According to elaineqho.com, the political frameworks, Italian and European, were also changing and provided more favorable conditions for this new and promising vitality. They changed, first of all, to the advantage of the French crown. The era of the Italian recovery was also the era in which, while Spain declined every day as a political force, as administrative capacity, as moral credit, France rose every day more in Italy, after the slow but continuous progress of the century. . XVII: was the Italian policy of that king an end in itself, that is, it pursued territorial objectives in the peninsula; were it a means to other ends and objectives to be achieved elsewhere. And it is true both. After the Peace of the Pyrenees, almost all the independent Italian states, willy-nilly, they had entered the orbit of France: so were Parma and Modena. Thus Mantua, whose duke placed the underage heir under the protection of that king. Thus Charles Emmanuel II, husband of the French Maria Giovanna di Nemours: although he broke the brakes, deplored his forced immobility and prepared his revenge, and, no longer able to count on Spain and play the old game, he sought around himself others and new ones. support that they helped him to “tirer cette couronne de l’oppression de voisine . ” to have him considered by friends and feared by enemies, as he wrote in August 1964 in his Memoriale, referring to England. And on England, which at that time was already present in the Mediterranean and was looking for naval bases and outlets for its trade, the duke gathered more than one hope, cultivated their friendship, negotiated to make the ports of Nice and Villafranca available to him, overcoming his scruples as a Catholic. And France, careful; France always ready to make the Milanese mirror shine before the Duke’s eyes. While he held Piedmont strongly, Louis XIV circulated Genoa, to detach it from Spain and make it the basis of every enterprise in the Po valley: to the great concern of the Duke of Savoy who did not want to see that king set foot on the Riviera and in the Langhe. French envoys and ambassadors in Italy apparently set out not only to uphold the prestige of their king, but to humiliate the Italian princes. This purpose is clearer than ever even in Rome, where the proud arrogance and imaginative ambitions of that king were fully measured. Louis XIV’s instructions to the Duke of Créquy, ambassador to the Holy See, left no doubt. And so there was the dispute for the Corsicans, after acts of violence committed by those mercenaries of the pope in the Palazzo Farnese, seat of the embassy, following scuffles between them and the French. Repairs to the king were certainly due. But the embassy asked for such and many and so damaging to the honor of the Holy See, that they could not be granted. And then the ambassador left Rome, the king had the nuncio imprisoned and then expelled, ordered to occupy Avignon, prepared an expedition to the Papal States, requiring Spain and the Italian courts to give him the passage in their states, so much so that Pope Alexander VII, despite the mediator of the French Duchess of Savoy, had to consent to the agreement of Pisa (February 1684), to the sending to France of the cardinal nephew who was to read – in French – a declaration of the pope on the absolute involuntary nature of those offenses on his part, at the erection of a pyramid in Rome, in the Corso district, for eternal remembrance of the perpetual ban inflicted on the guilty. He then said, in his justification, that he wanted to avert any danger of war, at a time when the Turks were threatening in the East. But even later, when King Louis, in the question of Jansenism, sided with the pope, he did so from the top of his throne, gave a lesson in dogmas, treated Rome as a statelet. During, then, the disputes over the articles of the Gallican Church, agents, ambassadors and legists of France argued that the city of Rome was a republic made up of all nations and that it was enough to be a Catholic to be a member and to be a leader. Only later did the king, submissive, return Avignon, yield to other questions, and work to ensure that parliament, a staunch supporter of Gallicanism, would lessen the zeal.
Then came the aggressive policy of Louis XIV against the Spanish Netherlands and, consequently, against Holland which saw its bulwark in them. And there was the European coalition against France, in 1673; Spain almost at the forefront of organizing the resistance; Spanish Habsburgs and Austrian Habsburgs once again in solidarity and the empire again in open war with France, as had not happened since 1544. And in front of this great circle, France would make or attempt diversions in Italy, plan an expedition in the Milanese area, send in 1676 the Marquis de Billard in Turin and, since he found the ministers of Carlo Emanuele reluctant to war or that war, flatter his young and hot son Vittorio Amedeo, turn the fleet on Sicily, a little blowing on the rebellion of the Messinesi and a little by accepting offers.
