On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Protestant-Catholic conflict had been a feature of the European sociopolitical landscape for over a hundred years before the Piedmont Massacre. Having dominated Europe for several centuries, the Catholic Church met active opposition with the beginning of the Protestant reformation in 1517. However, proto-Protestant factions, such as the Waldensians, have existed from the 12th century.

In the 16th century, critics within and outside the clergy began to argue that Christianity be freed from what they considered the excesses and corruption of Catholic papacy. Protestantism suggested that priestly mediation was unnecessary for approaching God. The powerful Catholic Church resisted the reformation, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, Europe’s political landscape was riddled by wars between Catholic and Protestant factions. The worst of these is considered the Thirty Years’ War, lasting from 1618 to 1648. While the authority of the Holy Roman Empire was being questioned, so was that of monarchy, especially in England. In 1649, the Second Civil War of England ended with the assassination of King Charles I and the mandate that the nation would be ruled by a commonwealth instead of the monarchy. Oliver Cromwell was made Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Milton, a known Latin and European languages scholar, became Cromwell’s secretary of foreign tongues for the Council of State, a position of great influence.

Milton was politically a republican—in the sense that he supported governance by the people rather than monarchy—and religiously closer to Puritanism, an even more austere and simple form of Christianity than Protestantism. In 1655, Milton learnt about the persecution of the Waldensians, a small sect of Protestants who lived in the Alps. Ordered by the French Catholic Duke of Savoy to leave the plains of Piedmont where they were settled, the Waldensians were forced into the mountains. On April 24, 1655, Piemontese soldiers cornered the Waldensians and massacred them. At least 1,700 Waldensians, including infants, were tortured and killed in the incident. Milton was deeply anguished by the barbarity, and the poet’s anger and pain suffuse “Sonnet 18,” its sound devices and truncated rhythms recalling the martyrs’ agony.

Milton’s official condemnation of the incident, written on Cromwell’s behalf, was relatively measured. However, his anger grew after Sir Samuel Morland, Cromwell’s special envoy to the Duke of Savoy, returned to London with all the grisly details of the terrible event. “Sonnet 18” vents all the rage Milton could not expend in his political correspondence. Although “Sonnet 18” seems largely about freedom of religious belief, it also reflects Milton’s distaste for tyranny of all kinds. One of the most prominent themes of the poem is, in fact, the fight between oppression and freedom—and the ultimate triumph of the good.

The Waldensians’s namesake and founder, Peter Waldo, was a French philosopher and reformer. Born around 1140, Waldo translated the Latin Bible into French to make it more accessible to people, and he preached despite lacking formal clerical training. He also urged for reform in the Catholic Church and advocated an end to the veneration of saints. As the simple, strict faith gained popularity in Western Europe, the Roman Catholic Church tried to quell it, ultimately designating the Waldensians a heretic sect. By Milton’s time, the persecuted Waldensians had dwindled to a few communities in and around the French and Italian Alps. When the community around Piedmont began to gain a foothold in the valley, their massacre was ordered in 1655.