Severe Persecution of the Anabaptist Waldenses in France, in the Year 1280

P. J. Twisck, having noted, in the first part of his Chronijck, for the year 1280, the doctrine of the Waldenses, whom he calls Waldois, after their leader, Peter Waldus, finally speaks of their persecutions, saying: "Matthias Illyricus, in his Register of the witnesses of the truth, says that he has in his possession the consultations of certain advocates of Avignon, also of the three bishops of Narbonne, Arles, and Aix, and of the bishop of Alban, aimed at the extermination of the Waldois, or Waldenses, and written three hundred years earlier; from which it is clear that at that time and before, a great number of the believers were scattered here and there throughout France.

"We can also gather from the consultations of the archbishops just named, that just as their number was great, so the persecution against them was also very cruel; for at the end of this consultation it is written: 'Who is so much a stranger in France as to be ignorant of the sentence of condemnation (so these papists themselves speak) which has now, for a long time, been most justly used against these heretical Waldois (Waldenses); and should we doubt a matter so notorious and common, which has cost the Catholics so much money, sweat, and labor, and has been sealed with so many condemnations and executions of unbelievers (this is what he calls the true believers)?'

"From this it appears," writes Twisck, "what massacres of believers took place at this time, and what cruelties the subjects of antichrist used against them. 'And it can be proved,' says Boxhorn, 'even from the testimony of their greatest enemies, that they declared, maintained, and testified in the midst of the fire, that they had received this faith of theirs unaltered, from hand to hand, from the times of the apostles; and they have continued even to the present time, having never been entirely exterminated.' " P. J. Twisck, Chron., page 606, columns 1, 2. [n453-1]