DOCUMENTATION | Exhibitions: 1648 - War and Peace in Europe |
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| Essay Volumes > Tome I: Politics, Religion, Law and Society |
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ROBERT ORESKO AND DAVID PARROTT
Reichsitalien and the Thirty Years War |
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The Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War has been consistently neglected. Many important accounts of the war have been written from distinct nation-sate viewpoints [1] emphasising specific perspectives - French, German, Swedish, Czech - of what became a conflict which engaged all of what perceived as Christendom. Yet Italian historians have produced no equivalent studies of the role played by Italian sovereignities, many of which formed part of the Holy Roman Empire. As Von Arentin observed: "Wer über Reichsitalien in der Neuzeit schreibt, gräbt eine vergessene Geschichte aus." [2] Moreover, broader, synthetic attempts to explore the Thirty Years War from a multiplicity of viewpoints have also neglected the Italian sphere. [3] The following two articles attempt to establish the significance of the Italian theatre of war within a broad European context.
The Italian sovereignities were involved in the Thirty Years War from ist inception, the Republic of Venice, the grand duchy of Tuscany, the duchies of Savoy and Mantova and the Papacy reacted immediately to the crisis of 1618-19, while the duchy of milano and the kingdom of Naples, both governed by the Spanish branch of the House of Austria, along with such client states as the Republic of Genova, were instantly enmeshed in broader Habsburg policy. Minor sovereignities, such as Modena, Parma, Guastalla, Carrara, were inevitably implicated in the wider disputes. The Alps and the north Italian plain became critically important theatres of war, as they had been in the sixteenth century and as they would be during the eighteenth.
The Italian element of the Thirty Years War divides itself, roughly, into three phases: the crisis over the control of the Valteline passes beginning in 1620 and ending with the peace of Moncòn in 1626; the War of the Mantovan succession, ignited by the death of Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga in 1627, which streched to 1631; and the formal entry of France into the war in 1635, intensified after 1637 by the civil wars in the states of the Duke of Savoy. While the Chaos in Savoy was resolved in 1642, the conflict between France, Spain and their Italian allies continued until 1659, when the Mediterranean aspect of the Thirty Years War was concluded by the Peace of the Pyrénées.
The Westphalian Treaties defined the juridical and constitutional state of Christendom: the United Provinces and the Helvetic Confederation were formally recognized as independent of the Holy Roman Empire. The situation amongst the Italian sovereignities was much more complicated, thanks to the deeply-rooted juridical conceptof Reichsitalien, to which much of the northern half of the peninsula belonged, and to the role of the Imperial Vicars. There were many Imperial Vicars (Reichsvikare) [4] both north and south of the Alps, princes posessing the right to exercise Imperial juridical authority, without recourse to the Aulic Chamber. The counts and, from 1436, dukes of Savoy asserted from 1422 their hereditary rights to prohibit "à tous les Sujets du Duc de se pourvoir en appel par devant sa Majeste Impérial [Sigismund], des jugemens rendus par le Duc ou par son conseil" [5] Any Reichsvikar, therefore, claimed, in the name of the Emporer, final judgment without appeal over those cases emanating from the lands over which the Imperial court had granted him his vicariate.
The attempt of the House of Savoy to obtain a monopoly on the position of Reichsvikar for Reichsitalien did not go unquestioned; the relatively 'minor' marchesi di Finali extracted some concessions for their lands, and the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantova mounted a major challenge in the seventeenth century. [6] The Dukes of Savoy continued to assert their rights as perpetual, and, therefore heriditary, Reichsvikars, and Emanuele Filiberto, as early as 1564, one year after his installation in Torino, dispached an envoy to Vienna in order to confirm and to extend his control over Imperial fiefs in such important bishoprics as Genova, Grenoble, Mâcon, Geneva, Nice, Lausanne, Embrun (a key military strongpoint) and others in order to operate for the Emperor's "servito nelle cose d'Italia, di Franza et de Svizzani". [7]
However important an understanding of the juridical functioning of Reichsitalien is for the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years Wars, it is at least as imperative to grasp the practical political implications. On the one hand, by consistently detaching itself from a juridical relationship with the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Venice, a major power in the Italian north but one self-declaredly not part of Reichsitalien, was able to pursue ist cult of neutrality, indeed to offer itself as a potential arbitrator in any conflict and to avoid full-scale mlitary involvement, apart from circumstances when the Ottoman Empire was the antagonist. By contrast, the two great dynastic and hereditary rivals in the north, the Houses of Savoy and of Gonzaga, by stressing their membership of the Empire, ran the risk of becoming enmeshed in the conflicts between the two branches of the House of Habsburg and, on a European scale, in the confrontation between the House of France and the House of Austria, the final phase of the Thirty Years War which opened officially in 1635 but extended well beyond 1648. En revanche disputes either within or between the duchies of Savoy and Mantova inevitably attracted the attention of the greater powers, invoking their responsibilities as 'patrons' and power-brokers and elevating lokal disputes into questions of European importance. The familiar picture of the major courts squaring off against each other by supporting opposing factions within the Italian sovereignities was scarcely new; it was a major structural element of the sixteenth century and would re-emerge potently in the warfare and diplomacy of the eighteenth century; its importance for the Thirty Years War has not always been recognized.
FOOTNOTES
1. See for example Pagès 1939; Polišenský 1971; Barudio 1985.
2. Arentin 1986, p. 161.
3. For example Wedgewood 1984.
4. Arentin 1983, S. 97f.. ASTo. Materie d'Impero, cat. 2, m. 1, no. 5 for the 1612 claims of the Count Palatinate Philipp Wilhelm for an Imperial Vicariate in the Rheinland.
5. Guichenon #, I, S. 461
6. ASTo, Materie d'Impero, cat. 2, m. 1, no. 7 for an exchange of letters the electors and the Duke of Mantova dating from 1658.
7. ASTo, Materia d'Imperio, cat. 2, m. 1.
ROBERT ORESKO
The House of Savoy and the Thirty Years' War |
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On 20 March 1619 the Emperor Matthias died in Vienna in the midst of the central-European crisis which would escalate into the European conflict called subsequently 'The Thirty Years War'. Just over two months earlier, on 12 January 1619, Carlo Emanuele I, Duke of Savoy, celebrated his fifty-seventh birthday. [1] He had been on his thrones since 1580, not very far short of forty years. Only one other sovereign prince of the first or second rank totally attentive to events in Bohemia was of the same age and had the same chronological stretch of experience. James VI, King of Scots, four years younger than Carlo Emanuele I, but king at the age of one, assumed the administration of government in Edinburgh in 1578, two years before the Duke of Savoy succeeded to the crown in Torino, although it was not until 1603, with the acquisition of his English inheritance as James I, that he became a prominent power-holder within a very disturbed Christendom. The early stages of the conflict were dominated by princes from the following generation - at this point it was a 'young man's war' - and Carlo Emanuele I and James VI and I stand out as elder statesmen, having survived the politico-confessional strife of the second half of the sixteenth century only to see its revival in the autumn of their reigns. Perhaps it is, therefore, not too surprising that, following the assassination of Henri IV in 1610, both sovereigns attempted to draw closer together [2] as the political implications of the dynastic crisis in the House of Habsburg became increasingly apparent during the years before 1618-19.
Recent attempts to cantonise Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, along with Rudolf II, Henri III and Vincenzo I Gonzaga, into a group of ' principi tardorinascimentali, o, potremmo forse dire "manieristici" o protobarocchi' [3] owe their terminology to a deeply traditional interpretation of the history of art and culture. The duke responded to the crises of 1618-19 in a way which was not typical of an individual princely 'genio' but rather one which was consistent with the goals set down by his father, Emanuele Filiberto, and which were continued by his successors into the eighteenth century: a) expansion of Sabaudian territory to the south (conquest of the Republic of Genoa); b) to the north (re-acquisition of the city of Geneva and intrusions into the Vaud); c) to the east (invasion of the duchies of Monferrato and Milano); d) to the west (annexation of parts of Provence and the Dauphiné); or e) any combination of these. Territorial expansion was intimately linked with the acquisition of a royal crown or, at least, the royal title, an ambition shared and pursued by several other dynasties eager to penetrate the 'magic circle' of the Habsburg-Valois/Bourbon monopoly on high power politics and for which the chaos of the Thirty Years War seemed to present a 'window of opportunity' for hierarchical advancement. [4]
The intimate ties of the House of Savoy (juridically) to the Holy Roman Empire and (dynastically) to the House of Habsburg have been much misunderstood and, even more, undervalued. Francophone historiography of Savoy presents Torino as a pale reflection of the Paris-Versailles system, the fringe of the nineteenth-century hexagon as part of a sequence of neutered client-states; while Risorgimento Italian historiography was at pains to stress (and to date) the, according to this interpretation, very early vision of a united peninsula on the part of the dynasty. Both traditions had political agendas which were frequently quite open and blatant. The transalpine links of the composite states of the Dukes of Savoy and their role in both the Thirty Years War and in the Westphalian negotiations which concluded its German section in 1648 were neglected because the conflict between Torino and Vienna for power in northern Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the very time that state archives were becoming more accessible, [5] made such scholarly interests politically unacceptable.
