89 Facts About Cardinal Mazarin

Jules Cardinal Mazarin, born Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, or Mazarini, was an Italian cardinal, diplomat and politician who served as the chief minister to the Kings of France Louis XIII and Louis XIV from 1642 to his death.

Cardinal Mazarin acted as the head of the government for Anne of Austria, the regent for the young Louis XIV.

Cardinal Mazarin was made responsible for the king's education until he came of age.

Cardinal Mazarin took Anne of Austria and Louis XIV out of Paris and then shifted his base to Germany for a time.

Turenne, a general loyal to Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, defeated Conde, and Cardinal Mazarin made a triumphal return to Paris in 1653.

Cardinal Mazarin introduced Italian opera on a grand scale to Paris and assembled a remarkable art collection, much of which today can be seen in the Louvre.

Cardinal Mazarin founded the Bibliotheque Mazarine, the first true public library in France, which is found in the Institut de France, across the Seine from the Louvre.

Cardinal Mazarin's parents were residents of Rome, spending the summer in Pescina to escape the summer heat.

Cardinal Mazarin's mother Ortensia Bufalini was a native of Rome, from the Bufalini family of nobility whose origins were in Citta di Castello in Umbria.

Cardinal Mazarin was the goddaughter of Filippo I Colonna, her husband's employer.

Cardinal Mazarin excelled in theatrics; he was chosen to play the part of the newly sainted Ignatius of Loyola in a religious pageant.

Cardinal Mazarin acquired the habit of gambling at cards, and was frequently in debt.

Cardinal Mazarin studied law with Girolamo during the daytime and in the evenings continued to gamble and again was in debt.

Cardinal Mazarin received a message from Rome informing that his mother was seriously ill.

Cardinal Mazarin was summoned before the Pope, Urban VIII, to explain why he had deserted his post.

Cardinal Mazarin threw himself at the feet of the Pope, and pleaded to be pardoned for his excess of loyalty to his family.

In 1628 Cardinal Mazarin was named the secretary to Jean-Francois Sacchetti, a senior papal diplomat, who was trying to prevent the impending War of the Mantuan Succession between the armies of France and Spain for dominance of that region of northern Italy.

Cardinal Mazarin is so Spanish and so Savoyard that what he says shouldn't be taken as gospel truth.

Cardinal Mazarin brought together the Spanish and French commanders and explained the terms of the agreement, which were readily accepted by both sides.

Cardinal Mazarin tried to persuade Louis XIII to send a military expedition to capture Geneva, the fortress of the Protestant movement, but the King, who had good relations with the Swiss cantons, rejected the idea.

Cardinal Mazarin wrote later that he had done his best to persuade Richelieu to avoid a war.

Cardinal Mazarin had the affection of Pope Urban VIII, but he was disliked by Cardinal Barberini, the chief of Papal diplomacy, and by the large contingent of Spaniards in the papal household.

Cardinal Mazarin spent his time collecting sculpture and other works of art which he sent to Richelieu for the Cardinal's new palace in Paris.

Cardinal Mazarin considered serving the rulers of Savoy, Poland, or Queen Henriette of England, but in the end he decided to enter the service of Richelieu and France.

However, Richelieu was in no hurry to bring him to Paris; he valued the diplomatic contributions Cardinal Mazarin was making in Rome, as well as the art treasures he was acquiring.

Cardinal Mazarin kept Mazarin in Rome for two more years.

Cardinal Mazarin had to wait the entire year of 1639 before his new position was confirmed.

When he arrived in Paris, Cardinal Mazarin was welcomed warmly by the King, by Richelieu, and by the Queen, Anne of Austria, to whom Cardinal Mazarin had regularly sent perfumes, fans, gloves and other gifts.

Cardinal Mazarin recommended artists to bring from Rome to Paris, and in 1640 he commissioned a bust of Richelieu from the sculptor Bernini in Rome, sending Bernini pictures of Richelieu.

