Fattening itself along the trade routes of southern Europe sat Lyons, France, a center of the silk trade in the region.
Fattening his own fortunes there was a wealthy young banker and merchant named Peter Waldo (?-1217). In 1160, he was stunned by the death of a guest at one of his banquets. Peter had also been impressed by the message of a Troubadour who related the legend of Saint Alexius, the penitent scion of a noble family who refused a bride and went into self-imposed exile and poverty. Alexius returned to his home years later, destitute and unknown.
Waldo consulted the local theological minds about this story and was directed to the saying of the Lord Jesus, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow Me” (Mt. 19:21). In 1173, he sold his property and gave away all the proceeds except what he needed to care for his wife, and sent his two daughters to a monastery. Thereafter, in class-conscious feudal Europe, he stepped down and began to preach to the common people.
What saved Peter from being swallowed up in Dark Ages monasticism was his emphasis on the Word of God. At some point in those early years, while he still had the discretionary income to do so, he obtained a copy of the Scriptures and employed two clerks to translate it into the Romance dialect. Portions of these hand-written translations are still preserved. This Bible is called the Romaunt or Gallic Version.
Peter was a leader and an organizer, and soon had a band of co-workers who were styled “the poor in spirit,” or “the poor of Lyons.” Their initial intent was not to become a protest movement. They really had two requests: freedom to preach as laymen, and permission to produce Bible translations in the vernacular of the common people.
In 1179, they crossed the mountains in order to present their cause in Rome at the Third Lateran Council. A Welshman named Walter Map was appointed to interview them. He remarked that they spoke with such naivete that he often had to laugh out loud. He said he felt like a fowler who spread his net in plain view of his prey. Pope Alexander III allowed the “Poor of Lyons” to maintain vows of poverty, but they were denied permission to preach as laymen unless they were expressly invited to preach by the local clergyman.
At first they thought they could live with this arrangement, but soon realized that the dissolute clergymen of their region made poor supervisors. They went preaching with or without an invitation. In 1184, Pope Lucius III had them excommunicated for their insubordination. Peter did not want to leave the established church; he was forced out. So he went from being a reformer, to a separatist, to a schismatic. Stephan de Borbonne called him a man “who was driven from Lyons and went over to the Italian side of the mountains where he sowed and drank in heresy.”
By this time, he had made contact with other believers living among the valleys of the Alps on the boundary between France and Italy. On the west side of the range the believers in French soil were called Albigenses, probably because of their proximity to the city of Albi. Within Italy, their accusers called them Waldenses. It is popularly assumed that they are named after Peter Waldo. Both groups were known as Vaudois by the French and the Valdes by the Italians. One of them described his fellowship as “the little flock of Christians referred to falsely and with false names as p.o.v.o.b.” The initials probably stood for “Picards or Waldensians or Beghards,” all of which were such inflammatory labels that it was unsafe to write them out in full.
Among these believers Peter found large agreement, so much so that Peter’s new work was associated with the older movement. The Inquisitor, Rainier Sacconi bitterly complained, “These heretics have always had many sects among them; but of all that ever existed, none was more pernicious to the church of God than the Poor of Lyons…they existed already in the days of Sylvester, others referring them even to the time of the apostles.”
Where were the Waldensians doctrinally? We cannot assume that everyone burned at the stake or hurled off a cliff by the magistrates of the Middle Ages was a Bible-believing Christian. Just as we are surrounded by weird and strange ideas today, so there were unsound teachers then. It would be unwise for us, at this late date, to vouch for the orthodoxy of people we are so far removed from. But in the case of the Waldensians, we believe they were the most strictly biblical group of believers of the Middle Ages. For instance, while the Inquisition accused the Cathari and Albigenses of fundamental error, they affirmed that the Waldenses were sound on the basic doctrines of Scripture. Their complaint against them was not about their doctrines as much as their stubborn resistance to papal authority.
The Waldenses were evangelical in the best sense of the word, sending out young men in pairs on missionary trips. The fact that these men were usually unmarried has given currency to the accusation that the Waldensians forbad marriage. But this was not true. The Waldensians, as an ethnic group, persist in the south of France and in the north of Italy to this day. So if these people had taught that marriage and child-bearing were evil, there must have certainly been many backsliders among them.
John Darby noted that many of their beliefs were in reaction to errors of the state church. “The infamy of the clergy, degraded by species of vice which none can call in question, had roused the conscience of many, and more as to practice and the acts by which they made money than as to dogma. But purgatory, consecration to the priesthood, and indulgences, confession to priests, prayers for the dead, were all rejected.”
James’ epistle was a favorite among these saints. In a child’s teaching manual they asked, “How many kinds of faith are there?” The answer was, “Two, dead and alive!” A Waldensian tract includes this poem:
“Saint James has shown and said quite plain
That no man is saved by faith alain;
If faith is mingled not with deed
Then vain it is and surely dead.
Saint Paul confirms this language brave
That what one hears can not him save;
If with man’s faith works join not hand
Then goes he not to gloryland.”
