FranceHistories

1536–1544: The Second and Third Wars Against Charles V

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Francis I: The Knight King and the French Renaissance (1515–1547) · RENAISSANCE

The second (1536–1538) and third (1542–1544) wars between Francis I and Charles V continued the Franco-Habsburg rivalry, with mixed success for France and a fragile peace at Crépy-en-Laonnois.

🗺️ Context of the Conflicts

The Peace of the Ladies of 1529 had settled nothing at its root: the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V, fed since 1521 by the same territorial stakes — the Milanese, Burgundy, Artois, Roussillon — needed only an occasion to flare up again. The European context, meanwhile, had grown considerably more complex: the Protestant Reformation divided Germany, the Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent pressed on Christendom’s eastern borders, and Francis I, seeking allies capable of counterbalancing Habsburg power, no longer hesitated to look towards the German Protestant princes, or even the sultan himself.

In 1530, at Bologna, Charles V received the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Clement VII — a coronation that sealed the reconciliation between the emperor and the papacy after the trauma of the 1527 Sack of Rome, and which further strengthened Charles V’s position on the European chessboard. That same year, on 7 August 1530, Francis I married Eleanor of Habsburg, widow of King Manuel I of Portugal and sister of his great rival — a political marriage called for by the Treaty of Cambrai, without great love but with genuine mutual respect, which was nonetheless not enough to durably ease tensions between the two crowns.

🤝 Francis I’s New Alliances

It was in this climate that Francis I forged the boldest — and most controversial — alliances of his reign. As early as 1528, he intervened diplomatically with Suleiman the Magnificent to secure the restitution of a church in Jerusalem turned into a mosque, the first contact in a relationship that deepened rapidly: in 1536, the Capitulations granted France considerable commercial privileges within the Ottoman Empire — free movement for French merchants, protection for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, the right to establish consulates, and even a Catholic chapel in Constantinople, the first permanent embassy of a European power at the Porte. In exchange for these advantages, an Ottoman fleet was soon operating in the Mediterranean against Spanish interests — a military cooperation that scandalised Christian Europe, where an alliance with the “infidels” against a Christian prince was denounced, but whose strategic effectiveness was hardly in doubt: it forced Charles V to watch his back in the Mediterranean while supporting the French war effort.

At the same time, Francis I turned towards the Protestant princes of Germany: on 26 October 1531, the Treaty of Saalfeld bound him to the Schmalkaldic League, in a defensive alliance against Charles V that France backed financially in exchange for potential military support against the Habsburgs. Here too, scandal rumbled through Catholic Europe — how could a “Most Christian” king ally with heretics? — but the logic was purely strategic: to divide the Habsburg possessions and threaten Charles V on several fronts at once. These backdoor alliances, however shocking to contemporaries, inaugurated a resolutely pragmatic foreign policy, in which the interest of the kingdom took precedence over confessional solidarity — a policy that would leave a lasting mark on French diplomacy in the centuries that followed.

⚔️ The Second War (1536–1538)

The death, heirless, of the Duke of Milan Francesco II Sforza in 1535 immediately reignited the Milanese question: Francis I laid claim to the duchy, Charles V occupied it militarily, and the king of France demanded its withdrawal in vain. War resumed in 1536, France relying on its Ottoman alliance while Charles V retained the support of Henry VIII’s England. The emperor personally invaded Provence, hoping to take Marseille and threaten the south of the kingdom; but Constable Anne de Montmorency organised a scorched-earth defence so effective that Charles V, unable to break through, had to retreat by October 1536. At the same time, a French army of forty thousand men invaded the Duchy of Savoy and halted at the Lombard border, while Montmorency, engaged in Piedmont, achieved some local successes without managing a decisive breakthrough towards the Milanese. At sea, the Ottoman fleet operated in the Mediterranean against the Italian and Spanish coasts — an alliance whose military effectiveness in no way dispelled the controversy it continued to stir in Europe.

After two years of war with no clear victor, Pope Paul III secured a mediation: the Truce of Nice, negotiated in June–July 1538, established a ten-year peace on the basis of the status quo — the Milanese remaining with Charles V, Piedmont staying French — accompanied by a promise of cooperation against the Turks and the Protestants. Tellingly, the two sovereigns did not even meet directly at Nice; it was not until 14 July 1538, at the château of Aigues-Mortes, that they met in person, in an atmosphere of apparent reconciliation and promises of cooperation against shared dangers — without this staged display truly dispelling, beneath the surface, an intact mutual distrust.

⚔️ The Third War (1542–1544)

The Peace of Nice held for barely four years. Charles V, despite his commitments, refused to invest one of Francis I’s sons with the Duchy of Milan, and the death of the Duchess of Milan in 1540 gave the king of France a fresh occasion to revive his claim. Francis I then strengthened his network of alliances — the Ottoman Empire once again, but also Christian III’s Denmark, Gustav I Vasa’s Sweden, the Schmalkaldic League, and even James V’s Scotland, bound to France by the 1542 Treaty of Rouen — and war resumed on several fronts at once.