Cardinal Mazarin declared that it was perfect, so lifelike that, as he wrote, "it seemed about to speak", but French tastes did not approve of the Baroque style.

The other members of the Court condemned the work, and Cardinal Mazarin wrote back to Bernini, sending him more pictures of Richelieu and asking him to try again.

Cardinal Mazarin successfully secured Christine's position, and established a solid alliance between Savoy and France.

Cardinal Mazarin had established a cordial relationship with Richelieu; Richelieu jokingly referred to him as Rinzama, or Nunzinicardo, or, most frequently, Colmarduccio, or Colmardo.

Cinq-Mars was arrested, Gaston was disgraced, and another conspirator, the Duke of Bouillon, was granted a pardon on the condition of revealing all the details of the plot to Cardinal Mazarin, and surrendering the important fortress of Sedan to the King.

Cardinal Mazarin did not reveal the participation of the Queen in the conspiracy, but his knowledge gave him even greater leverage at the court.

Richelieu did, according to Cardinal Mazarin himself, advise the King to employ Cardinal Mazarin, who until that time had no official position at Court.

Cardinal Mazarin had been close to Richelieu and was the only real rival in experience to Mazarin.

The evening that she became regent, she declared that Cardinal Mazarin would be her chief minister and head of her government.

The management style of Cardinal Mazarin was entirely different from that of Richelieu.

Cardinal Mazarin has the spirit, the insinuation, the playfulness, the manners, but a certain laziness.

Cardinal Mazarin continued Richelieu's costly war against the chief rivals of France in Europe, the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain.

Cardinal Mazarin settled Protestant princes in secularized bishoprics and abbacies in reward for their political opposition to the Habsburgs, building a network of French influence as a buffer in the western part of the Empire.

Towards Protestantism at home, Cardinal Mazarin pursued a policy of promises and calculated delay to defuse the armed insurrection of the Ardeche, for example, and to keep the Huguenots disarmed: for six years they believed themselves to be on the eve of recovering the protections of the Edict of Nantes, but in the end they obtained nothing.

Cardinal Mazarin was more consistently an enemy of Jansenism, in particular during the formulary controversy, more for its political implications than out of theology.

Cardinal Mazarin was forced to raise money by any means possible to support the war against the Habsburgs.

Cardinal Mazarin discovered an old law dating to Henry IV which forbade Parisians to build houses outside the city limits.

Cardinal Mazarin recommended to the Queen that she listen to the parlement and modify her decrees, but she was furious at their opposition.

Cardinal Mazarin waited until the right moment to strike back.

Cardinal Mazarin quickly sent an envoy to the Emperor in Vienna, calling for a truce and peace conference.

Cardinal Mazarin then set to work intriguing to divide the different factions of the Fronde.

Cardinal Mazarin's goal was to separate the members of the Parlement and the more radical Parisian street demonstrators, who were united only by their dislike of Mazarin and Anne of Austria.

Cardinal Mazarin then persuaded the Parlement that they had more to fear from an uprising of the Parisiens than they did from him.

Cardinal Mazarin had an excellent network of agents, and immediately learned of the plot.

Cardinal Mazarin decided it was wisest to resign his position and leave France while he could.

Cardinal Mazarin had Conde freed from prison, and, after a long journey to different cities, settled in Bruhl near Cologne, as the guest of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne.

Cardinal Mazarin's instructions were carried out meticulously by Anne of Austria.

Cardinal Mazarin's intrigues succeeded in preventing the proposed marriage between one of the leading Frondeurs, the Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti with Princess Charlotte-Marie of Lorraine, Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, another of his principal enemies in Paris.

Cardinal Mazarin was greatly aided by the political ineptitude of Conde, who offended many of his natural allies.

Cardinal Mazarin urged Anne of Austria to bring him back to Paris as soon as possible, "to correct the greatest attack ever made against the royal authority".

The Presidents of the Parlement, now allies of Cardinal Mazarin, demanded that the violence be stopped and that Conde take his army out of Paris.

Cardinal Mazarin had to wait longer to make his return, which was carefully orchestrated with his help.

