From Louis XII and the Italian Wars through Francis I at Marignano, Leonardo at Amboise, the châteaux of the Loire and the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts, the disaster at Pavia, the Affair of the Placards and the rise of Calvinism, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the Catholic League, the assassination of Henri III, to Henri IV's conversion, the Edict of Nantes, and the knife of Ravaillac. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made and unmade the Renaissance monarchy of France.
On the death of Charles VIII in an accident at Amboise, the Orléans cousin Louis XII inherits the crown. He has the marriage to Charles's widow Anne of Brittany annulled and remarried, keeping Brittany within the royal house, and renews the war for Milan.
From Louis XII and the Italian Wars through Francis I at Marignano, Leonardo at Amboise, the châteaux of the Loire and the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts, the disaster at Pavia, the Affair of the Placards and the rise of Calvinism, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the Catholic League, the assassination of Henri III, to Henri IV's conversion, the Edict of Nantes, and the knife of Ravaillac. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that made and unmade the Renaissance monarchy of France.
On the death of Charles VIII in an accident at Amboise, the Orléans cousin Louis XII inherits the crown. He has the marriage to Charles's widow Anne of Brittany annulled and remarried, keeping Brittany within the royal house, and renews the war for Milan.
Six months after his coronation, the twenty-year-old Francis I crosses the Alps with the largest French army the century has seen and defeats the Swiss pikemen at Marignano in a two-day battle. He is knighted on the field by the Chevalier Bayard. Milan is his.
Pope Leo X and Francis I sign at Bologna a concordat that gives the king the nomination of all French bishops, abbots, and major priories. In return, France abandons the radical conciliarism of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The French crown now controls the wealth and the personnel of the Gallican Church.
Outside Calais, near Guînes, Francis I and Henry VIII of England meet for eighteen days of jousts, banquets, masques, and wrestling in a temporary city of gold and silk. The summit looks like a peace; in reality, both men are courting the new emperor Charles V.
Outside Pavia in Lombardy, the Spanish-imperial arquebusiers of Charles V destroy the French chivalry under Francis I in a few hours. The flower of the nobility falls; Francis is taken prisoner and carried to Madrid. From there he writes to his mother the celebrated phrase: 'all is lost save honour, and life, which is safe'.
By the Edict of Union at Vannes, the duchy of Brittany — inherited by Francis I's late wife Claude from her mother Anne — is permanently united with the kingdom of France, on condition of preserving its liberties. The last great independent feudal principality is gone.
On the night of 17 October, anti-Eucharistic broadsheets attributed to the pastor Antoine Marcourt are posted in Paris, Orléans, Tours, Rouen, Blois — and on the bedroom door of the king himself at Amboise. A young John Calvin flees France. The first systematic persecution of French Protestants begins.
Francis I orders that all royal acts, judgements, and ecclesiastical records — until now in Latin or local langues — be written 'en langaige maternel françois'. The edict also requires every parish to keep a register of baptisms. The French language and the modern administrative state advance together.
Francis I dies at Rambouillet; his second son Henry II succeeds him. The court is dominated by his Italian-born queen, Catherine de' Medici, and by his older mistress, Diane de Poitiers, for whom Philibert de l'Orme builds the bridge across the Cher at Chenonceau.
Henry II signs the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis with Philip II of Spain. France renounces sixty-five years of Italian ambitions but keeps Calais and the Three Bishoprics. At the tournament celebrating the peace, the king is mortally wounded in the eye by the lance of Gabriel de Montgomery and dies eleven days later.
Passing through the Champagne town of Vassy on a Sunday in March, the duc François de Guise and his armed retinue fall on a Huguenot congregation worshipping in a barn. Some seventy are killed. The Protestant prince of Condé takes up arms; the first of eight Wars of Religion has begun.
On the night of 23-24 August, in the days after the wedding of Henri of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, the queen mother Catherine and Charles IX authorise the murder of the Huguenot leadership in Paris. The order escapes the palace; the city rises, and the killing spreads to the provinces for weeks. Admiral Coligny is among the first to die.
After the Edict of Beaulieu grants the Huguenots wide concessions, the Catholic militants of Picardy form the first chapter of the Sainte Ligue. Henri, duc de Guise, soon takes leadership of a national network that will challenge the crown for the next thirteen years.
Henri III brings Swiss troops into Paris against the Guise; the city throws up barricades and the king flees to Chartres. In December, summoning the duke to the royal château at Blois under safe conduct, he has Guise and his brother the cardinal murdered in his bedchamber.
Besieging League-held Paris with Henri of Navarre, Henri III is stabbed at Saint-Cloud by the Dominican friar Jacques Clément, sent by the League. With his dying breath he names Navarre his heir. The last Valois dies; the Bourbon dynasty begins.
At Ivry-la-Bataille in March, Henri IV — 'Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc' — crushes the League army under the duc de Mayenne and lays siege to Paris. The city eats its dogs, cats, and the grass of the Tuileries before a Spanish relief army under Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, forces him to lift the siege.
Convinced that he will never enter his capital while he remains a Protestant, Henri IV abjures his Calvinism at the abbey of Saint-Denis on 25 July. The Parisian apocryphon attributed to him — 'Paris vaut bien une messe' — captures the political theology of the act. Paris opens its gates the following March.
On 13 April Henri IV signs at Nantes the edict that grants the Huguenots freedom of conscience, restricted freedom of worship, equal civil rights, and some hundred and fifty fortified places of refuge. Three weeks later the Treaty of Vervins ends the war with Spain. The Wars of Religion are over.
On 14 May, as his carriage is stuck in traffic on the narrow rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris, Henri IV is stabbed three times by the Catholic fanatic François Ravaillac. He dies on the way back to the Louvre. His nine-year-old son becomes Louis XIII, with the queen mother Marie de' Medici as regent.