Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe
305
Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe
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Overview
John Julius Norwich—“the very model of a popular historian”—is acclaimed for his distinctive ability to weave together a fascinating narrative through vivid detail, colorful anecdotes, and captivating characters. Here, he explores four leaders—Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, and Suleiman—who led their countries during the Renaissance (The Wall Street Journal).
Francis I of France was the personification of the Renaissance, and a highly influential patron of the arts and education. Henry VIII, who was not expected to inherit the throne but embraced the role with gusto, broke with the Roman Catholic Church and appointed himself head of the Church of England. Charles V was the most powerful man of the time, and unanimously elected Holy Roman Emperor. And Suleiman the Magnificent—who stood apart as a Muslim—brought the Ottoman Empire to its apogee of political, military, and economic power. These men collectively shaped the culture, religion, and politics of their respective domains.
With remarkable erudition, John Julius Norwich offers “an important history, masterfully written,” indelibly depicting four dynamic characters and how their incredible achievements—and obsessions with one another—changed Europe forever (The Washington Times).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802189462 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 305 |
| Sales rank: | 432,995 |
| File size: | 17 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
The Hollow of Their Hands
The beginning of the sixteenth century was an exciting time to be alive. The feudal Europe of the Middle Ages was changing fast into a cluster of national states; the unity of western Christendom was endangered more than it had ever been before, and was indeed to be lost before the century had run a quarter of its course; the Ottoman Turks, thanks to a succession of able and ambitious sultans, were surging westward on all fronts; the discovery of the New World had brought fabulous wealth to Spain and Portugal, causing vast disruption to the traditional European economy. And in no other period was the entire continent overshadowed by four such giants, all born in a single decade – the ten years between 1491 and 1500. They were, in order of age, King Henry VIII of England, King Francis I of France, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Sometimes friends, more often enemies, always rivals, the four of them together held Europe in the hollow of their hands.
The most colourful was Francis. When he was born, in Cognac on 12 September 1494, he seemed a long way from the throne. His father Charles, Count of Angoulême, was only the first cousin of the reigning king, the already ailing Louis XII, who in his determination to produce a male heir married three wives, the last being Henry VIII's younger sister Mary Tudor. The French were shocked that this ravishingly beautiful eighteen-year-old with luscious golden hair to her waist should be handed over to a gouty and toothless old dotard three times her age; but Mary bore her fate philosophically, knowing that it could not possibly last very long. And she was right. After their wedding night on 9 October her battered bridegroom boasted to all who would listen that 'he had performed marvels', but nobody believed him. As he watched Francis jousting during the wedding celebrations, he was heard to murmur: 'Ce grand jeunehomme, il va tout gâcher.' He died on New Year's Day 1515, less than three months after the marriage – exhausted, it was generally believed, by his exertions in the bedchamber. Mary found it hard to disguise her relief. She had long been passionately in love with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and was now at last free to marry him – which she lost no time in doing, despite a warning by two English priests in Paris that he regularly cast spells and trafficked with the Devil. Francis, meanwhile, assumed the throne. In the previous year he had married King Louis's daughter Claude, and on 25 January 1515, in Rheims Cathedral, he was crowned and anointed the fifty-seventh King of France.
His new subjects were delighted. The country had recently suffered a whole series of drab and sickly monarchs; here now was a magnificent figure of a man, bursting with youthful energy. A Welshman who saw him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 describes him as being six feet tall, the nape of his neck unusually broad, his hair brown, smooth and neatly combed, his beard (of three months' growth) darker in colour, his eyes hazel and somewhat bloodshot, and his complexion the colour of watery milk. His buttocks and thighs were muscular, but his lower legs were thin and bandy. He was not, it must be said, strictly handsome – his perfectly enormous nose earned him the nickname of le roi grand-nez – but he made up for it with his grace and elegance, and with the multicoloured silks and velvets which left his courtiers dazzled. He had beautiful manners and irresistible charm. He loved conversation, and could discuss any subject relating to the arts and sciences – not so much because he had studied them all deeply as because of his quite extraordinary memory: it seemed that he remembered everything that he ever read, or was ever told. Always laughing, it was clear that he loved every moment of his kingship, revelling in all the pleasures that it could provide – hunting, feasting, jousting and, above all, the ready availability of any number of beautiful women.
