The Château and the village were the scene of the massacre in 1644 of about 700 Vaudois, or Waldensians—a reformist group declared heretical by the Catholic church.
After the settlement of Waldensian refugees who spoke the Occitan language, the place gained the name of Guardia dei Valdi.
He married Lucia van Mollem in 1704 in the Waldensian church in Utrecht, and they had one son, Hendrik (1709–1738), and one daughter, Jacoba.
Waldensians, members of a Christian sect also known as Vaudois
After reconciling with Victor Amadeus, the Waldensians returned to their land and homes in the valley.
A well-known group of letters from Pope Innocent III to the diocese of Metz, where the Waldensians were active, is sometimes taken as evidence that Bible translations were forbidden by the church, especially since Innocent's first letter was later incorporated into canon law.
Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, called for a general fast in England and proposed to send the British Navy if the massacre was not stopped while gathering funds for helping the Waldensians.
She allowed refugee Huguenots and Waldensians to settle in the county, and in 1699 founded the Waldensian settlement Charlottenberg near Holzappel which was named after her.
It was not until the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 that reconstruction work started again and Frederick Augustus brought in 220 Waldensians and Huguenots which he settled in a specially planned town coined “Augustistadt” (Augustus town) to the north of Gochsheim.
He is remembered for being responsible for the 1545 Massacre of Mérindol, engendered in part by his highly coloured accounts forwarded to Francis I of activities in the Vaudois of Protestants, and encouraged by the papacy to root out the "heretics" in the Venaissin, culminated in the massacre in which hundreds or thousands of Waldensians were killed at the order of the king.
Founded in 1298 during the Ostsiedlung in Brandenburg, the town was the site of death of the last Ascanian margrave in 1319, a center of the Waldensians movement in the 14th century, and the site of the conclusion of a Franco-Swedish alliance during the Thirty Years' War, which else virtually depopulated the town.