Conducting Louisquatorzien Absolutism in Venice: The Abbé d’Estrades, Alessandro Stradella, and the Outing of Negotiations for Casale, 1677

Sherrod Brandon Marshall, Syracuse University

Assassins pummeled composer Alessandro Stradella on 10 October 1677, leaving him for dead in the streets of Turin. Alvise Contarini, the musician’s Venetian employer, had ordered the assault in retribution for Stradella’s elopement with his mistress, Agnese van Uffelle. Leaving Venice to pursue the composer, the assassins carried a letter of protection from the Abbé d’Estrades, the French ambassador in Venice.1 In the missive Estrades enjoined the Marquis de Villars, Louis XIV’s ambassador to the Duke of Savoy, to lodge the Venetians. Private revenge became scandal when it was learned that Contarini’s henchmen sought asylum at the French embassy after their attack on Stradella. The Duke of Savoy in turn demanded explanations from Louis XIV for the attempted murder of the composer in his state. The attack contravened the duke’s sovereignty, and the unusual involvement of French ambassadors in a personal affair without his foreknowledge outraged and embarrassed Louis XIV.2 After the king rebuked the Abbé d’Estrades for overextending his authority without royal consent, the ambassador feverishly defended his

1 Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (AMAE), Correspondance Politique (CP), Venise, vol. 99, Copie d’une lettre de Monsieur l’Abbé d’Estrades du 8 Sept. 1677, Fs 209-210. 2 Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF), Clairambault (CL), 584, Estrades to Card. Cesar d’Estrees, 20 Nov. 1677, F 477; Carolyn Gianturco, “Alessandro Stradella,” online article, Oxford Music Online, web address http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/26888, accessed October 16, 2014.

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actions in letters to his master and to colleagues.3 In his explanation to Louis XIV, the abbé believed it prudent to reveal for the first time another secret negotiation that he was spearheading with the Duke of Mantua for a French purchase of the stronghold and territory of Casale in Northern Italy. 4 Explanations for the Stradella affair read in conjunction with Estrades’s revelation regarding Casale highlight the complex networks the ambassador cultivated from Venice in service to Louis XIV and to his own burgeoning career. As he defended his actions, Estrades sought to demonstrate to the king that the untoward interventions in the life of a musician should not vitiate his character as royal representative. To deflect attention from his misstep vis-à-vis Stradella, Estrades presented a diplomatic morsel to Louis XIV that soon led to the French acquisition of Casale. The ambassador aimed to vindicate his role in the republic. His independent actions in Louis XIV’s name required response and resolution from the crown. That the monarch should have to react to rather than generate policy speaks to the precariousness of absolute monarchy. Estrades’s story contributes to our understanding of louisquatorzien centralization at the geopolitical level. Historians have considered absolute monarchy within the borders of the dynastic state as a politics of collaboration between the monarch and the various entities and individuals within the kingdom vying for authority.5 Others, like Junko Takeda, claim that accommodative better describes the king’s administrative paradigm. 6 I suggest here that foreign relations represented another context in which the accommodative politics of absolutism emerged externally; louisquatorzien centralization was forced to accommodate – read adapt to – contingencies occurring far from the center of royal authority. Using Estrades as a lens, the reversal of center and periphery vis-à-vis traditional views of absolutism, as scholars such as Takeda suggest, becomes increasingly evident. 7 Embassies like that of

3 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Pomponne to Estrades, 27 Oct. 1677, F 248; Estrades to Louis XIV, 13 Nov. 1677, F 255-258; BNF, CL 584, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 20 Nov. 1677, Fs 497-499. 4 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 18 Dec. 1677, F. 292v. 5 William Beik synthesized the historiography regarding French absolutism as social collaboration. Junko Takeda has suggested that accommodation better expresses the politics of Louis XIV. See: Beik, “Review Article: The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” in Past & Present, N. 188 (August 2005) and Junko T. Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 8- 9. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 11-12

