Treaty of the Pyrenees

Agreed on 7 November 1659 on Pheasant Island, a small island in the Bidasoa River on the French–Spanish border, the Treaty of the Pyrenees ended a war between France and Spain that had lasted since 1635. Spain gave up Roussillon and Artois, the frontier between the two kingdoms was drawn along the Pyrenees, and the young Louis XIV was promised the hand of the Spanish king's daughter. The peace is often seen as the moment when leadership in western Europe passed from Habsburg Spain to Bourbon France.

France had entered the Thirty Years' War against the Habsburgs and from 1635 fought Spain directly. Each side stirred up the other's internal troubles: France backed the revolt of Catalonia from 1640, while Spain supported the Fronde rebellions in France from 1648. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the wider war in Germany but not the Franco-Spanish conflict, and France's gains there helped cut Spain's links between its Austrian Habsburg relatives and the Netherlands.

In June 1658 an Anglo-French army won the Battle of the Dunes, but in the following year a French campaign against Milan failed, and both exhausted powers turned to negotiation. The talks were led by the chief ministers, Cardinal Mazarin for France and Luis Méndez de Haro for Spain, and held on the island in the middle of the border river, which has remained jointly administered by the two countries ever since.

In the south, France received Roussillon with its capital Perpignan and the northern part of Cerdanya, the Catalan lands north of the mountains later called Northern Catalonia. The treaty transferred the "villages" north of the Pyrenees, and because Llívia was legally a town, it stayed Spanish and survives today as a Spanish enclave inside France. The line was not fully settled until the Treaty of Bayonne of 1856. In the western Pyrenees the parties also agreed on boundaries in disputed Basque valleys.

In the north, France gained Artois, with Arras, and a series of towns on the borders of Flanders and Luxembourg, among them Béthune, Gravelines, Thionville and Montmédy. Spain also confirmed France's gains at Westphalia. In return, France abandoned its support for Portugal, which had been in revolt against Spain since 1640, and dropped its claim to Catalonia, which French forces had largely controlled between 1641 and the fall of Barcelona to Spain in 1652. England, France's ally, received Dunkirk, though it sold the town to France in 1662.

Under the treaty Louis XIV was to marry Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain. She renounced her rights to the Spanish throne in exchange for a dowry. The dowry was never paid, a failure that later helped lead to the War of Devolution of 1667. In June 1660 the two kings met on Pheasant Island, and the princess crossed into France.

For the historian J. H. Elliott, the treaty amounted to Spain's admission that it could no longer act as the defender of Catholicism against the rest of Europe. Paul Kennedy saw it as the climax of the Habsburg bid for mastery, which was brought down by the cost of defending a worldwide empire. It was the last great diplomatic success of Mazarin and, together with Westphalia, gave Louis XIV's Kingdom of France stability and a strong diplomatic position, while Spain was left weakened. Along the mountains themselves, the new border brought customs posts and limits on the free movement of people and goods.

Our 1650 map shows the Spanish Empire still holding Roussillon and Artois, and the 1700 map shows the frontier of France moved north and south after the treaty.