Throughout the seventeenth century successive rulers of Savoy, either dukes or their regents, emphasised that most of their lands formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, and this 'propaganda' campaign was pursued in public. Possession of the Imperial Vicariate (see introduction above) was a critically important factor, as was the iconography surrounding the claims that the Savoy dynasty was a cadet branch of the Saxon House of Wettin. Even before 1618-19 the court of Torino looked north to the German-speaking world. Moreover Carlo Emanuele I had particularly close family ties to the House of Austria as a whole, for in 1585 he had married the Infanta Doña Cataliña Michaela, the younger daughter of Felipe II of Spain, and this marriage proved to be particularly fertile. Of the ten children the duchess bore, nine survived to adulthood. All had strong claims to the Spanish kingdoms and all bore the style 'Infante' or 'Infanta'. During one of the characteristic moments of dynastic fragility in Madrid, the three eldest Savoy sons were sent to the Spanish court to be educated, and it was subsequently claimed that the senior of these had been promised the duchy of Milano in an eventual partage of the Spanish realms. [6] Nearly all of these children, born between 1586 and 1596 and therefore adults in 1618, were strongly pro-Habsburg. Many of them entered Spanish service for at least part of their lives, and some of them never wavered from this affinity. The third son, Emanuele Filiberto, was Grand Admiral of Spain and, from 1622 until his death in 1624, Viceroy of Sicily, while the eldest daughter, Margherita, married to the heir of the Mantuan throne in 1608 as part of Carlo Emanuele's attempt to resolve the problems between the Houses of Savoy and of Gonzaga, was a leading representative of the Spanish cause during the crisis of the Mantuan succession after 1627 and was the Vicereine of Portugal from 1634 until the revolt of 1640. [7] Such links of blood and of service indicate that a pro-Habsburg faction always existed within the House of Savoy.
These affinities were strengthened by the relations of the duke's children with their only aunt, the Infanta Doña Isabella Clara Eugenia, governor, with her husband the Archduke Albrecht, of the Southern Netherlands since 1599. As the Infanta had no surviving children of her own, she was always attentive to the needs and to the careers of her dead sister's offspring, and this opened up the possibility of an eventual Savoyard succession in what became another critically important theatre of activity during the Thirty Years War, the Low Countries. With ties to Vienna, Madrid and Brussels, the triangle of Habsburg power-holding, Carlo Emanuele I was a much more cosmopolitan political figure than is usually appreciated, and, despite his perpetual flirtation with Paris, in an attempt to play the House of France off against the House of Austria, his meditations on the plausibility of a Stuart alliance, his efforts to create an Italian league as a third power bloc, such Austrian links provide the necessary structure for understanding his policy during the period from 1618 to his death in 1630.
Yet, despite his close relations with the court of Madrid, Carlo Emanuele I was, in 1618, deeply disillusioned with the House of Austria. The second War of the Monferrato Succession, which ended in that year, had made clear Spanish unwillingness to support both Sabaudian territorial claims on parts of the disputed duchy and Carlo Emanuele's insistence that his granddaughter, Princess Maria Gonzaga, be transferred from the court of Mantova to that of Torino, where her widowed mother, Margherita, was in residence. When faced with Habsburg intransigence, Dukes of Savoy traditionally looked to Paris - and vice versa - and in 1618 Carlo Emanuele I was in serious negotiations for the marriage of his son and heir, Vittorio Amedeo, principe di Piemonte to the sister of Louis XIII, Marie-Christine of France. Aged thirty-one, Vittorio Amedeo needed a wife in order to secure the succession in the senior line. Marriage to Marie-Christine, celebrated early in 1619, not only provided a bride of royal rank but also sealed an alliance for the House of Savoy with the traditional rivals of the Habsburgs at the very moment of the Bohemian crisis. Marie-Christine was only thirteen when she made her entry into Torino; the consolidation of her position by becoming a mother and her ability to concentrate the French faction at her father-in-law's court were years away. But her establishment in Torino created a potentially powerful centre of attraction for those families opposed to any Spanish orientation of Savoy's policy, while ensuring an eventual deepening of court factions in light of the pro-Habsburg affinities of most of her husband's brothers and sisters. It was, indeed, these lines of clientéle loyalties to different members of the ducal family, pursuing diametrically opposed foreign policies within the same court, which determined the particular nature of the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War.
Thus, in pondering the upheavals north of the Alps during the crisis years of 1618 and 1619, Carlo Emmanuele was influenced by the failure of the Habsburgs to resolve the Monferrato problem in a way favourable to his own interests and by the presence of a (hopefully) nubile, French royal daughter-in-law. This conjoncture of events, especially the possibilities held forth by the disruptions in the Holy Roman Empire, encouraged the duke to make a sequence of bold moves, including the launch of his candidacies for election to both the Imperial and the Bohemian crowns. [8] Carlo Emanuele I and the House of Savoy were, therefore, deeply involved in the Thirty Years War from its very inception. Profiting from his position as a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and from his special status as Imperial Vicar in Reichsitalien, Carlo Emanuele I made approaches to the German Protestant Union which resulted in the engagement of Ernst, Graf von Mansfeld to assemble a regiment in Sabaudian service during the second Monferrato War. Mansfeld also provided the subsequent channel for contact with the Palatine circle of advisors surrounding Elector Friedrich V, which led to the first direct, albeit hidden, engagement of the House of Savoy in the Thirty Years War: the half-subsidy provided by the court of Torino for Mansfeld's regiment of 2000 men to serve in Bohemia in the cause of the Protestant Union. Carlo Emanuele I, the prinicpal menace to the city of Geneva, the citadel of Calvinism, presented his candidacies to the Imperial and Bohemian thrones on the basis of his defense of both confessional liberties and elective sovereignty and his determination to weaken the grip of the House of Austria on power-holding in the Empire.
The unanimous election of Friedrich V as King of Bohemia destroyed Sabaudian hopes in Prague, and Mansfeld's military setbacks forced the Duke of Savoy into attempted reconciliations with Ferdinand II, specifically, and, in general, the House of Austria as a whole. Well before the archives of the Palatine chancery fell into Tilly's hands following the Battle of the White Mountain, archives which contained proof of Carlo Emanuele's dealings with Protestant princes opposed to Ferdinand II, the Duke of Savoy changed policy entirely, abandoning the Bohemian cause and offering to the Emperor 10,000 infantry and 2000 cavalry to help to sustain the Habsburg position in Prague, in return for an Imperial marriage for one of his daughters and recognition of the royal rank of the House of Savoy. This stasis in relations between Torino, Vienna and Madrid was sharply broken by the Valtelline crisis, which sent shock waves through the northern Italian sovereignties.
The prospect that the House of Austria would control permanently the key passes connecting the Tyrol to the duchy of Milano and, thus, assure for the foreseeable future the easy transfer of troops between the Habsburg Erbländer and Reichsitalien posed a direct military menace to the Republic of Venice and a grave threat to the political position of the Duke of Savoy. Traditionally known as the 'gatekeeper of the Alps', the Duke of Savoy was the sovereign of a classic example of the 'composite state', a polyglot group of units linked together through dynastic accident, sprawling on either side of the mountains but bordering upon the Mediterranean-oriented Republic of Genoa, the key banking centre for Habsburg military enterprise. As such, lo stato sabaudo had an important rôle in the logistical functioning of 'the Spanish Road', the means by which men, money and supplies moved overland on a north-south axis within the Habsburg system. This strategic geo-political situation assured the court of Torino special consideration in Vienna and Madrid, but the prospect that the Valtelline passes would move definitively into the Habsburg sphere had European-wide implications. For Savoy, such a development signified that a guaranteed 'eastern' mode of communication reduced dramatically any political dependence upon the 'western' transalpine network, for which the states of the Duke of Savoy were a key element. The need to placate and satisfy the court of Torino's ambitions was correspondingly diminished. Furthermore, the ease with which the Austrian Habsburgs could move troops into the duchy of Milano simply fortified and made 'less penetrable' the critical area of the north Italian plane into which the House of Savoy hoped to move in order to re-create a Lombard kingdom. Habsburg control of the Valtelline equated itself with the impregnability of the Milanese and made its piecemeal dismemberment - not to mention its total conquest - much less likely.
For Paris the situation was equally complicated as the pretext for the Habsburg invasion of the Valtelline was the persecution of the Catholic inhabitants of the valleys by their Protestant Grisons overlords, who happened, despite confessional differences, to be the allies of France. Despite a number of initiatives to try to resolve by diplomatic means what was essentially a local problem, the dispute had developed by late 1623 into a major issue of contention between France and Spain. Louis XIII's councillors saw little alternative but to prepare for war, and under the leadership of Charles de La Vieuville and, ultimately, of Cardinal de Richelieu, military preparations were pressed forward with vigour. [9] Thus, for once, the interests of the courts of Torino and Paris were in total harmony: the Habsburgs could not be permitted unchallenged control of the Valtelline passes. This confrontation opened the first Italian stage of the Thirty Years War.
If the breaking of the Habsburg monopoly upon the Valtelline was a powerful motive for an accord between Paris and Torino, the French court added a further inducement in the proposed strike on the Republic of Genoa, one which not only threatened the Hapsburg system throughout northern Italy and the maintenance of the Spanish Road but also offered the Duke of Savoy the potential to acquire one of its traditional territorial goals, a seaport on the Ligurian coast. Sabaudian logistical support was essential for any invasion of the republic, but in combining with Carlo Emanuele I in what the French saw primarily as a diversionary tactic for success in the Valtelline, Louis XIII and Richelieu took a key step on the road to a more open involvement in the wider European conflict. The 1625 campaign, however, turned disastrously wrong for the Franco-Savoyard alliance as it became clear that the small French army sent to the Valtelline under the command of François-Annibal d'Estrées, marquis de Coeuvres, was faced with such immense logistical problems that the Habsburgs would be able to overwhelm whatever forces the French were able to field. Richelieu was faced with the deeply unpleasant prospect in throwing more men and money into both the Valtelline and Genoese campaigns and needed a pretext to extricate himself from what had become an untenable situation without compromising his new-found standing with Louis XIII, a relationship which was much more mercurial and subject to shifts in balance than some étatistes historians would allow. Here the revolt of the Huguenot Benjamin de Rohan, duc de Soubise came to his rescue. In order to deal with 'the Protestant enemy within', secret negotiations were opened with Spain which led to the Treaty of Monzón (May 1626), explicitly gaving to the House of Austria exclusive control of the Valtelline and marking the renunciation, at least temporarily, of French aspirations amongst the Italian sovereignties. [10] Implicitly, it brought an abrupt end to the alliance with Savoy and left an abandoned and thunderstruck Carlo Emanuele I alone to face the Genoese and Spanish forces. This 'betrayal' left a profound bitterness at the court of Torino and did nothing but strengthen the pro-Austrian faction there.
