city or its laws; they knew what they owed to the Bishop, how defenceless they would have been without him, and what immunities his presence and influence had secured. But they would not because of past favours submit to present wrongs, especially to the wrong which the freeborn man most resents, the loss of his freedom. Hence, Geneva read the situation with other eyes than the House of Savoy, and resolved not to change its religion but to preserve its liberty.
Its leaders were men like Philibert Berthelier, a genuine Genevan, self-indulgent, not free from vice, but brave, prudent, patriotic, by his death helping to redeem the city he loved; Bezanson Hugues, a statesman, pure and high-minded, incapable of meanness or cowardice, a devout Catholic, yet a strenuous republican, whose policy was to check the Savoyard by a Swiss confederacy or a joint citizenship with Swiss allies; François de Bonivard, Abbot of St Victor, a humanist with the gift of speech and of letters, a kind of provincial Erasmus, with a graphic pen and a faculty for witty epigram, yet with a courage that neither the fear nor the experience of a prison could damp. The patriots were known as "Eyguenots(tm) confederates, men who had bound themselves by an oath to stand together and serve the common cause; the Savoyard party were termed "Mamelukes" because, as Bonivard tells us, "they surrendered freedom and the public weal that they might submit to tyranny, as the Mamelukes denied Christ that they might follow Mohammad."
The battle was fought with splendid tenacity; the patriots, as became loyal Catholics, first tried to coerce the Bishop by appeals to Rome and Vienne, and failed. Left face to face with Savoy, they appealed to their Swiss neighbours, Bern and Freiburg, proposed to them a joint citizenship, and long negotiated concerning it in vain. Bern hung back; for, progressive and Protestant, it did not desire that the defeat of the Duke should be to the advantage of the Bishop, who at last himself took the decisive step. On August 20, 1530, Pierre de la Baume proclaimed the Genevans rebels, and called upon the Savoyard host to put down the rebellion. Bern and Freiburg took the field, and the emancipation of Geneva began. Yet it was only a beginning; the ecclesiastical question was involved in the political, though the political had till now concealed the religious. But the revolt against the Bishop could not but become a revolt against the Church. In other times it might have been the reverse, but not now. Reform was in the air; the preachers had long stormed at the gates of the city, and they had remained closed. But with-Bern helping in the front they could be kept fast no longer. They were opened, and Guillaume Farel, fiery and eloquent in speech and indomitable in spirit, preached in his fearless way. On February 8, 1534, the public opinion of Geneva pronounced for the Bernese joint citizenship, and therefore for the Reformation; and thus ended the reign of the Bishop and the chances of the House
