590 Nine Bishops rejected the communion of the Pope, as heretical, and this schism, we are told by another author, began even in the year 553.
604 On the death of Pope Gregory, Boniface III. styled himself "universal Bishop," and the worship of images became general; but long before this period, in the fourth century, Socrates the historian speaks of the Novations having churches at Constantinople, Nice, Nicomedia, and Coticæus in Phrygia, &c. as well as a church at Carthage, the doctrines and discipline of which, we find that Dionysius, Bishop of' Alexandria, and Fabius, Bishop of Antioch, approved of.
660 Some persons have supposed that the Valdenses have derived their name from Petro Valdo, but Reinerius Sacco, an inquisitor who lived 80 years after Valdo of Lyons, admits that they flourished 500 years before the time of this celebrated reformer, i. e. about the year 660. Some of these Valdenses, like the Novations, we find called Puritans, or Gathari; when Paulinus, Bishop of Aquilæia, and other Italian Bishops, condemned the decrees of the second Council of Nice, which had confirmed image worship.
817 Claude, Bishop of Turin, (and of the Vallies of Piedmont inhabited by the Valdenses,) was zealous against this idolatrous practice, and bears witness that the gospel was preserved amongst these mountaineers in its native purity and glorious light. Genebrand and Rorenco (Roman Catholic writers) have owned that the Patarines* and inhabitants of Piedmont preserved the opinions of Claude during the ninth and tenth centuries.
* Patarines, so called from Pataria, a place near Milan, where those Vaudois who took part with the Bishop of Milan against the Roman Pontiff, Nicholas II., held communion together. See the Sermon of Archbishop Wake, preached for the relief of the Vaudois, A.D. 1669, at St. James's Westminster.
1026 Thus before 1026, and 500 years previous to our own reformation, says Dr. Allix, we discover a body of men called Patarines, Valdenses, or Cathari, whose belief was contrary to the doctrines of the See of Rome. In 1040, the Patarines were very numerous at Milan, (Voltaire speaks of them in his General History, 1100 chap. 69.) In 1100, the Valdenses became well known by the "Noble Leycon," and another work, entitled "Qual Cosa Sia l'Antichrist."