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Estrades in Venice reveal the level of adaptation that foreign affairs and ministers to foreign courts demanded from the crown. Rather than a solely domestic project whereby the monarch-qua-center imposed royal will upon the peripheral boundaries of the state and beyond, Estrades’s story highlights how events outside of the kingdom necessitated response from the seat of the absolute monarch-qua-periphery. Foreign affairs acted upon Louis XIV’s aspirations to a centralized absolutism. Stradella’s misfortune occurred near the end of Estrades’s tenure in the Serenissima. The ambassador’s involvement in the scandal was not an example of malfeasance. The affair demonstrated, rather, Estrades’s able – if overzealous – cultivation of constituents sympathetic to France. Using the scandal as a point of departure we discover that Jean-François d’Estrades, Abbé de Conches and Moissac and the Personat of Heerlen (1647-1705), was a crucial and strategic conduit in an information system linking Venice, the Congress of Nijmegen, Savoy, and Rome with Louis XIV’s court. Estrades was only twenty-eight years old upon becoming French ambassadeur ordinaire to Venice in 1675. Despite his youth, the abbé’s ability to gather and synthesize information for the court and for Louis XIV’s chief plenipotentiary at the Congress of Nijmegen (1676-1679), the abbé’s own father, proved diligent and accomplished.8 The Estrades were clients of the Duke d’Orleans, the secretary of state, Pomponne, and many others at court through the Marechal d’Estrades’s many years of diplomatic service. The family also boasted many connections in foreign diplomatic circles. The broader international connections of the Estrades clan worked in concert with the abbé’s own skillful networking in Venice.9 Louis XIV maintained an embassy in the city almost continuously throughout his reign. All the leading European powers courted the Republic of Saint Mark, and Estrades was instructed no less to cultivate its “good disposition” toward the king.10 As the states of Europe looked to end the Dutch War (1672-1678), the king promoted aggressive representation

8 Joël Cornette, Chronique du régne de Louis XIV: De la fin de la Fronde à l’aube des Lumières (Paris: Sedes, 1997), 243. 9 See BNF, CL. 584, Fs 18, 163, 172, and 236-237; Régis de La Haye, “Un bénéfice aux Pays Bas pour Jean François d’Estrades, Abbé de Moissac,” in Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de Tarn-et-Garonne (BSATG), vol. 115 (1990), 3-4 10 All translations are the author’s. Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’instruction au Sieur Abbé d’Estrades, in Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France depuis les Traités de Westphalie jusqu’à la Révolution Française, publié sous les auspices de la Commission des Archives Diplomatiques au Ministres des Affaires Étrangères, XXVI, Venise, ed. Pierre du Parc (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, 1958), 75.

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in Venice. The king sought to manipulate its neutrality, its central location, and its politicians to further French aims while reassuring the Venetian senate that France had no greater designs in Italian affairs – a point far from true as negotiations for Casale made clear.11 The tasks of reinforcing the choice of emissary that Venice might send to Nijmegen as a “neutral” arbiter and warning the republic against any collusion with Spain in Italian politics were paramount in Estrades’s instructions.12 While negotiations for the choice of Venetian envoys to Nijmegen concerned Estrades, our task here is to provide the context for Estrades’ intervention in the life of Alessandro Stradella and the circumstances surrounding the secret negotiations Estrades engineered for the purchase of Casale. Estrades maintained an immediate correspondence with his father at Nijmegen. The abbé plied the marshal with updates of Venice’s relations with Emperor Leopold I and Charles II of Spain. Both rulers needed Venice’s influence in Italian affairs. The republic’s location too proffered passage of troops between Habsburg states across its terra firma possessions and through the Adriatic Sea. 13 Because the Habsburgs courted the republic, relations with Venice were critical to France in the final years of the war. Louis XIV wanted Venice pliable in a geopolitical moment when the republic might be tempted to seek an alliance with Habsburg states to offset growing French encroachments. While the republic’s Mediterranean trade suffered throughout the seventeenth century, its wealth and prosperity remained. It feared further commercial loss, however, and France, like England and Holland, loomed as a powerful competitor in the Mediterranean thoroughfares it alone once dominated. 14 France’s naval victories from 1674-1676 resulted in the increased French maritime presence in the Mediterranean for which Jean- Baptiste Colbert strove, and they augured the possibility of French ascendance in Southern Italy.15 France was prominent in the seventeenth-century race for precedence in the Mediterranean Sea. 16 A glance at the marines catalogues of the Archives Nationales reveals Louis XIV’s enterprises in

