Italy, 1600–1660

Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, had seized the marquisate of Saluzzo in the autumn of 1588, while France was torn by civil war. It was France's last possession on the Italian side of the Alps. When Henry IV, at peace again, demanded it back, the duke stalled and refused to hand it over on French terms.

Henry IV declared war and in August 1600 invaded Savoy's lands west of the Alps. By the end of the year his troops held Bresse and almost all of Savoy proper. Only the fear that Spain's governor in Milan would intervene made him ready to talk peace.

Charles Emmanuel kept Saluzzo, and so closed France's gate into Piedmont, but gave Henry Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and Gex, his lands on the far side of the Rhône, and paid 300,000 livres. France was left with no foothold in Italy.

Philip III, king since 1598, ruled Milan and Naples through governors and viceroys he appointed. He left most business, and nearly all access to himself, to one favourite.

The Duke of Lerma controlled patronage across the monarchy, so appointments in Italy were made through him. He held that place until he was forced from court in October 1618.

The Count of Fuentes, a veteran general, was named governor of Milan in 1600 and used its army so freely that he alarmed his Italian neighbours, Venice above all. In 1603 he began a fortress at the head of Lake Como, near Colico, guarding the border of the Protestant Grisons and the road over the Alps.

In Spanish Calabria the Dominican Tommaso Campanella had preached a coming upheaval and plotted to drive out Spanish rule. Betrayed in 1599, he was jailed in Naples and tortured; he feigned madness to escape execution and was sentenced to life. In prison he wrote The City of the Sun (1602).

Clement VIII, born Ippolito Aldobrandini, had reconciled Henry IV to the Church in 1595 and annexed Ferrara in 1598. He wanted no war between two Catholic princes on Italy's doorstep, and in Rome he kept a hard hand on heresy.

Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit theologian whom Clement made a cardinal in 1599, sat as one of the inquisitors in the long trial of Giordano Bruno and pressed him for a full recantation.

Bruno, a former Dominican friar, had been held by the Inquisition since 1592 for denying core doctrines, among them the Trinity and transubstantiation, and for teaching an infinite universe of many worlds. He refused to recant and was burned alive in Rome's Campo de' Fiori on 17 February 1600.

That autumn Clement sent his nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, to Lyon as legate. He blessed Henry's marriage to Marie and mediated between Henry and Charles Emmanuel until the peace was signed in January 1601.

Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, wanted a counterweight to the Spanish power that ringed his state. The French crown owed the Medici a fortune from loans made during its civil wars, and Henry IV needed a wife and money.

Ferdinando's niece Marie married Henry by proxy in Florence on 5 October 1600 and met him at Lyon that December. Her dowry wiped out much of France's debt to her family. Ten years later she would rule France for her son.

Henry IV, whose candidate Leo XI had been, backed Venice against Paul V while Philip III egged the pope on. Henry did not mean to fight: he wanted to play the peacemaker and win influence in Italy.

Henry sent Cardinal François de Joyeuse, who had led the small French party in the conclaves of 1605, to negotiate between Rome and Venice. In April 1607 he brokered the face-saving terms that ended the interdict.

Philip III ordered Fuentes in Milan to make his troops ready to support the pope, so the quarrel threatened to become a war. The French mediation left the Spanish army unused.

Clement VIII died on 3 March 1605. The conclave chose Alessandro de' Medici, a Florentine cardinal close to France, who took the name Leo XI on 1 April. He caught a fever at his possession of the Lateran and died on 27 April, after twenty-seven days.

The next conclave elected Camillo Borghese, a canon lawyer who had sat among Bruno's judges, on 16 May 1605. As Paul V he insisted on the Church's full jurisdiction, and at Christmas 1605 demanded that Venice repeal its laws on church property and hand over two priests it had jailed.

Paul made his sister's son Scipione Caffarelli a cardinal at once and let him take the Borghese name. As cardinal-nephew he ran the papal government and its patronage, and spent the family's new wealth on a great art collection, buying Caravaggio and, from 1618, launching the young Bernini.

When Venice's theologians defended the republic in print, Bellarmine wrote the papal replies, answering Paolo Sarpi and his colleagues point by point in the pamphlet war of 1606.

Venice had barred churches from acquiring land without the Senate's leave and in 1605 jailed two priests for common crimes. Leonardo Donà, elected doge on 10 January 1606, refused Paul's demands. When the interdict came in April 1606 he ordered the clergy to keep saying mass, and the Jesuits, who obeyed Rome, were expelled.

The Senate took the Servite friar Paolo Sarpi as its canon lawyer in January 1606. He argued that a sovereign state held full authority over temporal affairs, clergy included, and his tracts turned a local quarrel into a European argument about sovereignty.

On 21 April 1607 the two priests were handed to the French cardinal, the interdict was lifted, and Venice's laws stood. The Jesuits stayed banished. On 5 October 1607 assassins stabbed Sarpi in Venice and fled into papal territory; he survived.

At Bruzolo in the Susa valley, on 10 April 1610, Charles Emmanuel signed an alliance with Henry IV to drive Spain out of Milan, which the duke was to have, with a French princess for his heir Victor Amadeus.

On 14 May 1610 a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac, stabbed Henry to death in a Paris street, weeks before the campaign was to begin. The alliance died with him.

Marie de' Medici, regent for the eight-year-old Louis XIII, dropped the Bruzolo pact and turned France towards Spain, arranging Spanish marriages for her children. Charles Emmanuel was left to face Spain alone.

Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, was Marie de' Medici's brother-in-law and kept one of Italy's most lavish courts. To calm the Duke of Savoy, who coveted Montferrat on his border, he married his heir to Charles Emmanuel's daughter.

Margherita of Savoy married Francesco Gonzaga in Turin on 19 February 1608. Their daughter Maria was born on 29 July 1609, giving her grandfather in Turin a family claim to Montferrat.

