Louis XII “Father of the People” (1498-1515)
Since all four of Charles VIII’s children had died before their father’s passing, when the time came for succession, the throne fell to his father’s first cousin, Louis of Orleans, who was crowned King Louis XII. He had been long-infatuated with the now-widowed Queen Anne of Brittany, but only needed his “slight, dark and round-shouldered” wife, who was known to be sterile, out of the picture. In this situation, the Pope’s son Cesare Borgia spoke with his father (in exchange for land and money) and King Louis was granted his marriage annulment, while Brittany was to remain French. His poor first wife, Jeanne, retired to Bourges where she founded a religious order of nuns (apparently, she was made a saint in 1950).
The first task of the new king was to turn his eye toward Italy and vindicate the Angevin claim to Naples as well as the Orleanist claim to Milan (he assumed the title of Duke of Milan at his coronation). After taking Milan, France jointly took Naples with the House of Aragon Spain before infighting took hold and France was ultimately compelled to surrender Naples. “This might have been the end of French ambitions in Italy, but for the death in 1503, in mildly suspicious circumstances, of Pope Alexander VI. His successor, Pius III, died less than a month after his election and was followed by perhaps the most redoubtable of all the Renaissance popes, Giuliano della Rovere, who took the name of Julius II. Julius had very decided ideas about Italy. The peninsula as he saw it, was now divided into three. In the north was French Milan, in the south Spanish Naples. Between the two, there was room for one – and only one – powerful and prosperous state; and that state, he was determined, must be the papacy. The problem, clearly, was Venice” (114). And so in 1509 King Louis XII amassed an army that decimated the Venetians in a little village called Agnadello between Bergamo and Milan. On that day Machiavelli wrote: ‘the Venetians lost what it had taken them eight hundred years to conquer.’ However, he was wrong and Venice quickly regained what was lost. First, France and the Papacy were allied against Venice, then the Papacy and Venice united against France, before Venice and France were fully prepared to join together against the Papacy when Pope Julius died in February 1513. He was to be replaced with Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici who took the name of Leo X. He was a spectacularly rich, Florentine son of Lorenzo, and unlike Julius, he was publicly a man of peace.
By now, King Louis XII seemed utterly exhausted by his exploits in Italy (at the age of fifty-two he was already showing signs of senility). He quickly ushered his troops back onto native soil just as England invaded France and captured Tournai. In the fall of 1514, Louis took a third wife, fifteen-year-old Princess Mary of England (sister of Henry VIII). The fatigued king claimed he had ‘performed marvels’ in the royal bedroom on their wedding night, but no one believed him. Exhausted, he died on New Years Day 1515 just three months after his marriage. It was the popular opinion that he died as a result of his bedchamber exertions.
Francis I “The Father of Letters” (1515-1547)
When Louis XII died without a male heir, his first cousin once removed, Francis I, came rocketing onto the scene. On January 25, 1515 at the age of twenty-one, Francis was crowned and anointed in Rheims Cathedral, making him France’s fifty-seventh king. “Here at last was a proper king: a young man of colossal charm, bounding with all the energy of youth… Moreover it was clear from the outset that he really loved being king: loved the hunting, the feasting and jousting, and loved all the ready availability of beautiful women” (119).
“But all that was only the beginning: Francis was, in every fibre of his being, a man of the Renaissance. Not only did he show a genuine passion for art: he also possessed the wealth to indulge it” (119).
He was a great patron of the arts, bringing Leonardo da Vinci from Italy to Amboise where the great painter lived until his death, and he largely ordered the construction of Amboise, Blois, and Chambord as well as his best-loved chateaux, Fontainebleau (which features his characteristic salamander in every room). He was a great reader and was a personal friend of Francois Rabelais. His agents sought out rare books and manuscripts all over Europe, the foundation of which became the Bibliotheque Nationale (which had amassed over three thousand volumes and was open to all scholars). “In short, it seems hardly too much to say that modern French culture as we know it was virtually his creation” (120). At long last, the religious wars that had come to dominate the Middle Ages had given way to education and culture. New life had finally been breathed into the stale and stagnating culture of religious Europe. It is no wonder that Francis, along with Henry IV, is most beloved by the French today. He is loved for his swagger and braggadocio, as well as his courage in war, and color and opulence, along with culture and architecture, art and music, as well as his reported prowess in the bedchamber (of course, this overlooks his financial recklessness and increasing persecution of the Protestants in the last decade of his reign). His court was constantly on the move, never remaining in one single place for more than fifteen days at a time.
