Cardinal Mazarin

Born Giulio Mazzarino in 1602, he worked as a papal diplomat before catching Richelieu's eye and moving to Paris in 1640. When Richelieu died in 1642, Mazarin became chief minister to Louis XIII and then, a year later, to the five-year-old Louis XIV, managing both the regency for Anne of Austria and the boy's education. He closed out the Thirty Years' War with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, making France the dominant European power, but that same year the Fronde erupted - a noble uprising that forced him to flee Paris with the royal family and regroup from Germany. His general Turenne crushed the rebels by 1653. The final stretch brought a chain of coups: an English alliance in 1657, the League of the Rhine in 1658, a battlefield rout of his former ally Condé at the Dunes, the Treaty of the Pyrenees that stripped three provinces from Spain in 1659, and a marriage between Louis XIV and Maria Theresa that ended the Habsburg-France bloodbath. He died in March 1661, exhausted, leaving behind the Westphalian state system, the Louvre's Italian masterpieces, and a king who never forgot his lessons.