Francesco had commissioned Monteverdi's Orfeo for the carnival of 1607. When Vincenzo died in February 1612 he became duke and at once cut the cost of the court.

Claudio Monteverdi, the court's music master, was dismissed in 1612 and went home to Cremona almost penniless. In August 1613 Venice appointed him choirmaster of St Mark's, a post he held for thirty years.

In Madrid the Duke of Lerma still filled the great offices of the monarchy with his family and friends; the viceroyalties of Italy went to his relatives and clients.

The Count of Lemos, Lerma's nephew and son-in-law, became viceroy of Naples in 1610. He rebuilt the university and in 1611 was present at the founding of the Accademia degli Oziosi; Cervantes dedicated the second part of Don Quixote to him.

Ferdinando I died in February 1609 and his son Cosimo II, eighteen and already in poor health, became grand duke. Galileo had been his tutor in mathematics, and a young court wanted prestige.

Galileo, professor at Padua under Venice, showed his telescope to the Venetian government in August 1609 and had his salary doubled. In January 1610 he saw four moons circling Jupiter. His Sidereus nuncius, published that March, named them the Medicean Stars and dedicated them to Cosimo.

Belisario Vinta, Cosimo's first secretary of state, handled the bargain. Galileo asked in May 1610 to be philosopher as well as mathematician, and in July signed on as chief mathematician of Pisa and philosopher to the grand duke, with 1,000 scudi a year and no duty to teach. He moved to Florence that September.

In the spring of 1611 Galileo took his telescope to Rome, where the Jesuits of the Roman College confirmed his moons. Prince Federico Cesi, who had founded the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603, enrolled him in it; the academy later published his books and defended them.

Invoking a marriage treaty of 1330 and his granddaughter's rights, Charles Emmanuel invaded Montferrat in April 1613 and took Trino, Alba and Moncalvo. When Spain intervened he cast himself as Italy's liberator from Spanish rule; Venice paid a third of his costs.

The regent kept France out of the war, though the governor of Dauphiné sent troops to help Savoy against her orders. On 24 April 1617 Louis XIII, fifteen, had his mother's favourite Concini killed and sent her into exile at Blois. French and papal mediators then helped end the war.

Francesco IV's only son Ludovico died of smallpox in August 1612, and Francesco followed him on 22 December 1612, after ten months as duke. He left a three-year-old daughter, Maria.

His brother Ferdinando, a cardinal, took both duchies. Mantua passed only in the male line, but Montferrat could pass to a woman. Ferdinando put his niece in a Mantuan convent and in 1615 gave up the cardinal's hat to marry and rule.

Maria, Charles Emmanuel's granddaughter, was the child in whose name Savoy claimed Montferrat. The peace of 1617 left her uncle in possession; her marriage would decide the next succession.

The Marquis of la Hinojosa, governor of Milan, pressed Madrid to intervene, since Casale, Montferrat's capital, commanded the road from Milan to Genoa. In 1614 he drove the Savoyards out of Montferrat, but Lerma wanted no great war, and in June 1615 Hinojosa accepted the French-mediated Peace of Asti.

Madrid disowned the peace and recalled Hinojosa as a scapegoat. His successor, Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca, governor from 1616, renewed the war and took Vercelli on 25 July 1617. The peace of Pavia and Madrid that autumn restored every conquest.

In Naples the Duke of Osuna, viceroy from 1616, saw that Venice was paying for Savoy's war. He sent his privateering fleet into the Adriatic against Venetian shipping, and the two fleets clashed off Ragusa in November 1617.

In February 1616 the Inquisition's theologians judged heliocentrism foolish and formally heretical. On Paul V's orders Bellarmine summoned Galileo on 26 February and told him to abandon the Copernican opinion; in March the Index suspended Copernicus's book until corrected.

Christina of Lorraine, Ferdinando I's widow and Cosimo II's mother, heard a philosopher, Cosimo Boscaglia, argue at court in Pisa in December 1613 that the Earth's motion contradicted Scripture.

Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine monk and Galileo's former pupil, made professor of mathematics at Pisa that year, defended him on the spot and reported the whole exchange to him.

Galileo answered with a letter to Castelli on how Scripture should be read where it touched nature, expanded in 1615 into the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. Copies of the first letter circulated among his enemies.

On 20 December 1614 the Dominican Tommaso Caccini preached against Galileo and mathematics in Santa Maria Novella. In March 1615, after his fellow friar Niccolò Lorini had sent the Inquisition a copy of the letter to Castelli, Caccini went to Rome and denounced Galileo.

Giovanni Bembo, a veteran of Lepanto, was elected doge on 2 December 1615. That month Venetian troops besieged Gradisca on the Isonzo: Venice was at war with the archduke whose Uskok raiders, based at Senj, plundered its Adriatic shipping.

Archduke Ferdinand of Inner Austria, lord of the Uskoks, held Gradisca with Spanish money: Philip III backed him as the next emperor in return for promised lands. The peace of 1617 settled the Uskok war together with Montferrat, and the Uskoks of Senj were disbanded.

The French match planned at Bruzolo came about after all. On 10 February 1619 Henry IV's daughter Christine married Charles Emmanuel's heir, Victor Amadeus, at the Louvre, tying Turin to the French court again.

On 4 October 1618 the Duke of Lerma, undermined by his own son and the king's confessor, was forced to leave court. He had made himself a cardinal that March, which protected him from his enemies.

Osuna had governed Naples by quartering 12,000 soldiers on the city and courting the common people against the nobles. Without Lerma's network behind him he was pushed out: in June 1620 Cardinal Borja took over the viceroyalty and Osuna went back to Madrid.

The Duke of Feria succeeded Toledo as governor of Milan in 1618. North of Lake Como lay the Valtellina, a Catholic valley ruled by the largely Protestant Grisons and the shortest road from Milan to the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1618 the Grisons had a Catholic archpriest, Nicolò Rusca, tortured to death.

