He gave them twenty days to sell their lands and leave the town or to attend Catholic mass. In 1655 Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy renewed the persecution. A series of attacks were made on the group before Charles I, Duke of Savoy intervened to bring peace to his lands. The group was excommunicated from the church after refusing to conform to Catholicism. In 1487, shortly after the Crusades in Southern France, Pope Innocent VIII turned his focus to the Waldensians in Northern Italy.

Also known as Milton’s “Sonnet 18,” “On the Late Massacre at Piedmont” has been described by the famous essayist William Hazlitt as filled with “prophetic fury.”įord Madox Brown's painting Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, depicting Milton (left), Cromwell and Andrew Marvell preparing their response to the massacre ' On the Late Massacre in Piedmont' is a sonnet by the English poet John Milton inspired by the Easter massacre of Waldensians in Piedmont by the troops of Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy in April 1655. The triple tyrant that from these may grow O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth sway The vales redoubled to the hills, and they Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones įorget not: in thy book record their groans Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,Įven them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Iambic pentameter of sonnet 18