This lines up with the accusation of the inquisitor Sacconi, “They preach much from the Gospels and say among other things that a man should do no evil, nor lie, nor swear. When they preach from the Gospels and Epistles they corrupt them with their explanations, as masters of error who know not to sit at the feet of truth, teaching and expounding the Scriptures being wholly forbidden to layfolk. They say that their church is the true church and that the Roman church is not a true Church but is the Church of malignants. They reprobate Church wealth and ecclesiastical ‘regalia’ or the high feudal privileges of bishops and abbots. They seek to abolish all ecclesiastical privilege and they maintain no one should be compelled to the faith…They condemn the Church’s sacraments and say that a priest who lives in mortal sin cannot make the body of Christ, that transubstantiation takes place not in the hands of the priest…but in the mind of him who received it worthily.” And all of this from Rainier Sacconi, who was formerly among the “heretics,” but in the time of persecution left them and became a Dominican and an Inquisitor. From such sources we have to conclude that the real transgression of the Vaudois was their refusal to honor the authority of the popes and their traditions.
The evident success of this missionary movement infuriated the papacy. The ever clever Pope Innocent III did more than fret about “innumerable” Waldenses in the south of France. In 1208, he sponsored the Albigensian crusade by offering indulgences, and possibly cities and lands, to the conquerors. The man who led this glut was a military prodigy named Simon De Montfort. This was nothing else than genocidal slaughter of whole communities where the Albigensian and Waldensian believers were active. With John Milton we can also pray:
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.
The Waldenses saw evident success in the work of the gospel. This progress is known today by reading page after page from the old book, Martyr’s Mirror. By the sixteenth century, there were functioning congregations in Bavaria, Bohemia, England, France, Italy, Poland, Swabia, and Switzerland. An evangelist claimed that there were as many as 13,000 Waldenses believers in Austria. And where was Waldo at this time? He was out preaching in the hill country of Austria, and for a brief time in Germany. His travels finally brought him to Bohemia where the evangelistic work was prospering.
In 1216, Pope Innocent III died. In 1217, the exile, Peter Waldo, was mercifully taken to his eternal home from the land of Bohemia. Back in Occitania, Simon de Montfort had his skull crushed by a stone from a catapult on June 25, 1218, so ending that crusade. But in 1220, the corporation of Pinerol forbade any to open their homes to the travelling Waldenses.
In 1226, Francis of Assisi died at the age of 44. His life mirrored Waldo’s. E. H. Broadbent says, “The likeness turned to contrast when the one was accepted and the other rejected by the organized religion of Rome. The inward relation to the Lord may have remained the same, but the working out of the two lives differed widely.The Franciscans being absorbed into the Roman system helped to bind men to it, while Waldo and his band of preachers directed multitudes of souls to the Scriptures, where they learned to draw for themselves fresh and inexhaustible supplies from the ‘wells of salvation.'”
In 1229, the Council of Toulouse commanded every boy over fourteen and every girl over twelve to take an oath to report all heretics. This really signaled the beginning of the Inquisition. Between 1230 and 1250, the Dominican friars became a chief instrument of combatting the “heretics” and the Inquisition began to steamroll across Europe as an engine of persecution.
By 1250, the Romaunt Version was widely distributed. The Dominican monk, Etienne de Bourbon, complained, “I have seen some lay-folk so steeped in their doctrines that they could repeat by heart great portions of the Evangelists, such as Matthew and Luke, especially all that is said in them of Christ’s teaching and sayings, so that they could repeat them without a halt and with hardly a word wrong here or there.”
In 1260, a priest wrote, “In Lombardy, Provence, and elsewhere, the heretics had more schools than the theologians, and far more hearers. They disputed openly, and called the people to solemn meetings in the marketplaces or in the open fields. No one dared to hinder them, on account of the power and number of their admirers.”
In 1263, Pope Gregory IX made this pronouncement: “We excommunicate and anathematize all heretics, Cathars, Patarenes, Poor Men of Lyons, Passaagini, Josepini, Arnaldistae, Speronistae, and others, by whatever names they may be known, having indeed different faces, but being united by their tails, and meeting in the same point through their vanity.”
In 1299, the Romaunt Version was condemned at the Council of Toulouse. A verse used to forbid reading the Scriptures was taken from Exodus 19, “Whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death” (Ex. 19:12). But the mount that Peter Waldo and his friends had climbed was not Sinai. They had “come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant…” (Heb. 12:22-24).
Material for this article was taken from:
Philip Schaff History of the Christian Church, Eerdman, Vol. V
Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy, Blackwell
Peter Allix, Ecclesiastical History of the Ancient Churches of Piedmont and of the Albigenses
Verduin, Anatomy of a Hybrid, Eerdman
Martyrs’ Mirror, Herald Press
J. A. Wyle, History of the Waldenses, Historical Tales for Young Protestants, Protestant Church Society
J. N. Darby, The Vaudois, Collected Writings, Vol. 20, Bible Truth Publishers