You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an abundance of sunshine and rain.
While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands.
In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.
But there had not been anything which, however remotely, could be construed into open rebellion. Here and there in certain small villages certain people were beginning to hint that their priests might live as simply and as unostentatiously as their parishioners; who refused (oh, memory of the ancient martyrs!) to fight when their lords went forth to war; who tried to learn a little Latin that they might read and study the Gospels for themselves; who let it be known that they did not approve of capital punishment; who denied the existence of that Purgatory which six centuries after the death of Christ had been officially proclaimed as part of the Christian Heaven; and who (a most important detail) refused to surrender a tenth of their income to the Church.
Whenever possible the ring leaders of such rebellions against clerical authority were sought out and sometimes, if they were deaf to persuasion, they were discreetly put out of the way.
But the evil continued to spread and finally it was deemed necessary to call together a meeting of all the bishops of the Provence to discuss what measures should be taken to put a stop to this very dangerous and highly seditious agitation. They duly convened and continued their debates until the year 1056.
By that time it had been plainly shown that the ordinary forms of punishment and excommunication did not produce any noticeable results. The simple country folk who desired to lead a “pure life” were delighted whenever they were given a chance to demonstrate their principles of Christian charity and forgiveness behind the locked doors of a jail and if perchance they were condemned to death, they marched to the stake with the meekness of a lamb. Furthermore, as always happens in such cases, the place left vacant by a single martyr was immediately occupied by a dozen fresh candidates for holiness.
Almost an entire century was spent in the quarrels between the papal delegates who insisted upon more severe persecutions and the local nobility and clergy who (knowing the true nature of their subjects) refused to comply with the orders from Rome and protested that violence only encouraged the heretics to harden their souls against the voice of reason and therefore was a waste both of time and energy.
And then, late in the twelfth century, the movement received a fresh impetus from the north.
In the town of Lyons, connected with the Provence by way of the Rhone, there lived a merchant by the name of Peter Waldo. A very serious man, a good man, a most generous man, almost fanatically obsessed by his eagerness to follow the example of his Saviour. Jesus had taught that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich young man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Thirty generations of Christians had tried to explain just what Jesus had actually meant when he uttered these words. Not so Peter Waldo. He read and he believed. He divided whatever he had among the poor, retired from business and refused to accumulate fresh wealth.