The Peace of the Pyrenees

NOV 07 1659 · 12:00

Louis XIV and Philip IV meet on Pheasant Island to seal the Peace of the Pyrenees. Place: Pheasant Island (Île des Faisans), in the Bidassoa river, on the Franco-Spanish border Figures: Jules Cardinal Mazarin, for France · Luis Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, for Spain · Louis XIV, marrying Maria Theresa of Spain as a clause of the treaty The War That Outlasted Westphalia The Franco-Spanish War, opened in 1635 as France's overt entry into the Thirty Years' War, does not end at Münster in 1648. Spain, refusing France's terms, fights on for eleven further years against a France itself convulsed by the Fronde, the noble and parlementaire revolt that nearly unseats the young Louis XIV. The Spanish victory at Valenciennes in 1656 briefly suggests Madrid might recover its position. The Anglo-French victory at the Battle of the Dunes in 1658, fought partly with English New Model Army veterans loaned by Cromwell, closes the question. The Treaty of the Pyrenees is the closing instrument of the wider Westphalian round, signed eleven years after the main peace, on a small island in the river that separates the two crowns. Pheasant Island is chosen because it belongs to neither kingdom. A wooden pavilion is built across the border line laid through its center; Mazarin and Luis de Haro meet there for twenty-four conferences over three months. The island is, for the duration of the negotiations, the most carefully neutral square mile in Europe. Marriage as Clause France gains Roussillon, parts of Cerdagne, and Artois. Spain retains the rest of the Spanish Netherlands and its overseas empire, but its continental primacy is finished. The settlement extends the Westphalian framework to the Iberian peninsula and confirms what the war had decided: France is now the leading land power of Europe, and will remain so until 1815. The treaty's most consequential clause is a marriage. Louis XIV is to wed Maria Theresa of Spain, eldest daughter of Philip IV. She renounces her Spanish inheritance in exchange for a dowry of 500,000 gold écus; the renunciation is conditional on the dowry's payment. Spain, broke, never pays. The conditional renunciation becomes the legal pretext on which Louis claims Spanish territory in the War of Devolution (1667) and, more consequentially, the Spanish inheritance itself in the war that will end at Utrecht (see [[peace-of-utrecht-1713]]). The wedding takes place on the same island in June 1660. The bride crosses from the Spanish to the French half of the pavilion and is delivered to her husband at the border line.