ABSTRACT
The people of the Valtelline were strictly, even bigotedly Catholic, while their masters, the Graubundners, were partly Protestant, partly Catholic, and in both cases of a very deep dye. The political development of Europe at the opening of the seventeenth century was about to raise the Valtelline to a point of the highest importance. Since the triumph of the Protestant party at Bergiin, Thusis, and Davos, the Valtelline had been even more harshly governed in Protestant interests than heretofore. The sole support, therefore, which the Grisons found in their projected attempt to recover the Valtelline was the 3200 men furnished by Bern and Zurich, and the money and munitions which Venice promised. The policy of the Court of Madrid was peace in Italy. The Pope too felt the gravest alarm at the prospect of a conflagration; and so, to avoid a war over the Valtelline, he proposed the sequestration—the “depositum as it was called—of that valley into his own hands.
