In the year 1380, a monk inquisitor, named Francis Borelli, was appointed by Clement VII. to search out the heretics in the valleys of Piedmont. Armed with this papal bull, the communes of Fraissiniere and Argentiere were ransacked for heretics. In the space of thirteen years, one hundred and fifty Waldenses were burned at Grenoble, and eighty—around Fraissiniere. There was now a double motive for persecution; a law was made that half the goods of the condemned should go to the inquisitors' court, and the other half to their temporal lords. Thus avarice, malice, and superstition were united against the unoffending peasants. But these burnings were too few and too far between to satisfy Rome's thirst for the blood of God's saints.
In the winter of 1400, the massacre extended from Dauphiny to the Italian valley of Pragela. The poor people, seeing their mountain caves possessed by their enemies, fled over the Alps. But the severity of the season and the coldness of the heights proved fatal to nearly all who had escaped from the hand of slaughter. Many of the mothers were carrying their infants and leading by the hand the little children who were able to walk. But cold and hunger speedily brought relief. One hundred and eighty babes are said to have died in the arms of their mothers, and were soon followed, with other children, by their broken-hearted mothers. No estimate can be formed of the numbers that perished by the tyrannies and cruelties of Rome. But heaven guesses not at their number, or even at their names. The martyred parents and the children have their record and reward eternal in the heavens; while their persecutors have had time to gauge their guilt and feel their punishment these four hundred years in the place of hopeless woe. In allusion to such scenes, the noblest of our poets composed the following sonnet: -
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not; in Thy book record their groans,
Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold,
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learned Thy way,
Early may flee the Babylonish woe."—MILTON.
The fires of persecution were again kindled in the valley of Fraissiniere, in the year 1460, by a monk of the order of Friars Minor, armed with the authority of the Archbishop of Embrun. Debarred from social intercourse, driven from their places of worship, beset with enemies, they had no resource, no refuge, but in a good conscience and the living God. The inquisitors did their cruel work.
In Piedmont, the Archbishop of Turin labored much to promote the persecutions of the Waldenses. Their charge against them was that they made no offerings for the dead, valued not masses and absolutions, and took no care to redeem their relations from the pains of purgatory. But the princes of Piedmont, who were the dukes of Savoy, were unwilling to disturb their subjects, of whose loyalty, peaceableness, and industry, they had received such good accounts. Yet every method which fraud and calumny could invent was practiced against them. The priests at length prevailed, and the civil power permitted the dragon host to indulge its thirst for blood.
About the year 1486 the memorable Bull of Innocent VIII. gave unlimited powers to Albert de Capitaneis, archdeacon of Cremona, to carry confiscation and death into the infected valleys. An army of eighteen thousand was raised, and precipitated into the mountain retreats of the Waldenses. Driven to despair, and availing themselves of the natural advantages of their situation, they defended themselves with wooden clubs and crossbows—the women and children praying—and turned into confusion this great military force.
The house of Savoy—which was established in supreme authority in Piedmont about the middle of the thirteenth century—had acted in a mild and tolerant way towards the proscribed people; but, sad to say, the regent-mother, like Theodora and Irene, during the minority of her son, is the first to sign a state-paper for their persecution. She called upon the authorities of Pignerol to assist the inquisitors to compel the heretics to return to the bosom of the church—a worthy daughter of her mother Jezebel! But not a single one of the inhabitants could be forced to return to the arms of Rome. The sword was now let loose upon them; and soon were the streams of the valleys tinged with the blood of the saints. Subsequent edicts of the sons were more tolerant. They began to speak of their Waldensian subjects, not under the obnoxious appellation of heretics, but as religionists, men of the valleys, and faithful vassals; whom they recognized as privileged subjects because of ancient stipulations.
So far Rome had utterly failed to accomplish her cruel and fiend-like object. She had determined to exterminate these obstinate opponents of popery, but faithful witnesses of the truth; and to eradicate their very name from the valleys. But, wonderful to say, neither the individual executions nor the indiscriminate slaughters, the secret treachery nor the open violence, could prevail for their extinction. But Jezebel still plots; and the tiara and the miter generally proved too strong for the crown.