Giacomo Robustelli, a Valtellina noble who had once fought for Savoy, led the Catholic rising on 18–19 July 1620. Armed bands killed about 600 Protestants between Tirano and Morbegno, the Sacro Macello. Feria had encouraged the revolt, and his troops took the valley's forts.

Three comets appeared in the autumn of 1618. Early in 1619 Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit professor at the Roman College, published a lecture arguing from their lack of parallax that they lay far beyond the Moon.

Galileo answered through his pupil Mario Guiducci's Discourse on Comets, calling them perhaps optical effects in the air and mocking the Jesuit. In October 1619 Grassi replied as 'Lotario Sarsi' with the Libra astronomica. Galileo began the reply that became The Assayer.

The Marquis of Bedmar, Spain's ambassador since 1607, ran a wide spy network in Venice. In May 1618 the republic announced a plot by foreign soldiers to fire the arsenal and seize the city, arrested a Frenchman, Renault, and hanged him and others. It blamed Bedmar and Osuna; Bedmar left Venice. Historians still dispute whether the plot was real.

Antonio Priuli was hurriedly elected doge on 17 May 1618, after his predecessor Nicolò Donà died thirty-five days into office. Under him the hunt for foreign agents went on for four years, with hundreds of arrests.

Savoy, Venice and France allied in Paris in February 1623 to drive Spain from the Valtellina. Rather than fight them, Spain agreed to hand the valley's forts to papal garrisons.

Philip III died on 31 March 1621, ten days before Spain's truce with the Dutch ran out, leaving Milan, Naples and a renewed war to his sixteen-year-old son.

Philip IV ordered that every paper needing the royal signature go first to Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, who had served in his household as prince.

The Count of Olivares became valido, the king's favourite and alter ego. He set out to rebuild the monarchy's military and fiscal strength, and purged Lerma's men: Osuna was arrested in 1621 and died a prisoner in 1624.

Paul V died on 28 January 1621. Alessandro Ludovisi, Archbishop of Bologna, aged 67 and in poor health, was elected on 9 February 1621, chiefly through Scipione Borghese's influence. As Gregory XV he founded the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622, made Richelieu a cardinal that September, and in 1623 took the Valtellina forts into papal keeping.

Gregory made his nephew Ludovico a cardinal within a week and left the government to him. Ludovico was prefect of the new Propaganda and patron of Guercino and the Jesuits' church of Sant'Ignazio.

Gregory died on 8 July 1623. On 6 August the conclave elected Maffeo Barberini, a cardinal of Florentine family who had written a Latin poem in Galileo's honour. As Urban VIII he meant to keep the papacy independent of Spain.

Cosimo II died of tuberculosis on 28 February 1621, and his son Ferdinando II became grand duke at ten. The title passed at once; the government did not. He took power himself only on 14 July 1628, after a tour that ended with his uncle the Emperor in Prague.

His mother Maria Maddalena, Emperor Ferdinand II's sister, and his grandmother Christina of Lorraine governed jointly. Their regency was remembered for lavish spending, a court full of clergy and rising taxes.

Galileo finished his reply to Grassi as The Assayer, published by the Lincei in Rome in October 1623 with the Barberini bees on its title page and a dedication to the new pope, who had it read to him at table.

Antonio Foscarini, a former ambassador to Paris and London and an open critic of the pope and the Jesuits, was arrested leaving the Senate on 8 April 1622, accused of selling secrets at the house of the English Countess of Arundel. The Council of Ten had him strangled that month. Witnesses then confessed to perjury, and on 16 January 1623 the Ten cleared him and told the courts of Europe.

Back at court after her quarrels with her son, Marie de' Medici pushed her adviser, the Bishop of Luçon, Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. Gregory XV made him a cardinal in 1622, and she introduced him to the king's council.

Richelieu entered the royal council on 29 April 1624 and was soon its master. In November French and Swiss troops marched into the Valtellina and drove out the papal garrisons, cutting Spain's road. To draw Spanish strength away he backed Savoy's attack on Genoa.

On 8 March 1625 Charles Emmanuel, with a French corps under Marshal Lesdiguières, invaded the Republic of Genoa, Spain's banker, over the Zuccarello fief. His son Victor Amadeus took the western Riviera, but the generals quarrelled and the march on Genoa stalled.

Ferdinando Gonzaga died on 29 October 1626 without a legitimate son. His brother Vincenzo II, stripped of his own cardinalate for marrying, was childless too. Short of money, he sold Gonzaga pictures to Charles I of England. In December 1627, dying, he married his niece Maria to the son of his father's French cousin, Charles, Duke of Nevers.

Feria commanded the league Spain raised with Tuscany, Parma, Modena, Genoa and Lucca. While the Marquis of Santa Cruz's fleet brought troops from Naples to relieve Genoa in the spring of 1625, Feria drove the French and Savoyards back, retook Gavi and Novi, and marched on Turin until the fortress of Verrua stopped him.

France and Spain made peace at Monzón in Aragon without consulting Savoy, Venice or the Grisons. The Grisons kept the Valtellina, but only the Catholic faith was allowed there and the valley chose its own magistrates. France's allies called it a betrayal; Charles Emmanuel turned to Spain.

The Duke of Alba, viceroy of Naples from December 1622 to 1629, had to meet the costs of the Valtellina war and of Genoa's defence. In 1626, after Urban VIII interceded with Philip IV, the Neapolitan government let Campanella out of prison after twenty-seven years.

The Holy Office took Campanella to Rome and held him there. Urban, who feared eclipses predicted to kill him, used his astrology and freed him fully in 1629.

Urban made his nephew Francesco a cardinal in 1623 and in 1625 sent him to Paris as legate to settle the Valtellina. From March to September he negotiated with Richelieu and got nothing; France and Spain settled without him.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini had made his name carving for Scipione Borghese from 1618 to 1623. Urban turned him to architecture: from 1624 he built the bronze Baldacchino over St Peter's tomb, and in 1629 he became architect of St Peter's.