It was only in early 1628, just after the death of Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga of Mantova and after nearly two years of fighting in isolation, that the duke brokered an accord with the Spanish based upon a partition of the duchy of Monferrato, Carlo Emanuele I's primary area of interest in the Mantuan succession dispute. It should be noted that the 'amoeboid' character of Sabaudian policy was a source of strength and a source of weakness. Willing to move towards any of the four compass points, the court of Torino was able to react to changing circumstances with considerable flexibility, but, conversely, the existence of so many temptations inevitably led to high-risk strategies; if France could offer Genova as a bait for an alliance, Spain could counter with the Monferrato, while Savoy itself could always insist upon yet another assault on Geneva. Disillusion, such as that engendered at Monzón, could be assuaged by the prospect of expansion elsewhere, and although acquisition of the duchy of Milano probably always remained the prime goal, the greater powers, until well into the eighteenth century, could and did exploit the court of Torino's susceptibility to the lure of compensation in different geographical spheres. The accord with Spain lasted only until 1629 when the French forced the pass of Susa, opening up the subalpine plane and providing easy access to the city of Torino itself; this imposed rapprochement did not survive the year and Carlo Emanuele I returned to his Spanish alliance, only to be forced back into the arms of France in 1630 with the invasion of the duché de Savoie and a guarantee of the duke's rights in the duchy of Monferrato. These rapid renversements did much to contribute to the reputation of the House of Savoy as an 'unreliable ally', another long-standing trope of early-modern diplomatic thinking, but they also indicate that the Duke of Savoy had become a key player in the guerre muette conducted between France and Spain in the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War.
The death of Carlo Emanuele I in 1630, after a reign of fifty years, brought these tergiversations to a halt. His eldest surviving son and successor, Vittorio Amedeo I, [11] remained locked in a French alliance during his brief reign of seven years (1630-1637), especially after 1635 when France openly declared war against Spain. This affinity was due less to the more accommodating and less mercurial character of his 'nature' and more to his belief that the position of his consort as sister of Louis XIII served as the best possible guarantee against a repetition of the 'betrayal of Monzón'. On her husband's succession in 1630, Marie-Christine [12] was twenty-four and the rallying-point for the French faction at the court of Torino. She had produced two children, but not yet the male heir needed for the succession to the Sabaudian thrones. He appeared in the form of Prince Francesco Giacinto in 1632 and was followed, in 1634, as the needed assurance, by a younger brother, Carlo Emanuele, named after his grandfather. By the early 1630s, therefore, the position of Marie-Christine and, consequently, the French party at the court of Torino appeared to be impregnible. Those members of the dynasty who now saw their way blocked by the presence by the two young princes or who held traditionally pro-Austrian views reacted accordingly.
In 1634, both of Vittorio Amedeo I's younger brothers, who had previously enjoyed good relations with Paris, withdrew from their patrimonial court of Torino. Cardinal Maurizio returned to Rome, where he resigned his commission as Cardinal Protector of France at the papal court and assumed that as Cardinal Protector of the Holy Roman Empire and the House of Austria. Tommaso Francesco, principe di Carignano had already been in negotiations for entry into Spanish service as second to his ageing maternal aunt, the Infanta Doña Isabella Clara Eugenia, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, but these were stalled, albeit only temporarily, when the infanta died in 1633. They were resumed on the arrival of her successor in Brussels, the Cardinal-Infante Fernando, and in 1634 Tommaso Francesco sent his French-born wife and their children to Milano while he made his way north. Having now entered Spanish service, [13] Tommaso Francesco received his first important commission in 1635, the assault on Trier and the arrest of its Archbishop-elector Philipp Christoph von Sötern, who had put himself under French protection. The fall of Trier and the kidnapping of the Archbishop-elector (March 1635) led to Tommaso Francesco's advancement to the post of General of the Spanish Army. The Trier episode was also the cause, or at least the pretext, for the official French declaration of war against Spain, a development which had major implications for Carignano's brother, Duke Vittorio Amedeo I. In 1631, the Infanta Margherita, dowager Duchess of Mantova withdrew permanently from the court of Torino and arrived in Spain in 1634, when she was named Vicereine of Portugal. She never returned to Savoy, settled in Spain after the Portuguese revolution of 1640 and was buried at Burgos. Two other sisters, the Infanta Francesca Caterina and the strong-minded Infanta Maria Apollonia, previously the centre of much matrimonial speculation, registered their protest by entering the Franciscan Order and settling into a convent in Biella, although Maria Apollonia eventually moved on to one in Rome from where she worked for the Habsburg cause at the papal court. The House of Savoy was now publicly divided against itself with the duke's brothers and sisters assuming positions of high importance and responsibility in the service of the House of Austria and advocating policies diametrically opposed to the pro-French stance of Vittorio Amedeo I. This acutely visible division within the family was a necessary pre-condition to the tumult of the Sabaudian civil wars of 1638-1642, following the Valtelline crisis and the War of the Mantuan Succession (for which see David Parrott's adjoining article), the third great episode in the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War.
Indeed, the only members of the dynasty remaining in Torino by 1634 were Vittorio Amedeo I, Marie-Christine and their three surviving young children, although two more princesses were born in 1635 and 1636. The new Duke of Savoy's accord with the French court was sealed by the Treaty of Cherasco (April 1631), which included a clause handing over to the French the Piedmontese fortress of Pinerolo, with Casale in the Mantuan Monferrato, one of the two strongholds guarding access to the subalpine plain and to Spanish Lombardy. With a major French garrison now implanted on Italian soil and the Sabaudian forces strengthened by the renewal (1634) of the traditional alliance with the Catholic cantons of the Helvetic Confederation, the French campaigns against the House of Austria in northern Italy gathered momentum, and the Treaty of Rivoli (1635) confirmed the alliance between Paris and Torino in the year that France declared open hostilities against the King of Spain. The cession of Pinerolo was bitterly criticised by Vittorio Amedeo I's brothers and sisters, who shifted the blame onto Marie-Christine's French affinity and determination to accommodate her brother, another very early indication of the fissures which would divide the family and the court into opposing camps during the civil wars later in the decade. The duke and duchess, however, had their own agenda, for in 1632, following the birth of Francesco Giacinto, Vittorio Amedeo declared the House of Savoy to be a specifically royal dynasty on the basis of the fifteenth-century Lusignan grant of their rights to the kingdom of Cyprus. The quest for the trattamento reale became a central plank in Sabaudian policy, and both duke and duchess expected rapid and complete support from the French court. [14] Instead Louis XIII and Richelieu stood firm and attempted to use this request to advance their own war aims. The French crown would recognise a resurrected Kingdom of Lombardy - or a more poetically named Kingdom of Upper Liguria (Alta Liguria) - in favour of the House of Savoy, once the duke had conquered the duchy of Milano, thus unifying the north Italian plain and raising his dynasty to royal status while driving the Spanish definitively from their Lombard power-base. The entire period between 1630 and 1637 was characterised by constant friction between the two allies, [15] Louis XIII always urging his brother-in-law to commit more men and resources to a full-scale onslaught on the Milanese, Vittorio Amedeo I persistently complaining that the French consistently delivered less than they had promised and seemed to expect the Sabaudian troops to do most of the fighting. This tension was heightened by a genuine mutual dislike between the French and Piedmontese military commanders, directed particularly towards the French maréchal de Créqui, Charles de Blanchefort, duc de Lesdiguières.
It was, perhaps, in hopes of effecting some form of reconciliation that Créqui, in early October 1637, mounted a banquet in honour of Vittorio Amedeo I. If so, the results were disastrously different. The duke and one of his closest advisers, Augusto Manfredo Scaglia di Verrua, the general of the Sabaudian infantry, died immediately afterwards in great agony, while a third member of the Piedmontese party fell gravely ill. The loss of the Duke of Savoy was compounded in the next month by the death of Charles de Nevers, Duke Carlo I Gonzaga of Mantova, so that within some six weeks France lost its two most stalwart Italian allies, albeit princes not always prepared to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of Richelieu's policy aims. The situation in Mantova was especially grave as the new duke, Carlo II, was only eight and ruled under the regency of his mother, Maria Gonzaga, duchesse de Rethel, who fully shared the pro-Habsburg views of her mother, the Infanta Margherita of Savoy, and was determined to steer Mantova closer to Vienna. The situation in Piedmont seemed, from Richelieu's point of view, more stable, indeed the assumption that Marie-Christine, as regent for the five-year-old Francesco Giacinto, would be totally dependent upon Louis XIII, along with the violence and suddeness of Vittorio Amedeo I's death and that of his companion and the openness with which the duchess conducted her liaison with the Conte Filippo d'Agliè all combined to give rise to the inevitable but here quite plausible rumours of poisoning, providing yet more fodder for the anti-French faction and the supporters of i cognati, Marie-Christine's two brothers-in-law.