In Flanders, the Duke of Vendôme achieved only limited success, for lack of coordination and in the face of stubborn local resistance. In the Pyrenees, the Dauphin Henry — the future Henry II — failed before Perpignan, whose siege had to be lifted in November 1542, a costly failure that weighed on troop morale. In Italy, François de Bourbon, Count of Enghien, allied with Barbarossa’s fleet, laid siege to Nice in 1543: the lower town fell, though not the citadel, and the partial sack of the city by the Ottoman allies once again fuelled controversy over this cooperation with the “infidels.” It was in the spring of 1544 that the war reached its climax: Charles V, at the head of more than forty thousand men and sixty-two pieces of artillery, crossed Lorraine and the Trois-Évêchés to invade Champagne, laid siege to Saint-Dizier in mid-July, then pushed the bulk of his army towards Paris — while England, Charles’s ally, besieged and took Boulogne-sur-Mer. Both sides, however, were exhausted: Charles V struggled to pay his troops, leading to widespread desertions, and Francis I too had to contend with drained finances; it was Anne de Montmorency, once again, who organised the resistance against the imperial advance.

It was against this backdrop that, on 14 April 1544, the finest French victory of this whole period took place: at Ceresole, in Piedmont, the thirteen thousand men of François de Bourbon-Vendôme, Count of Enghien, faced the eighteen thousand imperials of the Marquis Alfonso d’Ávalos. After a fierce engagement by the French gendarmerie and stubborn imperial resistance, it was the decisive intervention of the Gascon infantry that tipped the battle: the Marquis del Vasto was routed, leaving six thousand dead on the field against two thousand on the French side, along with numerous high-ranking prisoners. It was the greatest French victory since Marignano — but a victory with no strategic sequel: it was not enough to halt the imperial advance in Champagne, which continued to threaten the capital directly.

🕊️ The Peace of Crépy-en-Laonnois (18 September 1544)

Financially exhausted, each threatened on other fronts — the Turks in the east for Charles V, the Protestant princes in Germany for the emperor as well — the two sovereigns resolved, once again under the mediation of Pope Paul III, to negotiate at Crépy-en-Laonnois, near Laon, in the summer of 1544. The treaty, signed on 18 September, arranged a mutual restitution of conquests: the Milanese remained definitively with Charles V, Francis I renounced Burgundy for good, the status quo prevailed in Flanders as in Navarre. The most original clause concerned the planned marriage between Charles, Duke of Orléans, Francis I’s younger son, and either Mary of Austria, Charles V’s daughter, with the Milanese as dowry, or Anne of Austria, his niece, with the Low Countries as dowry — a plan that even provided, should Charles V die without a direct heir, for the young French prince to inherit the whole of his territories. To this were added clauses of alliance against the Turks and the Protestants, guaranteed by an exchange of hostages, for a peace described, in theory, as perpetual.

The treaty’s reception was mixed. In France, there was relief at seeing a costly war come to an end, but the terms were judged too favourable to Charles V, and the parlement accepted it only with reluctance. In the Empire, Charles V obtained essentially what he wanted, but his finances remained in a disastrous state and his health, already, was declining under the weight of exhaustion. In Europe, France’s disappointed allies — Suleiman the Magnificent foremost among them — saw this peace as an abandonment, while Henry VIII’s England, for its part, continued its own war against France without concerning itself with the Franco-imperial agreement.

📜 A Legacy of Mutual Exhaustion

The military balance sheet of these two wars can be summed up in a few words: Ceresole remains the only great French victory, while Flanders and Roussillon ended in failure, France’s real success lying above all in the effective defence of its national territory rather than in conquest. The human and financial toll, meanwhile, was heavy for both sides — tens of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded, massive debt — while the territorial balance sheet amounted to a near status quo: France definitively lost the Milanese, but consolidated its borders and pursued, in parallel, its first colonial explorations in Canada.

These conflicts also marked Francis I himself: at fifty-two, at the end of the third war, the king was ageing, his health declining, and he now devoted more energy to the kingdom’s domestic affairs than to military campaigns. Though he never recovered the Milanese, he left his son a kingdom whose territorial integrity had been preserved against all odds, at the price of a complex system of alliances — Ottoman, Protestant, Scandinavian — that would remain, long after him, a model for French diplomacy. These wars mark, in short, the end of the great personal rivalry between Francis I and Charles V, but also foreshadow, through the scale of the confessional alliances forged on both sides, the religious tensions soon to set the whole of Europe ablaze.

🧠 Key Takeaways

  • 1530: imperial coronation of Charles V at Bologna; marriage of Francis I to Eleanor of Habsburg
  • 1536: Capitulations with the Ottoman Empire; failed invasion of Provence by Charles V
  • June–July 1538: Truce of Nice, followed by the Aigues-Mortes meeting between the two sovereigns
  • November 1542: failure of the siege of Perpignan by the Dauphin Henry
  • 14 April 1544: French victory at Ceresole, the finest since Marignano
  • Summer 1544: invasion of Champagne by Charles V, capture of Boulogne by the English
  • 18 September 1544: Peace of Crépy-en-Laonnois, France definitively loses the Milanese
  • Wars that exhausted both sides without resolving anything, and that closed the great personal rivalry between Francis I and Charles V

Next zoom: The Protestant Reformation and Francis I’s religious policy (1534–1547).