Cardinal Mazarin, knowing this was the plan, accepted this decision, and waited a respectful time in exile.

Cardinal Mazarin was welcomed with a triumphal banquet at the Hotel de Ville, where crowds earlier had demanded his downfall.

One effect of the enormous amount of money in the market during the period of the Regency of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin was a decline in the value of the Livre tournais, the official coin of the realm, lost twenty percent of its value against the Florin.

Cardinal Mazarin did not defend Fouquet; shortly before his own death, he agreed that Fouquet had to go.

About one third of the personal fortune of Cardinal Mazarin came from some twenty-one abbeys around France, each of which paid him an annual share of their revenue.

Cardinal Mazarin left to his family jewels worth an estimated 2.5 million livres, and gave a collection of diamonds worth 50,000 livres to the new Queen, and a 14-carat diamond called The Rose of England, valued at 73,000 livres, to the Queen Mother.

Cardinal Mazarin was second only to Louis XIV as a patron of the arts in France in the 17th century.

Cardinal Mazarin's collection included works by most of the major French and Italian artists of his time and before, going back to the Renaissance.

Cardinal Mazarin's acquisitions included works by Poussin, Rubens, Corregio, Van Dyck, Titian, and many others, as well as the famous Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione by Raphael, which had belonged to Charles I of England, and had been bought by Richelieu.

The Palais Cardinal Mazarin was created by Cardinal Mazarin beginning in 1643, soon after he became first minister, when he rented four adjacent hotels on the north side of the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs between the Rue Vivienne to the east and the Rue de Richelieu on the west and across from the Palais Royal, which was the King's residence.

Cardinal Mazarin commissioned Francois Mansart to add a garden wing with two superimposed galleries running north from the west end of the easternmost building, the Hotel Tubeuf, where he could display his art.

In 1721, the Palais Cardinal Mazarin became the site of the King's Library, now the Richelieu site of the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Cardinal Mazarin spent little time in his Palace; he lived most of the time in the Palais Royal, when Louis XIV was in residence there, or in the Louvre.

Cardinal Mazarin had the moats of the chateau turned into a kind of zoo, with lions, tigers, bears and other exotic animals, for the amusement of the young King.

Cardinal Mazarin played an important role in bringing Italian music to Paris.

Louis XIII, Catherine de Medici and Marie de Medici had all brought Italian musicians to Paris, but Cardinal Mazarin did it more systematically and on a much larger scale.

Melani doubled as a diplomat; Cardinal Mazarin sent him on several secret missions to other courts in Europe.

In 1645 Cardinal Mazarin brought to Paris the famous scenery designer Giacomo Torelli, who staged Sacrati's opera La finta pazza.

However, when Cardinal Mazarin was forced to leave Paris during the Fronde, his library was seized by the Fronde leaders, and was dispersed.

Cardinal Mazarin then began a second library with what was left of the first.

In 1658, after long and intense preparation, Cardinal Mazarin unveiled the League of the Rhine, a new group of fifty small German principalities which were now linked by a treaty with France.

Cardinal Mazarin probably calculated that the King would be too embarrassed to take all of his mentor's and chief Minister's wealth.

Cardinal Mazarin had prepared a different will, which left a large sum for the establishment of the College des Quatre-Nations, which he had founded for students from the four new provinces which he had added to the territory of France by the Treaty of Westphalia.

Cardinal Mazarin asked that his remains be interred there, where they rest today in a marble monument beneath the dome.

Cardinal Mazarin did not have children, but he did have seven nieces: five from the Mancini family and two from the Martinozzi family.

The nieces all moved to Paris, and Cardinal Mazarin devoted care to arranging marriages for them, always with wealthy and aristocratic families.

Cardinal Mazarin married Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Vendome, grandson of King Henry IV, and was the mother of the great general the Duke of Vendome.

Cardinal Mazarin wished to marry Marie, but was prevented by his mother and by Mazarin, who had greater plans to marry Louis to a princess of Spain.