He was quintessentially a man of the Renaissance, with a passion for art and a degree of wealth that enabled him to indulge it to the full. Before long he was celebrated as one of the greatest patrons of his age. He brought Leonardo da Vinci from Italy, installing him in splendid apartments at Amboise, where the great man lived till his death. At various times he also welcomed Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino (known to the French as Maître Roux) and countless other Italian painters, sculptors and decorators, including Benvenuto Cellini, who carved the medallion from which Titian was later to paint his famous portrait. Of them all, however, his favourite was Francesco Primaticcio, whom he employed – particularly at Fontainebleau – with spectacular success. Fontainebleau was always his favourite residence; it was indeed his home – insofar as he had one. But Francis was restless by nature, and he was also a compulsive builder. He largely reconstructed the châteaux of Amboise and Blois, and created Chambord – that most magnificent of all hunting-boxes – quite possibly with the help of Leonardo himself. In all of them, again and again, we see his emblem, the salamander, often surrounded by flames; its legendary attribute of being impervious to fire made it the perfect symbol of endurance. In Paris itself he transformed the Louvre from a medieval fortress into a vast Renaissance palace, and personally financed the new Hôtel de Ville in order to have full control over its design.
Then there was literature. Francis was a dedicated man of letters, with a reverence for books which he had inherited from his mother, Louise of Savoy. She had taught him fluent Italian and Spanish; his weak spot was Latin, with which he was never entirely at ease. He was a personal friend of François Rabelais, for whose unforgettable giant Pantagruel he is said to have provided the inspiration. To be his chief librarian he appointed Guillaume Budé, who at the age of twenty-three had renounced a life of debauchery and pleasure to become the greatest French scholar of the day; and he employed special agents all over north Italy to seek out manuscripts and the relatively new printed books, just as others were seeking out paintings, sculptures and objets d'art. In 1537 he signed a decree, known as the Ordonnance de Montpellier, providing that one copy of every book published or sold in France should be lodged in the Royal Library – a right that is now enjoyed by the Bibliothèque Nationale, of which that library formed the nucleus. At the time of his death it was to contain over three thousand volumes (many of them looted from the Sforza Library in Milan) and was open to any scholar who wished to use it. Another decree, the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts, of 1539, made French – rather than Latin – the official language of the country and instituted a register of births, marriages and deaths in every parish.
To be Chancellor of a new college for Greek, Latin and Hebrew, Francis invited the greatest humanist of his day, Erasmus of Rotterdam; and Budé wrote a letter urging him to accept the invitation. 'This monarch', he wrote,
is not only a Frank (which is in itself a glorious title); he is also Francis, a name borne by a king for the first time and, one can prophesy, predestined for great things. He is educated in letters, which is unusual with our kings, and also possesses a natural eloquence, wit, tact, and an easy, pleasant manner; nature, in short, has endowed him with the rarest gifts of body and mind. He likes to admire and to praise princes of old who have distinguished themselves by their lofty intellects and brilliant deeds, and he is fortunate to have as much wealth as any king in the world, which he gives more liberally than anyone.
