Louis XIV (baptised as Louis-Dieudonné) (September 5, 1638 – September 1, 1715) ruled as King of France and of Navarre. He acceded to the throne on May 14 1643, a few months before his fifth birthday, but did not assume actual personal control of the government until the death of his First Minister ("premier ministre"), the Italian Jules Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. Louis would remain on the throne till his death just prior to his seventy-seventh birthday in 1715. The reign of Louis XIV spanned seventy-two years and three months, the longest of any European monarch and the second-longest documented reign of any monarch since antiquity. Only Sobhuza II of Swaziland had a longer precisely documented reign (1899-1982). Louis XIV is known as Louis the Great (in French Louis le Grand or Le Grand Monarque, "the Great Monarch"), after the Parlement de Paris, following the victo

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