ABSTRACT
The joust in which Henri was mortally wounded on 30 June 1559 was organized as part of the celebrations connected with the ratifi cation of the Treaty of CateauCambrésis – named for the town in present-day Belgium where it was negotiated the previous April. The French invasion of Italy in 1494, ostensibly to exercise an ancestral claim to the kingdom of Naples, had touched off a European war that was subsequently complicated by the Protestant Reformation in the 1520s. By the 1550s it had largely bankrupted most of Europe’s ruling families and so some kind of permanent peace had become a necessity (Elliott 1968: 11). The treaty putting an end to so many decades of war would naturally be a cause for festivities, especially since it also involved the marriages of Henri’s daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain and of his sister to the Duke of Savoy.
