4758, with a château and some coal mines. Waldenburg became a town in 1426.
WALDENSES. The Waldensian valleys lie to the south-west of Turin, in the direction of Monte Viso, but include no high or snowy mountains, while the glens themselves are (with one or two exceptions) fertile and well wooded. The principal town near the valleys is Pinerolo (Pignerol). Just to its south-west there opens the chief Waldensian valley, the Val Pellice, watered by the stream of that name, but sometimes called inaccurately the Luserna valley, Luserna being simply a village opposite the capital, Torre Pellice; near Torre Pellice the side glens of Angrogna and Rora join the Pellice valley. To the north-west of Pinerolo. up the Chisone valley, there opens at Perosa Argentina the valley of St Martin, another important Waldensian valley, which is watered by the Germanasca torrent, and at Perrero splits into two branches, of which the Prali glen is far more fertile than that of Massello, the latter being the wildest and most savage of all the Waldensian valleys.
The name Waldenses was given to the members of an heretical Christian sect which arose in the south of France about 1170. The history of the sects of the middle ages is obscure, because the earliest accounts of them come from those who were concerned in their suppression, and were therefore eager to lay upon each of them the worst enormities which could be attributed to any. In later times the apologists of each sect reversed the process, and cleared that in which they were interested at the expense of others. In early times these sectaries produced little literature of their own; when they produced a literature at the beginning of the 15th century they attempted to claim for it a much earlier origin. Hence there is confusion on every side; it is difficult to distinguish between various sects and to determine their exact opinions or the circumstances under which they came into being. The polemical conception which has done much to perpetuate this confusion is that of the historical continuity of Protestantism from the earliest times. According to this view the church was pure and uncorrupt till the time of Constantine, when Pope Sylvester gained the first temporal possession for the papacy, and so began the system of a rich, powerful and worldly church, with Rome for its capital. Against this secularized church a body of witnesses silently protested; they were always persecuted but always survived, till in the 13th century a desperate attempt was made by Innocent III. to root them out from their stronghold in southern France. Persecution gave new vitality to their doctrines, which passed on to Wycliffe and Huss, and through these leaders produced the Reformation in Germany and England.
This view rests upon a series of suppositions, and is entirely unhistorical. So far as can be discovered the heretical sects of the middle ages rested upon a system of Manichaeism which was imported into Europe from the East (see Manichaeism). The Manichaean system of dualism, with its severe asceticism, and its individualism, which early passed into antinomianism, was attractive to many minds in the awakening of the 11th century. Its presence in Europe can be traced in Bulgaria soon after its conversion in 862,[1] where the struggle between the Eastern and Western churches for the new converts opened a way for the more hardy speculations of a system which had never entirely disappeared, and found a home amongst the Paulicians (q.v.) in Armenia. The name of Cathari (see Cathars), taken by the adherents of this new teaching, sufficiently shows the Oriental origin of their opinions, which spread from Bulgaria amongst the Slavs, and followed the routes of commerce into central Europe. The earliest record of their presence there is the condemnation of ten canons of Orleans as Manichees in 1022, and soon after this we find complaints of the prevalence of heresy in northern Italy and in Germany. The strongholds of these heretical opinions were the great towns, the centres of civilization, because there the growing sentiment of municipal independence, and the rise of a burgher class through commerce, created a spirit of criticism which was dissatisfied with the worldly lives of the clergy and their undue influence in affairs.
The system of Catharism recognized two classes of adherents, credentes and perfecti. The perfecti only were admitted to its esoteric doctrines and to its superstitious practices. To the ordinary men it seemed to be a reforming agency, insisting on a high moral standard, and upholding the words of Scripture against the traditions of an overgrown and worldly church. Its popular aim and its rationalistic method made men overlook its real contents, which were not put clearly before them. It may be said generally that Catharism formed the abiding background of medieval heresy. Its dualistic system and its anti-social principles were known only to a few, but its anti-ecclesiastical organization formed a permanent nucleus round which gathered a great deal of political and ecclesiastical discontent. When this discontent took any independent form of expression, zeal, which was not always accompanied by discretion, brought the movement into collision with the ecclesiastical authorities, by whom it was condemned as heretical. When once it was in conflict with authority it was driven to strengthen its basis by a more pronounced hostility against the system of the church, and generally ended by borrowing something from Catharism. The result was that in the beginning of the 13th century there was a tendency to class all bodies of heretics together: partly their opinions had coalesced; partly they were assumed to be identical.
Most of these sects were stamped out before the period of the middle ages came to a close. The Waldenses, under their more modern name of the Vaudois, have survived to the present day in the valleys of Piedmont, and have been regarded as at once the most ancient and the most evangelical of the medieval sects. It is, however, by no means easy to determine their original tenets, as in the 13th and 14th centuries they were a body of obscure and unlettered peasants, hiding themselves in a corner, while in the 16th century they were absorbed into the general movement of the Reformation. As regards their antiquity, the attempts to claim for them an earlier origin than the end of the 12th century can no longer be sustained. They rested upon the supposed antiquity of a body of Waldensian literature, which modern criticism has shown to have been tampered with. The most important of these documents, a poem in Provençal, “La Nobla Leyczon,” contains two lines which claimed for it the date of 1100:—
Ben ha mil e cent anez compli entierament
Que fo scripta l' ora, car sen al derier temp.
But it was pointed out[2] that in the oldest MS. existing in the Cambridge university library the figure 4 had been imperfectly erased before the word “cent,” a discovery which harmonized with the results of a criticism of the contents of the poem itself. This discovery did away with the ingenious attempts to account for the name of Waldenses from some other source than from the historical founder of the sect, Peter Waldo or Valdez. To get rid of Waldo, whose date was known, the name Waldenses or Vallenses was derived from Vallis, because they dwelt in the valleys, or from a supposed Provençal word Vaudes, which meant a sorcerer.
Putting these views aside as unsubstantial, we will consider the relation of the Waldenses as they appear in actual history with the sects which preceded them. Already in the 9th century there were several protests against the rigidity and want of spirituality of a purely sacerdotal church. Thus Berengar of Tours (990-1088) upheld the symbolic character of the Eucharist and the superiority of the Bible over tradition. The Paterines in Milan (1045) raised a protest against simony and other abuses of the clergy, and Pope Gregory VII. did not hesitate to enlist their Puritanism on the side of the papacy and make them his allies in imposing clerical celibacy. In 1110 an apostate monk in Zeeland, Tanchelm, carried their views still farther, and asserted that the sacraments were only valid through the merits and sanctity of the ministers. In France, at Embrun, Peter de Bruys founded a sect known as Petrobrusians, who denied infant baptism, the need of consecrated churches, transubstantiation,
