Valdes, Peter

(late tenth/early eleventh Centuries)

   Sect Founder.

   Little is known of Valdes. He was a rich merchant of Lyons, France, who, having provided for his family, gave up everything to become an itinerant preacher. He attracted a group of equally high-minded people, both men and women, but, despite their orthodoxy and virtue, they were forbidden by the Church establishment to spread their message. In consequence, they set up their own separate community outside the Church. Their lives were based on Scripture and they refused to participate in war or to take oaths. Known as the Waldensians, the sect spread through southern Europe, although there was no formal leadership after Valdes’s death. They were greatly persecuted by the Inquisition from the time of Pope Innocent III, but none the less a small group still survives in Piedmont.

   J.A. Wylie, History of the Waldenses (1880).