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Strict rules had been prescribed to them, and severe penalties

threatened for infringing them, which had some power for awhile;

but the number of deaths, and the increasing desolation, and the

universal alarm, soon relieved them from all superintendence, and

they constituted themselves (the monatti in particular) the

arbiters of every thing. They entered houses as masters and

enemies; and, not to mention their robberies, and the cruel

treatment which those unhappy persons experienced whom the plague

condemned to their authority, they applied their infected and

criminal hands to those in health, threatening to carry them to

the lazaretto, unless they purchased their exemption with money.

At other times they refused to carry off the dead bodies already

in a state of putrefaction, without a high price being paid them;

it is even said, that they designedly let fall from their carts

infected clothing, in order to propagate the infection from which

their wealth was derived.