#rocroi

[illustratus]

The Battle of Rocroi "Rocroi, the Last Tercio" by Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau

#augusto ferrer dalmau #battle of rocroi #art #thirty years war #rocroi #tercios #tercio #spain #spanish empire #spanish #pikemen #infantry #pike and shot #europe #history #spanish golden age #habsburg spain #france #habsburg monarchy #house of habsburg #habsburg #european #battle #last stand #franco spanish war

[postcard-from-the-past]

Moat by the Porte de France gate in Rocroi, Champagne region of France

French vintage postcard, mailed in 1906 to Laon

#champagne #tarjeta #postkaart #sepia #rocroi #porte #historic #france #laon #gate #photo #moat #postal #briefkaart #de #photography #1906 #mailed #vintage #ephemera #ansichtskarte #old #postcard #french #region #postkarte #the porte de france gate #carte postale

[francepittoresque]

19 mai 1643 : bataille de Rocroi gagnée sur les Espagnols par le duc d’Enghien ➽ http://bit.ly/Bataille-Rocroi Voulant mettre à profit la mort de Louis XIII, les Espagnols avaient repris l’offensive du côté de la Champagne et mis le siège devant Rocroi, sous la conduite de don Francisco de Mello. Le duc d’Enghien, quoique âgé de 21 ans seulement, est chargé de faire lever ce siège avec une armée très inférieure en nombre à celle des ennemis

#CeJourLà #19Mai #bataille #Rocroi #Français #Espagnols #duc #Enghien #Grand #Condé #Champagne #histoire #france #history #passé #past #français #french #news #événement #newsfromthepast

[revistadehistoria-es]

Síguenos en Substack https://revistadehistoria.substack.com/ Lee cada día nuevos Artículos Históricos GRATIS: https://revistadehistoria.es/registro-gratuito/ La batalla de Rocroi: El Crepúsculo de los Tercios

#Rocroi

[rooster-does-art]

Aspa de Borgoña flameando al viento

Hijos de Santiago grandes son los tercios

Escuadrón de picas, flancos a cubierto

Solo es libre el hombre que no tiene miedo

Translation:

Cross of Burgundy fluttering in the wind

Children of Saint James great are the Tercios

Pike escuadrón, flanks covered

Free is only the man who is not afraid

The tercio was a military administrative unit that contained around 3,000 troops. In the battlefield the tercio would form pike and shot formations called the escuadrón. Through the use of the tercio, Spain would dominate land warfare in the European continent from the 1500s to the 1600s.

Depicted in this piece is the Spanish tercio during the battle of Rocroi (1643). This battle is often reffered to as the begining of the downfall of the tercio. However, it should be noted that the Spanish tercios in this battle were never defeated.

At Rocroi, the Spanish cavalry was routed and the Spanish artillery was captured by the opposing French army. But the tercios stood strong. Withstanding artillery bombardment and numerous infantry and cavalry attacks, the tercios managed to hold.

Having the Spanish surrounded and outnumbered, the French asked them to surrender. In response, the Spanish said: "His Excellency seems to forget he is facing a Spanish tercio."

After more numerous failed attacks that were unable to break the tercios, the French eventually allowed an honorable surrender for the Spanish, where they could march out of the field, complete with their colors and weapons.

----------------------------------------

Featuring:

FairChild (@temper-temper) - Stanrad Bearer carrying the Cross of Burgundy

@techbro-arts and @askpokeeosin as pikemen

Boom (@thedumbguywithaheart43) as an arquebusier

#Silver Wing #FairChild #Techbro #Pokee #Boom #temper-temper #techbro-arts #askpokeeosin #thedumbguywithaheart43 #Art #Random Art #MLP #My Little Pony #History #30 Years War #Tercio #Spanish Tercio #Battle of Rocroi #Pike and Shot #Welp looks like I'm out of my Roman phase #And so enters a new addiction called the 30 Years War #So probably a lot of Pike and Shot warfare art coming out in the next couple of weeks

[histoireettralala]

Condé vs Mazarin: power and legitimacy.

