Francis I of France

Francis I, king of France from 1515 to 1547, brought the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps and spent much of his reign at war with the Habsburg emperor Charles V. A lavish builder and collector, he also lost a great battle and his own liberty at Pavia, made an alliance with the Ottoman sultan that shocked Christian Europe, and ended his reign persecuting Protestants.

Francis was born on 12 September 1494 at Cognac, the only son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. His branch of the royal family was not expected to rule, but Charles VIII died childless in 1498, and his successor, Louis XII, had no son. Since women could not inherit the French crown, the four-year-old Francis became heir. In 1514 he married Louis's daughter Claude, heiress to Brittany, and when Louis died on 1 January 1515 Francis became king. He was crowned at Reims that month.

The Italian Wars shaped his reign. In September 1515 he crushed the Swiss and papal forces at Marignano and took Milan. But in 1519 the electors chose his rival, Charles of Habsburg, already king of Spain and ruler of the Netherlands, as Holy Roman Emperor rather than Francis. Charles V now hemmed France in on several sides. Francis courted Henry VIII at the lavish Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520, without result, and lost Milan in 1521. At the Battle of Pavia on 24 February 1525 his army was destroyed and he was taken prisoner. Held in Madrid, he signed a treaty in January 1526 giving up his Italian claims and Burgundy, then repudiated it as soon as he was free, his two young sons having been handed over as hostages in his place.

Francis kept fighting: in the League of Cognac with the pope and Venice, ended by the "Ladies' Peace" of Cambrai in 1529, and in further wars in 1536 to 1538 and 1542 to 1546. Seeking allies against the Habsburgs, he reached an understanding with Suleiman the Magnificent, the first formal relationship between a European power and the Ottoman Empire. Critics called it an impious union of the lily and the crescent, but it lasted, and in 1543 French and Ottoman fleets jointly besieged Nice. He also sent Jacques Cartier to explore the St Lawrence in 1534.

Francis found the royal palaces with few great paintings and not one sculpture. He brought Italian artists north, among them Benvenuto Cellini and Rosso Fiorentino, and persuaded the elderly Leonardo da Vinci to spend his last years in France; the Mona Lisa stayed there after his death. He began Chambord, rebuilt the Louvre and turned Fontainebleau into his favourite residence. He enlarged the royal library under the humanist Guillaume Budé, ordered in 1537 that it receive a copy of every book sold in France, and founded the royal college that became the Collège de France. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539 made French, not Latin, the language of administration and required priests to keep registers of births, marriages and deaths.

At first Francis was fairly tolerant of the Reformation, influenced by his sister Marguerite of Navarre. That changed after the Affair of the Placards in October 1534, when posters attacking the Catholic Mass appeared in Paris and other cities. Protestants were imprisoned and burned, John Calvin was among those driven into exile, and in 1545 Francis ordered the suppression of the Waldensians that ended in the massacre of Mérindol.

Francis died at Rambouillet on 31 March 1547, his son Henry's twenty-eighth birthday, and was buried at Saint-Denis. Henry II, husband of Catherine de' Medici, succeeded him. In France he has often been remembered as a reckless pleasure-seeker humbled at Pavia, an image fixed by the historian Jules Michelet, while others, such as the British historian Glenn Richardson, judge him among France's greatest kings for his cultural legacy.

Our 1530 map shows the Kingdom of France at the height of his rivalry with Charles V, bordered by Habsburg lands to the north, east and south.