Born: September 12, 1494

Cognac, France

Died: March 31, 1547

Rambouillet, France

King Francis I of France was a true Renaissance monarch. The Renaissance was a cultural revolution that began in Italy in the mid-1300s. It was initiated by scholars called humanists who promoted the human-centered values of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanist ideals were soon influencing the arts, literature, philosophy, science, religion, and politics in Italy. During the early fifteenth century, innovations of the Italian Renaissance began spreading into the rest of Europe and reached a peak in the sixteenth century. Francis was devoted to making France a center of the Renaissance. He actively patronized (gave financial support to) painters, sculptors, architects, scholars, poets, and writers. Francis also practiced shrewd diplomacy (relations with other countries) and strengthened centralized rule in France. He was a man of immense charm and humanity who had a lust for life. He also was daring and courageous in battle. Yet there was a darker side to the gallant French king. Throughout his reign, Francis waged war against Spain for control of Italy, seeking revenge on his great rival, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558; see entry), who was also king of Spain. These wars were part of the conflict known as the Italian Wars (1494-1559), which began during the reign of King Louis XII. Francis used deception in foreign policy, frequently breaking his solemn word in order to advance his own interests. Even though he was a Catholic, he formed alliances with Muslims (followers of the Islam religion) and Protestants (members of a religious group that broke away from the Catholic Church) to oppose Catholic Spain. Francis’s final downfall was his futile rivalry with Charles V, which became his life-long obsessed.

Achieves first military victory Francis was born at Cognac on September 12, 1494, the son of Charles de Valois (died 1496), count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy (1476–1531). While his parents were fairly obscure nobles, Francis had a strong claim to the French throne. His father was a cousin of the king of France, Louis XII (1462–1515; ruled 1498–1515). Francis and his sister Margaret (Margaret of Navarre; see entry) were brought up in Cognac by their mother, who supervised their education. The young Francis learned the Spanish and Italian languages, and he spent his time admiring art and reading mythology, history, and literature. Surrounded by young playmates, he also learned the art of warfare and showed signs of unusual talent at the craft. When Francis was thirteen, he and Margaret left their mother’s household to live at the French court, where courtiers (noblemen of the court) referred to Francis as the dauphin (elder son of the king). Louis XII granted him the duchy of Valois, created from the vast estates of the house of Orléans. In 1514 Francis married Louis’s daughter, Claude de France (1499–1524).

Francis had his first experience as a military leader at an early age. In 1512 France went to war with Spain in the second phase of the Italian Wars (see accompanying box). Louis gave eighteen-year-old Francis command of an army. The Spanish king, Ferdinand II (1452–1516; ruled 1479–1516) of Aragon, had conquered and annexed the small kingdom of Navarre, situated between France and Spain on the Bay of Biscay. The French were now trying to recapture Navarre. Although Francis had able military advisers, he failed to score a victory. Then in 1513 Swiss troops inflicted a humiliating defeat on the French at Novara, a province in northwest Italy.

On December 31, 1514, Louis died, and on the first day of 1515 Francis took the throne as the king of France.

Challenges Charles I

As king, Francis was primarily a man of action. He excelled in various outdoor sports and spent much of his time hunting. He and his court were constantly traveling. Whenever the king visited a town for the first time he was given an entrée joyeuse (joyful entry). Festivities included street theatricals and the erection of temporary monuments in his honor, adorned with inscriptions of praise and appropriate symbols of his royalty. Francis’s personal emblem was the salamander and his motto was “Nutrisco et extinguo.“ Roughly translated, this means “I feed upon the good and put out the evil one.” Popularly known as le roi chevalier (the knight king), Francis spent much of his reign fighting. He had an impressive beginning as a military leader. Determined to avenge the defeat at Novara by taking Spanish-held Naples, the young king personally led an army into Italy. In 1515, at Marignano (now Melegnano) near Milan, Francis won the greatest triumph in what was to be a long military career. His troops annihilated Swiss mercenaries (hired soldiers) under the command of Massimiliano Sforza (1493–1530), duke of Milan. In the aftermath of Marignano, Francis took the duchy of Milan, and Pope Leo X (1475–1521; reigned 1513–21) gave him neighboring Parma and Piacenza. The pope also entered into the famous Concordat of Bologna with Francis in 1516. According to the terms of the agreement, the Catholic Church in France came under direct control of the French crown.

