page_title: Louis XIII
section_title: Marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Louis XIII / Marriage
context_page_description: Louis XIII was King of France from 1610 to 1643 and King of Navarre from 1610 to 1620, when the crown of Navarre was merged with the French crown.
  Shortly before his ninth birthday, Louis became king of France and Navarre after his father Henry IV was assassinated. His mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent during his minority. Mismanagement of the kingdom and ceaseless political intrigues by Marie and her Italian favourites led the young king to take power in 1617 by exiling his mother and executing her followers, including Concino Concini, the most influential Italian at the French court.
  Louis XIII, taciturn and suspicious, relied heavily on his chief ministers, first Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes and then Cardinal Richelieu, to govern the Kingdom of France. King and cardinal are remembered for establishing the Académie française, and ending the revolt of the French nobility. They systematically destroyed the castles of defiant lords, and denounced the use of private violence. By the end of the 1620s, Richelieu had established "the royal monopoly of force" as the ruling doctrine. His reign was also marked by the struggles against the Huguenots and Habsburg Spain.
context_section_description: On 24 November 1615, Louis XIII married Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain. The couple were second cousins, by mutual descent from Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor. This marriage followed a tradition of cementing military and political alliances between the Catholic powers of France and Spain with royal marriages. The tradition went back to the marriage of Louis VII of France and Constance of Castile. The marriage was only briefly happy, and the King's duties often kept them apart. After 23 years of marriage and four stillbirths, Anne finally gave birth to a son on 5 September 1638, the future Louis XIV.
  Many people regarded this birth as a miracle and, in show of gratitude to God for the long-awaited birth of an heir, his parents named him Louis-Dieudonné ("God-given"). As another sign of gratitude, according to several interpretations, seven months before his birth, France was dedicated by Louis XIII to the Virgin Mary, who, many believed, had interceded for the perceived miracle. But the text of the dedication does not mention the royal pregnancy and birth as one of its reasons, and Louis XIII himself is said to have expressed his scepticism with regard to the miracle after his son's birth. In gratitude for having successfully given birth, the queen founded the Benedictine abbey of the Val-de-Grâce, for which Louis XIV laid the cornerstone of its church, an early masterpiece of French Baroque architecture.
caption: Anne of Austria, Queen of France, wife of Louis XIII (by Peter Paul Rubens, 1625)
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