Francis I of France

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Francis I of France was born on the 12th of September 1494, in a château in the town of Cognac, and from the moment he arrived, his path to the throne was nothing anyone would have predicted. His family held the county of Angoulême, not the crown. Three other men stood between his branch of the house and the kingship of France. Then, one by one, they died without sons. By 1498, the four-year-old Francis was heir presumptive. By 1515, he was king. What follows is the story of how that accidental monarch became one of the most consequential rulers France has ever had. He drew Leonardo da Vinci to France, built the Château de Chambord, and forged the first formal alliance between a Christian kingdom and the Ottoman Empire. He also suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in French royal history, spending months as a prisoner in Madrid. The questions his reign raises are still worth asking. How did a man raised on chivalry and Renaissance ideals navigate a world where power was measured in artillery and dynastic marriages? And why, centuries later, does France still remember him poorly?

• 2. The Accidental Heir

  ›

  Charles VIII of France died childless in 1498, and with that single event the universe of French succession collapsed inward toward a boy in Angoulême. Francis was two years old when his father, Charles, Count of Angoulême, died. He was four when he became heir presumptive. The Salic Law barred women from the throne, so the line ran through him alone. He was vested with the title of Duke of Valois.

  Louis XII, who succeeded Charles VIII, also had no male heir. In 1505, when Louis fell ill, he ordered that his daughter Claude and the young Francis be engaged immediately. Claude was heir presumptive to the Duchy of Brittany through her mother, Anne of Brittany. The marriage would bind that duchy more tightly to France. Only pressure from an assembly of nobles made the engagement happen at all. Anne of Brittany died, and the marriage proceeded on the 18th of May 1514. Less than eight months later, on the 1st of January 1515, Louis XII died.

  Francis was crowned in Reims Cathedral on the 25th of January 1515. He was twenty years old. His education had covered arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. He loved archery, falconry, jousting, and real tennis. His mother Louise of Savoy had passed her admiration of Italian Renaissance art directly to her son. He arrived at the throne not as a traditional warrior-king but as something newer: a man shaped by humanist ideas at a moment when those ideas were reshaping Europe. His first year on the throne would prove just how dangerous, and how glorious, that combination could be.

• 3. Leonardo and the Palace Collections

  ›

  At the moment Francis ascended the throne, the royal palaces of France held only a scattering of great paintings and not a single sculpture, ancient or modern. He set about changing that with a speed and ambition that had no precedent among French kings. His most celebrated move was persuading Leonardo da Vinci to spend his final years in France.

  Leonardo came to France and, while he painted very little during those years, he brought with him some of his greatest works. Among them was the Mona Lisa, known in France as La Joconde, which Francis acquired. These works remained in France after Leonardo's death. Francis did not stop with Leonardo. He also employed the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, painters Rosso Fiorentino, Giulio Romano, and Primaticcio, all of whom worked on decorating his palaces. Architect Sebastiano Serlio was invited to France and enjoyed what the sources describe as a fruitful late career there. Francis commissioned agents in Italy specifically to find notable artworks and ship them to France.

  The painter Andrea del Sarto was among those who received Francis's patronage. A portrait of Francis made between 1525 and 1530 by Jean Clouet now hangs at the Louvre in Paris. That building, which Francis transformed from a medieval fortress into a Renaissance palace, became the permanent home of much of what he gathered. The Château de Chambord, begun early in his reign and possibly designed by Leonardo da Vinci, drew on Italian Renaissance architectural styles. The largest of his building projects was the Château de Fontainebleau, which quickly became his favourite residence and the home of his official mistress, Anne, Duchess of Étampes.

• 4. Words, Laws, and Letters

  ›

  Guillaume Budé, the French humanist whom Francis appointed as chief librarian, presided over what became one of the most ambitious bibliographic projects of the sixteenth century. Francis employed agents in Italy to seek out rare books and manuscripts, in the same way he sent agents to find artworks. The royal library grew substantially during his reign, and unusually for a monarch, there is evidence that Francis actually read the books he acquired.

  In 1537, Francis signed the Ordonnance de Montpellier, which required that his library receive a copy of every book sold in France. This was an early form of legal deposit, a mechanism for building a national collection. He opened the library to scholars from around the world to spread knowledge beyond the court.

  In 1530, Francis declared French the national language of the kingdom and opened the Collège des trois langues, also called the Collège Royal, where students could study Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Arabic instruction began there under Guillaume Postel in 1539. Then, in 1539, Francis signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts at his castle of the same name. This edict made French the administrative language of the kingdom, replacing Latin in official documents. It also required priests to register births, marriages, and deaths, and to establish a parish registry. Scholars regard this as the beginning of civil vital statistics records in Europe.

  His older sister, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was herself an accomplished writer whose collection of short stories, the Heptaméron, became a classic. Francis corresponded with the abbess and philosopher Claude de Bectoz, and he carried her letters with him to show to the ladies of his court. He even visited Claude de Bectoz in Tarascon together with his sister. For his work on behalf of the French language and letters, Francis earned the title le Père et Restaurateur des Lettres, the Father and Restorer of Letters.

• 5. Pavia and the Price of Rivalry

  ›

  Charles V was the central adversary of Francis's reign. In addition to the Holy Roman Empire, Charles personally ruled Spain and Austria, which left France geographically surrounded. Francis had tried and failed to be elected Holy Roman Emperor himself at the Imperial election of 1519, a defeat the sources attribute largely to Charles threatening the electors with violence.