Despite these shadows surrounding the assumption of the duchess's first administration, Francesco Giacinto was universally acknowledged as his father's direct heir and Marie-Christine, with both Maurizio and Tommaso Francesco, the only other potential claimants to the government, geographically distanced from Piedmont, as his only possible regent. [16] Moreover, Marie-Christine had in reserve another strong card in the form of her second son, Carlo Emanuele, so that even if the duchesse de Rethel firmly guided Mantova towards an Imperial alliance, the duchess-regent of Savoy seemed well placed to guarantee the continuation of the Franco-Sabaudian alliance and the prosecution of the war on the north Italian plain. For as long as Francesco Giacinto lived Marie-Christine seemed reasonably secure, but on 4 October 1638, after a reign just a few days short of one year, the boy-duke died. The succession itself posed no problem and the crown passed immediately to his four-year-old younger brother, now Duke Carlo Emanuele II. The regency was a different matter entirely, and Marie-Christine's position became extremely fragile and vulnerable. The brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law 'scented blood', as did the House of Austria, which saw in the new situation an opportunity to roll back the effects of seven years of French dominance in the Sabaudian realm and, indeed, to alter the entire structure of the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War in its favour.
The political and, indeed, juridical background to the ensuing conflict is extremely complex and has too frequently been presented exclusively in terms of political opportunism. Duke Carlo Emanuele II's health was reported to be as fragile as that of his late brother. Under the Salic Law which governed the Sabaudian succession, his immediate heir was his uncle, Cardinal Maurizio, followed by his younger uncle, Tommaso Francesco. By this right alone the two uncles could expect some role in the regency, although their declared objective soon became the complete divestment of Marie-Christine's administrative functions and, probably, her forced return to France. Maurizio, as a Prince of the Church, had no legitimate posterity, but Tommaso Francesco, who had been married since 1625, had, by 1638, three sons, whose rights to the succession he was obliged to protect. The problem here was that the two brothers were convinced, and not without reason, that the court of Paris had plans to dismember the Sabaudian realm should the boy-duke die, the most likely scenario being the detachment of the duché de Savoie [17] as a dowry for his eldest sister, the nine-year-old Ludovica Cristina, who would then be married to a French prince; Louis XIII's Dauphin was born in 1638. Even Marie-Christine came eventually to appreciate the seriousness of this threat, which struck a particularly raw nerve in Vienna, where the Emperor, as juridical overlord of Reichsitalien had the final judgement in all succession disputes, as was, indeed, the case in the Mantuan and Monferrato crises. Any move which even hinted at detaching part of Reichsitalien from the Holy Roman Empire inevitably caused profound alarm at the Imperial court.
With these imperatives as the necessary background and encouraged by their sisters - the rôle of women in this conflict has been seriously underestimated - Maurizio and Tommaso Francesco sought and received assurances of Spanish military aid for a two-pronged invasion of Piedmont which rapidly turned itself into a popular uprising against Marie-Christine's regency and a civil war dividing the noble and urban élites into factions supporting the princes (i principisti) and those dwindling numbers loyal to Marie-Christine (i madamisti). [18] Marie-Christine's position collapsed with astonishing and breath-taking speed. Maurizio arrived in Piedmont in November 1638, and by the spring of 1639 nearly all of the south, Cuneo, Mondovì, Saluzzo and Nice were in his hands, while his younger brother rapidly and effortlessly took the north, Ivrea, Biella and the Valle d'Aosta. Only Torino itself remained the subject of dispute. The impact on the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War was enormous. With Spanish troops, under the command of the princes, in control of nearly all the principality of Piedmont, with the exception of the capital, and the county of Nice as well, the centre of gravity had shifted westwards from battles on the Piedmontese-Lombard frontier to a full-scale military occupation of the Italian part of the Sabaudian realm. Even the court of Paris, which habitually greeted setbacks for the House of Savoy with studied equanimity, became worried.
Torino remained the primarily goal. Having taken the precaution of sending her four children, including the young duke, to the relative safety of Chambéry under the supervision of Don Felice di Savoia, the one illegitimate member of the dynasty whom Marie-Christine trusted, [19] the duchess shut herself into the fortified medieval Castello in the heart of the 'old city' of Torino. By April 1639, Tommaso Francesco had seized the outskirts of the capital and, operating with the official authority now accorded him by Emperor Ferdinand III, aimed to take the city itself. In late July the Spanish troops and those of the principisti succeeded in infiltrating Torino; only the citadel, with its French garrison, held out. At this point, Marie-Christine fled the Castello and joined her children at Chambéry.
With nearly all of Piedmont occupied by her brothers-in-law and their supporting Spanish troops, the duchess now had to face the horrors of those dependent upon the help and support of the Cardinal de Richelieu. [20] Le grand Armand gave no quarter and, without forgetting to point out that much of her dilemma stemmed from her own personal failings and weaknesses, he demanded the French occupation of the duché de Savoie and the dispatch of Carlo Emanuele II to Paris in order to be raised with the Dauphin. Throughout the seventeenth century the concept of French 'protection' seemed to carry the menace of suffocating the protégé; Marie-Christine was forced to make some concessions but succeeded in maintaining her hold upon the fortress of Montmélian and the custody of her own son, but by 1640, when the siege of Torino began, she found herself in virtual exile at Chambéry, a woman entre chien et loup in the forms of her own brother and his chief minister and of her brothers-in-law and the rest of her late husband's family.
The siege of Torino lasted over four months. Tommaso Francesco's troops in the city, joined by the urban militia, assaulted the French-occupied citadel, but as most of the great sixteenth-century fortresses - and that of Torino was no exception - had been constructed with the double purpose of both defending and attacking the city to which they were attached, the citadel responded with its own bombardment. Meanwhile, fresh French reinforcements under the command of Henri of Lorraine, comte d'Harcourt also attacked the Spanish troops within Torino and undermined Carignano's military position in the surrounding countryside. Despite Richelieu's determination that the siege be continued until total victory and the capture of Tommaso Francesco, the prince and Harcourt reached a truce, and on 24 September 1640 Tommaso Francesco marched out of the capital.
This did not mark, however, the end of the civil wars, which continued until 1642, periods of negotiation, truces and prolongations of truces alternating with open warfare. Marie-Christine herself felt secure enough to return to Torino in November 1640, but it was not until 1642 that Giulio Mazzarini, always suspected by Richelieu and his circle of excessive savoyardisme, [21] succeeded in bringing the disparate elements together into a family reconciliation. The two princes officially recognised Marie-Christine as regent for their nephew on condition that they join the ducal council and that all edicts issued by it with Marie-Christine's signature included the formula 'Coll' assistenza de' Signori Principi miei Cognati'. Each received his own power-base, Maurizio the governorship of the city and county of Nice, Tommaso Francesco that of Ivrea and Biella. Richelieu's offer to guarantee the integrity of the Sabaudian realm and the application of the Salic Law to its succession was effectively brushed aside by the decision of the forty-nine-year-old Maurizio to resign his cardinalate in order to marry his thirteen-year-old niece Ludovica Cristina, effectively blocking any future schemes for partitioning the patrimony.
1642 was, indeed, a good year for Marie-Christine, for in addition to the termination of the civil wars, it also saw the death of Richelieu. The death of her brother, Louis XIII, in the next year and the gradual emergence of a régime in Paris directed by her sister-in-law, the Regent Anne of Austria, and the man who emerged as both her chief minister and favourite, Giulio Mazzarini, now gallicised as Jules Mazarin, assured a more sympathetic treatment for the court of Torino and gave Marie-Christine greater freedom of action, liberated from the surveillance of Richelieu.
Now her mind turned northwards in an attempt to repair and solidify relations not so much with the court of Vienna, where her rival Mantuan regent, the duchesse de Rethel, would always have the superior entrées, but more with the Holy Roman Empire as a whole. The comprehensive re-integration of the Sabaudian realm into the Reich became a constant, if not dominating, factor in Marie-Christine's policy for the next two decades, and this aspect is apparent in the presence of the court of Torino at the Westphalian peace negotiations. The sessions at Münster were under the direction of two Italians as the principal mediators, Alvise Contarini from the Republic of Venice, a man with a profound knowledge of northern Protestant courts - he had been envoy to both The Hague and to Whitehall - and the papal representative, Fabio Chigi, the future Pope Alessandro VII. But despite the major role accorded to Italian diplomacy in the daily structure of meetings and debate in order to forge the peace treaty, only two princes from Reichsitalien were formally represented at Westphalia. The duchesse de Rethel sent Francesco, marchese di Nerli as the porte-parole at Münster for her son, Duke Carlo II Gonzaga of Mantova. The House of Savoy was represented at both Münster and Osnabrück, at the former by Claude-Jérôme de Chabò, marquis de Saint-Maurice, born in Chambéry and a member of one of the principal court and ministerial clans in Torino, and the Senator Giovanni Francesco Bellezia. At Osnabrück the Sabaudian envoy was the Conte Lorenzo Nomis, although Saint-Maurice attended sessions there as well as at Münster. Given the importance of the dispute over the duchy of Monferrato in the Italian theatre of the Thirty Years War, it was obvious that the courts of Torino and Mantova were determined to make their views heard and to present their cases at the general European peace settlement.
