OUR story begins in March 1559 with the Peace of
Cateau-Cambrésis. It was primarily a peace between
Spain and France, though England too was a party,
for Mary Tudor had entered the war in the train of her husband
Philip II, and had lost Calais. This peace marks the close of an
epoch in European as well as French history.

The most obvious change in the European scene was its new
rulers. Only three to four years before, Philip II had taken
over Spain and the Spanish Netherlands from his father, the
Emperor Charles V; in England Elizabeth had become Queen
the previous November; and in France celebrations connected
with the Peace were to result in the death of Henry II and thus
lead to the gradual emergence of the Queen-Mother, Catherine
de Medici, as the director of French policy. By a striking
coincidence all three of these rulers were long-lived. Catherine
de Medici died at the turn of the year 1588-9: she was sixty-
nine. Philip II died in 1598: he was seventy-one. Elizabeth died
in 1603: she was sixty-nine. The second half of the sixteenth
century was dominated by these three personalities, and,
according to one's national standpoint, is the Age of Philip II,
of Elizabeth, or of Catherine de Medici.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis closed the period of the
Italian Wars, which had gone on intermittently for over sixty
years and ended, from the French point of view, in complete
humiliation. France finally gave up the challenge to Spanish
hegemony in Italy, and Italy was left to itself and Spain. The
Italian states could no longer disturb the peace by playing off
one great power against another; they passed out of the main
current of international affairs.

-11-