When he returned to Paris, he surrounded himself with Swiss mercenary guards; he no longer trusted his countrymen
He saw a crumbling and feeble idiot in the Spanish king, Philip, and decided to show him what he was made of by invading the Spanish Netherlands - modern-day Belgium - on the pretext that his wife had dynastic claims to Spanish land. His battle-hardened royal troops decimated the dilapidated Spanish, the war serving as a grievous blow to their pride. Then, in a bizarre twist of events, in 1668 the Dutch - with Swedish and English backing - called for a truce. Louis saw it as a great betrayal; he had 'liberated' Dutch land from the Spanish, and now they were forcing him to relinquish it. He saw it as "ingratitude, bad faith and insupportable vanity."
Louis swore revenge and launched an invasion against the Netherlands. He paid off the English with gold, and butchered thousands of Dutch soldiers before his troops were finally cut off when dykes were flooded around the royal army. Louis was forced yet again to accept terms, but under the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678 he was awarded new territories for his tenacity. His power had become almost unending, the portraits he had commissioned of himself as a god-like figure with his vast legions around him stirring his ambition further. In his final great war, he risked everything by going up against a grand alliance of major European powers to influence the Spanish succession and gain power on the continent. The French fought valiantly, but Louis' strength had been depleted, the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 destroying any hopes of influencing Spain. Louis had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen by the end
Defining moment
World History
