Peter Waldo (died around 1205–1218) was a wealthy merchant from Lyon, France, who gave away his fortune around 1173 to follow Jesus in poverty. He paid to have parts of the Bible translated into the everyday language of his region and sent lay preachers out two by two. When church leaders ordered him to stop, he kept preaching. His followers, the Waldensians, survived centuries of persecution in the Alps, joined the Protestant Reformation in 1532, and still exist today.
A Rich Merchant in Lyon
In the late 1100s, Lyon was a busy trading city on the Rhône River, and one of its most successful citizens was a merchant named Valdes. Contemporary sources call him simply Valdes (or Valdesius in Latin). The first name “Peter” shows up only in much later writings, more than a century after his death, and “Waldo” is an English form of his name. Some sources say he grew rich partly through moneylending, a business the medieval church viewed with deep suspicion. He was married and had two daughters.
A chronicle written by an anonymous monk of Laon dates his conversion to 1173 and tells a memorable story. One Sunday, Valdes stopped to listen to a street singer performing the legend of Saint Alexius, a rich young man who left everything to live as a poor pilgrim. Deeply moved, Valdes took the singer home to hear more. The next morning he went to a theology teacher and asked how he could be saved. The teacher pointed him to Jesus’ words to a rich young man.
Matthew 19:21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Valdes took Jesus at his word. Later accounts add that the sudden death of a friend also shook him, though that detail is less certain. What is clear is what he did next. He provided for his wife, placed his daughters in a convent at Fontevraud, repaid people he had wronged in business, and gave the rest away to the poor. During a severe famine around 1176, he handed out bread to the hungry in the streets of Lyon. His neighbors thought he’d lost his mind. One account says he told them he was freeing himself from the money that had enslaved him.
Scripture in the Language of the People
Giving away his money wasn’t the most radical thing Valdes did. He wanted to know exactly what Jesus had said, but the only Bible the Western church used was the Latin Vulgate, and he couldn’t read it well. Like most laypeople, he depended on clergy to tell him what God’s Word meant.
So he paid for a translation. According to Stephen of Bourbon, a Dominican writer of the next generation, Valdes hired a priest named Stephen of Anse to translate the Gospels and other books of the Bible, along with sayings from church fathers like Augustine and Jerome, into the Franco-Provençal dialect of the Lyon region. A young scribe named Bernard Ydros wrote it down. It wasn’t a complete Bible, but it was a breakthrough. Valdes read these passages again and again and memorized large portions.
Then he began to share them. He spoke in streets and squares, explaining what he had learned, and others wanted to join him. Valdes believed God’s Word had power to change ordinary people, not just scholars and priests. Paul says the same thing about how faith begins.
Romans 10:17 Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.
That conviction, that ordinary believers should hear and understand Scripture for themselves, would become one of the most important threads in the story of the Reformation.
The Poor of Lyon Go to Rome
A small community formed around Valdes. Men and women gave up their property and traveled two by two, as Jesus sent out his disciples, preaching repentance and the simple teaching of the Gospels. They called themselves the Poor in Spirit; others called them the Poor of Lyon. Their lifestyle looked a lot like the one Francis of Assisi would embrace a generation later. The difference would come down to obedience to church authority.
Preaching was officially reserved for ordained clergy, and the archbishop of Lyon was uneasy. In 1179, Valdes and some followers went to Rome during the Third Lateran Council to ask Pope Alexander III for approval. The pope embraced Valdes and approved his vow of poverty, but he ruled that the group could preach only with permission from local clergy. An English churchman at the council, Walter Map, wrote a mocking account of questioning a few of them and found them, in his view, simple and unlearned.
Valdes didn’t set out to start a rival church. In 1180, at a church gathering in Lyon led by the papal legate Henry of Marcy, he signed an orthodox profession of faith that affirmed the Catholic creeds and sacraments. He wanted to stay inside the church. He just wanted to keep preaching.
Obeying God Rather Than Men
Permission didn’t come. A new archbishop of Lyon, Jean Bellesmains, forbade the Poor to preach. Valdes answered with words he took straight from Scripture, and they became the movement’s motto.
Acts 5:29 Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!”