Genoa had few soldiers of its own. It made Carlo Doria, Duke of Tursi, whose family's galleys served Spain, military governor of the city and commander of its militia. The militia stopped the Savoyards at Monte Pertuso, and Spain sent 6,000 troops.

Giacomo Lomellini was elected doge in June 1625 in the middle of the war. Once the danger passed he laid the first stone of new city walls on 7 December 1626. He resented Genoa's dependence on Spain, whose bankruptcy of 1627 hit Genoese lenders hard.

Charles Emmanuel took Trino in April 1628 and Nizza Monferrato in June, and ambushed the French reinforcements Nevers sent over the Alps. He also worked against Genoa from within, sending an agent to recruit a plotter there.

Once La Rochelle surrendered in October 1628, Louis XIII and Richelieu crossed the Alps. In March 1629 they forced the Pass of Susa; Charles Emmanuel changed sides at once, and the Spanish lifted the siege of Casale. Louis left a French garrison there under the Marquis of Toiras and went home.

In late December 1627, as Vincenzo II lay dying, his niece Maria married Charles, Duke of Rethel, eighteen like her. His father was head of the Gonzaga-Nevers, a French branch of the family, so the marriage joined the strongest male claim to Mantua with Maria's claim to Montferrat.

His father Charles, Duke of Nevers, born in Paris, inherited both duchies under Vincenzo's arrangement and entered Mantua in January 1628. Savoy wanted Montferrat, and Spain and the Emperor would not accept a pro-French duke beside Milan.

Ferrante II Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla, a distant cousin and the Emperor's commissary in Italy, claimed Mantua for himself. His claim gave the Emperor a legal handle.

Mantua and Montferrat were imperial fiefs. On 1 April 1628 Ferdinand II sequestered both until he chose an heir, meaning to tie them back to the Empire. Nevers refused to hand them over.

In September 1629, after the French had gone home, Count Rambaldo di Collalto, president of the Emperor's war council and born of a Mantuan mother, led an imperial army down through the Valtellina, took Goito and laid siege to Mantua.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, governing Milan, agreed with Charles Emmanuel to share Montferrat and in the spring of 1628 laid siege to Casale, its fortress capital. He complained he lacked the men and money to take it.

When Córdoba failed to take Casale or stop the French, Madrid recalled him for court-martial and sent Ambrogio Spinola, the Genoese general who had taken Breda. He landed at Genoa on 19 September 1629 as plenipotentiary, with the painter Velázquez in his company, but Olivares, his enemy, later cut back his powers.

Giulio Cesare Vachero, a rich commoner from the county of Nice shut out of Genoa's noble government, agreed in 1628 to lead a rising for Charles Emmanuel and become doge of a pro-Savoy republic. An informer betrayed the plot on 31 March, the eve of the rising.

Lomellini, now head of the republic's war magistracy, helped crush the plot. Vachero and his associates were executed on 31 May 1628 despite Charles Emmanuel's threats against Genoese in Turin; Vachero's house was razed for a column of infamy, and Genoa created a State Inquisition.

Charles Emmanuel had declared himself neutral. In March 1630 Richelieu led a French army over the Alps to hold him to the Treaty of Susa and took Pinerolo, a Savoyard fortress on the road from France into Piedmont.

Charles Emmanuel saw his army beaten in the lower Susa valley and died of a fever at Savigliano on 26 July 1630, with French troops in Piedmont.

His son Victor Amadeus, Christine's husband, inherited a ravaged duchy with France holding its gate, and set out to bargain for what he could keep.

Marie de' Medici had come to resent the power of the minister she had brought into the council. On 10 November 1630, at the Luxembourg Palace, she told Louis XIII to choose between Richelieu and her.

Louis withdrew to Versailles in silence while the court celebrated Richelieu's fall, then assured him of his support. This was the Day of the Dupes; Marie went into exile, and Richelieu kept control of France's Italian policy.

When Collalto fell ill, his deputies Matthias Gallas and Johann von Aldringen took over. On 29 May 1630 Gallas routed a Franco-Venetian relief army at Villabuona, and from June they pressed the siege of plague-stricken Mantua.

On the night of 17–18 July 1630 imperial troops seized a gate by surprise and broke in. The city was sacked for three days, and the Gonzaga collections were carried off; the plunder made Gallas and Aldringen rich men.

Nevers fled into papal territory with his family. He was now a duke without a capital, his hopes resting on France and on the Emperor's need to make peace.

In June 1630 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden landed in Pomerania with 18,000 men. The Emperor now needed his troops in Germany, and the Italian war became a burden he wanted to be rid of.

Spinola invested Casale again on 23 May 1630. The French garrison sortied every day; on 4 September a truce handed the town and castle to Spain until mid-October while the citadel held out. Spinola, his powers curtailed from Madrid, died on 25 September.

The Marquis of Toiras held Casale's citadel for France. During the truce he visited the dying Spinola. His defence left France a foothold in Casale that the peace would not take away.

In Milan the plague of 1630 followed the famine of 1627–28. Cardinal Federico Borromeo, the archbishop who had founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1609, refused to leave the city, visited the pest-houses and lost most of his household; eight in nine of his parish priests died.

Giulio Mazzarino, a young papal diplomat, shuttled between the commanders. On 26 October 1630, as French reinforcements under Marshal Schomberg drew up to fight the Spanish outside Casale, he rode between the armies waving his hat and crying 'Pace!', and stopped the battle.

Nicolò Contarini, once of Leonardo Donà's party, was elected doge on 18 January 1630. Venice backed Nevers, but its relief army was beaten at Valeggio in May. Plague reached the city in June and killed about 46,000; in October Contarini vowed a church to the Virgin, Santa Maria della Salute.

Giulio Mazzarino, the papal agent of Casale, worked on the settlement through the winter and was sent to Paris early in 1631 to settle its details. The treaties of Cherasco, of 6 April and 19 June 1631, ended the Mantuan war, and they made his name with Richelieu.

