Cardinal Mazarin, the gambler who galloped between armies shouting peace
On 26 October 1630, French and Spanish troops faced each other outside Casale in northern Italy, ready to fight. A young papal envoy rode between the lines waving a flag and crying for peace, carrying a deal from the Spanish commander. Both sides accepted it. That rider, Giulio Mazzarino, later ruled France in all but name.
Mazarin was born in 1602 in Pescina in the Abruzzo, the eldest of six children of a Roman household official serving the powerful Colonna family. Jesuit-educated in Rome, he defended a thesis at 16 on that year's comet and played Ignatius of Loyola in a pageant. He also loved cards, ran up debts, and gave his name to a card game, Hoc Mazarin. Studying in Spain, he nearly married a notary's daughter who came with a generous dowry, until his patrons summoned him home.
Cardinal Richelieu, meeting him in 1630, suspected he was more spy than negotiator. Mazarin won him over with diplomacy and a stream of gifts, from perfumes for court ladies to Renaissance paintings for Richelieu himself. Though made a cardinal in 1641, he was never ordained a priest. He moved to Paris in 1640 and succeeded Richelieu as chief minister in 1642, then governed for the regent Anne of Austria and oversaw the education of the boy king Louis XIV.
Victories late in the Thirty Years' War let him make France Europe's leading power and helped produce the Peace of Westphalia, whose ideas of state sovereignty and legal equality between states still underpin international law. Then came the Fronde, a noble and parliamentary revolt starting in 1648. Mazarin smuggled the queen and king out of Paris and spent time in exile in Germany before returning in triumph in 1653.
His final years brought an alliance with England in 1657, the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, which added three provinces, and Louis XIV's marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. He introduced grand Italian opera to Paris, amassed art now in the Louvre, and founded the Bibliothèque Mazarine, France's first true public library. He died in 1661.
Source: Cardinal Mazarin