Erasmus, though flattered and tempted, did not allow himself to be persuaded. (The fact that he was receiving a regular pension from the Emperor may have had something to do with it.) The invitation was declined, and the project shelved. Only a little more successful was the King's short-lived Greek college in Milan. His great educational triumph, on the other hand, came in 1529 when, to the fury of the Sorbonne, he founded the Collège des Lecteurs Royaux, the future Collège de France. In short, it seems hardly too much to say that modern French culture and all it stands for was virtually originated by Francis I. He was the personification of the Renaissance. Hunting and fighting were no longer enough for a nobleman; education was now required as well. Before him the French world was still essentially Gothic, obsessed by war; during his reign war might still be important – Francis himself was a fearless fighter on the battlefield and loved nothing more than staging mock battles for the amusement of his friends – but the art of elegant living was more important still. In Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier – which was begun in 1508, though it was not published until twenty years later – it is Francis who is seen as the great white hope who brings civilisation to France at last. 'I believe', says Count Ludovico,
that for all of us the true and principal adornment of the mind is letters; although the French, I know, recognize only the nobility of arms and think nothing of all the rest; and so they not only do not appreciate learning but detest it, regarding men of letters as basely inferior and thinking it a great insult to call anyone a scholar.
But the Magnifico Giuliano replies:
You are right in saying that this error has prevailed among the French for a long time now; but if good fortune has it that Monseigneur d'Angoulême, as it is hoped, succeeds to the throne, then I believe that, just as the glory of arms flourishes and shines in France, so also with the greatest brilliance must that of letters. For when I was at the Court not long ago I set eyes on this prince ... And among other things I was told that he greatly loved and esteemed learning and respected all men of letters, and that he condemned the French themselves for being so hostile to this profession.
The Magnifico, as we know, was not disappointed; and it is no surprise that, of all their kings, it is Francis whom – with Henry IV – the French most love today. They love him for his swagger and his braggadocio; for his courage in war and his prowess in the bedchamber; for the colour and opulence with which he surrounded himself; and for the whole new civilisation that he left behind. They pass over with a shrug his financial recklessness, which by June 1517 had led him into a debt roughly equal to his annual income. In the following year he paid Henry VIII 600,000 gold écus for the return of Tournai, which was French anyway; the imperial election meant the throwing away of another 400,000, while the Field of the Cloth of Gold could not have cost him less than 200,000 livres tournois. There is admiration, too, for the sheer zest that he showed in his lifelong struggle with the House of Habsburg – all too easily identified in French minds with Germany, France's traditional enemy for the next four hundred years. Only his increasing persecution of the Protestants, mostly (though not entirely) in the last decade of his reign, do they find harder to forgive.
For the first decade the most important woman in Francis's life was unquestionably his mother, Louise of Savoy. On two separate occasions while he was fighting in Italy, in 1515 and 1524–6, she served as Regent, but even when he was at home her influence was considerable – greater by far than that of either of her daughters-in-law. Next came his sister Margaret. Beautiful, elegant, intelligent and graceful in all her movements, to her brother she was everything that a woman should be. When she was eighteen she was forced to marry the Duc d'Alençon, in theory 'the second nobleman in France'. The marriage, however, was not a success – first, because Alençon was 'a laggard and a dolt', and second, because she was at the time passionately in love with the dashing Gaston de Foix, Duke of Nemours, known as 'the Thunderbolt of Italy'. There were, fortunately, no children; and after Alençon's death in 1525 she married King Henry II of Navarre.
Francis had two wives. His first, as we have seen, was Claude, the daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany. Her name is still remembered in the Reine-Claude plum, or greengage, and she did her duty by bearing Francis seven children; but since she was 'very small and strangely corpulent', with a limp and a pronounced squint, she never interested him much. For all that, she was a good, sweet-natured girl; an ambassador reported that 'her grace in speaking greatly made up for her want of beauty'. She died in 1524, in her twenty-fifth year. The King's second wife, whom he married after six years of riotous bachelorhood, was Eleanor of Austria, sister of Charles V; for three brief years she had been the third wife of King Manuel I of Portugal. Alas, she proved to be no great improvement on her predecessor: tall and sallow, with the jutting Habsburg chin and a curious absence of personality. A lady-in-waiting was subsequently to report that 'when undressed she was seen to have the trunk of a giantess, so long and big was her body, yet going lower she seemed a dwarf, so short were her thighs and legs'. Already four years before her wedding to Francis it was reported that she had grown corpulent, heavy of feature, with red patches on her face 'as if she had elephantiasis'. Francis largely ignored her; there were no children. She was certainly no match for her husband's regiment of mistresses – of whom the loveliest of all was Anne d'Heilly, one of the thirty children of Guillaume d'Heilly, Sieur de Pisseleu ('worse than wolf') in Picardy. Later Francis was to make her Duchesse d'Etampes. Well read, highly cultured and ravishingly beautiful, she was, as he used to say, 'la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles' ('the most beautiful of the scholars, the most scholarly of the beauties').