Inspired by these victories, Francis openly challenged Charles I and Henry VIII (1491–1547; see entry), king of England, for election to the vacant throne of the Holy Roman Empire. The three young monarchs bitterly competed for the title of emperor, but the rivalry was especially intense between Francis and Charles. Charles’s advisers bribed the German princes who served as electors, however, and in 1519 Charles took office as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. As both the king of Spain and head of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles was now the most powerful ruler in Europe. In order to avenge this slight, Francis initiated the first of five wars with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (Charles headed forces for both Spain and the empire). In 1520 Francis met with Henry VIII in Calais, France, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold (see accompanying box). Francis was hoping to win Henry’s support in the war against Spain, but Henry declined to join the French effort. Meanwhile, Charles V had formed an alliance with Pope Clement VII (1342–1394; reigned 1378–94). In late 1520 Francis secretly backed a successful assault on the imperial city of Luxembourg (now in Belgium) and occupied Navarre.

During the next four years, however, the war in Spain went poorly for Francis. His men won a few battles, but they were finally driven out of Navarre. The Spanish then invaded France, taking Toulon and other parts of southeast France. Spanish forces also won victories against the French in northern Italy. In 1522 the French suffered a major defeat and lost the duchy of Milan. Complete disaster awaited Francis at Pavia, a city near Milan, in February 1525. He led an army of thirty-seven thousand men against a Spanish army of equal numbers. The Spanish lost one thousand men. Between ten thousand and fourteen thousand Frenchmen died, and many others were taken prisoner, including Francis himself.

Violates treaty

Charles ordered that Francis be taken to Spain and placed under house arrest in Madrid. Although he was held for more than a year, the French king was not confined like most prisoners. He hunted regularly, enjoyed the companionship of his nobleman comrades, and attended numerous dinners given in his honor. He gained his release in 1526 by agreeing to sign the Treaty of Madrid, which required him to relinquish all claims to Italy and give up the duchies of Burgundy, Flanders (now part of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands), and Artois (a region in northern France). When Francis swore as a gentleman to return to captivity if he failed to live up to his end of the bargain, Charles agreed to set him free. Once he had returned to France, however, Francis declared the treaty to be null and void. His excuse was that he was forced to sign the document at a time when he could not think clearly.

Francis’s violation of the treaty made another war with Spain inevitable. Francis quickly organized the League of Cognac (1526), which allied France, England, Milan, Venice, the Papal States (territories under the direct rule of the pope), and the republic of Florence against Charles. But in this second war, which began in 1527, Charles was destined to win an even greater victory. By 1529, Francis had signed the Treaty of Cambrai, which repeated the humiliating terms of the earlier Treaty of Madrid. It also called for Francis’s two sons to be held in Madrid for a ransom (money paid for releasing a hostage) of two million gold crowns (a sum of Spanish money). In 1530 Francis married Eleanor of Portugal, a sister of Charles V.

Seeks further revenge

For six years, Francis remained in France, where he devoted his time to the arts. By 1536, however, he was determined to seek revenge against Charles. Francis formed an alliance with the Ottoman leader Khayr ad-Din (pronounced kigh-ruh-DEEN; died 1546), who was called Barbarossa by Europeans. This move shocked and offended most Christians in Europe, even many of Francis’s longtime supporters. Though they appreciated his will to resist the mighty Spanish kingdom, they felt that he was committing heresy (violation of church laws) by allying with “infidel,” or non-Christian, Turks to slaughter fellow Christians. Charles launched a successful assault against Francis’s Turkish ally in the Mediterranean Sea. Spanish forces led personally by Charles took La Goletta (now Halq al-Wadi), a seaport town in northeast Tunisia. Charles liberated thousands of Christian prisoners, and soon thereafter captured the port of Tunis. Barbarossa fled to Algiers (now Algeria), in North Africa, with the remnant of his fleet. Charles then turned toward Italy, landed in Sicily in August, and advanced with ease toward the Alps. He also invaded Provence, a region in southeast France, and areas of northern France. By 1538, when a peace agreement was signed at Nice, France, both sides were financially exhausted. In one year alone, Francis had spent 5.5 million livres (an amount of French money) on the war and had neither won nor regained any territory.

