Fox's Book of Martyrs: Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant; Deaths of the Primitive Protestant MartyrsFoxe, John
HistoryHistory
Fox's Book of Martyrs: Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant; Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs
Foxe, John
Church history; Martyrs; Persecution
A great number of men, women, and children, were flung from the rocks,
and dashed to pieces. Magdalen Bertino, a protestant woman of La Torre,
was stripped stark naked, her head tied between her legs, and thrown
down one of the precipices; and Mary Raymondet, of the same town, had
the flesh sliced from her bones till she expired.
Magdalen Pilot, of Villaro, was cut to pieces in the cave of Castolus;
Ann Charboniere had one end of a stake thrust up her body; and the other
being fixed in the ground, she was left in that manner to perish, and
Jacob Perrin the elder, of the church of Villaro, and David, his
brother, were flayed alive.
An inhabitant of La Torre, named Giovanni Andrea Michialm, was
apprehended, with four of his children, three of them were hacked to
pieces before him, the soldiers asking him, at the death of every child,
if he would renounce his religion which he constantly refused. One of
the soldiers then took up the last and youngest by the legs, and putting
the same question to the father he replied as before, when the inhuman
brute dashed out the child's brains. The father, however, at the same
moment started from them, and fled: the soldiers fired after him, but
missed him; and he, by the swiftness of his heels, escaped, and hid
himself in the Alps.
_Further Persecutions in the Valleys of Piedmont, in the seventeenth
Century._
Giovanni Pelanchion, for refusing to turn papist, was tied by one leg to
the tail of a mule, and dragged through the streets of Lucerne, amidst
the acclamations of an inhuman mob, who kept stoning him, and crying
out, He is possessed with the devil, so that, neither stoning, nor
dragging him through the streets, will kill him, for the devil keeps him
alive. They then took him to the river side, chopped off his head, and
left that and his body unburied, upon the bank of the stream.
Magdalen, the daughter of Peter Fontaine, a beautiful child of ten years
of age, was ravished and murdered by the soldiers. Another girl of about
the same age, they roasted alive at Villa Nova; and a poor woman,
hearing the soldiers were coming toward her house, snatched up the
cradle in which her infant son was asleep, and fled toward the woods.
The soldiers, however, saw and pursued her, when she lightened herself
by putting down the cradle and child, which the soldiers no sooner came
to, than they murdered the infant, and continuing the pursuit, found the
mother in a cave, where they first ravished, and then cut her to pieces.
Jacob Michelino, chief elder of the church of Bobbio, and several other
protestants, were hung up by means of hooks fixed in their bellies and
left to expire in the most excruciating tortures.
Giovanni Rostagnal, a venerable protestant, upwards of fourscore years
of age, had his nose and ears cut off, and slices cut from the fleshy
parts of his body, till he bled to death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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