Bartolomeo Concini is reporting to his master, Cosimo I de Medici, from the Florentine military camp outside the besieged city of Siena on April 6, 1554:
Messer Giulio de’ Ricasoli has written to tell me that last night he received information from an old Florentine woman who is living in Siena in the house of a young prostitute who is the sister of the old woman’s son-in-law. The prostitute, in the course of an affair with a French engineer, has learnt that our enemies are digging a tunnel from their citadel to the cellar of our fortress which is our munitions store. She has learnt that the work is well underway and that very soon they would play a trick on us and we would find our artillery destroyed [] nobody believes the account of the tunnel since our fortress is so much higher than their citadel and nobody inside Siena knows anything about it. [] Messer Giulio has sent the old woman home after promising her a reward if she can obtain the plan of the tunnel which she claims to have seen. The prostitute will be here shortly to tell us what she knows. It is possible that the engineer was just boasting in the typical French way to make it seem that he was doing something great []
