FAILURE OF CATANEO’S EXPEDITION.
The Valley of Angrogna--An Alternative--The Waldenses
Prepare for Battle--Cataneo’s Repulse--His Rage--He
Renews the Attempt--Enters Angrogna with his Army--
Advances to the Barrier--Enters the Chasm--The Waldenses
on the point of being Cut to Pieces--The Mountain
Mist--Deliverance--Utter Rout of the Papal Army--Pool of
Saquet--Sufferings of the Waldenses--Extinction of the
Invading Host--Deputation to their Prince--Vaudois
Children--Peace.
The camp of Cataneo was pitched almost at the gates of La Torre,
beneath the shadow of the Castelluzzo. The Papal legate is about to
try to force his way into the Val di Angrogna. This valley opens hard
by the spot where the legate had established his camp, and runs on
for a dozen miles into the Alps, a magnificent succession of narrow
gorges and open dells, walled throughout by majestic mountains, and
terminating in a noble circular basin--the Pra del Tor--which is set
round with snowy peaks, and forms the most venerated spot in all the
Waldensian territory, inasmuch as it was the seat of their college, and
the meeting-place of their Barbes.
In the Pra del Tor, or Meadow of the Tower, Cataneo expected to
surprise the mass of the Waldensian people, now gathered into it as
being the strongest refuge which their hills afforded. There, too, he
expected to be joined by the corps which he had sent round by Lucerna
to make the circuit of the Valleys, and after devastating Prali and San
Martino, to climb the mountain barrier and join their companions in
the Pra, little imagining that the soldiers he had dispatched on that
errand of massacre were now enriching with their corpses the Valleys
they had been sent to subdue. In that same spot where the Barbes had
so often met in synod, and enacted rules for the government of their
Church and the spread of their faith, the Papal legate would reunite
his victorious host, and finish the campaign by proclaiming that now
the Waldensian heresy, root and branch, was extinct.
The Waldenses--their humble supplication for peace having been
contemptuously rejected, as we have already said--had three courses in
their choice--to go to mass, to be butchered as sheep, or to fight for
their lives. They chose the last, and made ready for battle. But first
they must remove to a place of safety all who were unable to bear arms.
Packing up their kneading-troughs, their ovens, and other culinary
utensils, laying their aged on their shoulders, and their sick in
couches, and leading their children by the hand, they began to climb
the hills, in the direction of the Pra del Tor, at the head of the Val
di Angrogna. Transporting their household stuff, they could be seen
traversing the rugged paths, and making the mountains resound with
psalms, which they sweetly sung as they journeyed up the ascent. Those
who remained busied themselves in manufacturing pikes and other weapons
of defence and attack, in repairing the barricades, in arranging
themselves into fighting parties, and assigning to the various corps
the posts they were to defend.
Cataneo now put his soldiers in motion. Advancing to near the town of
La Torre, they made a sharp turn to the right, and entered the Val
di Angrogna. Its opening offers no obstruction, being soft and even
as any meadow in all England. By-and-by it begins to swell into the
heights of Rocomaneot, where the Vaudois had resolved to make a stand.
Their fighting men were posted along its ridge. Their army was of the
simplest. The bow was almost their only weapon of attack. They wore
bucklers of skin, covered with the bark of the chestnut-tree, the
better to resist thrust of pike or cut of sword. In the hollow behind,
protected by the rising ground on which their fathers, husbands, and
brothers were posted, were a number of women and children, gathered
there for shelter. The Piedmontese host pressed up the acclivity,
discharging a shower of arrows as they advanced, and the Waldensian
line on which these missiles fell, seemed to waver, and to be on the
point of giving way. Those behind, espying the danger, fell on their
knees and, extending their hands in supplication to the God of battles,
cried aloud, “O God of our fathers, help us! O God, deliver us!” That
cry was heard by the attacking host, and especially by one of its
captains, Le Noir of Mondovi, or the Black Mondovi, a proud, bigoted,
bloodthirsty man. He instantly shouted out that his soldiers would give
the answer, accompanying his threat with horrible blasphemies. The
Black Mondovi raised his visor as he spoke. At the instant an arrow
from the bow of Pierre Revel, of Angrogna, entering between his eyes,
transfixed his skull, and he fell on the earth a corpse. The fall of
this daring leader disheartened the Papal army. The soldiers began to
fall back. They were chased down the slopes by the Vaudois, who now
descended upon them like one of their own mountain torrents. Having
driven their invaders to the plain, cutting off not a few in their
flight, they returned as the evening began to fall, to celebrate with
songs, on the heights where they had won it, the victory with which it
had pleased the God of their fathers to crown their arms.
