through their whole history, and especially after the Reformation; but, on the whole, the two last Dukes of Savoy, and also Christine, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and Duchess-Regent through the minority of her son, the present Duke, had protected them in their privileges, even while extirpating Protestantism in the rest of the Piedmontese dominions.  Latterly, however, there had been a passion at Turin and at Rome for their conversion to the Catholic faith, and priests had been traversing their valleys for the purpose.  The murder of one such priest, and some open insults to the Catholic worship, about Christmas 1654, are said to have occasioned what followed.

On the 25th of January, 1654-5, an edict was issued, under the authority of the Duke of Savoy, “commanding and enjoining every head of a family, with its members, of the pretended Reformed Religion, of what rank, degree, or condition soever, none excepted, inhabiting and possessing estates in the places of Luserna, Lucernetta, San Giovanni, La Torre, Bubbiana, and Fenile, Campiglione, Briccherassio, and San Secondo, within three days, to withdraw and depart, and be, with their families, withdrawn, out of the said places, and transported into the places and limits marked out for toleration by his Royal Highness during his good pleasure, namely Bobbio,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,