AHC/WI: Wank the Waldensians

As the tin says, your challenge is to wank the Waldensians and make them a major Christian branch. What would the impact be due to an earlier challenge to Catholic domination?
 
Send your chaplain to study religious tech and wait for the "heretic councillor" event, then convert.

More seriously, Waldensianism was bound to be persecuted in medieval Europe, especially at the time of the Crusades. The valuing of voluntary poverty means it's also largely going to spread among the lower classes rather than the nobility. I think your best bet is to somehow get a significantly bigger community of Waldensians to the New World during the age of colonization.

Basically posit a scenario where you have Waldensians landing in New England rather than Puritans. Maybe they manage to buy passage on a couple ships out of Genoa; apparently the Piedmont area was something of a Waldensian stronghold. If their colonies thrive, you could end up with an Italian-speaking mostly-Waldensian North America.
 
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Mmmm, as planet of Hats says a Medieval success seems unfeasible, unless they turn into something like the Franciscans. It would not be a denomination, but a religious order, so a bit different than what you ask.
A possibility would be a much stronger Duchy of Savoy that comes to control Genoa and somehow acquires a colony in the New World and uses the Waldensian minority to populate it. It is not going to be anything more than a footnote in history in most plausible scenarios though...
Or they survive as iotl until the Reformation, which somehow spreads more to Italy, leading one of the Dukes of Savoy (or Montferrat) to adopt a Calvinist-influenced form of waldensianism (something like today's Chiesa Evangelica Valdese) as its State Religion (they were formally part of the HRE, weren't they? You need to dreastically weaken the Roman Catholic Church however, which by itself would bring much more significant butterflies than a Waldensian Piedmont.
 
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In my TL "Sweet Lands of Liberty," I have a Savoyard protect them after one prayed over his daughter, IIRC, and the Savoyard protection, as Yanez points out, helps them a fair deal. It's actually a Waldensian Reformation in my TL< though it takes a while and involves a few other twists of fate. Savoy basically becomes like OTL Switzerland with the Swiss Confederation added in.
 
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