There is an interesting record of these years of tribulation in the chronicle of a Milanese mercer named Burigozzo, who, sitting in his dark-browed shop, set down from day to day, as they passed before his eyes, the vicissitudes of _el povero Milano_. His quaint simplicity and patriotic grief make his tale very moving. It is a picture of confusion, tumult and misery, relieved at first by brilliant gleams, such as the hollow pomps and glories of the entries of kings and conquerors, but darkening ever to a more tragic gloom and terror and despair as it passes from the milder sufferings of the period of French occupation to the unspeakable horrors—_cose da non dire_—committed by the Spaniards and lanzknechts of Pescara and De Leyva. All the great events of the time are made vivid to us in his pages. We hear the ceaseless noise of battle outside, the guns of the Castello, often directed upon the terror-stricken city itself, roaring continually and answered by the great bell of the Duomo sounding _a martello_, to summon the citizens to arms. These, maddened by exactions and cruelty, or inspired by hope of driving out oppressors, or excluding assailants, gather in thousands at the call. Suffering has made them merciless, and they attack and butcher parties of mercenaries in the streets. Once they make a holocaust of the old wooden Campanile of the Duomo, with a whole company of Spaniards within it. And through the streets, crowded with blaspheming and bestial soldiery, we see endless processions pass, white-robed children, men and women with bare feet and clad in sackcloth, monks, friars, all the hierarchy of the Cathedral, filling the air with penitential wailings and cries of _misericordia_, as they wind from the Duomo to St. Ambrogio to implore the help of the great patron saint of the once fortunate Milan. Churches crowded with suppliants; the excited populace pressing round some upstart prophet—some fierce bearded monk who drives the timid priests from altar and pulpit, and calls upon the people in the name of Christ to slaughter the French. In street and temple alike confusion and foulness, where so shortly before the genius of order had presided. Then upon the uproar falls the sick and heavy silence of the pestilence, and the mercer’s tale moves as with a hushed step, while, imprisoned for a whole month within his house, he watches his children die, himself by the grace of God untouched and well—while no sound is heard but the carts going by laden with the sick, and the ceaseless _campana del corpo_—while the graveyards spread and double in extent round the numberless churches. A hundred thousand persons perished, he tells us, during the summer months of 1524.