there are extant documents from the PAPAL WARS of "special warfare" in the form of poisons, infected materials & "flame weapons" being used against beseiged cities. one method was throwing the bodies,clothing & bedding of the diseased dead over the city walls with catapults.
also there are official church documents from the colonial period that talk of exactly the sort of "germ warfare" mentioned in this thread.
This article is just another propaganda broadside in the war against Western Civilization, expounded by the many "Lets hate America" groups.
The coastal Indian populations of the Pacific Northwest was decimated prior to 1830 by German Measles brought by ship's crews. This was not germ warfare, an act purposefully committed, but the way in wich infectious diseases, as vectors, spread. This was true not just for North America but for China, Japan, southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Ancient Rome and Greece - the list encompasses many cultures and peoples across history.
As for the Papal Wars, this article discusses North America and smallpox, not the internecine wars among city states on the Italian Penninsula. Yes, there corpses were catapulted over city walls. That doesn't mean the attackers knew about and understood how bacteria and viruses spread. The most commonly believed protection used then, against such diseases as plague and smallpox, was to wear a garlic bulb on a string around the neck! This article poses that Europeans systematically used bioweapons in a sophisticated manner that was actually beyond their abilities and knowledge. It heavily implies a conspiracy to eliminate non-whites on the part of Europeans.
You want to sign-on to that?
The facts are actually quite different.
"In 1520, Captain Panfilo de Narvaez landed on the east coast of what is now Mexico, near Vera Cruz. His plan was to investigate the Aztec Empire, which was centered in great and powerful inland cities. One of the members of Captain Narvaez's landing party was an African slave who was sick with smallpox. Variola hatched from tiny spots on the man's mouth and amplified itself into a biological shockwave that ran from the seacoast back into the Aztec empire, ultimately killing roughly half of the human population of Mexico." From The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston.
Unfortunately Mr. Preston repeats the slander against the English and Sir Jeffrey Amherst, ignoring the fact that smallpox already existed among the native populations. No one had to give Indian Chiefs blankets seeded with smallpox to spread the disease, it already existed among the native populations due to a tribal peoples'normal behavior; to take what they wanted as victory spoils from the belongings of dead enemies.
And that, stand watie, is how disease spreads.
If you want to read about truly evil intents on biowarfare I suggest Richard Preston's book. He does an excellent job of describing smallpox, how it spreads and how the Russians purposefully in the post-Soviet collapse, created 200 tons of weapons grade smallpox AND a missile delivery system enabling them to attack and wipe out the U.S. population, all at a time in which we were trying to help that nation. The Evil Empire still lives!