"All the horrors ever exercised against a captured place were repeated and almost surpassed, on this dreadful event, which, notwithstanding all the subsequent disorders and the lapse of time, is still fresh in the recollection of its inhabitants and of Germany. Neither age, beauty nor innocence, neither infancy nor decrepitude, found refuge or compassion from the fury of the licentious soldiery. No retreat was sufficiently secure to escape their rapacity and vengeance; no sanctuary sufficiently sacred to repress their lust and cruelty. Infants were murdered before the eyes of their parents, daughters and wives violated in the arms of their fathers and husbands. Some of the imperial officers, recoiling from this terrible scene, flew to Count Tilly and supplicated him to put a stop to the carnage. 'Stay yet an hour,' was his barbarous reply; 'let the soldier have some compensation for his dangers and fatigues.'
"The troops, left to themselves, after sating their passions, and almost exhausting their cruelty in three hours of pillage and massacre, set fire to the town, and the flames were in an instant spread by the wind to every quarter of the place. Then opened a scene which surpassed all the former horrors. Those who had hitherto escaped, or who were forced by the flames from their hiding-places, experienced a more dreadful fate. Numbers were driven into the Elbe, others massacred with every species of savage barbarity--the wombs of pregnant women ripped up, and infants thrown into the fire or impaled on pikes and suspended over the flames. History has no terms, poetry no language, painting no colors to depict all the horrors of the scene. In less than ten hours the most rich, the most flourishing and the most populous town in Germany was reduced to ashes. The cathedral, a single convent and a few miserable huts, were all that were left of its numerous buildings, and scarcely more than a thousand souls all that remained of more than thirty thousand inhabitants.
"After an interval of two days, when the soldiers were fatigued, if not sated, with devastation and slaughter, and when the flames had begun to subside, Tilly entered the town in triumph. To make room for his passage the streets were cleared and six thousand carcasses thrown into the Elbe. He ordered the pillage to cease, pardoned the scanty remnant of the inhabitants, who had taken refuge in the cathedral, and, surrounded by flames and carnage, had remained three days without food or refreshment, under all the terrors of impending fate. After hearing a _Te Deum_ in the midst of military pomp, he paraded the streets; and even though his unfeeling heart seemed touched with the horrors of the scene, he could not refrain from the savage exultation of boasting to the emperor, and comparing the assault of Magdeburg to the sack of Troy and of Jerusalem."