The 1559 Franco-Spanish Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis has long been interpreted as a turning point; it variously ended the Italian Wars, isolated Italy, precipitated France's Wars of Religion, or initiated an era of Spanish preponderance and confessional diplomacy. Although historians have assigned it a liminal role, Cateau-Cambrésis has remained a peace more interpreted than studied.
Bertrand Haan's detailed study of the diplomatic negotiations culminating in Cateau-Cambrésis proposes a reevaluation of the treaty, which rests on his extensive reading of archived and edited diplomatic correspondence: the peace must be understood as a process, and this process turned largely on issues of princely honor. Haan rightly contends that the treaty cannot be understood through the usual binary oppositions of peace and war. It must instead be examined within the broader scope of contemporary treaty practice. He consequently depicts Cateau-Cambrésis as an aggregate of previous political arrangements, as well as a model for future treaties. Indeed, as a growing legal historical literature on treaty-making suggests, early modern peace treaties provided key precedents in subsequent constructions of an international legal order.
Focus on the treaty as a means of ordering territory and maintaining a balance of power ignores, Haan argues, its personal essence. Chief signatories Philip II of Spain and Henri II of France inherited their fathers’ passionate jousting for personal and princely honor. Haan applies “the scalpel of historical anthropology” (2) to Cateau-Cambrésis to reveal the centrality of signatories’ concern for honor in its construction. The peace, he persuasively argues in his initial section, should be viewed in the context of multiple generations of personal and dynastic rivalry. Haan offers a well-written diplomatic history of Habsburg-Valois rivalry from the 1520s through the 1550s. He convincingly establishes the 1559 peace as the culmination of a series of lesser negotiations long ignored by historians, on the one hand, and of signatories’ growing conviction, on the other hand, that peace could indeed be achieved with honor.
Scholars interested in the mechanics of early modern treaty practice will find Haan's second section of greater interest, although as before his emphasis lies less on social anthropologies of practice than on rulers’ concerns with reputation. Whereas early negotiations overwhelmingly favored France, the resounding French defeat at Saint-Quentin in August 1557 and capture of hundreds of French gentry was interpreted as a blow to Henri's reputation and a sign of divine disfavor. While French forces recouped honor through unexpected territorial gains, particularly Calais, French negotiations were nonetheless handicapped: imperial temporizing wrung significant Italian concessions from a France eager to preserve strategic gains on its borders, while Henri's lead negotiators were both prisoners-of-war intent on ensuring “reasonable” ransoms for themselves, their kin, and their clients. Thus the peace concluded on 2 April 1559 proved more favorable to Spain than imperial negotiators could have hoped: whereas Henri largely sacrificed his Italian commitments to preserve Calais and obtain the release of French prisoners, Philip kept faith with his allies, improved his frontier defenses, and became preëminent arbiter of Italian affairs. The treaty proved honorable for both, and both signed as equals; but Philip gained significantly more in reputation.
Haan's final chapters, fluidly written if not always clearly structured, engage alternate interpretations: the argument that peace was precipitated by financial necessity; and the thesis that the peace was driven by French desires to combat religious dissidence. By arguing that the nerve of early modern warfare was not money but credit, Haan reframes the financial argument in terms of honor. Both sovereigns’ finances were indeed catastrophic by 1557, but their ability to leverage personal reputations in persuading financiers to extend credit was more critical. Moreover, finances were more important in the negotiations, Haan argues, than domestic dissension. That the 1560s were so troubled in both kingdoms encouraged historians to grant the peace a greater causal role than it actually played. Indeed, Haan contends, it was not the treaty itself but its subsequent justifications which stoked French religious strife. The treaty's priority, he argues, was not a Catholic alliance to extirpate heresy but the affirmation of its signatories’ honor and amity, consecrated by a set of dynastic marriages.
Haan's study of Cateau-Cambrésis contributes to a growing literature on early modern peace-making and should be of interest to students of sixteenth-century European politics and diplomacy, international law, political theory, and court culture. Although less focused on peace as a practice, Haan's emphasis on princely honor frames a persuasive synthesis of the treaty's construction. Given the paucity of edited early modern treaties, moreover, Haan makes a second valuable contribution to early modern treaty-scholarship in providing an annotated text of the peace and associated documents in his appendix. Clearly-written resumés, finally, offer his chief conclusions to Spanish and English readers.
