Assisi, now the shell of her former self, seemed indeed a city of the dead. Through her deserted streets, running with the blood of the slain, echoed the sound of falling rafters and crumbling palaces, while bon-fires flamed on the piazza fed with the public archives by the destroying Perugians. Across the Tiber were to be seen the unhappy citizens being driven like droves of cattle by their captors up the hill to the city they hated. There the women, with their children clinging round their necks, were sold in the market-place as slaves, and exposed to the cruellest treatment by their masters. Even tiny children of four and five years old were sold; a maiden, we are told, fetched fifteen ducats, and many were bought, sometimes for the love of God, and sometimes as maidservants. Every day fresh booty was brought in, and the Perugians fought over the gold chalices, missals, and other treasures robbed from churches and convents; but these brought lower prices, for even Perugian consciences seem to have been troubled with scruples, and superstitious fear kept them from buying stolen church property. While the slave market was proceeding amidst the clanging of bells proclaiming the victory, the Priors of Perugia sat in their council hall of the great Palazzo Pubblico discussing how they could bring about the total annihilation of Assisi. The following curious letter was finally written, sealed, and sent to Niccolò Piccinino by five ambassadors who were to tempt him to do the deed with a bribe of 15,000 ducats: "Your illustrious Signory being well aware how that city has ever been the scandal of this one, and that now the time has come to take this beam from out of our eyes, we pray and supplicate your illustrious Signory, in the name of this city and of the State, that it may please you to act in such wise that this your city shall never again have reason to fear her; and so, as appears good to all the community, it will be well to raze her to the ground, saving only the churches. And this will be the most singular among other favours that your illustrious Signory has ever done to us."[11] "Trust in my words and trust in my deeds," replied Piccinino to the bearers of this truly mediæval letter; but, adds the chronicler, he refused his consent to their cowardly scheme for the destruction of the town. It is believed that he was acting upon orders received from Eugenius IV, who appears as the benevolent genius of Assisi, until, as the local historians tell us with rage, the Pope offered to sell them to the Commune of Perugia, when his clemency seems due solely to the fact that the papal coffers were sadly empty. Luckily the Perugians, somewhat in debt owing to the late war, were unable to pay the price, and Assisi thus escaped being given "like a lamb to the butcher," while her enemy missed the chance "of removing that beam from out of her eye."