is good pleasure, namely
Bobbio, Villaro, Angrogna, Rorata, and the County of Bonetti, under
pain of death and confiscation of goods and houses, unless they gave
evidence within twenty days of having become Catholics." Furthermore
it was commanded that in every one even of the tolerated places there
should be regular celebration of the Holy Mass, and that there should
be no interference therewith, nor any dissuasion of any one from
turning a Catholic, also on pain of death. All the places named are
in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of
the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their
concentration into five higher up. In vain were there remonstrances
at Turin from those immediately concerned. On the 17th of April,
1655, the Marquis di Pianezza entered the doomed region with a body
of troops, mainly Piedmontese, but with French and Irish among them.
There was resistance, fighting, burning, pillaging, flight to the
mountains, and chasing and murdering for eight days, Saturday, April
24, being the climax. The names of about three hundred of those
murdered individually are on record, with the ways of the deaths of
many of them. Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on
spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked,
tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled
and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six
ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained
variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of
Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives
were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and
starving; and not a few, women and infants especially, perished amid
the snows. On the 27th of April some of the remaining Protestant
pastors and others, gathered together somewhere, addressed a circular
letter to Protestants outside the Valleys, stating the hard case of
the survivors. "Our beautiful and flourishing churches," they said,
"are utterly lost, and that without remedy, unless God Almighty work
miracles for us. Their time is come, and our measure is full. O have
pity upon the desolations of Jerusalem, and be grieved for the
afflictions of poor Joseph! Shew the real effects of your
compassions, and let your bowels yearn for so many thousands of poor
souls who are reduced to a morsel of bread for following the Lamb
whithersoever