At the time of Christ's nativity Herod the Great, learning of the birth of the child who was destined to become "king of the Jews" and fearing that his own power would thereby be usurped, ordered the wholesale slaughter of infants in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. But the Holy Family, forewarned by an angel, had already fled to safety (Flight into Egypt). The scene is usually the courtyard of Herod's palace. Soldiers with drawn swords are snatching infants from the arms of their protesting, grief-stricken mothers. The ground is littered with dead bodies. Herod watches either from a balcony or from a throne. A fleeing mother, her child hidden in the folds of her cloak, represents Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist; her escape into the hills with the infant Baptist is told in the apocryphal Book of James. A seated woman lamenting over her child's body, alludes to a passage from the book of Jeremiah (31:15), "Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted... because they were not". The medieval Church regarded this as a prefiguration of Herod's massacre. The cult of the Holy Innocents, the veneration of the children as the first martyrs, existed from very early in the Christian era. In the Middle Ages and later they might be represented as a devotional group, holding martyrs' palms, and are sometimes included in Italian Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child with saints.