If investiture with part of the duchy of Monferrato was the principal aim of the Sabaudian envoys at Münster and Osnabrück, it was far from being the only item on their agenda. From France, they demanded the return of the various fortresses seized during the civil wars, principally that of Pinerolo; from Spain, the payment, still outstanding, of the dowry of the Infanta Doña Cataliña Michaela, the wife of Carlo Emanuele I, and recognition of the rights to territorial succession in the Southern Netherlands as the closest heirs to her elder sister, the Infanta Doña Isabella Clara Eugenia, who had died in 1633. From Vienna, the court looked for the erection of a ninth electorate in favour of the House of Savoy. This novel idea established itself in Sabaudian political thinking as it became increasingly clear that the Westphalian settlements would have to accommodate the concept of an eighth electorate for the restored Elector Palatine, thus breaking the Golden Bull of 1356 which had stipulated seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, although with the provision that the number would revert to seven should demographic accident bring about - as it did in 1777 - a unification of the Bavarian and Palatine branches of the House of Wittelsbach. Marie-Christine of Savoy and her councillors argued that as the House of Wittelsbach now had two hereditary secular electors - not to mention the third ecclesiastical electorate of Köln to which a cadet Bavarian prince was habitually selected by the Cathedral Chapter - the House of Wettin, that of the Saxon Dukes, from which the House of Savoy claimed descent, should also have two hereditary, secular electors. [22] If the Golden Bull could be stretched to include eight electors, the existence of a ninth or a tenth elector, with all the implications of sovereign powers enshrined in the Westphalian treaties, was plausible. Moreover, the duchess of Savoy maintained that such a solution would contribute to the peace of the Reich. Of the secular electors, only one, the Bavarian, was Catholic; the other three were Lutheran or Calvinist. A Savoy electorate would balance the confessional equation.
The motivations guiding Marie-Christine's policy were, however, much more complex. In seeking a close affiliation with the Holy Roman Empire, Madame Royale was looking not only for hierarchical advancement, but also for protection. The naked antagonisms so clearly manifested in her face-to-face confrontation at Grenoble with the Cardinal de Richelieu forced her to realise that her two brothers-in-law were correct: the dismemberment of the Sabaudian realm, like the occupation of the duchy of Lorraine, had a prominent rôle on the French political agenda. One way of protecting lo stato sabaudo was to incorporate it as firmly and deeply as possible within the Imperial constitution. Marie-Christine's patronage of the Lyon jurist, Samuel Guichenon, whose Histoire généalogique de la Royale Maison de Savoie, was first published in 1660, was motivated by a clear political programme, one which the lover of the duchess, Filippo d'Agliè, had helped to shape. [23] The historical argument was based upon the insistence of the position of the Duke of Savoy as a Prince of the Reich, the susceptibility of his lands to the Salic Law and the ultimate dependence upon the judgements of the Aulic Chamber in Vienna, not on the prises de position at Paris, later at Versailles. Guichenon's text argued for the fundamental attachement of the Sabaudian realm to the Holy Roman Empire and for its juridical immunity from French ambitions.
The failure to achieve most of the Sabaudian aims at Münster and Osnabrück - the detachment of Pinerolo from all Imperial jurisdiction was a particularly cruel blow - should not obscure the fundamental achievement; the very presence of three Sabaudian envoys at the conferences asserted with direct clarity the position of the duke as an Imperial prince. Bellezia's success in extracting the royal honours for the House of Savoy at the peace conferences was a major success in promoting the cause of the trattamento reale throughout Christendom. The seating plan at Osnabrück shows Saint-Maurice surrounded by the delegates from Mecklenburg, Bavaria and Nassau, an unambiguous statement of the membership of the Savoy dynasty within the Holy Roman Empire. However minimal the practical gains, the representational point had been made; Savoy was an integral part of the Reich. The success was iconographic and emblematic; confirmation of possession of the duchy of Monferrato or the erection of the ninth electorate proved illusory, but the Sabaudian realm was clearly presented as a member of the Reich.
One practical advance did emerge from the treaty discussions, again one which knitted the court of Torino more closely into the structure of the Holy Roman Empire, the initiation of the negotiations for the marriage of Marie-Christine's third daughter, Enrichetta Adelaida, to Ferdinand Maria, the eldest son of and heir to Maximilian I, the Bavarian elector. Yet again, rivalry with the court of Mantova had a rôle to play. With the Westphalian pacification, a number of Italian dynasties turned northwards, creating a transalpine network of familial links. The duchesse de Rethel, the regent of Mantova, with close ties to the court of Vienna, [24] had not been slow to react to the new situation. In late 1649, she brought about the marriage of her son, Duke Carlo II Gonzaga, to the Tyrolean archduchess Isabella Klara, while early in 1651 she assured the matrimonial triumph of her government by marrying her only daughter, Eleanora Gonzaga, to the Emperor himself, Ferdinand III, thus creating a notable situation in which two Gonzaga empresses, the widow of Ferdinand II and the consort of Ferdinand III, both named Eleanora, formed between 1651 and 1655 a foyer to represent Mantuan interests at the Imperial court.
Marie-Christine's response to the advances made by the duchesse de Rethel - the careers of these two princesses ran along remarkably parallel lines - was, to resort to jargon, 'to play the Wittelsbach card'. The Bavarian electors had been faithful allies to the House of Austria during the Thirty Years War, but this was a rare moment of accord between two dynasties who were locked into permanent rivalry for dominance in the Catholic sphere of the Holy Roman Empire. The marriage of Enrichetta Adelaida of Savoy to Ferdinand Maria of Bavaria, finally solemnised in 1652, initiated a half century of close cooperation between the courts of Torino and München. [25] The initial discussions for this match had been opened during the Westphalian discussions. From this point on the Bavarian elector and the Duke of Savoy worked closely together, with Marie-Christine and Enrichetta Adelaida urging Ferdinand Maria to present his candidacy for the Imperial election following the early and unexpected death of Ferdinand IV, King of the Romans, in 1654. Blocked by the House of Gonzaga from any advantage at the court of Vienna, Marie-Christine looked to Bavaria, the traditional rival to the Habsburgs, as a means to secure her rôle in the Reich, and, following the Westphalian peace treaties, formed part of a clearly defined north-south transalpine dynastic network of which the Vienna-Mantova, the Innsbruck-Firenze and the München-Torino lines of affinity formed the three major conduits of diplomatic activity. [26]
In 1648, the year of the Westphalian Treaties, Duke Carlo Emanuele II of Savoy reached his majority and the regency of his mother came to its juridical close, although her grip on real political power was terminated only by her death in 1663. On 22 December 1648, Carlo Emanuele formally ratified the Treaties of Münster and of Osnabrück. In practical terms Savoy had achieved very little, but by asserting its presence militarily during the Thirty Years War and diplomatically at the peace negotiations, mother and son assured that a clear role had been defined for the House of Savoy in central European politics, in Reichsitalien and in the Reich as a whole, a rôle which distanced them from France and integrated them more closely into the system of transalpine power-holding.
FOOTNOTES
1. The standard studies on Carlo Emanuele I's reign are Bergadani 1932 and Merlin 1991. The classic analysis of Sabaudian foreign policy at this period, which must be used with caution given the author's political biases, remains Claretta 1876.
2. For the exchange of diplomatic gifts of presents surrounding negociations for marriages linking the two dynasties see Bertana 1983 and Bertana 1991.
3. Rosso 1994, p. 183.
4. For the question of Sabaudian territorial expansion and the dynasty's titolo reale see Oresko 1997.
5. See Chadwick 1978.
6. See the 1773 manuscript Histoire de la Maison de Savoye in the Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, Mémoires et Documents: Sardaigne, vol. XII.
7. La Rocca 1940; Quazza 1930.
8. Klienman 1975 is the standard account of this episode.
9. Tapié 1934.
10. Pithon 1960.
11. Foa 1930.
12. Marie-Christine has received considerable biographical attention of which the most recent example is Brugnelli Biraghi/Denoyé Pollone 1991.
13. Quazza 1941.
14. Oresko 'The Quest of the House of Savoy...', op. cit.
15. For a traditionally French view of relations between the two allies during the 1630s see Mun 1907.
16. Claretta 1868/69) is another classic of Sabaudian historiography; see also Claretta 1877/78).
17. The duché de Savoie was also consistently proposed as the basis for anexchange with France should Paris, and later, Versailles, help Torino in conquering and annexing the duchy of Milano.
18. Quazza 1959/60) and for the socio-economic impact Cerutti 1992.
19. Oresko 1995.
20. Babel 1989 provides, in the duchy of Lorraine, another telling example of Richelieu's overbearing approach to sovereigns whose lands were located on the borders of France and helps to place Marie-Christine's response into a broader framework situating the cardinal as a French 'imperialist' and totally contradicting interpretations of him as a visionary 'man of peace'.
21. Richelieu to Queen Maria de' Medici, 8 July 1630: Mazarin ' est si espagnol et si savoyard' (Richelieu 1853ff., III, p. 747; for Mazarin's close ties with Marie-Christine and the House of Savoy see Dethan 1981.
22. Oresko 1997, pp. 329-330.
23. Castronovo 1965.
24. The duchesse de Rethel's paternal aunt, Eleanora Gonzaga, had married Emperor Ferdinand II in 1623. For the strength of the Mantuan faction at the Imperial court of Vienna see Oresko/Parrott 1997.
25. The Bavarian electress has attracted almost as much biographical consideration as her mother. The most recent scholarly account is Bary 1980.
26. The ties of the House of Medici with the Habsburg Archdukes of Tyrol, with their capital at Innsbruck, from where foreign poilcy could be directed without direct reference back to Vienna, started in 1626 with the marriage of Claudia de' Medici to Leopold V of Habsburg and were consolidated in 1646 with the marriage of their son, Ferdinand Karl, to Anna de' Medici.
