A period remarkable for plague followed in the year 1540, and ended about 1543. The summer of the first named year is especially mentioned in the chronicles as having been _hot_, and throughout the whole century it continued to be in great repute on account of the excellent wine it produced[769]. A spontaneous conflagration of the woods was frequent, and an earthquake was felt in Germany on the 14th of December[770]. Thereupon, in 1541, there followed in Constantinople a great plague[771] which, in the year 1542, spread by means of a Turkish invasion into Hungary, its superior importance being indicated by the presence of accompanying phenomena, among which the swarms of locusts that appeared this year are especially worthy of note. They came from the interior of Asia, and travelled in dense masses over Europe, passing northward over the Elbe[772], and southward as far as Spain[773]. Kaye saw a cloud of locusts of this description in Padua; their passage lasted full two hours, and they extended further than the eye could reach[774]. The plague quickly spread in Hungary and caused a similar destruction to the imperial army, which was fighting against the Turks under Joachim the Second, Elector of Brandenburg, as it had formerly caused the French before Naples[775]. Whether this pestilence may have been the original oriental glandular plague, or whether we may assume that it had already degenerated into the _Hungarian Petechial Fever_, such as likewise broke out in the year 1566, in the camp near Komorn, during the campaign of Maximilian the Second, and thence, by means of the disbanded lansquenets, spread in all directions[776], cannot now well be determined for want of ascertained facts. In the following year, 1543, however, this plague broke out in Germany, namely, in the Harz districts in the provinces of the Saale[777], and still more malignantly at Metz[778], yet upon the whole it did not cause any considerable loss of life. In the years 1545 and 1546 we again find the _Trousse-galant_ in France[779]. It proved fatal to the Duke of Orleans, second son of Francis the First, in the neighbourhood of Boulogne, and, according to the testimony of French historians, to ten thousand English in that fort, so that the garrison was obliged to pitch a camp outside the town, and the reluctant reinforcements felt that they were encountering certain death[780]. The disease spread itself also among the French troops, and we have seen that it extended its dominion beyond the Alps of Savoy[781].