11 Ibid., 81-82 12 Ibid., 78-79. 13 Ibid. 14 Cornette, 256; BNF, CL. 584, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 25 April 1676, F 179; Benjamin Arbel, “Venice’s Maritime Empire in the Early Modern Period,” in A Companion to Venetian History, 1400-1797, ed. Eric R. Dursteler (Brill, 2013), 239. 15 Charles-Édouard Levillain, Vaincre Louis XIV: Angleterre-Hollande-France, Histoire d’une relation triangulaire, 1665-1688 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2010), 273. 16 Ibid., 18.

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the sea and its environs, stretching from Tangier to Jerusalem and to trade routes onto which the Mediterranean gave access as far afield as Persia and Siam. The king’s foreign and commercial policies in Europe required a diplomatic presence in the port cities encircling the sea and to the systems of knowledge they afforded. Venice still stood out as the leading state with eyes – and ears – toward both the Mediterranean and Europe. It is significant that late-seventeenth-century Europe’s most powerful monarch nurtured robust diplomatic ties with the republic; Venice was not a dead letter in Mediterranean and Italian politics. Since 1672, Louis XIV’s warships, led by Vivonne and Duquesne, fought against the Dutch. With the alliance forged between Holland and Spain in 1673, naval battles spread into Southern Italian waters. 17 Continual successes against allied navies led by the formidable Admiral de Ruyter encouraged the inhabitants of Messina and Naples to petition Louis XIV for assistance to break the perceived Spanish yoke. Pleased to heed the Italians’ call, Louis XIV strengthened his forces in Southern Italy. 18 Constant communication regarding these matters between Estrades in Venice with the French envoys at Nijmegen attested to the leverage the Mediterranean and Italian theaters provided at the negotiating table.19 Estrades entertained spies from Southern Italy bringing information that he shared with colleagues in Rome, his father at the congress, and with the court. Spain worked to imprison informants and pamphleteers fleeing to Venice for French protection through the influence of their ambassador and the Hispanophile papal nuncio in the republic.20 Authors of anti-Spanish tracts in favor of the French seizure of Sicily importuned Estrades for protection. Known spies like Fra Francesco Maria Leone brought Estrades frequent news of Spanish actions in Messina to French advantage.21 Venice, as much as Spain, considered these spies dangerous because of their involvement in French movements in Southern Italy bringing the king’s warships further eastward. Venetian domestic agents’ numerous riferte to the inquisitori di stato along with Estrades’s dispatches attested to the frequency of information exchanged

17 Cornette, 207, 223; Levillain, 273 18 BNF, CL. 582, Plenipotentiaries at Nijmegen to Estrades, 3 Jan. 1677, F 255. 19 Ibid.; BNF, CL. 584. Marshal d’Estrades to Estrades, 27 Nov. 1676, Fs 191-192; BNF, CL. 582. 20 Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Inquisitori di Stato-Riferte dei Confidenti, Busta 566, Badoer to the Inquisitori di Stato, 12 Jan. 1676. 21 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 97, Estrades to Pomponne, 6 Feb. 1676, F 65r; Ibid., Pomponne to Estrades, 4 March, 1676, F 80.