By April 1649 Mazarin had survived the biggest challenge so far to his ministerial rule. A political revolt had briefly united popular unrest with the discontents of the bourgeoisie, the most senior judicial officers, and a large group of the court aristocracy. A combination of military threats and wide-ranging concessions had apparently calmed the situation; most significantly perhaps for Mazarin’s future calculations, it had demonstrated that his opponents would find it extremely difficult to militarize their opposition in any effective way. But relief was premature. For Mazarin’s new problem was that the military support he had drawn upon in early 1649 had cost him his previous near-monopoly over power and influence. Condé’s blockade of Paris had set him, as the defender of absolute royal authority —and thereby Mazarin’s ministry— directly against his own relatives and much of the great nobility. Hitherto idolized as the young military hero, he was now execrated by all those who had regarded the uprisings since August 1648 as a justified attempt to overthrow ministerial tyranny. Setting aside his personal ambitions, it was essential to his reputation that he should demonstrate as publicly and as vigorously as possible that he was no lackey of the first minister, and that his actions had been on behalf of the crown, not Mazarin.

Who then was Louis II de Bourbon-Condé, who was to become Mazarin’s nemesis for a decade from 1649? The duc d’Enghien, as he was titled until his father’s death in 1646, was no stranger to the realities of ministerial power. His father, Henri II, had rebuilt the material and political fortunes of the cadet branch of the Bourbon family on the basis of a close alliance with cardinal Richelieu after 1626. Henri de Condé provided Richelieu and his regime with the legitimizing support of a prince of the blood, and Condé in return benefited from a spectacular flow of political and territorial rewards. The benefits of the alliance were so great that he was ultimately cajoled into marrying his son, Louis II, to Richelieu’s niece, Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé. The marriage, celebrated at the Palais Cardinal on 9 February 1641, was a spectacular mésalliance for the duc d’Enghien, wished upon him by his father’s ambitions. Enghien, who until 1638 had stood only three lives from the throne, shared with his father an authoritarian ideology of an absolute monarchy mediated only by the king’s ‘natural advisors’, the princes of the blood. But the association with Richelieu and his family brought him into a close, stakeholder’s connection with the ministerial regime. Through this channel would flow the financial opportunities, patronage, and influence that had been enjoyed by his father over and above what would have been his as a prince of the royal blood.

Enghien would have been an important figure in the politics of the 1640s, just as his father had been in the previous decade. But the decision in 1643 to grant him the overall command of the army operating on the north-eastern frontier was not just a reflection of his status and political connections, but a remarkable act of confidence in a young man of twenty-three with no previous experience of overall military command. Enghien was surrounded by experienced lieutenants —most notably Jean, comte de Gassion— yet much would still depend on his untested ability to demonstrate qualities of leadership and decision-making. The French army faced a Spanish invasion, poised to take the town of Rocroi, and previous encounters in the field with the veterans of the Spanish army of Flanders had not ended well for the French. Enghien and his lieutenants took the decision to engage the Spanish army in an all-or-nothing bid to try to save Rocroi. Around 7.30 am on 19 May 1643 Enghien led a cavalry charge from the right flank of the French army which shattered the Spanish horse opposing him and left the infantry centre of the Spanish army exposed to his well-executed flanking attack. The magnitude of the victory over the best troops in the Spanish monarchy was unprecedented. The young duc d’Enghien became a legend overnight, a status that he never lost in the eyes of contemporaries.

Enghien’s successive military achievements through the 1640s in different campaign theatres were not just about heroic, charismatic leadership and calculated risk-taking. There was real tactical skill, partly learnt and partly intuitive, in his military deployments, his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of his own and enemy positions, and, above all, his ability to exploit surprise, shock, and speed to devastating advantage. Like his great contemporary, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, he recognized the fundamental importance of keeping his troops fed and equipped, and was free with his own resources to maintain supplies. Unlike Turenne, who had the well-regarded reputation of being thrifty with the lives of his own troops, Condé was unconcerned by heavy casualties in pursuit of his strategic objectives. Yet soldiers serving under his command recognized his remarkable talent for victory. On the eve of the battle of Bléneau in April 1652, one of Condé’s lieutenants wrote of the effect of the prince’s arrival, pulling the army together through the belief, above all among the common soldiers, that he was invincible.

