Cardinal Jules Mazarin
Jules Mazarin governed France for eighteen years, survived a civil war fought largely to remove him, and left the largest private fortune in the country. He was born Giulio Mazzarini in the Abruzzi in 1602, the son of a Sicilian in the service of the Colonna family, was educated by the Jesuits and in Spain, and made his name as a papal diplomat — most spectacularly at Casale in 1630, when he rode between two armies about to engage waving a paper and shouting peace, and stopped the battle. Richelieu recruited him, and he entered French service and was made a cardinal in 1641 without ever being ordained a priest. Richelieu died in 1642 and Louis XIII in 1643, leaving a four-year-old king, a Spanish-born regent in Anne of Austria, and Mazarin as first minister — a foreigner with an Italian accent, governing in partnership with the queen mother in a relationship contemporaries assumed was a secret marriage. He concluded the Thirty Years' War at Westphalia in 1648 on terms that gave France Alsace and destroyed the Habsburg position in Germany, and then had to survive the Fronde, five years of aristocratic and parlementaire revolt in which he twice went into exile and twice came back. He finished the war with Spain at the Pyrenees in 1659, married the young Louis XIV to a Spanish infanta, and trained him in the business of government. He died in March 1661. Louis, then twenty-two, summoned his ministers the next morning and announced that he would rule alone, which nobody present believed. He also assembled the finest private library in Europe and left it to the public, which is the Bibliothèque Mazarine and still open. The fortune, estimated at some 35 million livres, went largely to his nieces, whom he married into half the reigning houses of Europe.
- Lived: 1602 CE – 1661 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: cardinal, prime_minister, regent