At Cherasco Victor Amadeus gave up his father's claim to Montferrat in return for Trino and Alba. In a secret agreement of 31 March 1631 he also left Pinerolo to France, a loss his successors resented for decades.

Pinerolo gave France a permanent gate into Piedmont, so it no longer had to force a pass to intervene in Italy. France held it for sixty-five years, and Victor Amadeus's room for manoeuvre shrank accordingly.

Cherasco confirmed Nevers as Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, at the cost of concessions to Savoy and the Gonzagas of Guastalla. He came home in 1631 to a sacked, plague-emptied capital and empty coffers. On 14 August 1631 his son Rethel died, leaving Maria a widow with two infants.

Francesco Maria II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, lost his only son in 1623. In December 1624 he signed his duchy over to Urban VIII, and he died in April 1631, the last of his line.

Urban took Urbino into the Papal States, with his nephew Taddeo Barberini in charge. Having let Galileo write a balanced dialogue on the two world systems, he took its publication as defiance and let the Inquisition try him.

Cardinal Francesco Barberini, vice-chancellor from November 1632 and a great patron of letters and the arts, sat on the tribunal of 1633 and was one of three of its members who did not sign the sentence.

Vittoria della Rovere, Francesco Maria's granddaughter, had been betrothed as a baby to Ferdinando II and brought up in Florence. The regents hoped for Urbino; she inherited only the family's collections, which went to the Uffizi and Pitti.

Ferdinando II, ruling since 1628, married Vittoria privately on 2 August 1634 and publicly in 1637. Galileo dedicated his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems to him in 1632, and he kept Galileo in Florence until the Inquisition threatened to fetch him in chains.

The Dialogue appeared in Florence in 1632. Its Aristotelian, Simplicio, spoke the pope's own argument, and Urban took offence. Tried in Rome from February 1633, Galileo was found 'vehemently suspect of heresy' on 22 June, made to abjure, and sentenced to prison, commuted to house arrest.

Ascanio Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena and once a pupil of the mathematician Cavalieri, took Galileo in for the second half of 1633. In his house Galileo recovered and turned back to the work that became Two New Sciences.

Galileo was then allowed home to his villa at Arcetri, near the convent of San Matteo where his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, had looked after his affairs and written to him through the trial. Shortly after his return she died of dysentery, on 2 April 1634.

Contarini died in April 1631 before the Salute's first stone was laid. Francesco Erizzo, a former ambassador to Ferdinand II and to Urban VIII, was elected doge on 10 April 1631 and ruled for fifteen years, as Venice recovered from plague and war.

Nördlingen collapsed France's German allies. In 1635 Richelieu brought France openly into the war against Spain, with campaigns in the Netherlands, Italy and the Alps.

At Rivoli on 11 July 1635 Victor Amadeus joined France's league against Spanish Milan, with the dukes of Parma and Mantua; Richelieu meant him to lead an anti-Spanish alliance in Italy. He fought beside the French at Tornavento in 1636.

Richelieu sent the Duke of Rohan, the former Huguenot rebel leader, into the Grisons. In 1635 he beat the Spanish at Morbegno, held the Valtellina from Tirano and cut Spain's road to Austria, but France would not hand the valley back to the Grisons.

Jürg Jenatsch, a former Protestant pastor turned colonel, served under Rohan but became a Catholic in 1635 and backed a secret league that negotiated with Spain and Austria. In March 1637 he led 3,000 men against Rohan at Landquart and forced the French out of the Grisons.

Campanella, now in Rome, was implicated in 1634 in a new plot in Calabria by one of his followers. With help from Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the French ambassador he fled to France, where Louis XIII pensioned him and Richelieu protected him; he died in Paris in 1639.

Philip IV's Italian lands supplied money, men and the road north for a monarchy at war on several fronts. In 1633 he sent his younger brother Ferdinand, the Cardinal-Infante, through Genoa and Milan to take an army to the Netherlands.

The Cardinal-Infante raised his army in Lombardy and marched it north in 1634. On 5–6 September, joined with his cousin Ferdinand of Hungary, he crushed the Swedes at Nördlingen; Spanish veteran tercios held the hill that decided the battle.

Ferdinand of Hungary, the Emperor's son, had taken Regensburg that July. Nördlingen broke Swedish power in southern Germany and brought German princes to terms with the Emperor. He succeeded his father in 1637.

With Germany's Protestants beaten, France had to fight Spain itself. Olivares put his cousin, the Marquis of Leganés, who had fought at Nördlingen, in charge of Milan, the monarchy's main base in Italy.

Leganés became governor of Milan in September 1635. In June 1636 the French and Savoyards held him off at Tornavento on the Ticino; in 1638 he took Breme and Vercelli and carried the war into Piedmont.

Giovanni Francesco Brignole Sale, doge of Genoa from 1635, kept the republic neutral between France and Spain and sought royal honours for it. On 25 March 1637 Genoa proclaimed the Virgin Mary its queen; his successors were crowned as kings of Corsica, with royal rank.

Raffaele Della Torre, the jurist who had advised Vachero's judges and led Genoa's pro-French, autonomist party, wrote in 1637 a defence of Genoa's exclusive rights over the Ligurian Sea, against Spanish claims for its port of Finale.

Victor Amadeus fell ill after a dinner given by the French Marshal Créqui and died on 7 October 1637; poison was suspected. His widow Christine, Louis XIII's sister, Madama Reale, became regent. French troops were her support and France's demands her burden. Her brothers-in-law challenged her, and the court split into madamisti and principisti.

Her elder son, Francis Hyacinth, became duke at five and died on 4 October 1638. His brother Charles Emmanuel II succeeded at four, and the civil war was fought over who would rule in his name.

Cardinal Maurice of Savoy, Victor Amadeus's brother, who had kept a court of letters in Rome, hurried back from Paris to claim the regency together with his brother Thomas. Spain backed them with money and diplomacy.