Cataneo burned with rage and shame at being defeated by these herdsmen.
In a few days, reassembling his host, he made a second attempt to enter
the Angrogna. This promised to be successful. He passed the height of
Rocomaneot, where he had encountered his first defeat, without meeting
any resistance. He led his soldiers into the narrow defiles beyond.
Here great rocks overhang the path: mighty chestnut-trees fling their
branches across the way, veiling it in gloom, and far down thunders
the torrent that waters the valley. Still advancing, he found himself,
without fighting, in possession of the ample and fruitful expanse into
which, these defiles passed, the valley opens. He was now master so far
of the Val di Angrogna, comprehending the numerous hamlets, with their
finely cultivated fields and vineyards, on the left of the torrent.
But he had seen none of the inhabitants. These, he knew, were with
the men of Lucerna in the Pra del Tor. Between him and his prey rose
the “Barricade,” a steep unscaleable mountain, which runs like a wall
across the valley, and forms a rampart to the famous “Meadow,” which
combines the solemnity of sanctuary with the strength of citadel.
Must the advance of the Papal legate and his army here end? It seemed
as if it must. Cataneo was in a vast _cul-de-sac_. He could see the
white peaks round the Pra, but between him and the Pra itself rose,
in Cyclopean strength and height, the Barricade. He searched and,
unhappily for himself, found an entrance. Some convulsion of nature has
here rent the mountains, and through the long, narrow, and dark chasm
thus formed lies the one only path that leads to the head of Angrogna.
The leader of the Papal host boldly ordered his men to enter and
traverse this frightful gorge, not knowing how few of them he should
ever lead back. The only pathway through this chasm is a rocky ledge
on the side of the mountain, so narrow that not more than two abreast
can advance along it. If assailed either in front, or in rear, or
from above, there is absolutely no retreat. Nor is there room for the
party attacked to fight. The pathway is hung midway between the bottom
of the gorge, along which rolls the stream, and the summit of the
mountain. Here the naked cliff runs sheer up for at least one thousand
feet; there it leans over the path in stupendous masses, which look
as if about to fall. Here lateral fissures admit the golden beams of
the sun, which relieve the darkness of the pass, and make it visible.
There a half-acre or so of level space gives standing-room on the
mountain’s side to a clump of birches, with their tall silvery trunks,
or a châlet, with its bit of bright close-shaven meadow. But these only
partially relieve the terrors of the chasm, which runs on from one to
two miles, when, with a burst of light, and a sudden flashing of white
peaks on the eye, it opens into an amphitheatre of meadow of dimensions
so goodly, that an entire nation might find room to encamp in it.
It was into this terrible defile that the soldiers of the Papal legate
now marched. They kept advancing, as best they could, along the narrow
ledge. They were now nearing the Pra. It seemed impossible for their
prey to escape them. Assembled on this spot the Waldensian people had
but one neck, and the Papal soldiers, so Cataneo believed, were to
sever that neck at a blow. But God was watching over the Vaudois. He
had said of the Papal legate and his army, as of another tyrant of
former days, “I will put my hook in thy nose, and my bridle in thy
lips, and I will cause thee to return by the way by which thou camest.”
But by what agency was the advance of that host to be stayed? Will
some mighty angel smite Cataneo’s army, as he did Sennacherib’s? No
angel blockaded the pass. Will thunder-bolts and hailstones be rained
upon Cataneo’s soldiers, as of old on Sisera’s? The thunders slept;
the hail fell not. Will earthquake and whirlwind discomfit them?
No earthquake rocked the ground; no whirlwinds rent the mountains.
The instrumentality now put in motion to shield the Vaudois from
destruction was one of the lightest and frailest in all nature; yet no
bars of adamant could have more effectually shut the pass, and brought
the march of the host to an instant halt.
