While Spain was a global maritime superpower, the Austrian Habsburgs focused on securing a pre-eminent position in Germany and managing the threat posed by the Ottoman Empire.

[4] Unlike Ferdinand, who favoured compromise with his Protestant subjects, Charles and Philip responded to the rise of Calvinism in the Spanish Netherlands with repression, a policy that eventually led to the Dutch War of Independence in 1568.

[13] Initially, there were attempts on both sides to limit the conflict to the Papal States, but by December 1556, preparations were made for a resumption of hostilities on all fronts, and on 6 January 1557 Gaspard II de Coligny (French governor of Picardy) launched surprise attacks on Douai and Lens in the Spanish Netherlands.

[13] The Spanish victory in the Battle of St. Quentin (1557) (10–27 August) turned out to be decisive; while England had entered the war on Spain's side, France lost one ally after the other, including the Pope, who signed a separate peace on 12 September 1557.

[citation needed] The Franco-Spanish talks at Marcoing near Cambrai, initiated by France, lasted just three days (15–17 May 1558) and came to nothing, mostly because the Siege of Thionville (1558) was ongoing, Granvelle sought to gain time by negotiations to allow the Spanish army in the Netherlands to prepare for war, and both parties could not find diplomatic common ground.

[20] The Spanish delegates demanded that Henry II abandon all his (claimed) possessions in Italy (Piedmont, Corsica, the Republic of Siena, and part of Montferrat), and they used the Spanish-occupied places in Picardy as bargaining material to achieve this goal.

[29] Despite attempts to keep the negotiations secret, his spies kept Philip informed on their progress; although he disliked Elizabeth's religion, having the half-French Mary on the English throne would be far worse, even if she was a Catholic.

[31] Bertrand Haan (2010) stated that, until his publication, 'the various acts making up the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis have never been the subject of a scientific edition made from original documents,' pointing out that Jean Dumont's Corps universel diplomatique (1728) 'remains a reference, but is based on later copies.

[42] During a tournament held to celebrate the peace on 1 July, King Henry was injured in a jousting accident when a sliver from the shattered lance of Gabriel Montgomery, captain of the Scottish Guard at the French court, pierced his eye and caused subdural bleeding (though it never fully entered his brain).

[43] The resulting political instability, combined with the sudden demobilisation of thousands of largely unpaid troops, led to the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion in 1562 that would consume France for the next thirty years.

For Spain, despite no new gains and the restoration of some occupied territories to France, the peace was a positive result by confirming its control of the Habsburg Netherlands, the Duchy of Milan, and the Kingdoms of Sardinia, Naples, and Sicily.

Ferdinand I left the Three Bishoprics under French occupation, but the Netherlands and most of northern Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire in the form of imperial fiefs.

The imperial states were ruled by the Medici in Tuscany, the Spanish Habsburgs in Milan, the Estensi in Modena, and the House of Savoy in Piedmont (which moved its capital to Turin in 1562).

[49] The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, by bringing Italy into a long period of peace and economic stability (which critics call stagnation) marks the end of the Italian Renaissance and the transition to the Baroque (Vivaldi, Bernini, Caravaggio,... but also Vico, Bruno, Galileo).

Visconti (2003), for example, claimed that when pressured by Spain to implement this obligation, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy proclaimed the Edict of Nice (15 February 1560), prohibiting Protestantism on pains of a large fine, enslavement or banishment, which soon led to an armed revolt by the Protestant Waldensians in his domain that would last until July 1561.

[52] Haan (2010) argued that finances were more important than domestic religious dissension; the fact that the latter was prominent in the 1560s in both France and Spain may have led historians astray in emphasising the role of religion in the 1559 treaty.

The treaty's priority, he argues, was not a Catholic alliance to extirpate heresy but the affirmation of its signatories' honor and amity, consecrated by a set of dynastic marriages'.