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Updated: June 9, 2025
The "wilderness" of the Apocalypse, we are inclined to think, is the great chain of the Alps; and the "place prepared" in that wilderness, we are also inclined to think, are the Cottian Alps, and more especially those valleys in the Cottian Alps which the confessors, known as the Vaudois, inhabited.
It sometimes, however, happened, that the persecution waxed hotter on one side of the Cottian Alps, while it temporarily relaxed on the other; and on such occasions the French and Italian Vaudois were accustomed to cross the mountain passes, and take refuge in each others' valleys.
The Goths of Osimo, four thousand warriors, with those of Fæsulæ and the Cottian Alps, were among the last who maintained their independence; and their gallant resistance, which almost tired the patience, deserved the esteem, of the conqueror.
The position of two magazines, one of them collected on the banks of the Lake of Constance, the other formed at the foot of the Cottian Alps, seemed to indicate the march of two armies; and the size of those magazines, each of which consisted of six hundred thousand quarters of wheat, or rather flour, was a threatening evidence of the strength and numbers of the enemy who prepared to surround him.
All along the valley of the Po, and over the regions of the Cottian Alps, the bull of Innocent was talked of. Charles VIII. of France and Charles II. of Savoy sanctioned its design. The year 1488 marks an era of suffering for the Vaudois and of infamy to Rome. Some 18,000 soldiers responded to the call of De Capitaneis. He forms them into two bodies.
From Treves, Decentius was obliged to retire to Sens, where he was soon surrounded by an army of Germans, whom the pernicious arts of Constantius had introduced into the civil dissensions of Rome. In the mean time, the Imperial troops forced the passages of the Cottian Alps, and in the bloody combat of Mount Seleucus irrevocably fixed the title of rebels on the party of Magnentius.
Next summer he was forced to evacuate Italy, and in 353 his destruction was completed by a defeat in the Cottian Alps. Magnentius fell upon his sword, and Constantius remained the master of the world. The Eusebians were not slow to take advantage of the confusion. The fires of controversy in the East were smouldering through the years of rest, so that it was no hard task to make them blaze afresh.
From the main ridge of the Cottian Alps, which, divide France from Italy, great mountain spurs are thrown out, which run westward as well as eastward, and enclose narrow strips of pasturage, cultivable land, and green shelves on the mountain sides, where a poor, virtuous, and hard-working race have long contrived to earn a scanty subsistence, amidst trials and difficulties of no ordinary kind, the greatest of which, strange to say, have arisen from the pure and simple character of the religion they professed.
Beyond all towered the Cottian Alps, that form the barrier between Piedmont and Dauphiny, their snowy pinnacles glittering in the rays of the newly risen sun. "It was thither the able-bodied men of the valley had gone to defend the passes against the French.
This stream is doubtless the relic of that mighty flood which covered, at some former period, the vast space between the Alps and the Apennines, from the Graian and Cottian chains on the west, to the shores of the Adriatic on the east.
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