The charisma of a young, brilliant general extended beyond the armies: in the 1640s contemporaries noted that he was regarded with both awe and considerable fear. Madame de Motteville wrote that, even after Mazarin had arrested him, ‘the reputation of M. le Prince imposed itself on everyone, and generated a curious veneration for his person, such that sightseers would go to visit the chamber where he had been imprisoned at Vincennes’. Numerous accounts confirmed that even powerful and well-established individuals found it difficult to stand up to Condé in any face-to-face confrontation, and his anger had an unpredictable character that few wished to test. The legend gained further weight from the fictional, centre-stage representation of Condé in Madeleine de Scudéry’s best-selling novel Le Grand Cyrus, published between 1649 and 1653.

The very particular danger Condé posed to Mazarin, or to any government which sought to control him, was the intractable nature of his own ambitions. His father had been manageable because he was rebuilding the Condé inheritance after its devastation in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, and was rehabilitating his own political reputation after rebellion and imprisonment. By the 1640s the Condé had become the wealthiest aristocratic family in France, and more territorial grants, positions, and financial rewards, though demanded, were no guarantee of further tractability. Moreover, a family strategy that aimed to consolidate the pre-eminence of the Condé-Bourbon over any other aristocratic family in France would lead Condé to target further desirable assets, especially lands and governorships, whose possession would challenge the hegemony of the crown in areas of the kingdom.

Yet at base the prince was more interested in power and influence at the centre of the state than in local power and quasi-monarchical status built up across the provinces. This desire for influence did not mean that he wished to take over government, to oust Mazarin or supplant the role of ministers in general. Indeed, the detailed, procedural business of government, the workings of the executive, would have been considered by Condé to be beneath his status, and appropriate to (interchangeable or dispensable) professionals of modest birth like Mazarin. What Condé wanted for himself was a decisive influence in the formulation of royal policy, the ability to oversee and, where necessary, shape decision-making without negotiation or compromise with other parties. During the regency he considered that this was his right by virtue of his blood, and by his acquired status as the military paladin of the young monarch. He would expect to maintain this privileged role of high-status advisor and intimate councillor after the king came of age, with the assumption that his voice would naturally outweigh others in royal decision-making. Despite the charges variously made against him by Mazarin and the court, all on the basis of notably scant evidence, Condé was far too deeply committed to the principle of divinely ordained absolute monarchy to wish to replace the king. Such an act of usurpation would radically challenge his own ideology, which linked his own status to a God-given hierarchy headed by the sovereign. Indeed, his hostility to both the Parisian frondeurs and to Mazarin was precisely because they sought to trespass upon what were the fundamental prerogatives of the monarchy.

In seeking to unravel Condé’s personality and his motivation, it is no less necessary to retrieve him from the condescension of posterity. Equipped with hindsight which sees the defeat of the Fronde as a triumph for ministerial government and its modernizing, state-building initiatives, Condé’s fate becomes a facile metaphor for the fate of the traditional ‘sword nobility’ as a whole. His reckless and inappropriate ambitions for political autonomy, personal glory, and immoderate reward were vanquished by the agent of state power, cardinal Mazarin. Defeated, forced into exile and into the service of Spain at the end of 1652, Condé was required to make a humiliating submission to Louis XIV in 1659 as the price of his ‘pardon’. After this he was reduced to an obedient vassal of the monarch. This supposedly parallels the traditional nobility as a whole, whose last irresponsible and doomed act of self-assertion was the Fronde. After this final defeat they were reduced to well-ordered servitude in the court and army of the Sun King, whose powerful, centralized state represented the triumph of bourgeois administrators, the heirs of Mazarin’s victory over the frondeurs. On this interpretation, Condé’s chief crime, if he is relieved of the charge of attempted usurpation, is setting up an ideal of autonomous political action and individual liberty in defiance of the ‘modern’ requirement for disciplined, collective obedience to the crown imposed by its faithful ministers. Indeed, even by the standards of the collective ideal of aristocratic liberty, it is suggested that Condé went too far in pursuit of uncompromising self-assertion, and helped to undermine the very values that he sought to uphold.

