In Navarre, the civil wars between the Agramont and the Beaumont confederacies paved the way for the Spanish conquest of the bulk of Navarre from 1512 to 1524. The independent Navarre north of the Pyrenees was largely absorbed by France in 1620, despite the fact that King Henry III of Navarre had decreed Navarre's permanent independence from France (31 December 1596). In the decades after the Spanish annexation, the Basque Country went through increased religious, ideological and national homogenization, encouraged by new national ideas embraced by the rising Spanish and French absolutist monarchies during the Renaissance.