WALDENSIAN COLONIES IN CALABRIA AND APULIA.
An Inn at Turin--Two Waldensian Youths--A Stranger--Invitation
to Calabria--The Waldenses Search the Land--They Settle
there--Their Colony Flourishes--Build Towns--Cultivate
Science--They Hear of the Reformation--Petition for a Fixed
Pastor--Jean Louis Paschale sent to them--Apprehended--
Brought in Chains to Naples--Conducted to Rome.
One day, about the year 1340, two Waldensian youths were seated in an
inn in Turin, engaged in earnest conversation respecting their home
prospects. Shut up in their valleys, and cultivating with toil their
somewhat sterile mountains, they sighed for wider limits and a more
fertile land. “Come with me,” said a stranger, who had been listening
unperceived to their discourse, “Come with me, and I will give you
fertile fields for your barren rocks.” The person who now courteously
addressed the youths, and whose steps Providence had directed to the
same hotel with themselves, was a gentleman from Calabria, at the
southern extremity of the Italian Peninsula.
On their return to the Valleys the youths reported the words of the
stranger, and the flattering hopes he had held out should they be
willing to migrate to this southern land, where skies more genial,
and an earth more fertile, would reward their labour with more
bounteous harvests. The elders of the Vaudois people listened not
without interest. The population of their Valleys had recently been
largely increased by numbers of Albigensian refugees, who had escaped
from the massacres of Innocent III. in the south of France; and the
Waldenses, feeling themselves overcrowded, were prepared to welcome
any fair scheme that promised an enlargement of their boundaries. But
before acceding to the proposition of the stranger, they thought it
advisable to send competent persons to examine this new and to them
unknown land. The Vaudois explorers returned with a flattering account
of the conditions and capabilities of the country they had been invited
to occupy. Compared with their own more northern mountains, whose
summits Winter covered all the year through with his snows, whose
gorges were swept by furious gusts, and whose sides were stripped of
their corn and vines by devastating torrents, Calabria was a land
of promise. “There are beautiful hills,” says the historian Gilles,
describing this settlement, “clothed with all kinds of fruit-trees
spontaneously springing up according to their situation--in the
plains, vines and chestnuts; on the rising ground, walnuts and every
fruit-tree. Everywhere were seen rich arable land and few labourers.” A
considerable body of emigrants set out for this new country. The young
men were accompanied to their future homes with partners. They carried
with them the Bible in the Romance version, “that holy ark of the New
Covenant, and of everlasting peace.”
The conditions of their emigration offered a reasonable security
for the free and undisturbed exercise of their worship. “By a
convention with the local seigneurs, ratified later by the King of
Naples, Ferdinand of Arragon, they were permitted to govern their own
affairs, civil and spiritual, by their own magistrates, and their own
pastors.”[78] Their first settlement was near the town of Montalto.
Half a century later rose the city of San Sexto, which afterwards
became the capital of the colony. Other towns and villages sprang
up, and the region, which before had been thinly inhabited, and but
poorly cultivated, was soon transformed into a smiling garden. The
swelling hills were clothed with fruit-trees, and the plains waved
with luxuriant crops. The Marquis of Spinello was so struck with the
prosperity and wealth of the settlements, that he offered to cede lands
on his own vast and fertile estates where these colonists might build
cities and plant vineyards. One of their towns he authorised them to
surround with a wall; hence its name, La Guardia. This town, situated
on a height near the sea, soon became populous and opulent.[79]
Towards the close of the same century, another body of Vaudois
emigrants from Provence arrived in the south of Italy. The new-comers
settled in Apulia, not far from their Calabrian brethren. Villages
and towns arose, and the region speedily put on a new face under the
improved arts and husbandry of the colonists. Their smiling homes,
which looked forth from amid groves of orange and myrtle, their
hills covered with the olive and the vine, their corn-fields and
pasture-lands, were the marvel and the envy of their neighbours.