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between the abbé and informants from the south that in turn discomfited Venice.22 The ambassador’s ties with Venetian nobility provided another avenue of information gathering in the city and advocacy for France within the senate regarding French foreign policy. Among Estrades’ Venetian ties lay the various branches of the powerful Contarini clan. The Contarini dalla Porta di Ferro had been honored with the election of Alvise II Contarini as doge in 1676.23 Estrades worked to maintain links with those like the Contarini, “a family which,” the abbé said, “has already given (the city) so many leaders that it would seem the throne is hereditary due to the virtue which it (the house) is clothed.” 24 Such connections proved critical as the negotiations at Nijmegen progressed and as French authority seeped further into Italian politics and maritime affairs. Skill was needed to keep Venice neutral. Alessandro Stradella’s patron in Venice was a Contarini, and Estrades’s relation with the branches of the patrician family created the first strand linking him to the attempted murder of the composer. It was Contarini who requested the letter from Estrades to be given to the French ambassador in Turin. The second strand tying Estrades to the composer resulted from French aims in Northern Italy and in Rome. Venice was a beehive for purveyors of news from all of the major Italian courts.25 The informants from Southern Italy, contacts with Francophile spies in Venice, fellow French ambassadors in the peninsula, and the frequent sojourns of the Duke of Mantua and his agents in the republic kept Estrades’s finger on the pulse of Italian politics. Additionally, the presence of the papal nuncio and cardinals traveling to and from Rome plied the ambassador with news of the papal court.26 To appreciate these links further it is necessary to return to the ongoing tension between France and Spain. Spanish authority in Italy persisted in the late seventeenth century despite what Gianvittorio Signorotto called a “generic reference to the ‘clash between the two monarchies’…” that “…projected the shadow of Louis XIV’s subsequent preponderance in Europe back on to the middle

22 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 97, Estrades to Pomponne, F 211; Ibid., Estrades to the Senate, 11 July 1676; Parti du sénat du 13 juillet, 1676, F 226; BNF, CL. 585, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 16 Jan. 1677, F 31. 23 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 97, Estrades to Doge Alvise II Contarini, 1 Sept. 1676, Fs 283-284. 24BNF, CL., 584, Office sur l’élection du nouveau doge, F 370. 25 Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75. 26 BNF, CL. 584 and 585 attest to the breadth of Estrades’s networks. The marshal’s letters to Estrades are found in BNF, CL. 582.

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(of the century).”27 Spanish authority was entrenched. It was not until after the Treaties of Nijmegen and Saint-German-en-Laye that Spain’s international power declined before French dominance. In Rome especially, “the Spanish monarchy had not suffered irreparable damage…for the church, it (Spain) continued to represent the greatest source of benefits and wealth” supplying “most of the cardinals” at the papal court.28 For Estrades, the failing health of octogenarian Pope Clement X Altieri in 1675 and the conclave that followed in 1676 warranted a web of negotiations with Venetian and other Italian cardinals sympathetic to Louis XIV. The virulence of Franco-papal relations from the time of Alexander VII Chigi endured throughout Clement X’s pontificate. The curia anticipated the pontiff’s death. Louis XIV pressed French ties with Venetian cardinals and Roman clergy to sway an imminent election, instructing Estrades to cultivate these relationships.29 Clement’s successor would affect fraught Gallican policies, and the problematic preponderance of Spanish authority within the curia and its extensive Italian networks were in the balance. The 1676 conclave saw the election of Innocent XI Odeschalchi – a pontiff concerned with ecclesiastical reform and ostensibly opposed to papal alliance with any one dynastic power.30 The months following the election witnessed an exchange of gestures meant to benefit the Franco-papal rapport. Estrades especially solicited relations with papal secretary of state Cardinal Alderano Cibo.31 Cibo could inspire papal cooperation with Louis XIV in Rome and counter the Hispanophile nuncio in Venice for whom the cardinal had no sympathy.32

27 Gianvittorio Signorotto, “The Squadrone Volante: ‘Independent’ Cardinals and European Politics in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492-1700, eds. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antoniette Vesceglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187-188. 28 Ibid, 188. 29 Memoire du Roy, 84-85. 30 Signorotto, 206. 31 BNF, CL. 584, Estrades to Card. Delfin, 18 July 1676, F 314; Ibid., Estrades to Delfin, 1 August 1676, 329; BNF, CL.CL CL. 585, Copie de la lettre éscrite à M. le Cardinal Cibo sur le gratis des bulles de l’Abbaye de Moissac du CL, 6 Février 1677, Fs 85-86; Antonio Menniti Ippolito, “The Secretary of State as the Pope’s Special Ministry,” in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492-1700, eds. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antoniette Vesceglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 153-154. 32 Richard T. Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 164, 167.

