ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the first adumbrations of its decline in the 1559 Peace of Cateau-Cambrsis. Cateau-Cambrsis achieved its purpose of ending a 50-year conflict between Valois France and Hapsburg Spain over Italy and important cathedral cites in Lorraine. The Spanish-French peace lasted for 30 years, a good run by any measure. Spain used that time to consolidate and expand its transatlantic empire. The chapter focuses on a premodern diplomatic practice that, by the time of Westphalia, was degenerating into international scandal: using interdynastic marriages to resolve disputes between rival powers. The collapse of the European colonial system, for example, has inaugurated new empire studies. The treaty of Cateau-Cambrsis looked like a typical late medieval settlement. In England, the relationship between state-building and marriage diplomacy took an even more radical turn, one that set a precedent for the eventual abandonment of marriage as peacemaking.