Prince Thomas, who had commanded Spanish armies in the Netherlands, came from Milan with Leganés's troops in 1639, was welcomed by many towns, and in July got into Turin. Christine fled to the citadel, which the French held.

France sent the Count of Harcourt. In 1640 Thomas besieged the citadel, Harcourt besieged Thomas, and Leganés besieged Harcourt. Leganés failed, and in September Thomas gave up Turin. Young Turenne served under Harcourt.

The Marquis of Pianezza stayed in Piedmont when Christine fled and was made her lieutenant general in September 1639. He negotiated the princes' surrender in 1642, but insisted on ducal control of the fortresses, angering Richelieu.

Charles I of Mantua died on 22 September 1637, having brought back a little prosperity. His daughter-in-law Maria, widowed since 1631, became regent for her son. She turned from Nevers's French line towards the Emperor and Spain, helped by her aunt the dowager Empress Eleonora, and in November 1640 arrested officials plotting with France.

Her son Charles II, born in October 1629, was eight. Maria governed for ten years and arranged his and his sister's Habsburg marriages; he took power himself in 1647 and pushed her aside.

Olivares had raised Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán, a distant kinsman, by marrying him in 1624 to his only daughter María, who died in childbirth in 1626. When Ramiro sought the hand of a Neapolitan heiress who demanded a viceroy for a husband, Olivares objected to unseating his own brother-in-law, the Count of Monterrey, in Naples.

With Philip IV's backing the widower, Duke of Medina de las Torres, married Anna Carafa in June 1636 and became viceroy of Naples on 13 November 1637. He governed to 1644 through earthquakes, epidemics and a pro-French plot, lowered some taxes and lent his name to the Via Medina.

Anna Carafa, Princess of Stigliano, had inherited lands worth some 1.5 million scudi, including Sabbioneta from her Gonzaga grandmother, who had wanted an Italian husband for her. The Palazzo Donn'Anna at Posillipo, built for the viceregal court's feasts, carries her name. She died in October 1644.

Richelieu died on 4 December 1642. He had brought Mazarin to Paris in 1640, sent him to settle Savoy's regency quarrel, and got him a cardinal's hat in 1641.

Louis XIII at once named Cardinal Mazarin to his council. The king himself died on 14 May 1643, leaving a four-year-old heir and a will meant to keep his wife from ruling alone.

Anne of Austria, Philip IV's sister, had the Parlement of Paris set the will aside, became sole regent and kept Mazarin as chief minister. She continued the war against her brother.

Louis XIV was four. France's Italian policy, support for Christine in Savoy, campaigns against Milan and pressure on Rome, was run by Anne and Mazarin in his name.

Odoardo Farnese, Duke of Parma, had run up debts fighting Spain and living grandly. Visiting Rome in 1639 he slighted Urban's nephews; they had the grain of Castro, his fief north of Rome, barred from the Roman market, and his creditors, unpaid, appealed to the pope.

Papal troops took Castro on 12 October 1641 almost without a fight. Taddeo Barberini, Prefect of Rome and the pope's lay nephew, replaced the unwilling Savelli as commander-in-chief in January 1642, and on 13 January Urban excommunicated Odoardo and stripped him of his fiefs.

Francesco I d'Este, Duke of Modena, joined Venice and Tuscany in a league for Odoardo, hoping to win back Ferrara. The allies said they fought the Barberini, not the pope. The Tuscans beat the papal army at Mongiovino, and on 17 March 1644 the Barberini were routed at Lagoscuro.

Odoardo was absolved and got Castro back, Castro's grain could again be sold in Rome, and he was to resume paying his creditors. The war had cost the papacy about twelve million scudi and was seen as a disgrace.

Ferdinando II, Odoardo's brother-in-law, joined Venice and Modena in a league against the Barberini and went to war early in 1643. It was the last war Medici Tuscany fought, and its cost emptied the treasury.

Vincenzo Viviani, a young Florentine whose mathematics Ferdinando had paid for, had lived with Galileo at Arcetri since 1639 as his assistant. After Galileo died on 8 January 1642 he gathered his papers and spent his life guarding his memory.

Evangelista Torricelli, Castelli's pupil, came to Arcetri in late 1641 at Galileo's invitation. After Galileo's death Ferdinando made him grand-ducal mathematician. In 1643 he filled a sealed tube with mercury, showed the air has weight, and so made the first barometer.

Erizzo's Venice, alarmed at the Barberini's designs on its border, joined the league for Odoardo and entered the war early in 1643. Its troops fought the papal army under Cardinal Antonio Barberini around Ferrara.

Mazarin, whose career the Barberini had made, took the exiles in and used them against Innocent. In 1646 a French fleet and army under Prince Thomas besieged Orbetello in the Spanish Presidi on the Tuscan coast and failed, to the pope's open delight, but took Porto Longone on Elba in September.

Urban VIII died on 29 July 1644, his health broken, it was said, by the peace. Romans hated him for the war taxes, and his nephews had grown immensely rich.

The conclave ran from August to September. Cardinal Francesco Barberini split his family's party and brought about the election of the Spanish candidate, Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, on 15 September, on the understanding that the Barberini could keep their fortunes. As Innocent X he broke the deal and opened an inquiry into their war spending.

Olimpia Maidalchini, widow of Innocent's brother Pamphilio, held no office, but contemporaries believed she steered the pope's appointments and favours, and gossip made her his mistress.

Her son Camillo was made cardinal-nephew in 1644. On 21 January 1647 he renounced the purple and three weeks later married Olimpia Aldobrandini, Clement VIII's heiress, against his mother's and the pope's wishes; Olimpia had them banished from Rome.

Cardinal Antonio Barberini, Urban's nephew and France's protector at the Curia, fled to Paris in 1645, leaving the French royal arms over his door as a warning; his brother Francesco followed a year later. Innocent let the family keep its property, but the nephews stayed in exile.