DAVID PARROT
The Mantuan Succession and the Thirty Years' War |
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The second half of the Thirty Years? War was characterized by a traditional conflict between France and the Habsburg monarchies of Spain and Austria, with France fighting as the ally of the major protestant powers. Yet this full commitment of France to the European conflict was by no means a foregone conclusion. The young Louis XIII (1610-1643) subscribed to the rigorous enforcement of catholic orthodoxy; protestant sedition was the chief obstruction to royal authority, and the destruction of the independence granted to the Huguenots by his father became a fundamental objective of his policies. [1] There was no royal enthusiasm for involvement on behalf of the Protestant Union after Frederick, the Palatine Elector, had accepted the Bohemian throne in 1619; indeed, French diplomacy in the Empire was engaged in ensuring that the major protestant states of the Union would not give military support to the Bohemians or the Palatine Elector. [2]
How then did the Thirty Years? War come to be sustained principally as a French struggle against the forces of the Habsburgs? Central to this shift was that the three great sovereigns of early 17th-century western Europe had well-established and conflicting ambitions in the Italian peninsula. A succession of Holy Roman Emperors from the fifteenth century had been concerned to maintain and expand their authority as sovereign overlords of Reichsitalien, those substantial parts of northern and central Italy in which the local rulers acknowledged that ultimate sovereign authority lay with the Emperor. During the later sixteenth century the Emperor?s chief rival for influence in Italy was Philip II of Spain, ruler of Milan, Naples and Sicily. The third major power with interests in Italy was France, and French concern to re-assert a strong role in Italian politics after four decades of civil war had been evident from the reign of Henri IV (1589-1610). This legacy of French ambitions in Italy passed easily to Louis XIII.
All three powers were engaged in a struggle between 1620 and 1626 to control the Valtelline passes which connected Spanish Lombardy with the Austrian Tyrol. In 1619-20, the Spanish took advantage of their military commitment to the Emperor in Bohemia to occupy the Valtelline, on the grounds that the protestant Grison overlords - French allies - were persecuting the local catholic inhabitants. [3] Despite a number of diplomatic initiatives to try to resolve what became a major issue between France and Spain, the situation by late 1623 had deteriorated to the point where Louis XIII?s councillors saw little alternative but to prepare for war. Under the leadership of La Vieuville, and ultimately of Cardinal Richelieu, these military preparations were pressed forward with vigour. [4] But when, in late 1624, a small French army was despatched to the Valtelline, it swiftly became apparent that the logistical problems of sustaining this campaign were immense. Spain and the Austrians, adjoining whose lands the Valtelline was situated, would have little difficulty in overwhelming whatever forces the French could commit to that theatre. Faced with this prospect, Louis XIII and his premier ministre made a decision of fateful importance both for the shape of conflict in Italy over the next decades, and for the character of the wider Thirty Years? War. They proposed drawing the Spanish forces away from the Valtelline by threatening them with the loss of a far more important part of the Spanish system. The plan for 1625 was to attack Spain?s client-state in north Italy, the Republic of Genoa, whose capital was the key port for all communication between Spain and the Milanese.
This decision to open a second front had two critical consequences. First, France moved from an undeclared confrontation over the Valtelline, which it had been argued since the reign of François I had lain within a French sphere of influence, to a campaign aimed at the annexation and partitioning of one of Spain?s key allies in the Italian peninsula. The attack on Genoa provided a clear sign that France?s previous dévot neutrality had been superseded, and that Louis XIII?s new ministerial regime was aligned with the war aims of the Habsburg?s European enemies. Secondly, as France was not able singlehandedly to move an army down to invest Genoa and then to sustain a siege, it needed to gain the neutrality, or more probably the overt support, of the Duke of Savoy over whose territory the French forces would have to pass. The prospect of substantial territorial gains at the expense of the Republic of Genoa persuaded Duke Carlo Emanuele I into a full military alliance [5], and the combined forces laid siege to the port in April 1625. This was the first time since the 1550?s that French armies had entered Italy in military alliance with Italian rulers.
For the Habsburgs it was a matter of the gravest concern. One option considered by Spain and by the Emperor, was to open up a further campaign theatre, threatening France either with an invasion across her eastern frontier or up into Languedoc from Spanish Roussillon. Had this option been taken, Louis XIII would have been embroiled in the wider European conflict a decade before 1635 and the actual beginning of la guerre ouverte. In the event this expansion of the war proved unnecessary since the attempt to lay siege to Genoa was a disaster. A Spanish relieving army drove the French and Savoyard troops back into Piedmont, and exposed the Duke?s own territory to the exactions and raids of Spanish forces, while matters in the Valtelline went little better for France. [6] Given that Richelieu had been established as premier ministre specifically in order to take a tough line over the control of the Valtelline, his reputation would probably have demanded heavier French military commitment to Italy in the following (1626) campaign. He was saved from this high-risk strategy by a Huguenot revolt back in France. While Richelieu initially argued that the opportunist Huguenot rising of the duc de Soubise should be bought off [7], as the military situation in Italy worsened, his view changed. France, he now advised, needed to extricate herself from the Valtelline in order to settle with the Huguenot threat. [8] The treaty with Spain of May 1626 signed at Monzón in effect gave the Habsburgs full control of the Valtelline and marked France?s renunciation, for the time being, of attempts to reassert her influence in Italy. The most serious consequence of the treaty for France?s aspirations in Italy was that it was negotiated behind the back of her ally, the Duke of Savoy, who found himself still fighting a war against the Spanish-supported Genoese Republic, without French assistance. The Savoyard ill-feeling that the ?betrayal? of Monzón caused was to be one of the determining factors in the next great military crisis in Italy - the war over the Mantuan Succession. [9]
For a number of historians of seventeenth-century Spain, the Mantuan Succession crisis of 1628-1631 is the turning point in the fortunes of the Spanish monarchy, and a determining moment in the character of the Thirty Years? War. [10] Until that point the efforts of Olivares to redeploy Spanish resources through reform and coherent strategy, and the joint bid by the two branches of the Habsburgs to reassert European hegemony, appeared close to success. In this context, Olivares? 1628 decision to intervene in the Mantuan Succession has been seen as an act of pure hubris, of Spain?s inflexible determination that a potentially hostile European power should never be permitted a foothold in Italy. [11] Even historians who detect a greater complexity of motive, and suggest that Philip IV and Olivares recognized the long-term threat posed by France to Habsburg Italy and saw the Mantuan affair as an opportunity to strike a pre-emptive blow, still interpret these motives in a primarily ?European? context. [12]
Yet the actual forces at work behind the Mantuan crisis reveal that it was internal Italian affairs which were the dominant influence. The paradox of the Mantuan Succession was that France, Spain and the Emperor all wished to avoid a conflict in north Italy in 1628; all had pressing military concerns elsewhere. [13] They became involved because key Italian princely states refused to compromise and eventually turned to outside powers for support. The major European powers, reluctant to intervene, were even more reluctant to see the dispute settled through the intervention of a competitor for influence in Italy. And all three powers having become involved, the resulting north Italian war fundamentally changed the nature of the European conflict, and led inexorably to all-out war in 1635.
The death of Vincenzo II Gonzaga in December 1627 marked the extinction in the male line of the main branch of the Gonzaga di Mantova. However the Gonzaga had practised elaborate systems of partible inheritance through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. [14] There were thus substantial numbers of cadet branches of the Gonzaga, and the main inheritance would have to be transferred to one or more of these cadet branches. [15] This was the root of the conflict over the succession.
In terms of proximity to the last Duke of Mantua, the closest claimant to the Duchy was Charles de Gonzague-Nevers. Charles belonged to a branch of the family which had established itself at the court of France in the 1560?s, had made a spectacular marriage into the German princely House of Kleve, and had thereby inherited a number of small, independent sovereign territories, while simultaneously acquiring the French duchies of Nevers and Rethel in fief to the French crown. [16] In the eyes of commentators hostile to Nevers and his claims on Mantua, these duchies and their revenues made him a simple pawn of the king of France. This was not the case; he was an independent-minded and self-assertive sovereign prince, whose motto, ?nec retrogradior nec devio?, was to sum up his intransigence in defence of his own interests and sovereign status. [17]
The fundamental problem about Charles de Nevers was not his supposed ties to French interests in Italy, but his reluctance to accept the dynastic conventions which tacitly granted that cadet branches might, in some circumstances, have negotiable rights against a succession. Had Vincenzo II produced a son, then a direct heir in the male line would inherit the Duchy without serious opposition from lesser claimants, but when the inheritance moved out of the direct line, the situation became very different. The expectation then was that a deal should be negotiated, by which other claimants not so close to the main branch as Charles de Nevers should nonetheless receive territorial or financial compensation for claims that they held over parts of the territory. Within the Duchy of Mantua itself the chief claimant after Charles de Nevers was the Gonzaga Duke of Guastalla, who had a long-standing dispute with the now extinct main branch of the Gonzaga over two territories adjoining Guastalla, and wished this claim to be recognized by Charles. More important however, were the claims asserted by an outsider, the Duke of Savoy, over parts of the other Gonzaga Duchy, Monferrato. One of the peculiarities of the Duchy of Monferrato was that it could be inherited through the female line. The territory had long been coveted by successive Dukes of Savoy, who had made a number of agreements with the previous rulers of the Marquisate which had never been executed; it was bitterly resented in Turin that, when the last Marquis of Monferrato had died in 1533, it was the Gonzaga who won the inheritance by marrying the last surviving female of the line. [18] In 1612 dynastic accident gave even greater weight to the demands of the House of Savoy. Four years previously a marriage had linked the eldest of three sons of Duke Vincenzo I of Mantua to the daughter of Carlo Emanuele of Savoy. One child born of this marriage, the Princess Maria, survived infancy, and assumed critical importance when in 1612 Vincenzo I died, followed a month later by his eldest son. While the heir to the Duchy of Mantua was indisputably Vincenzo?s second son, Ferdinando Gonzaga, it was at least legally debatable whether Monferrato, as a feudo feminino, should not pass to the Princess Maria, direct heir of the last reigning Duke. [19] The Duke of Savoy recognized that the governorship of the young Princess, followed by her marriage into the House of Savoy, would offer the strongest possible claim to Monferrato, and was prepared to do all within his power, up to and including waging war against the Gonzaga, to gain possession of her, and the result was a sequence of Savoyard attacks on Monferrato. All three major powers with interests in Italy found themselves involved in this dispute - the first War of the Mantuan Succcession (1613-1615) - but for varying reasons none of them had an interest in seeing the Gonzaga despoiled of Monferrato by the Duke of Savoy. [20] Frustrated in his territorial ambitions, and unable to gain the Princess from the Gonzaga, Carlo Emanuele at least managed to extract a promise that Maria should not be married without the explicit permission of the Emperor and without consultation with interested parties. [21]
However it quickly became clear that the Duke of Savoy might, in any case, soon have another opportunity to assert his claims on Monferrato. Neither Ferdinando nor his younger brother, Vincenzo, managed to produce a legitimate male heir before their deaths in 1626 and 1627, so that on Vincenzo?s death Charles de Nevers arrived at the threshold of his inheritance. But these deaths also brought to a head the Duke of Savoy?s ambition to gain his long-awaited compensation from the Duchy of Monferrato. Almost all interested parties, including the ambassadors of France and Spain, considered that Charles de Nevers should compromise in the face of the Savoyard, the Guastalla, and other more minor, claimants to the succession. [22] Nevers alone, together with a faction of his supporters in Mantua, seems to have taken the view that he had inherited Mantua and Monferrato unconditionally and would not accept any compromise over his ?rights?. The resulting crisis placed the major powers of France, Spain and the Emperor in an extremely difficult position. While Nevers had never been a good subject of the King of France, he calculated that his intransigence over the rival claims to the succession would ultimately receive French support. Nevers? control of the Duchy of Monferrato, within easy distance of France through Savoie or Piedmont, was undoubtedly an attraction to French policy-makers. The key to Monferrato was the fortress and fortified capital of Casale, amongst the largest and most imposing fortification-systems in north Italy. If, in the long term, France could prise Casale out of the hands of Nevers, then she would gain a crucial ?gateway? into Italy, a means to facilitate military involvement in the peninsula for the future.