Francis mounted another war against Charles in 1542. This time he allied his forces with the Schmalkaldic League, a group of German Protestant noblemen who were opposed to Charles’s policies. At Mühlberg, Germany, however, Charles won his greatest victory over Francis and the Lutheran princes. In 1545 Francis vented his anger on the Waldensians, a group of religious dissidents, in his own country. The Waldensians were advocates of the views of Peter Waldo (Pierre Valdés; died before 1218), an early French religious reformer who protested corruption in the Catholic Church. A brutal campaign against the Waldensians demolished twentytwo towns and killed four thousand people. Francis issued a list of banned books and established a court to punish heretics. The court burned hundreds of Huguenots (French Protestants) at the stake.

Francis died of gout (inflammation of the joints caused by imbalance in metabolism) and liver disease at Rambouillet, France, in 1547. At the time of his death, the French crown was six million livres in debt. Ten years later, France declared bankruptcy (lack of funds to pay bills). The Italian Wars finally ended after a seventh war, which lasted from 1547 until 1559. It was waged by the successors of Francis and Charles. In these wars, Spanish armies were victorious for the sixth time. As a result of the victory, Spain was given control of Italy in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.

Leaves legacy in the arts

Although Francis failed in his military quest against Charles, he was remembered as a great patron of the arts who helped bring the Italian Renaissance to France. One of his pet projects was the renovation of the royal palaces at Blois, Chambord, Fontainebleau, and the Louvre. In 1515, after his conquest of Milan, Francis invited the great sixty-five-yearold Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519; see entry) to settle in France. The king gave Leonardo the manor of Cloux outside Amboise, where the painter spent the last three years of his life. He seems not to have painted anything for the king, but some of his notes and drawings date from his time in France. By 1545 several of Leonardo’s major works, including the famous Mona Lisa, were part of Francis’s collection. Francis also purchased the works of other Italian painters, including Michelangelo, (1475–1564; see entry) Raphael, (1483–1520; see entry) and Titian. For a brief time Francis employed the artist Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530). The king also collected drawings, sculpture, tapestries (large embroidered wall hangings), and precious objects.

Francis I has been called “père des lettres” (“father of letters”). He had several scholars in his court, including the French humanist Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), who wrote L’institution du prince (The institution of the prince). Francis also corresponded with the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536; see entry) and sponsored a royal lecture series that supported promising scholars. The king liked books, and a chest containing his favorite books—mostly ancient histories and medieval romances—followed him on his travels. He enlarged the library at Blois, which he had inherited. He employed agents in Italy and elsewhere to acquire precious classical manuscripts, many of them in Greek, for his library at Fontainebleau. The two royal libraries were integrated in 1544, eventually forming the nucleus of the present-day Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris. His paintings also were the beginning of the collection that is now in the Louvre, an art museum in Paris. In 1540 Francis ordered many of his books to be bound in tooled (decorated) leather. Printing was another of the king’s interests. Three special fonts (style of writing used in printing) of Greek characters were cut by the French type designer Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561) at Francis’s expense.

Like many monarchs of the time, Francis was interested in the occult (supernatural) sciences—astrology (prediction of future events according to the positions of stars and planets), alchemy (science devoted to turning bases metals into gold), and the Kabbalah (Jewish mystical text). At the time these sciences were thought to hold the key to the secret forces of the universe. In 1530 the king created four royal professorships, two in Greek and two in Hebrew, to which others were added later. The Collège de France traces its origin to this foundation. In the sixteenth century Francis was commonly called “le grand roi François” (“the great king Francis”). Later he was known as a playboy (man who devotes his life chiefly to pleasure). Modern historians have reassessed this view, noting his impressive cultural legacy and his reign as a strong monarch.

Books

Cox-Rearick, Janet. The Collection of Francis I: Royal Treasures. New York:

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996.

Knecht, R. J. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Seward, Desmond. Prince of the Renaissance;