Agent Provocateur or Political Heavyweight?

Francis I of France reign lasted for more than thirty years and coincided with movements as significant as the Renaissance and the Reformation. Text-books are apt to gloss over the domestic history of France before the outbreak of the Wars of Religion and convey the impression that Francis was more of a lightweight monarch than his exact contemporaries, Henry VIII and Emperor Charles V. He is given the credit for having subordinated the Concordat of Bologna with the Pope. Otherwise he is represented as little more than an agent provocateur, who obstructed the Emperor's efforts to heal the religious schism in Germany by shady intrigues with the Protestant princes of that country and by an unholy alliance with the Turkish Infidel, who was hammering at the gates of Vienna. Yet in his own day Francis was widely regarded with awe and respect. There may be in a historiographical reason for the decline of his reputation.

In this essay we shall treat mainly with his constitutional significance...