The powerful figure Richelieu was as glamorous as he was colorful in the early Baroque period. He forced France, which was torn apart by the interplay of many individual interests, into unity and allowed it to rise to the dominance of European nations during the Thirty Years' War. He brought his rivals in the struggle for power to the scaffold and humiliated his opponents. However, his ruthlessness, which he expressed in the guise of a clergyman, and his sophisticated manipulation of people and media, which seems incredibly modern, always served his political vision: all power to the monarchy. Thus, he became the forerunner of absolutism. Uwe Schultz reveals in his thrilling biography of Richelieu, who, in the service of Louis XIII, betrayed former patrons as the situation demanded and made pacts with the enemy, the many faces of the demonic cardinal.