Women of all ages were raped in the streets, nuns rounded up and herded into bordellos, priests sodomized, civilians massacred. After the first, week-long orgy of destruction, more than 2,000 bodies were floating in the Tiber, some 9,800 others awaited burial, and countless thousands of corpses lay sprawled in the city’s ruins, their bloated, stinking remains eviscerated by rats and hungry dogs.