But there were other factors which made Nevers? intransigence much less welcome. In his attempt to recover a base of support within France after the debacle of the Valtelline, Richelieu had moved swiftly into an alliance with the dévots based upon the priority of destroying, finally, the Huguenot ?state within a state?. By 1628 the royal army was locked into the protracted siege of La Rochelle. There were no military resources to spare for an Italian adventure, and Richelieu was fully aware that his ministerial survival now depended on ensuring victory at La Rochelle, however long this took. And even if France had possessed the additional military resources, it is questionable whether Louis and Richelieu would wish to use these to support Charles de Nevers? uncompromising claim to the succession. A far more long-term and substantial corner-stone of French policy in Italy was a working alliance with the Duke of Savoy. The 1626 Treaty of Monzón had done considerable damage to Franco-Savoyard relations, and it was essential that France should be seen to do something for her established ally if the relationship was to be restored. The obvious means to achieve a rapprochement with the Duke of Savoy was to persuade Charles de Nevers to compromise over the inheritance of Monferrato, granting those disputed areas of the Duchy on the borders of Piedmont to Carlo Emanuele. Thus if Nevers were brought to negotiate with Savoy through French diplomatic pressure, this might open the way to a renewal of good relations between France and Savoy. Unfortunately for France, Nevers was simply not prepared to play along with French ambitions. Despite the blandishments of French ambassadors, Nevers refused to compromise with Savoy or with anyone else over the succession. And when these blandishments had evidently failed by early 1628, it was clear that France did not have the available military resources to impose a succession arrangement by force.
For the Duke of Savoy, this apparent French impotence forced him to consider other options. Immediately after Vincenzo?s death, news reached Turin that Charles? supporters in Mantua had pushed through a marriage between Charles? son, the duc de Rethel, and the princess Maria, arguably the legal heir to Monferrato. The weakest point in Charles? title to the succession now appeared to have been stopped up, albeit at the price of flouting a whole series of international agreements about prior consultation and Imperial consent in the marriage of Maria. For Carlo Emanuele this was further, exasperating evidence that Charles de Nevers was intending to ignore the Savoyard claims on Monferrato. [23] Piedmont-Savoy was considerably more powerful militarily than the Gonzaga Duchies, but if Carlo Emanuele were to launch a pre-emptive strike against Monferrato, he would certainly encounter the hostility of the Spanish in the Milanese. The prospect that the Duke of Savoy, who had always tended in the past towards alliances with France, would annex Monferrato right up to the frontier with the Milanese, was not one which Philip IV and Olivares would accept. The Spanish, like the French, wished for some peaceful solution through which Nevers and Carlo Emanuele settled their differences over Monferrato without the intervention of any other European power. But if that was not possible, the Spanish were reluctant to employ their diplomacy and military force to prevent Carlo Emanuele making good his claims on Monferrato, simply in order to guarantee the entire, strategically-vital, Duchy in the possession of Charles de Nevers, for in so far as he had a loyalty it was more likely to be pro-French than pro-Spanish.
Nevers? intransigence thus left the Spanish little choice but to negotiate directly with the Duke of Savoy, and by March 1628 Carlo Emanuele and Gonzalo de Córdoba, Spanish governor of Milan, had agreed terms for the partitioning of Monferrato, granting Savoy the disputed territories on her borders, and giving Spain control of Casale. [24] Philip IV and Olivares were not prepared to accept either allowing Savoy to overrun Monferrato single-handed, or seeing the dispute settled through the diplomatic initiatives of France; the partition treaty seemed therefore the least bad option. Spain had little or no interest in events in the main Duchy of Mantua; its strategic importance was so much smaller than Monferrato, and its susceptibility to Spanish pressure so much greater, that no one who held just Mantua could pose much of a threat to Spanish security. Yet the chief claimant to parts of the Duchy of Mantua, the Duke of Guastalla, felt no less frustration at Nevers? intransigence. While Savoy played France off against Spain to try to gain her aims in Monferrato, Ferrante II Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla, appealed to the Emperor over the disputed Gonzaga lands within the Duchy of Mantua. As Imperial Commissary General in north Italy, Ferrante was well-connected at the court of Vienna and in the Imperial Privy Council. [25] The Emperor, preoccupied with the catholic ?crusade? which was carrying Wallenstein?s army to the Baltic coast, had no wish to become embroiled in a dispute between Italian princes. But the pressure of Guastalla and his allies, combined with the flagrant defiance of Imperial jurisdiction by Nevers, forced the Emperor to become involved. [26] Declaring the Duchies sequestered pending Imperial adjudication over the various claimants, the Emperor demanded that Nevers place his territories in the hands of an Imperial administrator.
By refusing to accept the edict of sequestration, and by raising troops from his principalities and French duchies to launch a diversionary attack on the Savoyard and Spanish armies in Monferrato, Nevers took a further step towards general conflict in north Italy. His own military initiative failed, but his defiance of Imperial authority and his willingness to contest the occupation of Monferrato with force, raised the real prospect that he might end up entirely excluded from his territories to the profit of a Habsburg-Savoyard alliance. [27] Although France could do nothing until the siege of La Rochelle had been brought to an end, Richelieu began to lay contingency plans for a rapid strike into Monferrato, lifting the siege of Casale and pushing back the Duke of Savoy - not to expel him from Monferrato, but to restrict his territorial gains to those claimed before the partition treaty - an arrangement which would now be guaranteed by France, not Spain. [28]
In March 1629 this plan was put into action, and for the second time under Richelieu?s aegis, French troops invaded Italy. The intervention achieved short-term success. The Duke of Savoy was induced to break his military alliance with Spain and to return to French allegiance in return for support over his claims on Monferrato. [29] The Spanish were driven off from the siege of Casale, and the fortress was garrisoned with French troops. While the French rapidly withdrew the rest of their army to resume the struggle against the Huguenots, the effects on the Habsburg powers of this direct French intervention forced them to reconsider their own military priorities. Spain, above all, was deeply concerned at the prospect of Monferrato divided between Savoy and Nevers, both now allied with the king of France, and with a French garrison in the key fortress of Casale. Olivares and Philip IV therefore decided to raise the stakes, to launch another siege of Casale to expel the French forces, and to try to persuade Savoy back into a Spanish alliance. [30] Moreover, Spain was now concerned to rid herself of Nevers altogether, and her ambassador in Vienna joined with the pro-Guastalla faction to demand punitive sanctions against Nevers for defying the edict of sequestration. Although reluctant to place Nevers under the Imperial ban, the Emperor was persuaded to commit troops to occupy the Duchy of Mantua pending decisions about the claims on the inheritance. [31]
It was the French king who now found himself embarrassed by the situation in Italy. Having previously hoped that a rapid strike down into Monferrato would serve France?s interests in Italy, the maintenance of France?s position would now require a willingness to match the concentrations of Spanish and Imperial troops moving into Monferrato and Mantua. Savoy?s readiness to revert to a Spanish alliance threatened France with the loss of all influence in Italy if she failed to respond to the challenge. Richelieu had no illusions that France would be fighting under a considerable military disadvantage. [32] The strategic problems of aiding the Duchy of Mantua were even greater than those of getting troops into the Valtelline: France could do nothing to prevent the siege and sack of the city of Mantua in June 1630. In Monferrato, Spanish troops were prepared for a long siege of Casale, and any relief expedition would be faced with a hard-fought campaign. The best that France could achieve was the intimidation of the Duke of Savoy, through the military occupation of the duché de Savoie, bordering Dauphiné, and the ten-day siege and capture of the Savoyard ?super-fortress? of Pinerolo. [33] Even more than Casale this fortress was perceived as the key gateway for subsequent French intervention in Italy. It soon became clear that France regarded Pinerolo as a primary gain from the conflict and was far more likely to make concessions at the expense of her erstwhile ally, Charles de Nevers, than to return this fortress to the Duke of Savoy.
