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This chapter examines how war affected interdynastic marriage in seventeenth-century France. By late seventeenth century, the hope for European peace had lost its foundations in a shared sacramentology and confidence in women's intercessions. When discrete national historiographies celebrating nation-states rather than dynasties appeared, their writers cast the women whose marriages bound Europe in a single family as tragic victims of their fathers' ambitions and husbands' infidelities. This chapter analyzes how French drama registered the personal and cultural impact of marriage diplomacy's declining prestige by focusing on Pierre Corneille's Horace and Tite et Bérénice, as well as Jean Racine's Andromaque and Bérénice. It also discusses two treaties, the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees and the 1670 Treaty of Dover.

This chapter focuses on Aurore's twenty-first birthday, when sisters Jane and Aimee Bazouin, on a visit to Nohant en route to the Pyrenees, had suggested that Aurore join them on holiday at Cauterets and Bagneres. Before leaving, Aurore wrote a letter to her mother, recounting the difficulties they faced on their difficult journey to Spain when she was four years old. Aurore seems to be saying that her mother was thoughtless with her as a child, yet she didn#x0027;t intend to repeat those mistakes with her own child. Upon her arrival at the Pyrenees, the natural beauty of the environment raised Aurore's spirits, and she began to recover her energy for adventure. She soon found an ideal companion in twenty-eight-year-old Zoe Leroy, the daughter of a wealthy Bordeaux wine merchant.

This chapter introduces the Carpathian Mountains which are Central and Eastern Europe's most prominent physical feature. It mentions how most studies tend to overlook the Carpathian Mountains compared to the Alps and Pyrenees. The Poles discovered these mountain ranges and turned them into extremely popular vacation destinations, which is in various ways paradoxical following the repeated discovery of the Tatra Mountains which are in the Hutsul region of Eastern Carpathians. The chapter notes how the title is divided into three parts which tackle the Tatra Mountains, the land of the Hutsuls, and the Bieszczady Mountains.

The events leading up to the signing of a peace at the Pyrenees in 1659 present a case study of the themes discussed over the course of this book: the valido’s fixation with war and foreign policy as a means of justifying his ministry; the tendency for disgruntled ministers in the field to take the law into their own hands; the political repercussions of the return of malcontents to Madrid; and the king’s susceptibility to pressure from his entourage during his sojourns away from Madrid. Haro’s ultimate triumph at the Pyrenees was the result of his ability to exploit the weakness of another minister-favourite, whilst applying all of his skills as a courtier to the field of international diplomacy.

Two related phenomena characterize the last 30,000 years or so of the Pleistocene and the Old Stone Age in Europe, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic. The first of these is the arrival of a version of ourselves, Homo sapiens, around 40,000 years ago. The second is the creative explosion in technology, equipment, raw materials, art, and decoration that took place in this period. There appears to have been a substantial upgrade in human abilities and the variety of activities taking place. The first part of this chapter examines some of the sites and places that tell this story. At the end of the Pleistocene and the Paleolithic, 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers continued to thrive in a warmer, “postglacial” Europe, but their time was coming to an end. Agriculture had been invented in the Near East and was spreading toward the continent, arriving in the southeast by 7000 BC and reaching the northeast by 4000 BC. This period of post-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Europe is known as the Mesolithic and is the focus of the second part of this chapter. By the end of the Pleistocene, Homo sapiens had created art, invented many new tools, made tailored clothing, started counting, and spread to almost all parts of the world. As noted earlier, the oldest known representatives of anatomically modern humans have been found in East Africa, from almost 200,000 years ago. Further evidence of the activities of these individuals comes from caves around Pinnacle Point on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and dates to 165,000 years ago. This evidence is not in the form of fossil skeletons, but artifacts. Several finds—small stone blades, pieces of red ochre (an iron mineral used as a pigment), the earliest known collection and consumption of shellfish—point to new kinds of food, new tools that probably required hafting, and the use of powdered mineral as a pigment or preservative. These are firsts in the archaeological record and likely document the beginnings ative explosion witnessed more fully after 50,000 years ago.