THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
from Calabria and Apulia to the Alpine valleys, the Waldensian apostles evidently made missionary efforts in central Italy, thus explaining the communities found in the fifteenth century in the States of the Church, including Umbria, Tuscany, and Romagna. These communities seem to have been especially numerous in the duchy of Spolato, and small Waldensian conventicles were also to be found in Camerino, Ancona, Perugia, Bologna, Lucca, and Florence. Even Rome contained one, but the conventicles then existing at Genoa and elsewhere in Liguria were apparently survivals of the old Lombard mission. The most remarkable proof of the energy of the Italian Waldenses, however, is, that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they carried their propaganda into the territory of the French ‘‘ poor men.” The occasion was likely the colonizing, by the Barons Bouliers, of a few Waldensian families of Saluzzo on the north bank of the Durance in France, who may have been tracked by the apostles. It is uncertain whether they found remnants of old French communities in their labors in Provence, Valentinois, Vivarais, Venaissin, Auvergne, Limousin, and Bordelais; but at all events they were able to gather a series of conventicles in Auvergne, Valentinois, and near Trévoux, north of Lyons, and even to hold an assembly in Lyons, May 31, 1492.
In Germany occurred the first execution of Waldenses en masse, at Strasburg, in 1211 (ut sup.); and in 1231-33 took place there the first general persecution. Nothing was now heard of them for a long time in central Germany, but in upper Germany they soon again attracted attention. They were encountered in Constance in 1243, and in Hall in Swabia in 1248 they dared openly to defend the ex-
communicated Emperor Frederick II. 2. In and tobrand Pope Innocent IV. asa
Germany, heretic. In Bavaria and in Upper and
Bohemia, Lower Austria they spread so quickly, Poland, and despite incessant bloody persecution,
Hungary. that about 1260 the Inquisition found
Waldensian schools in forty-two parishes of Upper and Lower Austria; while in 1315 heretics were found in thirty-six places between St. Pélten and Traiskirchen, the “poor men” themselves then estimating the number of their followers in the duchy of Austria at more than 80,000. Meanwhile they had also found their way into Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Meissen, Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Poland. By the end of the fourteenth century they were in a series of places in Hungary, and even in Transylvania. Half a century later the sect was first noticed in the duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg and in the district of Magdeburg, and twenty years later in what is now Mecklenburg-Schwerin. In southern Bohemia the Waldenses formed entire villages in the German colonies near Neuhaus, about 1340, and in Moravia they were so numerous that the Church almost despaired of overcoming them. In Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Mecklenburg no less than 443 persons were accused of the Waldensian heresy in 1393-94; and the sect seems to have been a regular concomitant of German colonization in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Waldenses were equally active in the interior of Germany. In the last decade of the fourteenth century the In-
quisition discovered them in many towns beside Erfurt, Mainz, Nuremberg, and Regensburg, and in all Upper and Lower Austria, Salzburg, and Styria. In Swabia, Augsburg was an early center of the sect, and they were found in Ulm, Donauwérth (twentysix executed in 1393), and other towns. On the Upper Rhine among the notable places which they occupied were Strasburg, Hagenau, and Speyer; and in Switzerland, Rasel, Solothurn, St. Gall, Bern, Freiburg, Neuchatel, Lausanne, Vaud, and others. Records are wanting of their presence only in the Tyrol, in the Rhine valley north of Bingen with its lateral valleys, Lower Saxony, Frisia, Holstein, and, for along time, the Netherlands. The Waldensians drew their recruits chiefly from the lower classes. In Upper Germany they were especially influential among the cloth-makers, but only a few of the clergy or of the cultured classes joined their ranks. Among their patrons and adherents, however, were not seldom those of knightly position or high office, so that as diligent artizans and colonists they received open favor in the margravate of Saluzzo, the Montagne du Luberon, Apulia, and Calabria. Among their “ friends ’’ were representatives of the higher classes, especially in the cities of Swabia, Franconia, and Bavaria, as well as in Bern and Freiburg in Switzerland.
The Lombard Waldensians developed their organization from an ascetic band of preachers to an antichurch or sect as quickly as their French brethren.
As early as 1260 they and their
3. Internal “friends ”’ formed, even in Germany, Develop- a loose but practically organized secret ment. church, which considered itself the only Church of Christ, occasionally termed
entrance to its number true baptism, and thus implied what it explicitly declared in the fourteenth century, that outside of it there was no salvation. It accordingly declined all the claims, hierarchy, and worship of the Roman Catholic Church, designating it, as early as about 1240, as the great beast of the Apocalypse, and declaring that it had ceased to be the Church of Christ when Pope Silvester, the first anti- Christ, received the donation from Constantine. The Waldenses protested against all privileges of rank, clerical prerogatives, the titles of pope and bishop, priestly despotism, all incomes and endowments of churches and monasteries, the division of the land into dioceses and parishes, against councils and synods, the whole system of ecclesiastical courts and penalties and of marriage law, the celibacy of the clergy, and the like. They also rejected, at least after the fourteenth century, monasticism in all its forms; the system of religious instruction; the mystical interpretation of the Scriptures; all ordinations and acts of worship not explicitly directed by the Bible; all church fasts and feasts excepting Sundays and sometimes Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday, and the feasts of the apostles; the blessing of all articles such as candles, palms, water, and the use of articles thus blessed; the blessing and dedication of churches, cemeteries, pilgrims, and the like; the churching of women; and pilgrimages, processions, organs, bells, spires, canonical hours, the whole Latin liturgy, and all else appertaining to the externals of worship. More emphatic was their condem-