In the territories of this young prince, in the Piedmontese valleys of Luserna, Perosa, and San Martino, on the east side of the Cottian Alps, lived the remarkable people known as the Vaudois or Waldenses. From time immemorial these obscure mountaineers, speaking a peculiar Romance tongue of their own, had kept themselves distinct from the Church of Rome, maintaining doctrines and forms of worship of such a kind that, after the Lutheran Reformation, they were regarded as primitive Protestants who had never swerved from the truth through the darkest ages, and could therefore be adopted with acclamation into the general Reformed communion. The Reformation, indeed; had penetrated into their valleys, rendering them more polemical for their faith, and more fierce against the Church of Rome, than they had been before. They had experienced persecutions 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.