What was the Treaty of the Pyrenees?

Relations between countries are for better or for worse, what has moved the world for centuries, since the appearance of the first civilizations. One type of relationship between various civilizations are the signing of treaties, which serve as trade agreements or as a way to bring peace to a conflict, often being elements that totally change the history of a state. One of these relevant treaties is that of the Pyrenees, which affected many countries, and changed the situation of the European states for centuries. Therefore, in this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to talk about what was the Treaty of the Pyrenees.

To understand how the Treaty of the Pyrenees was arrived at, we must know the Thirty Years War, one of the most violent armed conflicts in history. In its origin, the war was a confrontation between the states that formed the Holy German Empire, facing those who they supported the reform against those who defended the Counter Reformation. Little by little the European states were entering the war, becoming a conflict between the major European powers and largely forgetting its origin of religious war.

France entered the war late, her motives being largely political, since her intervention was aimed at defeating the Habsburgs, the Spanish royal family and thus being able to increase her influence over Europe.

For all these reasons, parallel to the Thirty Years' War, the Franco-Spanish war began which spanned from 1635 to 1659, beginning within the period of the Thirty Years' War, but ending a few years later, after the signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees. France began this conflict by taking advantage of the weakness of the Empire's Habsburgs, since the French country was surrounded by Habsburg territories.

All the wars made Spain unable to have a large grouped army, having to send troops against the Dutch, against the Portuguese and against the French. To all this was added the beginning of the War of the Reapers, in which a group of Catalans dissatisfied with the policy of the Spanish monarch, decided to rise up against Spain, being supported by the French. Spain had a war in every part of the world, and this caused an exhaustion that made in the end a peace will be signed between the two countries, the so-called Treaty of the Pyrenees.

To conclude with this lesson on what the Treaty of the Pyrenees consisted of, we must talk about the consequences of the Peace of the Pyrenees and the great influence it left in later Europe, especially in Spain.

Representatives of the Spanish and French crowns met on the island of the Pheasants on November 7, 1659, to put an end to the long conflict that had faced both powers. The representative of Spain was Luis de Haro, while the French representative was Cardinal Mazarino, they are the two who signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, also called Peace of the Pyrenees.

This agreement is considered to be the beginning of the end of the hegemony of the Spanish Empire and one of the keys to the loss of power of the Habsburgs. The agreement had more favorable consequences for the French state than for the Spanish, because the latter was at a disadvantage.

Some consequences that had this agreement were the following:

• France got the county of Artois, Conflent, Vallespir, part of Sardinia and Roussillon. Some of these regions never returned to the hands of the Spanish, being great losses for the Spanish crown.
• Spain recovered the Franche-Comté and some areas in Italy.
• The border between the two countries became delimited by the Pyrenees, except for a small exception such as the Aran Valley.
• It solved the problem of Catalan uprising, giving pardons to those persecuted during this period.
• In the treaty it was said that France should keep the Usatges of Barcelona in Roussillon, but the French king never kept this part of the bargain. The monarch repealed the Usatges, and banned Catalan throughout the area.
• The agreement included the pact of a wedding between the French king, Louis XIV of France and Maria Theresa of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king. The dowry for this wedding was never paid, which caused France to attack Spain again a few years later.