The Struggle for The Valteline, 1621-1639: The Alpine Campaigns of The Thirty Years' War

A Thesis.The Thirty Years's War, which dominated the secondquarter of the seventeenth century, turned on a great manyissues and involved most of Europe's great powers, but inbroadest terms it quickly evolved into another phase of thelong struggle between France and the Habsburgs. Mostgeneral accounts of the war suggest that until 1635 Francelimited her efforts to subsidizing the enemies of Habsburginterests and that only after the crushing defeat of Swedishand Protestant German forces at Nordlingen did France makedirect commitments. For over a decade before enteringdirectly into the war in Germany, however, the French wereinvolved deeply in a direct and rather large-scale opposi¬tion to Habsburg forces in the Alps, in the area called theGrisons and the Valteline. This thesis examines that Frencheffort, investigates the problems it encountered and attemptsto evaluate its successes and its failures.