The real problem posed by Condé for Mazarin and his regime was not Condé’s uncontrolled individualism, his ‘folle liberté’, but the perception of contemporaries that he held more legitimate right to participate in the decision-making of a regency by virtue of his blood than did a ministerial appointee of the queen mother. Indeed, it is a remarkable triumph of a well-entrenched historiography that Condé’s actions are perceived as illegitimate attempts to challenge what is treated as the legitimate royal government personified in its first minister. By conflating Mazarin with the authority of the crown, the crucial dynamic of the conflict building up from 1643 and climaxing in the Fronde is misunderstood. Mazarin’s attempts to resist Condé’s claims to involvement in the political decisions of the regency did not deny the essential legitimacy of those claims. His approach most frequently relied on alarming both the queen mother and the king’s uncle, Gaston d’Orléans, that Condé would squeeze them out of the decision-making which was no less their right by family. Mazarin hardly needed to be reminded, and the mazarinades would have done the job for him, that his own position enjoyed no such legitimacy.

David Parrott- 1652- The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the Fronde.

#xvii #david parrott #1652: the cardinal the prince and the crisis of the fronde #la fronde #cardinal mazarin #louis ii de bourbon condé #le grand condé #henri ii de bourbon condé #cardinal de richelieu #claire-clémence de maillé-brézé #jean de gassion #battle of rocroi #henri de la tour d'auvergne #turenne #battle of bléneau #madame de motteville #madeleine de scudéry #louis xiv #anne d'autriche #gaston d'orléans

[twinegardening]

Lady Thalia and the Rose of Rocroi by E. Joyce and N. Cormier [IFDB]

Everyone who’s anyone summers in France - which means master thief Lady Thalia is there too, attending garden parties by day and stealing masterpieces by night. Unfortunately, this holiday is less than restful, as she crosses paths with foes both old and new. Case your targets, steal works of art, and team up with your Scotland Yard nemesis in this puzzle-based Twine game.

#interactive fiction #twine gardening #lady thalia and the rose of rocroi #this game was part of spring thing 2022 #to finish #spring thing 2022

[liberty1776]

Alatriste ~Battle of Rocroi (English Subtitles)

#Military History Pike and Shot Rise of France Battle of Rocroi

[playitagin]

1643 –Battle of Rocroi

French forces under the duc d'Enghien decisively defeat Spanish forces at the Battle of Rocroi, marking the symbolic end of Spain as a dominant land power.

#May.19.1643 #Battle of Rocroi #Thirty Years' War #history today

[enalfersa]

1643 Rocroi

View On WordPress

#1643: Rocroi #9788409081066 #Alburquerque #España #Felipe IV #Flandes #Francisco de Melo #guerra de los Treinta Años #Historia de España en viñetas #Miguel Lobera Santos #siglo XVII

[where-is-tom-scott-today]

I am here at the battle of Rocroi.

#submission

[horses-in-art-history]

I've gotten into a 1600s matchlock mood recently and I watched a Swedish documentary that tried to dispel nationalist myths about the 2632 battle of listen (their actual words Idk I don't remember convos very well but they said nationalism and glory days myths)

Any way stupid intro to question: did sweden have any specific kind of cavalry horse or did they just grab whatever?

(A US civil war/native extermination said the US bought what horse was brown and had the right temperment)

And is there any kind of *shift* in how cavalry has been portrayed in art? Like are there certain poses lighting whatever that's been slowly removed or put in?