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Estrades’s career aspirations – and those of his father for him – intertwined also with royal and clerical affairs. The ambassador received the abbacy of Moissac in 1669 long before he left for Venice, but he still had not acquired the costly papal bulls conferring the sinecure’s revenue.33 The cost of maintaining a magnificent household in Venice and payments to informants was immense, and, as Saint-Simon later attested, the ambassador “had indebted himself greatly” during his embassy. 34 Estrades’s income suffered, and he believed that his financial woes could only be settled in part through the conferral of the bulls.35 The abbé explained his finances to Louis XIV, Innocent XI, and Cardinals Cibo and Estrées petitioning from Venice to have the bulls gratis – foregoing payment of the tax to the papal chancellery.36 Estrades particularly curried Cibo’s patronage to expedite matters and to demonstrate the “care that I (he) had taken to manage the court of Rome.”37 To encourage respect in Rome he undertook favors also for his French benefactor, Cardinal d’Estrées, providing protection in Venice for the cardinal’s protégé, Catarina Nardi, an opera singer.38 Meanwhile, from Nijmegen, the Marshal d’Estrades recommended his son to the king, the pope, and Cibo in hopes that he might receive a French bishopric should one become vacant.39 Finally, in March, Estrades’s labors prevailed. Innocent XI granted the gratis for the bulls. Undoubtedly this was also a boon to Louis XIV and the abbé’s father.40 Estrades set about thanking, through favors, those who

33 La Haye, “Un bénéfice aux Pays Bas,” 6. 34 Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires complètes et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la Régence, vol. 12 (Paris: A. Sautelet, 1829), 134-135. 35 La Haye, 8. 36 For the tax on bulls see: Jane E. Sayers, Papal Government and England During the Pontificate of Honorius III (1216-1227) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 47-48. 37 BNF, CL. 584, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 10 Oct. 1676, F 417; Ibid., Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 31 Oct. 1676, F 437; Ibid., Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 14 Nov. 1676, F 461; see also La Haye, 6. 38 BNF, CL. 585, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 6 Feb. 1677, F 79. 39 BNF, CL. 582, Marshal d’Estrades to Estrades, 24 Dec. 1677, F 745; BNF, CL. 585, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 23 Jan. 1677, F 33. 40 Ibid., Lettre de remerciement à Sa Saintété pour le gratis des bulles de l’abbaye de Moyssac, du 20 Mars 1677, F 143.

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acted on his behalf like Cibo.41 In so doing the other link to Stradella materialized. Stradella and a castrato of his acquaintance contrived to extort ten thousand scudi from a Roman woman engaged to marry a member of the Cibo family. The scheme failed, and Stradella fled to Venice, humiliating the cardinal and his family and bringing the composer into Alvise Contarini’s employ. 42 The musician’s subsequent scandalous behavior under Contarini’s roof opened a clear path for Estrades to strengthen French aims in Venice and Rome through what seemed a trifling letter.43 The strands of the Stradella case merged. At Contarini’s request, the abbé provided his men the letter to be delivered to Villars in Turin. No doubt Estrades considered it a small gesture to repay efforts on his behalf for the bulls; to recommend his services to the cardinals who could nominate him for sinecures; and to keep Contarini in the French camp maintaining an insider in the Venetian government. “It is true, Monsieur,” the abbé claimed to Cardinal d’Estrées, “I was told if Stradella refused to marry the girl he abducted, which was the only way to satisfy M. Contarini, that he would be beaten…but what persuaded me further was that he cruelly injured Cardinal Cybo in Rome.”44 Estrades claimed good intentions through his obligations in Venice and Rome, but his participation implied royal approval for an extraterritorial act of violence in the Duchy of Savoy. 45 Estrades’s networks strengthened French connections in Venice and Rome, but his reputation plummeted because of his enterprising independence from the crown. The ambassador needed to salvage his future quickly. The ambassador begged Louis XIV’s pardon, and he promised to avoid further errors of judgment. While doing so he revealed a diplomatic project he was secretly engineering.46 The Stradella debacle pushed the ambassador to write a submissive letter to the king in which he acknowledged negotiations with the Duke of Mantua’s agent in Venice, Mattioli, for the purchase of the stronghold of Casale.47 Estrades and Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli had maintained the deepest secrecy throughout their talks –

