MAZARIN, JULES (1602-1661), French cardinal and statesman, elder son of a Sicilian, Pietro Mazarini, the intendant of the household of Philip Colonna, and of his wife Ortensia Buf falini, a connection of the Colonnas, was born at Piscina in the Abruzzi on July 14, 1602. He was educated by the Jesuits at Rome till his seventeenth year, when he accompanied Jerome Colonna as chamberlain to the university of Alcala in Spain. On his return to Rome, about 1622, he took his degree as Doctor utriusque furls, and then became captain of infantry in the regi ment of Colonna, which took part in the war in the Valtelline. Pope Urban VIII. entrusted him, in 1629, with the difficult task of putting an end to the war of the Mantuan succession. He was presented to two canonries in the churches of St. John Lateran and Sta. Maria Maggiore, although he had only taken the minor orders, and had never been consecrated priest; he negotiated the treaty of Turin between France and Savoy in 1632, became vice legate at Avignon in 1634, and nuncio at the court of France from 1634 to 2636. Seeing that he had no chance of becoming a cardinal except by the aid of some great power, he accepted Richelieu's offer of entering the service of the king of France, and in 1639 became a naturalized Frenchman.
In 1640 Richelieu sent him to Savoy, where the regency of Christine, the duchess of Savoy, and sister of Louis XIII., was disputed by her brothers-in-law, the princes Maurice and Thomas of Savoy, and he succeeded not only in establishing Christine but in winning over the princes to France. He was rewarded by pro motion to the rank of cardinal on the presentation of the king of France in Dec. 1641. On Dec. 4, 1642, Richelieu died, and was succeeded as minister by Mazarin. The new minister ingratiated himself with the queen, who would be regent after the king's death. Louis XIII. died on May 14, 1643, and Mazarin retained office. His skilful policy was shown in every arena on which the great Thirty Years' War was being fought out. Mazarin had in herited the policy of France during the Thirty Years' War from Richelieu. He had inherited his desire for the humiliation of the house of Austria in both its branches, his desire to push the French frontier to the Rhine and maintain a counterpoise of German states against Austria, his alliances with the Netherlands and with Sweden, and his four theatres of war—on the Rhine, in Flanders, in Italy and in Catalonia.
During the last five years of the great war it was Mazarin alone who directed the French diplomacy of the period. He made the peace of Bromsebro between the Danes and the Swedes, and turned the latter once again against the empire; he sent Lionne to make the peace of Castro, and combine the princes of North Italy against the Spaniards, and he made the peace of Ulm between France and Bavaria, thus detaching the emperor's best ally. He made one fatal mistake—he dreamt of the French frontier being the Rhine and the Scheldt, and that a Spanish princess might bring the Spanish Netherlands as dowry to Louis XIV. This roused the jealousy of the United Provinces, and they made a separate peace with Spain in January 1648; but Turenne's victory at Zusmarshausen, and Conde's at Lens led to the peace of West phalia (1648).
At home Mazarin's policy lacked the strength of Richelieu's. The Frondes were largely due to his own fault. The arrest of Broussel threw the people on the side of the parlement. His ava rice and unscrupulous plundering of the revenues of the realm, the enormous fortune which he thus amassed, his supple ways, his nepotism, and the general lack of public interest in the great foreign policy of Richelieu, made Mazarin the especial object of hatred both by bourgeois and nobles. He had tried consistently to play off the king's brother Gaston of Orleans against Conde, and their respective followers against each other, and had also, as his carnets prove, jealously kept any courtier from getting into the good graces of the queen-regent except by his means, so that it was not unnatural that the nobility should hate him, while the queen found herself surrounded by his creatures alone. Events followed each other quickly ; the day of the barricades was followed by the peace of Ruel, the peace of Ruel by the arrest of the princes, by the battle of Rethel, and Mazarin's exile to Briihl before the union of the two Frondes.