Philippe Emanuel de Lorraine, Duke de Mercoeur, was born at Nomény, in 1558. Attached to the Duke of Guise, he was about to be arrested at the States of Blois in 1588, but the queen, Louise de Lorraine, his sister, gave him timely warning, and he escaped. He then openly embraced the party of the League, withdrew to his government of Brittany, called in the aid of the Spaniards, and gave them possession of the port of Blavet in 1591. He made his submission to Henry IV in April, 1598, and was pardoned at the intercession of Gabrielle d'Estrées, lately created Duchess of Beaufort, who, however, previously stipulated that the duke should give his daughter, Françoise, one of the richest heiresses in France, in marriage to the son of Henry IV, César, Duke de Vendôme. In 1601 the Emperor Rodolph offered De Mercoeur the command of his army in Hungary against the Turks. He endeavoured with only fifteen thousand men to raise the siege of Chanicha, which Ibrahim Pacha had invested with sixty thousand. He was forced to retire, but his retreat passed for one of the most skilful then known. Obliged in the following year to return to France, he died on the way, at Nuremberg, in 1602. In order, then, to accomplish my design, I went to Blavet,[34] where at that time was a garrison of Spaniards, in which place I found an uncle of mine called "the Provençal captain," considered to be one of the good mariners of France, and who, in that year, had been engaged by the king of Spain as Pilot-General of his sea armies. [34] Blavet, the last town held by the Spaniards in Brittany, was, together with all the places they possessed in Picardy, given up by the treaty of Vervins, in June 1598, and thus the whole province was submitted to the king's authority. Blavet, or Port Louis, a fortified town with citadel and harbour in Brittany, department of the Morbihan, at the embouchure of the river Blavet; the town being ruined during the wars of the League, Louis XIII rebuilt it from the former materials, erected a fort, and gave it his name.