Beyond this, the situation for France appeared grim. Once Mantua had fallen and north Italy was awash with Spanish and Imperial troops, there was little chance that France would be able to launch a successful relief of Casale. But just as Italian affairs shaped the wider European conflict, so, in this case, did military and political events outside of Italy change the seemingly inevitable outcome of the struggle in Monferrato. Neither Spain nor the Emperor could afford a protracted military campaign in Italy. For Spain the commitment to Monferrato was accompanied by an alarming deterioration of her military position in the Netherlands. [34] For the Emperor the landing in Pomerania of a small army under King Gustav-Adolf in late 1630, and the consolidation of the Swedish military and political base in north Germany, became a real threat which he now lacked adequate forces to confront. [35] Thanks to the pact with Spain the majority of veteran Imperial troops were now in Italy. The Emperor had accepted the need to re-assert Imperial authority in Italy, but not involvement in a protracted north Italian war; he now wanted his troops out of Italy in order to campaign in the north, and if Spain would not agree to a general and immediate peace settlement, he would act unilaterally to withdraw his forces, leaving Spain to face the French unaided.
Time was on Richelieu?s side, and as the Imperial position on the withdrawal of troops hardened, so Olivares and Philip IV drew back from the prospect of escalating the war in north Italy. It was far from clear that France could have won a decisive victory in north Italy, but by October 1630 the Spanish crown?s readiness to continue the struggle had evaporated, and negotiations for peace were begun which culminated in the two treaties of Cherasco of April and June 1631. [36]
Although the Treaty of Cherasco has been seen as the end of the ?Italian episode? of the Thirty Years? War, it did not in the event represent a permanent solution to any of the conflicts surrounding the Mantuan succession, nor did it re-establish a ?balance of power? between the major rulers with interests in Italy. The treaty forced the Emperor to withdraw the edict of sequestration imposed on Charles de Nevers, and damaged Imperial authority in Reichsitalien by removing the Emperor?s right to arbitrate the succession dispute. Equally, though, Charles de Nevers was bitterly opposed to a negotiated treaty which granted away not only the disputed part of Monferrato to the Duke of Savoy, but the disputed territory in the Duchy of Mantua to the Duke of Guastalla. [37] Both the Dukes of Savoy and Nevers paid the price of having become militarily involved, whether as opponents or allies, with France. Although the terms of Cherasco stipulated the evacuation of occupied territory by both Spain and France, the French had no intention of giving up the key fortresses of Pinerolo and Casale. Moreover, France, having gained these footholds, used them to strengthen and expand influence in the peninsula. Thus the Italian theatre in the early 1630?s was marked by considerable diplomatic activity, shifts of alliance and military manoeuvring to prepare for a possible resumption of conflict. The new Duke of Savoy, Vittorio Amedeo I, took the view that the chances of regaining Pinerolo and strengthening his claims on the rest of Monferrato would best be served by a close alliance with the French. On the other side, exasperated by the occupation of Casale, Charles de Nevers and his successors saw the future of the Mantuan territories in terms of a return to an Imperial alliance. There was little doubt about France?s further interventionist aims in north Italy. It was also a foregone conclusion that the Habsburgs would seek to force the French out of the peninsula when opportunity permitted.
But the effects of the Mantuan succession crisis extended beyond Italy. By snatching victory from the jaws of imminent defeat, Richelieu had greatly enhanced his own credibility with Louis XIII and had validated a policy of selective and limited challenges to Habsburg power. The assumption was that such policies would now be continued, allowing France to strengthen her control of territories across her frontiers and contributing at the same time to undermining the authority and military reputation of the Habsburgs. Richelieu had apparently found a via media between international catholic appeasement and all-out commitment to European war. Just as he sought to consolidate France?s advantages in Italy, Richelieu pressed forward with a series of military actions and territorial occupations on France?s eastern frontiers. After Cherasco he remained confident that however provocative such French activity, the Habsburgs would not be prepared to risk adding France to their open enemies by an outright declaration of war. [38] Yet while Richelieu?s brinkmanship brought France considerable success in extending her frontiers and interdicting lines of communication along the Rhine without encountering substantial opposition, the cumulative effect of such policies led inexorably towards confrontation. When combined Austrian and Spanish armies unexpectedly destroyed the main Swedish and German protestant force at Nördlingen on 6 September 1634, there began a slide into open warfare. The Habsburgs now felt strong enough to challenge the territorial and political advances made by France in the previous four years, whether in north Italy or the Rhineland; Louis XIII and Richelieu found themselves in a changed situation in which war could only have been avoided by a wholesale surrender of France?s recent gains.
The crisis of the Mantuan Succession, which had precipitated a war in north Italy wanted by none of the major European, had also contributed to a larger and longer war which was equally unsought by those powers. In a real sense the outcome of the war of the Mantuan Succession paved the way to this general European conflict between the Habsburgs and France, and by doing so decisively shaped the character of the Thirty Years? War.
FOOTNOTES
1. See, for example Lublinskaja 1968, pp. 156-158.
2. Tapié 1934, pp. 507-513.
3. See, for example Quazza 1921.
4. Pithon 1960, p. 308.
5. The negotiations were concluded in November 1624: A[rchivio di] S[tato di] To[rino], L[etteri] M[inistri] Francia, 25, Carlo Emanuele to the abbé Alessandro Scaglia: fo 7, 8 Aug. 1624, fo 24, 9 Nov. 1624.
6. Capriata 1663, pp. 304-316.
7. Grillon 1975ff., I, pp. 218-220, [Sept. 1625]: Sur la necessité de la paix du dedans.
8. Grillon 1975-, I, pp. 226-233, 25 Nov. 1625.
9. A[rchivio di] S[tato di] Ma[ntova], A[rchivio] G[onzaga] E xv 3, busta 675, 17 Feb. 1627, report by the Mantuan representative in Paris concerning the Duke of Savoy?s resentment at the Treaty of Monzón.
10. Elliott 1986, pp. 406-408; Stradling 1986; Straub 1980, pp. 428-436; Koenigsberger 1971, pp. 243-245; Parrott 1987.
11. See, for example Baudson 1947, pp. 237-240, 254.
12. For example, Elliott 1986, pp. 337-343.
13. For example, Pithon 1960, pp. 297-322; Israel 1982, pp. 162-174; Straub 1980, pp. 288-314.
14. Fichtner 1989.
15. There were 85 signori e cavalieri of the House of Gonzaga in the 1570?s, of whom 24 were Imperial fiefholders: see Mozzarelli 1979.
16. Parrott 1997, pp. 154-159.
17. The device is featured on numbers of coins stamped for Charles de Nevers after his arrival in Mantua: Bignotti 1984, pp. 94-95.
18. Davari 1891.
19. Carutti 1875-1880, II, pp. 112-117.
20. A[rchives des] A[ffaires] É[trangères], M[émoires et] D[ocuments] Italie, 21, fos 20 [v ], 21, 27 April, 5 May 1613: exchange of letters between the Spanish Governor of Milan and Louis XIII, concerned to ensure a settlement in north Italy.
21. Gabiani 1915, pp. 170-172.
22. See, for example, the letters of the French ambassador, the marquis de Saint-Chaumont, to Louis XIII: A.A.E., C[orrespondance] P[olitique], Mantoue, 1, fos 223, 227, 14 Nov., 4 Dec. 1627.
23. Most attempts to reconcile Mantua and Savoy in the first months of 1628 identify the marriage as the primary source of contention - for example, A.S. To., Ducato Monferrato, busta 37, pieces 1,10; A.A.E., C.P. Savoie 8, fo 268, 14 Mar. 1628.
24. A.A.E., C.P. Savoie 8, fo 242, 3 Mar. 1628, Claudio Marini, French agent in Turin, to Louis XIII; A.A.E., C.P. Mantoue 2, fo 28, 28 Mar. 1628, Saint-Chaumont to secrétaire d?état, d?Herbault.
25. Affò 1982, III, p. 120.
26. For example, Quazza 1926, I, 92-93.
27. Quazza 1926, I, 199-201.
28. Grillon 1975, III, pp. 587-588, [Dec.] 1628, Allocution au Roi par le Cardinal de Richelieu; A.A.E., C.P. Savoie 8, fo 471, 21 Dec. 1628, instructions for Henri d?Estampes, chevalier de Valençay, concerning the reassurances to be given to Carlo Emanuele.
29. A.A.E., C.P. Savoie 9, fos 114-119, 10 May 1629: text of treaty of Bossolino which gave French support to Savoy?s control of the disputed parts of Monferrato.
30. Stradling 1986, p. 77;
31. Quazza 1926, I, 410-411.
31. Richelieu spoke of this second intervention as ?un jeu forcé? which he would have wished to avoid: Grillon 1975, IV., pp. 676-81, Considérations pour estre veues par le Roi...
33. Humbert 1960, pp. 77-157.
34. Israel 1990a.
35. Roberts 1958, II, pp. 439-452.
36. Text of the armistice agreement in A.A.E., C.P. Mantoue 3, fo 466 et seq., 26 Oct. 1630. For the text of the treaties of Cherasco: A.A.E., M[émoires et] d[ocuments] Italie, 21, fo 220v et seq., 6 April 1631.
37. Of Monferrato, Nevers wrote to Richelieu with some bitterness: ?vous avez maintenant sceu ce qui s?est passé dans la conclusion du traite de Cherasco et le demembrement qui y est fait en faveur du duc de Savoye de la meilleure et plus riche partye du Monferrat?: A.A.E., C.P. Mantoue 4, fo 83, 17 April 1631. For the agreement to respect the claims of Guastalla: A.A.E., M.D. Italie, 21, fo 219, 12 Feb 1631, ?Accordo tra Mons. vescovo di mantova et Guastalla fatto a Vienna?.
38. Parrott 1987, pp. 95-100
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