Around 1182 or 1183, the archbishop expelled Valdes and his followers from Lyon. Then in 1184, at a council in Verona, Pope Lucius III issued a decree called Ad abolendam that condemned several groups as heretics, including the Poor of Lyon, for preaching without authorization. It’s worth being fair here. Church leaders weren’t simply opposing the Bible; they feared that untrained preachers would spread error, and the twelfth century was full of competing movements, including the Cathars, whose teaching really did depart from historic Christian faith. But the result was that a group trying to obey Jesus was pushed outside the church.
Scattered, the Waldensians spread into southern France, northern Italy, Germany, and beyond. Some, called the Poor Lombards, developed their own leadership, and by 1205 they had split from the followers in France. Valdes himself fades from view. He probably died sometime between 1205 and 1218; when the two branches met in Bergamo in 1218 to try to reconcile, they spoke of him as already dead. No one knows where he is buried.
Surviving in the Alpine Valleys
For the next three centuries, the Waldensians lived as a hidden church. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 condemned heresy again, and inquisitors hunted Waldensians across Europe. Many were imprisoned or burned. The movement survived best in the high valleys of the Cottian Alps, west of Turin in what is now Italy, and in pockets of southern France.
Their traveling preachers, called barbes (meaning “uncles”), moved quietly from village to village, often disguised as merchants or peddlers. They memorized whole books of Scripture, heard confessions, and taught families the faith. Many Waldensians outwardly attended Catholic Mass while meeting secretly in homes. Over time they rejected purgatory, prayers for the dead, and oaths, and they insisted that Scripture should judge church tradition. Not every Waldensian belief matched later Protestant teaching, but their love for the Bible prepared them for what was coming. The broader story of these believers is told in how the hidden church preserved the gospel before the Reformation, and it continues in Lesson 2 with an Oxford scholar who also put Scripture in the people’s language.
When news of the Protestant Reformation reached the Alps, the barbes sent representatives to meet Reformed leaders. In September 1532, at Chanforan in the Angrogna valley, the Waldensians held a synod with the Reformer Guillaume Farel and voted to join the Reformation. They also agreed to fund a new French Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek by Pierre Robert Olivétan, a cousin of John Calvin (see Lesson 8). That Bible, printed in 1535, carried a preface by Calvin himself.
Massacre, Return, and a Living Church
Joining the Reformation brought fresh waves of persecution. In 1545, troops destroyed Waldensian villages in Provence, killing many hundreds and possibly thousands. The most notorious attack came on April 24, 1655, during Easter week, when forces of the Duke of Savoy under the Marquis of Pianezza turned on the Waldensians of Piedmont. The number killed is debated, but it ran into the hundreds, and many accounts put it around 1,700. The cruelty, including attacks on women and children, shocked Protestant Europe.
In England, Oliver Cromwell called a national day of fasting, raised money for survivors, and sent a diplomat to protest. John Milton, who served Cromwell’s government, wrote one of his most famous sonnets, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” which begins with the plea, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints.” His poem echoes the cry of the martyrs in Revelation.
Revelation 6:9-10 When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?”
In 1686 the Waldensians were expelled from their valleys altogether, and many died in prison or on the march into exile in Switzerland. In 1689 nearly a thousand armed exiles crossed the Alps back to their homeland in what they called the Glorious Return. Full civil rights finally came in 1848, when King Charles Albert of Sardinia granted them legal equality. Today the Waldensian Evangelical Church, united with Italy’s Methodists since 1975, is one of the oldest Protestant churches in the world, and Waldensian communities also exist in Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States.
What Peter Waldo Teaches Us Today
Waldo is sometimes called a forerunner of the Reformation, and that’s fair, as long as we remember that he wasn’t trying to be one. He was a businessman who read the words of Jesus and decided to obey them. That simple decision cost him his wealth, his city, and his place in the church he loved.
His life also reminds us that God’s Word belongs to every believer. Waldo trusted that ordinary people could hear the Gospels in their own language and follow Jesus, an idea later Reformers would describe as the priesthood of all believers. Most of us have more access to the Bible than Waldo could have imagined. The question is whether we’ll read it and let it rearrange our lives the way it rearranged his.
The Takeaway
Who was Peter Waldo? He was a twelfth-century merchant from Lyon who gave away his fortune to follow Jesus, paid to put Scripture in the people’s language, and kept preaching when told to stop. His followers, the Waldensians, endured centuries of persecution, joined the Reformation in 1532, and still worship today. His story challenges us to take Jesus at his word, value the Bible we hold, and obey God above all.
https://www.pursuegod.org/history-makers-of-the-reformation/