41 Ibid., Lettre de remerciement à Monseigneur Le Cardinal Cibo pour le gratis des Bulles de l’abbaye de Moyssac du 20 de Mars 1677, Fº 145; Ibid., Lettre à M. le Cardinal Altieri du 27 Mars, 1677, F 161. 42 Gianturco, “Alessandro Stradella”. 43 BNF, CL. 585, Estrades to Card. d’Estrées, 20 Nov.1677, Fs 498-499. 44 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 46 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 18 Dec. 1677, F 292v. 47 Ibid., Fs 292r-292v.

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evading even Venetian spies.48 The Duke of Mantua’s positive response to a proposed French purchase of Casale prompted Mattioli to write a letter for Louis XIV just as the Stradella affair unfolded. Estrades wisely included a copy of Mattioli’s letter in the dispatch to the king in which he obsequiously defended his connections to Stradella.49 The count’s letter lauded Estrades. He opined that, of the French ambassadors to Venice, Estrades “surpassed them all,” and that he was “seeking…to procure for Your Majesty the most considerable expansion.”50 The abbé admitted that he had been negotiating with the count for four months prior. 51 In this time, Mattioli confirmed to Estrades in November that the Duke might sell Casale to Louis XIV. Confirmation from the duke arrived just after the Stradella affair exploded.52 Estrades’ divulgation of the news in conjunction with the attack on the musician, however, has been neglected in accounts of the purchase of Casale. Louis XIV’s eventual purchase from the duke through Estrades’s connections and the later scandal involving Mattioli himself should be analyzed, therefore, through the lens of the Stradella affair. Here the personal nature of Louis XIV’s foreign ministry and the importance of the ambassador’s role emerge illuminating the diachronic evolution of louisquatorzien politics from beyond the kingdom.53 Sebastiano Foscarini, Venetian ambassador to France (1678-1683), well understood the personal nature of the French system. Through his 1683 relazione to the senate he captured Estrades’ personal inducements. Foscarini’s report coupled with Estrades’s suppliant letter of 18 December 1677 revealed a clear narrative of the arrangements prior to official talks of 1678 for the purchase of Casale. According to Foscarini, Casale gave the king an added stronghold in Northern Italy, and, along with Pinerolo in Piemonte, provided two “piazze” from which to intimidate the Duke of Savoy who held “the keys to Italy.” 54 The Venetian ambassador

48 Ibid., Fs. 292r, 294r, 301r-301v, 305r. 49 Ibid., F 300v. 50 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Count Ercole Antonio Mattioli to Louis XIV, 14 Dec. 1677, Fs 287r-287v. 51 Ibid., F 293r. 52 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 18 Dec. 1677, Fs 293r-293v, 298v-299r. 53 John C. Rule & Ben S. Trotter, A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 11. 54 Foscarini, Relatione, 1679-1683, in Le relazioni degli stati europei lette al senato dagli ambasciatori veneti nel secolo decimosettimo, serie II, vol. III, Francia, eds. Nicolo Barozzi & Guglielmo Berchet (Venice: Naratovich, 1865), 429.