In 1500 there arrived in Calabria yet another emigration from the
Valleys of Pragelas and Fraissinières. This third body of colonists
established themselves on the Volturata, a river which flows from the
Apennines into the Bay of Tarento. With the increase of their numbers
came an increase of prosperity to the colonists. Their neighbours,
who knew not the secret of this prosperity, were lost in wonder and
admiration of it. The physical attributes of the region occupied by the
emigrants differed in no respect from those of their own lands, both
were placed under the same sky, but how different the aspect of the one
from that of the other! The soil, touched by the plough of Vaudois,
seemed to feel a charm that made it open its bosom and yield a tenfold
increase. The vine tended by Vaudois hands bore richer clusters, and
strove in generous rivalry with the fig and the olive to outdo them in
enriching with its produce the Vaudois board. And how delightful the
quiet and order of their towns; and the air of happiness on the faces
of the people! And how sweet to listen to the bleating of the flocks
on the hills, the lowing of the herds in the meadows, the song of the
reaper and grape-gatherer, and the merry voices of children at play
around the hamlets and villages! For about 200 years these colonies
continued to flourish.
“It is a curious circumstance,” says the historian M’Crie, “that
the first gleam of light, at the revival of letters, shone on that
remote spot of Italy where the Vaudois had found an asylum. Petrarch
first acquired a knowledge of the Greek tongue from Barlaam, a monk
of Calabria; and Boccaccio was taught it from Leontius Pilatus, who
was a hearer of Barlaam, if not also a native of the same place.”[80]
Muston says that “the sciences flourished among them.”[81] The day of
the Renaissance had not yet broken. The flight of scholars, which was
to bear with it the seeds of ancient learning to the West, had not yet
taken place; but the Vaudois of Calabria would seem to have anticipated
that great literary revival. They had brought with them the Scriptures
in the Romance version. They possessed doubtless the taste and genius
for which the Romance nations were then famous; and, moreover, in their
southern settlement they may have had access to some knowledge of those
sciences which the Saracens then so assiduously cultivated; and what
so likely, with their leisure and wealth, as that these Vaudois should
turn their attention to letters as well as to husbandry, and make their
adopted country vocal with the strains of that minstrelsy with which
Provence and Dauphiné had resounded so melodiously, till its music
was quenched at once and for ever by the murderous arms of Simon de
Montfort? But here we can only doubtfully guess, for the records of
this interesting people are scanty and dubious.
These colonists kept up their connection with the mother country of the
Valleys, though situated at the opposite extremity of Italy. To keep
alive their faith, which was the connecting link, pastors were sent
in relays of two to minister in the churches of Calabria and Apulia;
and when they had fulfilled their term of two years they were replaced
by other two. The barbes, on their way back to the Valleys, visited
their brethren in the Italian towns; for at that time there were few
cities in the peninsula in which the Vaudois were not to be found.
The grandfather of the Vaudois historian, Gilles, in one of these
pastoral visits to Venice, was assured by the Waldenses whom he there
conversed with, that there were not fewer than 6,000 of their nation
in that city. Fear had not yet awakened the suspicions and kindled the
hatred of the Romanists, for the Reformation was not yet come. Nor did
the Waldenses care to thrust their opinions upon the notice of their
neighbours. Still the priests could not help observing that the manners
of these northern settlers were, in many things, peculiar and strange.
They eschewed revels and fêtes; they had their children taught by
foreign schoolmasters; in their churches was neither image nor lighted
taper; they never went on pilgrimage; they buried their dead without
the aid of the priests; and never were they known to bring a candle
to the Virgin’s shrine, or purchase a mass for the help of their dead
relatives. These peculiarities were certainly startling, but one thing
went far to atone for them--they paid with the utmost punctuality and
fidelity their stipulated tithes; and as the value of their lands was
yearly increasing, there was a corresponding yearly increase in both
the tithe due to the priest and the rent payable to the landlord, and
neither was anxious to disturb a state of things so beneficial to
himself, and which was every day becoming more advantageous.[82]
But in the middle of the sixteenth century the breath of Protestantism
from the North began to move over these colonies. The pastors who
visited them told them of the synod which had been held in Angrogna in
1532, and which had been as the “beginning of months” to the ancient
Church of the Valleys. More glorious tidings still did they communicate
to the Christians of Calabria. In Germany, in France, in Switzerland,
and in Denmark the old Gospel had blazed forth in a splendour unknown
to it for ages. The Lamp of the Alps was no longer the one solitary
light in the world: around it was a circle of mighty torches, whose
rays, blending with those of the older luminary, were combining to
dispel the night from Christendom. At the hearing of these stupendous
things their spirit revived: their past conformity appeared to them
like cowardice; they, too, would take part in the great work of the
emancipation of the nations, by making open confession of the truth.
