ABSTRACT
‘I was twenty-two years old … I had absolutely never had any business with the French when a servant of the duke of Parma, who was considered a great astrologer, asked me why I laboured serving the Spanish, since all my fortune, honours and advantages would come to me from France’: so wrote Mazarini to Chavigny in 1637. By then French service had begun to seem to Mazarini an attractive option, with something of inevitability about it. Years before Urban VIII had allowed himself to be persuaded to embark on the foolish war against Parma (1642), 1 which depleted Papal finances and compromised his role as peacemaker, it was becoming clear to his disconsolate servant that little was left of the authority that had enabled a Pope, as recently as 1598, in the Franco-Spanish treaty of Vervins, to exercise a decisive influence. The Pope could not compel rulers to heed his voice. The peace initiative at Cologne had foundered because none of the principals had thought it timely: each still looked for advantage.