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hypothesized that Louis XIV’s intensions to expand French authority in Italy further materialized through the purchase. 55 He expressed Louis XIV’s aspirations to universal monarchy, admitting that the Duke of Mantua offered himself, perhaps unwittingly, as part of this design.56 The duke opted to negotiate with France to maintain some authority and to augment his pitiful finances.57 The Habsburgs pressured the duke to render Casale to them.58 They threatened to wrest it from him. Rather than add French threats to those of Spain and the emperor, Foscarini argued, the “Abbe d’Estrades” chose to manipulate the duke’s vanity through his “active intellect.” 59 The astute ambassador, Foscarini continued, convinced the duke that “putting Casale in the hands of the Most Christian King,” would “confound the pride of the Spanish….”60 Estrades thus kept “the threads of the negotiation in his hands until the most opportune moment, neither pulling them too hard nor abandoning them.”61 Foscarini hinted that the abbé used the secret negotiations in his own favor. Foscarini understood that Estrades’s future depended on personal performance in his embassy. The Venetian offered an explanation for the abbé’s personal interest in the arrangement. Having admitted Estrades’s acumen, Foscarini concluded that the ambassador was “…eager to give birth to a transaction in an otherwise fruitless ministry.”62 Through this he signaled Estrades’s inability to alter Venetian neutrality despite relations with patricians like the Contarini and direct representation to the senate. Foscarini recognized that the abbé was in Venice for that reason, and he knew that Venice would not ally overtly with France as French forces gathered around Italy and as Louis XIV “dictated rather than contracted peace” at Nijmegen.63 Estrades’s reportage provided leverage at Nijmegen to gain “overlordship of the maritime ports of the Kingdom of Naples and to

55 Ibid., 408-409. 56 Ibid., 408, 431. 57 Ibid., 431. 58 Ibid., 405; AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 14 Dec. 1677, Fs 294v-295r. 59 Foscarini, 405. 60 Ibid.; AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 14 Dec. 1677, Fs 294v- 295r. 61 Foscarini, 406; AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Louis XIV, 14 Dec. 1677, Fs 292r, 305r. 62 Foscarini 356, 405. 63 Ibid., 355.

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reenter Sicily.”64 He reported on French entry into Spanish dominions in Italy and into the “commerce of the Levant and the Mediterranean…impeding its resources to all others.” 65 He reinforced French networks in Rome, and he maintained Franco-Venetian relations when the republic was growing anxious about French intentions.66 Yet, Venice remained obstinate, and Estrades exposed his negotiations with the Duke of Mantua as the Stradella case forced his hand. He wrote to Louis XIV, “Sire, this misfortune obliges me to act henceforth in all things through a great circumspection for which I hope Your Majesty will never have reason to be dissatisfied with my conduct.”67 Estrades’s reputation and his future career neared collapse. He needed to offer the crown some advantage. The prospect of a foothold in Italy pleased Louis XIV despite the secrecy through which it was negotiated. 68 Divulging the deal for Casale simultaneously secured Estrades’s pardon after the Stradella debacle while securing his new appointment as successor to the Marquis de Villars in Turin as ambassador in 1679.69 The confluence of events surrounding Stradella proved to be the “opportune moment” Foscarini described. The Stradella debacle forced Estrades to unpack other secrets done in the king’s name. Ultimately, his strategem with the Duke of Mantua prompted the crown’s negotiations for Casale. The territory’s purchase in 1681 for one hundred thousand pistoles and the arrival of a French garrison there further concretized French presence in Italy.70 Through clandestine plans to acquire Casale the ambassador prolonged his service to the crown despite the ill-conceived connection with Alessandro Stradella. Estrades’s measures demanded subsequent royal adaptation in their wake. Louis XIV fulminated against Estrades’s blunder with the musician, but he accepted the ambassador’s apology in the form of the negotiations to expand his authority in Italy. The monarch had no foreknowledge of his ambassador’s dealings. The crown was briefly peripheral to Estrades’s centrality. Louis XIV’s hand was forced into action from without to regain control of events from within reestablishing the

64 Ibid., 433. 65 Contarini, Relazione, 1676-1686, in Barozzi & Berchet, 327. 66 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 99, Estrades to Pomponne, 21 Aug. 1677, F 194ff. 67 Ibid., Estrades to Louis XIV, 18 Dec. 1677, F 292v. 68 AMAE, CP, Venise, vol. 101, Louis XIV to Estrades, 10 Jan. 1678, F 13r-13v; Ibid., Pomponne to Estrades, 12 Jan. 1678, F. 16. 69 Ibid. 70 John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 409-410.

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gravitation of royal authority – a would-be absolute authority forced to accommodate to such external initiatives throughout the king’s long rule.

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