But if there were hearts in the valley of Aosta ready to receive the Gospel, there were others determined to resist it. At the head of its opponents were two eminent men. Among the laity was Count René de Challans, marshal of Aosta, full of enthusiasm for popery and feudalism, and bursting with contempt for the heretics and republicans of Switzerland. Distressed at witnessing the reverses suffered by his master, the duke of Savoy, he had sworn that in Aosta at least he would exterminate the Lutherans. His fellow-soldier in this crusade was Pietro Gazzini, bishop of Aosta, one of the most famous prelates of Italy. Priests and devotees extolled his virtues and his learning, but what distinguished him most was the haughty temper and domineering humor which so often characterizes the priests of Rome. Gazzini was a canon of the Lateran, the first patriarchal church of the west, and served as the channel between the duke and the pope. He was at Rome when evangelical doctrine began to spread in his diocese, and he then tried to manage that the council, which was to put an end to heresy, should be held in the states of the duke his master.[825] He even carried his ambition for his sovereign very far. 'It was becoming,' he told the pontiff, 'that the direction of the council should be given to the duke of Savoy by the emperor and the king of France.'[826] The direction of a council given to a secular prince by the pope and two other secular princes is an idea apparently not in strict harmony with the theocratic omnipotence of the pontiff, which many men boast of so loudly. In the bishop's absence there was a person at Aosta quite worthy of supplying his place: this was the guardian of the Franciscan monastery, Antonio Savion (Antonius de Sapientibus), a well-informed, zealous man, who afterwards became general of the order, and was one of the fathers of the Council of Trent. Savion uttered a cry of alarm. One day, when Gazzini was performing his duties in the basilica of St. John, he received letters describing the state of affairs at Aosta. The alarmed prelate did not hesitate. 'When Calvin's heresy was penetrating into his diocese,' said Besson, the Savoyard priest, 'he hastened to block up the road.'[827] As soon as the bishop arrived, he visited every parish with indefatigable diligence; he went into the pulpits and 'kept the people in sound doctrine by his sermons.'[828] He told them that 'Satan was prowling about, like a roaring lion, to devour them; that they must therefore keep a strict watch and drive back the ferocious beast.' To these exhortations he added censures, monitions, and excommunications. All readers of Holy Scripture were to be driven from the fold of the church.