Even when Francis was not on campaign, he was constantly on the move. 'Never', wrote a Venetian ambassador, 'during the whole of my embassy, was the court in the same place for fifteen consecutive days.' This appears still more remarkable when one considers the logistical problems involved. When the court was complete, it took no fewer than 18,000 horses to move it; when the King visited Bordeaux in 1526, stabling was ordered for 22,500 horses and mules. The baggage train normally included furniture, tapestries (for warmth) and silver plate by the ton. And the finding of suitable accommodation, as may be imagined, was a constant nightmare. Often there were rooms only for the King and his ladies; everyone else slept in shelter often five or six miles away, or under canvas. But whatever hardships they were called upon to suffer, they were always expected to be ready for the elaborate ceremonies that were staged by the major cities and towns through which they passed. In Lyon in1515 Francis was entertained by a mechanical lion designed by Leonardo da Vinci; at Marseille in 1516 he sailed out to meet a Portuguese ship carrying a live rhinoceros, a present from King Manuel to the Pope. These royal visits, however, did not always pass without a hitch: in 1518 the captain of Brest was obliged to pay one hundred gold écus 'following artillery accidents during the King's entry ... as indemnity to the wounded and to the widows of the deceased'.
Appalled by the vast new wealth that was flooding from the New World into the coffers of his brother-in-law and rival the Emperor Charles V, Francis was determined that Charles should not have it all his own way. He sent several major expeditions across the Atlantic, as a result of which he was able to claimNewfoundland for France, together with the city of New Angoulême on the island of Manhattan. It was named by a certain Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian navigator sailing under the French flag, who in April1524 became the first man since the ancient Norsemen thoroughly to explore the Atlantic coast of the New World between New Brunswick and Florida. In 1534and 1535 Jacques Cartier was the first to describe the Gulf of St Lawrence and the shores of the St Lawrence river, but his reputation suffered greatly after the gold and diamonds that he had brought back with him were tested and found to be worthless. Meanwhile, Jean Parmentier of Dieppe – a town that later became famous for its mapmaking – sailed to the coasts of North and South America, west Africa and, in October1529, the island of Sumatra.
Where religion was concerned, Francis's reign coincided almost exactly with the Reformation. Initially, he had tended to sympathise with Protestantism – so long as it remained well this side of heresy – if only because by doing so he made trouble for Charles. (His sister Margaret had still stronger reformist tendencies, and was known, though not altogether deservedly, as la mère poule de la Réforme.) In 1534 he was even to send a mission to Germany, to establish friendly relations with the reformers. All the time, however, he had to contend with the Sorbonne, which remained vigorously pro-Catholic and, in 1521, issued a violent condemnation of Martin Luther. In 1523 it went further still and, shocked by the recent publication of a French version of the New Testament, even tried to ban foreign translations of the Scripture altogether; but this time Francis stepped in. Its author, he pointed out, was no less than Maître Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples, a highly respected scholar, celebrated and esteemed throughout Europe. Any objection to his works was henceforth forbidden.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Four Princes"
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Copyright © 2016 John Julius Norwich.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Author's Note xiii
Map xiv
1 The Hollow of Their Hands 1
2 'The flower and vigour of youth' 35
3 'All is lost, save honour' 69
4 'Enough, my son!' 109
5 'Like a brother to the Sultan' 143
6 'Noisome to our realm' 171
7 'A reasonable regret' 201
8 Fray Carlos and 'the drum of conquest' 223
9 "Worth Celebrating 261
Acknowledgements 269
Illustration Credits 271
Bibliography 273
Index 275
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