I think this is probably from my notice of how Cromwell (1970) and alatriste (2006). Cromwell shows the battle of edgehill and naseby as big romps in a field with pretty flags and uniforms vs alatristes siege of Breda and battle of rocroi that are more like loosely organised gang fights. Cromwell: very clean, pretty festive even. wide shots for the spectacle. Alatriste: everyone is in a shade of brown. The blood flows freely. You are up in the men's faces as they are stabbed repeatedly.

Maybe what I'm saying is if a dramatic change like that in thirty years what about 300+ years?

Or am I just seeing shapes in smoke?

To make this a little simpler I've boiled down your questions a bit so I can group my answers to them more clearly. I hope you don't mind that I focused a bit more on the first question since I felt I could give it the best answer.

What kinds of horses were used by the Swedish cavalry?

Sweden didn't have a regular cavalry until king Gustav Vasa (r. 1523-1560). In the cavalry there was a preference for stallions initially, since mares and geldings were thought to lack the strength and bravery needed in battle, but with the outbreak of war in 1700 they shifted to using geldings. Mares and stallions were instead kept at home to insure the breeding of new horses even as war was ongoing. In 1658 Sweden gained new territory further south (Skåne) that was well suited for breeding horses which greatly aided its efforts in supplying horses to the army. The average mount served for 15 years in the Carolean cavalry wich meant each year 350 newly ridden in horses were needed. These horses weren't that big by continental standards, being on average about 139 cm tall at the withers. Compare that to the requirements of the late 1900s when they had to be at least 152 cm and you get sense of the significant change that took place. By the mid 1700's each cavalry company had three stallions and twenty-odd mares to produce replacement mounts. There were some small changes in the early 1800's to this system. (Source)

King Karl XI (r. 1660-1697) instituted studs in Strömsholm, Kungsör, and Läckö to improve the quality of horse breeding. He also imported stallions from Norway, Swedish Livonia (parts of modern day Estonia and Latvia), Swedish Pomerania, and France with the same goal in mind. (Source)

Nowadays the Beriden Högvakt (mounted guards) in Stockholm use only Chestnut Swedish Warmbloods, Grey Kladrubers and a couple of draught horses as drum horses. (link to a Swedish article with more info)

How has the depiction of cavalry changed through time?

Your other question about depictions of cavalry is an interesting one, and I would just from what I have seen say that there is a movement form more composed images to dynamic and later more grounded/gritty depictions of horses in war. The pinnacle of this latter form being in WW1 in my opinion (this was probably helped by the work of war artists like Alfred James Munnnings, John Edwin Noble, etc). You can in all likelihood map this evolution on to more general societal/cultural feelings about war and as to whether it was seen as being glorious or a tragedy. Also the fact that the horse was becoming more obsolete during WW1 probably helped remove some of the glory from the art of the time. If you think about paintings from a bit earlier (the late 1800's) where there are still plenty of paintings of glorious cavalry charges it makes quite a contrast to the art of WW1.

I think you can look at this question through the lens of what is happening culturally but also in art history, especially with regard to your question about poses and lighting. For example a painting of cavalry from the Romanticism movement is going to look quite different from something done in a more realist style.

I don't feel like I've got the time to give this question the attention it deserves here so I'll leave it as it is for now, but I'll do my best to return to this question and give it a more complete answer. Also I've only written about European art in my answer which doesn't tell the whole story.

#horses in art history #the sources linked in my first answer go to pages in swedish but i thought i might have some Swedish followers who were interested #also it feels like the correct thing to do

[revistadehistoria-es]

Síguenos en Substack https://revistadehistoria.substack.com/ Lee cada día nuevos Artículos Históricos GRATIS: https://revistadehistoria.es/registro-gratuito/ La batalla de Tuttlingen. El Rocroi francés

#Rocroi #Tercios #Terciosespañoles #Tuttlingen

[thecreaturecodex]

Karnabo

Image © @a-book-of-creatures​, accessed at their site here

[The karnabo is a regional bogey from the Ardennes, a mountain range on the border of France and Belgium. Specifically, it’s associated with the fort of Rocroi and its surrounding commune, so it’s hyper-localized. It’s also very cool looking; I’m a sucker for anything with an elephant trunk. A Book of Creatures says that it has “basilisk eyes”, which probably means a death gaze, but instant kill abilities, as we know, are pretty rare in PF1e. It’s said to be the child of a sorcerer and a ghoul, so I gave it sorcerer spellcasting and links to ghouls in the flavor text.]