  The Battle of Marignano, fought on the 13th-the 15th of September 1515, offered an early glimpse of what Francis could achieve at war. He routed the combined forces of the Papal States and the Old Swiss Confederacy and captured Milan. That victory proved temporary. In November 1521, imperial forces took Milan back.

  The disaster at Pavia on the 24th of February 1525 was of a different order entirely. During the battle, a man named Cesare Hercolani injured Francis's horse, and Francis was subsequently captured by Charles de Lannoy. Some accounts claim Diego Dávila, Alonso Pita da Veiga, and Juan de Urbieta from Guipúzcoa were the ones who took him. Either way, the king of France was a prisoner. From his captivity in Madrid he wrote to his mother a line that history preserved as "All is lost save honour."

  The Treaty of Madrid, signed on the 14th of January 1526, forced Francis to surrender claims to Naples and Milan, recognise the independence of the Duchy of Burgundy, and accept a betrothal to Charles's sister Eleanor. He was freed on the 17th of March after his two sons, Francis and Henry, Duke of Orléans, were handed over as hostages. Once back in France, he repudiated the treaty on the grounds that an agreement made under duress carried no legal force. The story of how a dish called Zuppa alla Pavese was supposedly invented on the spot to feed the captive king after the battle may be apocryphal, but it captures the humiliation that attached itself permanently to Francis's reputation.

• 6. The Ottoman Gamble

  ›

  Francis's alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent was the most controversial diplomatic move of his reign. The Franco-Ottoman alliance has been described by historians as "the first nonideological diplomatic alliance of its kind between a Christian and non-Christian empire." At the time, critics called it "the impious alliance" and "the sacrilegious union of the Lily and the Crescent." For a Christian king, partnering openly with a Muslim sultan was a genuine scandal.

  The logic was straightforward: Francis needed a counterweight to Charles V. The pretext he used was the protection of Christians living in Ottoman lands. The alliance served both parties. In 1543, France and the Ottoman Empire conducted a joint naval assault in the siege of Nice. An ultimatum from Suleiman to Charles had also played a role in securing Francis's release from Madrid after Pavia.

  France became the first country in Europe to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire under Francis. Arabic language instruction was established at the Collège de France under Guillaume Postel. Francis also initiated official relations with Morocco in 1533, when he sent Pierre de Piton as ambassador. The Wattassid ruler of Fez, Ahmed ben Mohammed, responded in a letter dated the 13th of August 1533, welcoming the overtures and granting freedom of shipping and protection to French traders.

  French trade with East Asia also began during this reign. A French Norman ship from Rouen is recorded arriving at the Indian city of Diu in July 1527. Jean Parmentier reached Sumatra in 1529 aboard the Sacre and the Pensée, and the expedition's return triggered the development of the Dieppe maps, influencing cartographers including Jean Rotz.

• 7. The New World and Le Havre

  ›

  Francis had a pointed objection to the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on the 7th of June 1494 between Portugal and Castile, which divided the newly discovered lands between just those two powers. His response was sharp: he wanted to see the clause of Adam's will by which he should be denied his share of the world.

  The port now known as Le Havre was founded in 1517 during the early years of Francis's reign. It was originally named Franciscopolis after the king but that name did not survive into later reigns. The harbour was built because the ancient ports of Honfleur and Harfleur had silted up and lost their utility.

  In 1524, Francis helped the citizens of Lyon finance the expedition of Giovanni da Verrazzano to North America. Verrazzano visited the site of present-day New York City, which he named New Angoulême, and claimed Newfoundland for France. His letter to Francis dated the 8th of July 1524 is known as the Cèllere Codex.

  In 1534, Francis sent Jacques Cartier to explore the St. Lawrence River in Quebec with the explicit goal of finding gold and other riches. Seven years later, in 1541, Francis sent Jean-François de Roberval to settle Canada and advance the Catholic faith. These voyages laid the groundwork for the first French colonial empire. In 1531, Bertrand d'Ornesan had attempted to establish a French trading post at Pernambuco in Brazil. Francis's vision of France as a global power was real, even if most of its results would not fully materialise until long after his death on the 31st of March 1547.

• 8. Legacy and Reputation

  ›

  Francis died at the Château de Rambouillet on the 31st of March 1547, on his son Henry's twenty-eighth birthday. He was interred with his first wife, Claude, Duchess of Brittany, in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. His tomb, along with those of his wife and his mother, was desecrated on the 20th of October 1793 during the Reign of Terror.

  The historian Jules Michelet did significant damage to Francis's reputation, and that damage lasted. In 1994, France largely ignored his five-hundredth birthday. Popular memory fastened on the defeat at Pavia and the image of a king who allowed himself to be taken prisoner. His emblem was the salamander, and his Latin motto was Nutrisco et extinguo, meaning he nourished the good and extinguished the bad. His nicknames ranged from le Roi-Chevalier and le Roi-Guerrier to the more mocking François du Grand Nez, Francis of the Big Nose.

  British historian Glenn Richardson offered a more expansive verdict. Richardson described Francis as a king who ruled as well as reigned, who was brave if impetuous in battle, and who enhanced royal power while using his personal charisma to build loyalty among the nobility. Richardson's conclusion was that Francis's cultural legacy to France and to the Renaissance was immense, and that it ought to secure his reputation as among the greatest of its kings.

  The creative afterlife of Francis is striking. Victor Hugo's 1832 play Le Roi s'amuse featured the jester Triboulet at his court, which became the direct inspiration for Giuseppe Verdi's 1851 opera Rigoletto. The first screen portrayal came in 1907 in a Georges Méliès short, and actors including William Powell, Jean Marais, and Colm Meaney have played him since, the most recent in 2022.