is therefore hardly to be doubted, that, occurring as it did in those same years, it was the disease of which we have been treating, the malignity of which was increased on extraordinary occasions. A pestilence which, just before the siege of Naples, destroyed one-third of the inhabitants of Cremona, was in all probability the petechial fever[506]. Yet, here and there, the old bubo plague made its appearance. This it was which in the year 1524 carried off 50,000 people in Milan[507], and this appears likewise to have been the disease which, after the sacking of Rome, broke out among the German lansquenets, and in a short time annihilated two-thirds of these troops. Contemporaries saw therein God’s just punishment of their desecration of the Holy See, for in the succeeding years, all the remaining participators in the storming of the eternal city, also met with an end worthy of their crimes[508]. They did not take into account, however, the beastly intemperance and excesses of the soldiery, whose eagerness after plunder led them to encounter the plague poison in the most secret holes and corners; nor did they reflect, that the plague penetrated the Castle of St. Angelo itself, and destroyed some of the courtiers almost under the eyes of the Pope[509]. Of these lansquenets, many went to Naples in the following year under the Prince of Orange, and it may with good ground be supposed, that they took with them to that city fresh germs of plague; to which may be added, the by no means incredible story, that the besieged sent infected and sick soldiers to the French, in order to cause poisonous pestilences to break out among them[510]. This very circumstance tells in favour of bubo plague, for the decided certainty of its contagious nature was known, and seemed beyond all comparison greater than the more conditional communicability of the new disease[511]. Moreover, the same attempt at impestation had been already often made in earlier times.