gh tormented to the utmost, none of them were capable of revealing
the prime instigators of the plot. So thoroughly convinced was he,
together with the whole world, of their guilt, that he never paused to
reflect upon the fallacy contained in this remark. The rack-stretched
wretches could not reveal their instigators, because there were none;
and the acts of which they accused themselves were the delirious
figments of their own torture-fretted brains. We possess documents
relating to the trial of the Milanese _untori_, which make it clear that
crimes of this sort must have been imaginary. As in cases of
witchcraft, the first accusation was founded upon gossip and delation.
The judicial proceedings were ruled by prejudice and cruelty. Fear and
physical pain extorted confessions and complicated accusations of their
neighbors from multitudes of innocent people.[241] Indeed the parallel
between these unfortunate smearers and no less wretched witches is a
close one. I am inclined to think that, as some crazy women fancied they
were witches, so some morbid persons of this period in Italy believed in
their power of spreading plague, and yielded to the fascination of
malignity. Whether such moral mad folk really extended the sphere of the
pestilence to any appreciable extent remains a matter for conjecture;
and it is quite certain that all but a small percentage of the accused
were victims of calumny.

After taking brigandage, piracy, and pestilence into account, the
decline of Italy must be attributed to other causes. These I believe to
have been the extinction of commercial republics, the decay of free
commonwealths, iniquitous systems of taxation, the insane display of
wealth by unproductive princes, and the diversion of trade into foreign
channels. Florence ceased to be the center of wool manufacture, Venice
lost her hold upon the traffic between East and West.[242] Stagnation
fell like night upon the land, and the population suffered from a
general atrophy.

[Footnote 240: Mutinelli, _op. cit._ vol. ii. pp. 51-65.]

[Footnote 241: Cantu's _Ragionamenti sulla Storia Lombarda del Secolo
XVII._ Milano, 1832. The trial may also be read in Mutinelli, _Storm
Arcana_, vol. iv. pp. 175-201. Mutinelli inclines to believe in the
_Untori_. So do many grave historians, including Nani and Botta. See
Cantu, _Storia degli Italiani_, Milano, 1876, vol. ii. p. 215.]

[Footnote 242: Mr. Ruskin has somewhere maintained that the decline