Karnabo CR 10 CE Monstrous Humanoid This creature appears like a swollen, elephantine humanoid with thick gray skin and a long trunk instead of a nose. It stands taller than a man. Its eyes are hollow and haunting.

The karnabo is a ghastly creature that dwells in caves and mountain peaks. It feeds on travelers, but not indiscriminately, because a karnabo enjoys building its reputation and spreading fear. When it attacks, it will usually go out of its way to leave someone alive to tell the tale, and may take hostages to amuse itself with before letting them go with ample horror stories. One of the strangest things about karnabo behavior is that they have several minor healing abilities, and will often times patch up a victim before setting them on their way. Some karnabo even act as dedicated healers during holidays, although their criteria for whom they heal and when is often arbitrarily narrow. Those who fail such measures are attacked.

A karnabo has sorcerous powers, which they use to increase their mobility and stealth capacities—karnabo are decidedly slow and steady. Once within range, they reveal themselves to use their most potent weapon, a gaze that kills by liquefying the organs. Creatures that flee may be halted in their tracks with a shrill, fear-inducing whistle, or merely blasted with spells, depending on the karnabo’s whims. Few karnabos fight to the death, as their purposes are served by leaving scarred and wounded survivors.

Karnabos are usually solitary, as they are long lived, reproduce rarely, and prefer isolated landscapes. Their diet is the remains of their victim’s organs, reduced to slurry with their gaze and sucked up in the trunk and drunk like an elephant does with water. If they kill a victim with other means, they will let it ripen and rot to liquid putrefaction before drinking that. Whatever is left is abandoned to the elements, or occasionally fed to friends. Karnabos get along well with ghouls, and can be found in their company.

Karnabo               CR 10 XP 9,600 CE Medium monstrous humanoid Init +4; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +13, scent Defense AC 22, touch 10, flat-footed 22 (+12 natural) hp 126 (12d10+60) Fort +11, Ref +8, Will +11 Immune ability damage, ability drain, energy drain, paralysis Defensive Abilities stability Offense Speed 20 ft. Melee 2 slams +16 (1d8+4) Special Attacks gaze, paralyzing whistle Spells CL 9th, concentration +13 (+17 casting defensively) 4th (5/day)—fear (DC 18), stoneskin 3rd (7/day)—fly, lightning bolt (DC 17), ray of exhaustion (DC 17) 2nd (7/day)—cat’s grace, command undead (DC 16), invisibility, scorching ray 1st (7/day)—expeditious retreat, lock gaze (DC 15), mage armor, magic missile, shocking grasp 0th—detect magic, detect poison, light, mage hand, message, read magic, resistance, touch of fatigue (DC 14) Spell-like Abilities CL 9th, concentration +13 (+17 casting defensively) 3/day—cure moderate wounds (DC 16), lesser restoration 1/day—remove disease Statistics Str 19, Dex 11, Con 21, Int 12, Wis 16, Cha 18 Base Atk +12; CMB +16; CMD 26 (30 vs. bull rush, trip) Feats Arcane Strike, Combat Casting, Great Fortitude, Improved Initiative, Silent Spell, Skill Focus (Stealth) Skills Climb +14, Fly +10, Knowledge (arcana, religion) +9, Perception +13, Spellcraft +9, Stealth +11, Survival +13 Languages Common, Necril, Undercommon Ecology Environment any mountains or underground Organization solitary or pack (1-2 plus 3-12 ghouls) Treasure standard (spell components for stoneskin x2, other treasure Special Abilities Gaze (Su) Range 30 ft.; save Fort DC 20; effect 1d6 Con damage. The save DC is Charisma based. Paralyzing Whistle (Su) As a standard action, a karnabo can whistle horribly. All creatures within 30 feet must succeed a DC 20 Will save or be paralyzed for 1d4+1 rounds. A creature can break free of this paralysis early by succeeding another Will save as a full round action. A karnabo can only use this ability once every 1d4 rounds, and a creature that succeeds the initial Will save is immune to the paralyzing whistle of that karnabo for the next 24 hours. Spells A karnabo gains spellcasting as a 9th level sorcerer. It does not gain other benefits of the sorcerer class, such as a bloodline, unless it takes levels in sorcerer. Stability (Ex) As long as it is touching the ground, a karnabo gains a +4 racial bonus on its CMD against bull rush and trip attempts.

