‘La dernière ancre de leur finesse’: Truce and Peace Treaties as Criteria for bellum justum in Early Modern Europe

In several letters to Pierre Jeannin and Elie de La Place de Russy, Henry IV urged his diplomats to achieve a solid truce for twelve years including an explicit acknowledgement of free trade on all seas and warned them not to accept a mere prolongation of the current armistice for another year. Truces between Christian powers and the Ottoman Empire had frequently been concluded out of unnecessary religious scrupulousness forbidding full-scale peace treaties with non-Christian sovereigns. Political theorists since Machiavelli have amply treated the possible ways of one-sided revision or non-observance of peace treaties. In a famous and frequently quoted chapter of his De Principatibus , Machiavelli had compared the wise statesman to a lion terrifying his opponents, but at the same time to a fox whose intelligence and prudence allowed him to avoid the hidden traps of diplomacy. Keywords: Henry IV; Machiavelli; Ottoman Empire; peace treaties; Pierre Jeannin; truce treaties