A white cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, unobserved by the
Piedmontese, but keenly watched by the Vaudois, was seen to gather
on the mountain’s summit, about the time the army would be entering
the defile. That cloud grew rapidly bigger and blacker. It began to
descend. It came rolling down the mountain’s side, wave on wave, like
an ocean tumbling out of heaven--a sea of murky vapour. It fell right
into the chasm in which was the Papal army, sealing it up, and filling
it from top to bottom with a thick black fog. In a moment the host were
in night; they were bewildered, stupefied, and could see neither before
nor behind, could neither advance nor retreat. They halted in a state
bordering on terror.[27]
The Waldenses interpreted this as an interposition of Providence
in their behalf. It had given them the power of repelling the
invader. Climbing the slopes of the Pra, and issuing from all their
hiding-places in its environs, they spread themselves over the
mountains, the paths of which were familiar to them, and while the
host stood riveted beneath them, caught in the double toils of the
defile and the mist, they tore up huge stones and rocks, and sent them
thundering down into the ravine. The Papal soldiers were crushed where
they stood. Nor was this all. Some of the Waldenses boldly entered the
chasm, sword in hand, and attacked them in front. Consternation seized
the Piedmontese host. Panic impelled them to flee, but their effort
to escape was more fatal than the sword of the Vaudois, or the rocks
that, swift as arrow, came bounding down the mountain. They jostled one
another; they threw each other down in the struggle; some were trodden
to death; others were rolled over the precipice, and crushed on the
rocks below, or drowned in the torrent, and so perished miserably.[28]
The fate of one of these invaders has been preserved in story. He was
a certain Captain Saquet, a man, it is said, of gigantic stature, from
Polonghera, in Piedmont. He began, like his Philistine prototype, to
vent curses on the Waldensian dogs. The words were yet in his mouth
when his foot slipped. Rolling over the precipice, and tumbling into
the torrent of the Angrogna, he was carried away by the stream, and
his body finally deposited in a deep eddy or whirlpool, called in the
_patois_ of the country a “tompie,” from the noise made by its waters.
It bears to this day the name of the Tompie de Saquet, or Gulf of
Saquet.[29]
This war hung above the Valleys, like a cloud of tempest, for a whole
year. It inflicted much suffering and loss upon the Waldenses; their
homes were burned, their fields devastated, their goods carried off,
and their persons slain; but the invaders suffered heavier losses than
they inflicted. Of the 18,000 regular troops, to which we may add about
an equal number of desperadoes, with which the campaign opened, few
ever returned to their homes. They left their bones on the mountains
they had come to subdue. They were cut off mostly in detail. They
were led weary chases from valley to mountain and from mountain to
valley. The rocks rolled upon them gave them at once death and burial.
They were met in narrow defiles and cut to pieces. Flying parties of
Waldenses would suddenly issue from the mist, or from some cave known
only to themselves, attack and discomfit the foe, and then as suddenly
retreat into the friendly vapour or the sheltering rock. Thus it came
to pass that, in the words of Muston, “this army of invaders vanished
from the Vaudois mountains as rain in the sands of the desert.”[30]
“God,” says Leger, “turned the heart of their prince toward this poor
people.” He sent a prelate to their Valleys, to assure them of his
good-will, and to intimate his wish to receive their deputies. They
sent twelve of their more venerable men to Turin, who being admitted
into the duke’s presence, gave him such an account of their faith,
that he candidly confessed that he had been misled in what he had done
against them, and would not again suffer such wrongs to be inflicted
upon them. He several times said that he “had not so virtuous, so
faithful, and so obedient subjects as the Vaudois.”[31]
He caused the deputies a little surprise by expressing a wish to see
some of the Vaudois children. Twelve infants, with their mothers, were
straightway sent for from the valley of Angrogna, and presented before
the prince. He examined them narrowly. He found them well formed, and
testified his admiration of their healthy faces, clear eyes and lively
prattle. He had been told, he said, that “the Vaudois children were
monsters, with only one eye placed in the middle of the forehead, four
rows of black teeth, and other similar deformities.”[32]
The prince, Charles II., a youth of only twenty years, but humane and
wise, confirmed the privileges and immunities of the Vaudois, and
dismissed them with his promise that they should be unmolested in the
future.[33] The Churches of the Valleys now enjoyed a short respite
from persecution.