#karnabo #french folklore #ghoul #bogey #bogeyman #a book of creatures #world tour #pathfinder 1e

[lux-vitae]

Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau painting Rocroi, el Último Tercio (Rocroi, the Last Tercio) (2011)

#augusto ferrer-dalmau #art #photo

[histoireettralala]

What saved Mazarin

Mazarin's own position was paradoxical. He enjoyed the kind of public and unconditional support from the queen mother in the years after 1643 that Richelieu never received from Louis XIII. In that respect the perennial problem of the perceived illegitimacy of rule by an over-powerful first minister could be confronted by the insistence that obedience to the royal will trumped any constitutional distate for the way in which the rule had chosen to delegate their authority. But of course this was not the affirmation of an adult male king, but of a queen regent. The extent that it was permissible to delegate authority at all during a regency was open to legal debate, and to an array of assumptions and opinions shaped by custom and precedent. Insofar as the queen mother took advice from those immediately around her, the consensus, echoed repeatedly during the Fronde, was that this advice should come from the princes of the blood. Such a perception of the regency left no obvious legitimate space for a first minister, a servant of someone who was herself a servant of the young king.

What saved Mazarin, at least for a time, from the emergence of further opposition was a factor that has been insufficiently stressed in most accounts, but which was certainly not lost on contemporaries. The period from the victory at Rocroi through the battle won at Lens in August 1648 was one of outstanding French military success. Rocroi was followed by the capture of Thionville in summer 1643, by further progress in consolidating a grip on Roussillon and the bolstering of the Catalan revolt, and by the capture of Trino, securing the French position in Monferrato. The 1644 campaign produced further gains in Flanders, including the siege and capture of Gravelines, and turned a tactical defeat inflicted by the Bavarian army near Freiburg-im-Breisgau into a strategic success through an adroit manoeuvre that allowed the French army to take the fortress of Philippsburg on the Rhine, quickly followed by Mainz and Landau [..]

This foreign policy success deserves emphasis: it is the most obvious explanation for the relatively muted hostility to Mazarin's regime after 1643, despite fundamental questions about its legitimacy. Moreover, its reliance, like its predecessor, on narrow factional support, control of access to the crown, and close links between involvement in government and immoderate private profiteering, were all calculated to provoke anger and resentment amongst the rest of the political class. The military success itself could bring problems [..] What was preventing the achievement of a "good peace", given that a general European congress in which French was well represented was already in progress, and that from 1645 France and her allies held the upper hand militarily ? To many the answer seemed obvious it was neither in the political nor the financial interests of Mazarin and his clientele to conclude a settlement. To make peace would bring to an end the justification for the système de l'extraordinaire on which the ministry's claim to power and legitimacy rested: without war it would be impossible to justify such narrow ministerial control of the regency. Léon de Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny -no friend of Mazarin's after his disgrace in 1643, but an intelligent and astute observer- was clear that Mazarin could have made a good settlement that would have validated the war effort at any point from 1645. He held out, in Chavigny's opinion, because he knew that once a settlement had been concluded, his services would be dispendable.

Mazarin's actions certainly give some credence to Chavigny's charge.

David Parrott- 1652- The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the Fronde.

#xvii #david parrott #1652: the cardinal the prince and the crisis of the fronde #cardinal mazarin #anne d'autriche #cardinal de richelieu #louis xiii #battle of rocroi #battle of lens #chavigny