In September 1644 the Knights of Malta seized an Ottoman convoy of Mecca pilgrims and put in on Venetian Crete. Sultan Ibrahim blamed Venice, and on 23 June 1645 an Ottoman fleet landed on the island. Canea fell on 22 August after a 56-day siege.

The war went badly. Erizzo, seventy-nine, asked to be made captain-general himself, and the Senate agreed over the objection of Giovanni Pesaro. He died on 3 January 1646 while the fleet was being assembled.

Francesco Molin, a former naval commander, was elected doge on 20 January 1646 after 23 ballots. To pay for the war Venice sold entry into its nobility at 100,000 ducats a family, and new merchant houses became patricians.

Henri, Duke of Guise, who claimed the old Angevin kings of Naples as ancestors, landed in mid-November and was proclaimed duke of the republic on 21 December. Mazarin's fleet dealt with Annese, not with him, and sailed away. Guise courted the nobles; the people tired of him.

The French attacks on the Tuscan Presidi in 1646 threatened Naples itself, and the Duke of Arcos, viceroy since 1646, raised new taxes to defend it, among them a duty on fruit.

Giulio Genoino, a priest and lawyer of about eighty, had fought for thirty years to give the people a share in the city's government. Osuna had backed him in 1619; after Osuna's fall he spent thirteen years in prison and exile. Back in Naples, he coached the young fishmonger Masaniello.

On 7 July 1647 a riot over the fruit duty in the Market square made Masaniello captain of the people. For nine days he ruled Naples, professing loyalty to Philip IV while demanding the old privileges. The viceroy shut himself in the castles and granted everything. On 16 July Masaniello, who had begun to rave, was murdered.

In October Philip IV's natural son, Don Juan José of Austria, arrived with a fleet and bombarded the city. Genoino, compromised with the Spanish, was shipped off in December and died on the way to prison. The rising turned against Spanish rule itself.

Gennaro Annese, a gunsmith from the Market quarter who had commanded Masaniello's militia, proclaimed a republic on 22 October 1647 and appealed to the pope and France. He then had to yield the leadership to the man the rebels invited from Rome.

The Count of Oñate landed as viceroy on 1 March 1648, the Duke of Arcos having left in January. On 6 April Annese opened the gates to Don Juan José and Oñate under a promise of amnesty; Guise was captured. Oñate then hunted down the leaders, and Annese was beheaded in June.

Cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, Archbishop of Naples since 1641 and once Urban VIII's chamberlain, mediated between the viceroy and the crowd and brokered the concessions of 13 July. He opposed the new taxes, and stayed the go-between as the crisis went on.

From 1648 the Fronde, a revolt of the Paris Parlement and then of the great princes against Anne and Mazarin, tore France apart. Mazarin had to go into exile, and France's hold on its Italian garrisons weakened until the revolt ended in 1653.

Charles II of Mantua married Isabella Clara of Austria, a niece of Emperor Ferdinand II, in 1649. In 1652 he let Spain drive the French garrison out of Casale and replaced it with his own troops, then sent Paris a memorial justifying himself.

His sister Eleonora married Emperor Ferdinand III, a widower, at Wiener Neustadt on 30 April 1651. The Emperor's conditions were Mantua's loyalty to the Empire and her rights in Montferrat. Her godmother, the dowager Empress Eleonora Gonzaga, travelled north with her.

The Marquis of Caracena became governor of Milan in 1648. With France paralysed by the Fronde he attacked its Italian garrisons and in October 1652 took Casale, with the Duke of Mantua's help. In 1655 Prince Thomas and the Duke of Modena besieged Pavia; Caracena lacked the men to relieve it, but the garrison held.

Spanish Milan was run with Milanese patricians like Bartolomeo Arese, a senator since 1641 who always sided with Spain against the French. He built the palace now called Palazzo Litta from 1648, and in 1660 became president of the Senate, as his father had been.

In Naples Oñate restored order, revived the university and the Accademia degli Oziosi, foiled a noble plot of 1649, and in 1650 led Neapolitan troops to retake Piombino and Porto Longone from the French.

Ranuccio II Farnese was a boy of almost sixteen when his father Odoardo died in September 1646. He refused to pay the Roman creditors as the peace of 1644 required, and would not admit the bishop Innocent X named for Castro.

Cristoforo Giarda, a Barnabite preacher appointed Bishop of Castro in May 1648, was ordered by the pope to take possession regardless. On 18 March 1649, travelling to his see, he was shot dead near Monterosi. Innocent blamed Ranuccio and declared war.

Jacopo Gaufrido, a Provençal who had studied medicine and once corresponded with Galileo, had risen from Odoardo's French tutor to secretary of state. With no military experience he led the Farnese army and was routed at San Pietro in Casale on 13 August 1649. Ranuccio made him the scapegoat; he was beheaded on 8 January 1650.

Papal troops took Castro and, on the pope's orders, razed it to the ground. Its lands went to the Papal States, and the Farnese duchy of Castro ceased to exist.

Bernini had fallen from favour with the Barberini's fall, but a model smuggled into the Palazzo Pamphilj won him Innocent's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, designed in 1651 under the Pamphilj dove.

In Dalmatia Leonardo Foscolo took a string of forts from the Ottomans, retook Novigrad and in 1648 forced the surrender of Klis, a fortress thought impregnable. The Senate honoured him and made him captain-general of the sea.

In August 1648 Sultan Ibrahim was deposed and his six-year-old son Mehmed IV enthroned. The siege of Candia, Crete's capital, had begun that May; palace factions ran the war for the next eight years.

Alvise Mocenigo, captain-general of the sea from May 1648, won the battle between Naxos and Paros on 10 July 1651, with much of the credit going to the young Francesco Morosini. Reappointed in 1653, he died aboard ship on 2 December 1654.

In Genoa, nobles opposed to admitting new families to the patriciate walked out of the Great Council in December 1646. Giovan Paolo Balbi and four other leaders were banished on 31 January 1647. Balbi plotted a coup, sought help from Mazarin and then Spain, and was discovered in May 1648; he escaped and died in Amsterdam.