No longer content with the mere visit of a pastor, they petitioned the
mother Church to send them one who might permanently discharge amongst
them the office of the holy ministry.[83]
There was at that time a young minister at Geneva, a native of Italy,
and him the Church of the Valleys designated to the perilous but
honourable post. His name was Jean Louis Paschale; he was a native
of Coni, in the Plain of Piedmont. By birth a Romanist, his first
profession was that of arms; but from a knight of the sword he had
become, like Loyola, though in a truer sense, a knight of the Cross.
He had just completed his theological studies at Lausanne. He was
betrothed to a young Piedmontese Protestant, Camilla Guèrina.[84]
“Alas!” she sorrowfully exclaimed, when he intimated to her his
departure for Calabria, “so near to Rome and so far from me.” They
parted, nevermore to meet on earth.
The young minister carried with him to Calabria the energetic spirit
of Geneva. His preaching was with power; the zeal and courage of the
Calabrian flock revived, and the light formerly hid under a bushel was
now openly displayed. Its splendour attracted the ignorance and awoke
the fanaticism of the region. The priests, who had tolerated a heresy
that had conducted itself so modestly, and paid its dues so punctually,
could be blind no longer. The Marquis of Spinello, who had been the
protector of these colonists hitherto, finding his kindness more than
repaid in the flourishing condition of his states, was compelled to
move against them. “That dreadful thing, Lutheranism,” he was told,
“had broken in, and would soon destroy all things.”
The marquis summoned the pastor and his flock before him. After a few
moments’ address from Paschale, the marquis dismissed the members
of the congregation with a sharp reprimand, but the pastor he threw
into the dungeons of Foscalda. The bishop of the diocese next took
the matter into his own hands, and removed Paschale to the prison of
Cosenza, where he was confined eight months.
The Pope heard of the case, and delegated Cardinal Alexandrini,
Inquisitor-General, to extinguish the heresy in the Kingdom of
Naples.[85] Alexandrini ordered Paschale to be removed from the Castle
of Cosenza, and conducted to Naples. On the journey he was subjected
to terrible sufferings. Chained to a gang of prisoners--the handcuffs
so tight that they entered the flesh--he spent nine days on the road,
sleeping at night on the bare earth, which was exchanged on his
arrival at Naples for a deep, damp dungeon,[86] the stench of which
almost suffocated him.
[Illustration: PARTING OF PASCHALE FROM HIS BETROTHED.]
On the 16th of May, 1560, Paschale was taken in chains to Rome, and
imprisoned in the Torre di Nona, where he was thrust into a cell not
less noisome than that which he had occupied at Naples.
His brother, Bartolomeo, having obtained letters of recommendation,
came from Coni to procure, if possible, some mitigation of his fate.
The interview between the two brothers, as told by Bartolomeo, was most
affecting. “It was quite hideous to see him,” says he, “with his bare
head, and his hands and arms lacerated by the small cords with which
he was bound, like one about to be led to the gibbet. On advancing to
embrace him I sank to the ground. ‘My brother,’ said he, ‘if you are a
Christian, why do you distress yourself thus? Do you know that a leaf
cannot fall to the ground without the will of God? Comfort yourself in
Christ Jesus, for the present troubles are not worthy to be compared
with the glory to come.’” His brother, a Romanist, offered him half
his fortune if only he would recant, and save his life. Even this
token of affection could not move him. “Oh, my brother!” said he, “the
danger in which you are involved gives me more distress than all that I
suffer.”[87]
He wrote to his affianced bride with a pen which, if it softened the
picture of his own great sufferings, freely expressed the affection he
bore for her, which “grows,” said he, “with that I feel for God.” Nor
was he unmindful of his flock in Calabria. “My state is this,” says
he, in a letter which he addressed to them, “I feel my joy increase
every day, as I approach nearer the hour in which I shall be offered a
sweet-smelling sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ, my faithful Saviour;
yea, so inexpressible is my joy that I seem to myself to be free from
captivity, and am prepared to die for Christ, and not only once, but
ten thousand times, if it were possible; nevertheless, I persevere in
imploring the Divine assistance by prayer, for I am convinced that
man is a miserable creature when left to himself, and not upheld and
directed by God.”[88]