His first wife, Claude, was Louis XII’s only surviving daughter, and despite being small and corpulent with a limp, she bore seven children before her death at the age of twenty-five in 1524. Then, following six years of riotous bachelorhood, the king married Eleanor of Austria (sister of Emperor Charles V), but she was tall and sallow –and apparently devoid of personality. Francis largely ignored her and they had no children. Instead the king doted upon a revolving door of mistresses, none of whom was more lovely than Anne, one of the thirty children of Guillaume d’Heilly, Sieur de Pisseleu –she was “la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles.”
Francis was also a conqueror, launching a successful invasion of Naples, and increasing hostilities with Emperor Maximilian of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, while also opening war with Charles V over Milan and Pavia (which ended with the near annihilation of the French army and the capture of Francis before he was miserably imprisoned in the tower of Alcazar in Spain and only freed when he nearly died, and agreed to exchange his two young sons, as well as release his claims over Burgundy, Naples, and Milan). And yet, despite these troubles abroad, Francis managed to find friendship in Henry VIII of England. Filled with mutual respect and envy, both men met from June 7-24 in 1520 on “The Field of the Cloth of Gold” for many days of games, drinking, art, extravagance, and splendor. When all was said and done, the two monarchs got along famously, but neither trusted the other an inch.
With the rise of Charles V, and the new alliance (the “League of Cognac”) under the threatened pope in Rome, Francis sought an unlikely imperial ally in the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman –a man widely regarded as “Satan” by much of still-Christian Europe. This was controversial to say the least but it was all done in the name of the Valois dream of conquering Italy. But peace between France and the Empire finally arrived with the so-called “Ladies Peace” negotiated in 1528-1529 by Francis’s mother Louise of Savoy and her sister-in-law (the emperor’s aunt) Margaret of Austria. It effectively confirmed imperial rule in Italy –France renounced its claims to Milan, Genoa, and Naples; while Charles ransomed the king’s sons for a million ducats and promised not to press his claims to Burgundy, Provence, and Languedoc.
Despite negotiating an effective coup in the marriage of his son, the Duke of Orleans, with his niece Catherine de’Medici, Francis felt he had orchestrated a tolerable détente with Italy –until Pope Clement died in 1534 and his replacement Pope Paul III pursued a decidedly new approach to French-Rome relations. Shortly thereafter threatening placards began appearing all over France denouncing Catholic mass, the church, priesthood, and so on. It led to a wave of hysteria as persecutions of Protestants followed, as well as performative pro-Catholic events in the streets, and many Protestants were publicly burned at the stake. The abuse continued for many months. Protestantism was soon declared heretical and treasonous, Parisian booksellers were tortured and humiliated, the Sorbonne began collecting a forbidden list of books, and Francis dispatched an army to hunt down various Protestant sects, such as the unfortunate Waldensians, an ancient Christian sect residing in the town of Merindol. What followed was thousands of innocent deaths as the entire region was burned to the ground. For these unspeakable atrocities, King Francis was naturally decorated and praised by the Pope, as was the president of the parlement of Provence –this was all too often the case throughout the history of Christendom.
Toward the end of his reign, Francis faced a potential partnership with the Turks under Frederick Barbarossa. But when Barbarossa arrived in France fully expecting a joint assault on the Spanish empire, he was outraged to find that France was not serious about walking back its peace treaty, and so the two united powers settled for a joint invasion of Nice instead. The result was a victory but it was short-lived as much of Europe was outraged to find Christian France fighting alongside Muslim Turks to attack fellow European Christians. Barbarossa was publicly blamed and he brought his men to take up residence along the Cote d’Azur in France where they quickly outgrew their welcome –they ruled the region with an iron fist and plundered French ships and stores freely for themselves.
Francis fell ill in 1545 and by the time news of Henry VIII’s death reached him, Francis sought to lead a memorial ceremony in Paris, but he died before he could do so in Rambouillet on March 31, 1547. His funeral proceedings were as elaborate and energetic as was his life as a Renaissance King.
House of Valois-Orléans
- Louis XII “Father of the People” (1498-1515)
House of Valois-Angoulême
- Francis I “The Father of Letters” (1515-1547)
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s A History of France (2018), one of his final books before his death.