His friend Stefano Raggi, banished with him, was denounced in June 1650 for plotting to kill the doge; a letter in Balbi's hand was found in his house. He stabbed himself in custody and died on 5 July. His corpse was hanged and his house razed. Modern historians think he was framed.

Charles Emmanuel II, of age since 1648 but still guided by his mother, let a council for the propagation of the faith in Turin drive policy. An edict of 25 January 1655 ordered the Waldensian Protestants out of their lower valleys within three days.

Pianezza, who ran that council, commanded the army of local, French and Irish troops sent into the valleys. From 24 April 1655, the Piedmontese Easter, they massacred thousands of Waldensian villagers.

Joshua Janavel, a farmer from Rorà, held off the Savoyard assault on his village and became 'the Lion of Rorà'. With Bartolomeo Jahier he fought on until he was badly wounded at Angrogna in June.

News of the massacre outraged Protestant Europe; Milton wrote his sonnet. Cromwell sent Samuel Morland to Turin and threatened intervention, and France, his partner against Spain, pressed Savoy too. On 18 August 1655 the Patents of Pinerolo pardoned the Waldensians and restored part of their rights.

The Count of Castrillo, viceroy of Naples from 1653, beat off a second landing by the Duke of Guise in 1654. In 1656 plague killed between 150,000 and 200,000 people in the city, more than half its population, and spread to Rome and Liguria.

In Milan the Count of Fuensaldaña, a veteran of the Army of Flanders, succeeded Caracena in 1656. The French and the Duke of Modena took Valenza that year, but Alessandria held out against a month's siege in 1657.

Innocent X died on 7 January 1655. After eighty days the conclave elected Fabio Chigi, the papal envoy at the Westphalia talks, as Alexander VII. When Venice begged help for Crete he made the Jesuits' return, banished since 1606, his price; they came back in 1657.

Christina, Gustavus Adolphus's daughter, gave up the Swedish throne on 6 June 1654, announced her conversion at Innsbruck that November and entered Rome in December 1655; the pope confirmed her at Christmas. She settled in the Palazzo Farnese and opened an academy there in January 1656.

Alexander's favourite architect was Bernini. In 1656 he began the colonnades of St Peter's Square, finished in 1667, an oval forecourt built so that the greatest number of people could see the pope give his blessing.

Leopoldo de' Medici, the grand duke's brother, a pupil of Torricelli and disciple of Galileo, founded the Accademia del Cimento with Ferdinando in 1657, to investigate nature by experiment in Galileo's way.

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Castelli's pupil, came from Messina to teach mathematics at Pisa around 1655. With Viviani and Malpighi he was a founding member of the Cimento, where he began the studies that became his work on animal motion.

In Genoa Emanuele Brignole led the building of the Albergo dei Poveri, a great house for the city's poor begun in the early 1650s. The plague of 1656 stopped the works; he went on funding it for the rest of his life.

Lorenzo Marcello, who had fought the papal navy in the Castro war, became captain-general in September 1655. On 26–27 June 1656 his Venetian and Maltese fleet destroyed the Ottoman fleet inside the Dardanelles, the Turks' worst defeat since Lepanto. He was killed on the first day.

After the victory Venice occupied Tenedos and Lemnos and blockaded the Straits; Constantinople went hungry that winter. Lazzaro Mocenigo, called 'the one-eyed captain' by the Turks, led the fleet in 1657 and was killed at the Dardanelles on 17 July when a shot brought a mast down on him.

The defeat at the Dardanelles brought Köprülü Mehmed Pasha to power as grand vizier on 14 September 1656, with near-dictatorial powers granted by the sultan's mother. His fleet broke the blockade in July 1657, and by November the Ottomans had retaken Tenedos and Lemnos.

From 1658 Francesco Morosini again commanded the Venetian fleet. He could no longer hold the Straits, so he raided instead: Santa Maura in 1658, Kalamata and other Ottoman ports in 1659. Candia still held in 1660.

Turenne, who had served under Harcourt in Piedmont, commanded the French army besieging Dunkirk with 6,000 English troops of Cromwell's. On 14 June 1658, at the Dunes, he crushed the Spanish relief army of Don Juan José and Condé.

Both crowns were exhausted, and a French push on Milan failed in 1659. Mazarin met Luis de Haro on Pheasant Island in the Bidassoa and signed the Peace of the Pyrenees on 7 November 1659: France kept Pinerolo, Savoy got Vercelli back.

The peace was sealed by a marriage. On 9 June 1660, in the church of St John the Baptist at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Louis XIV married his double first cousin Maria Theresa, Philip IV's daughter.

Maria Gonzaga, sidelined since her son came of age in 1647, died at her villa of La Favorita outside Mantua on 14 August 1660, the last of the senior Gonzaga line. The dynasty restored at Cherasco survived; Casale and Montferrat stayed a bone of contention between France and Spain.

Don Juan José, who had retaken Naples in 1648, now governed the Spanish Netherlands. His defeat at the Dunes cost Spain Dunkirk, which went to England, and left both crowns ready to talk.

Luis de Haro, Olivares's nephew, had succeeded him as Philip IV's favourite in 1643, a more modest man than his uncle. He negotiated the peace with Mazarin in person: Spain kept Milan, Naples and Sicily.

Philip IV's daughter Maria Theresa married Louis by proxy at Fuenterrabía on 2 June 1660, Haro standing in as bridegroom, and in person a week later. Her renunciation of the Spanish succession was tied to a dowry Spain could not pay.

Giovanni Pesaro, who had abandoned his post at Lagoscuro in the Castro war and opposed Erizzo's command, swung the Great Council behind continuing the Cretan war with a speech and a pledge of 6,000 ducats. Elected doge on 8 April 1658, he was hated by the people and died on 30 September 1659. The war went on.