In 1526, France, considering itself surrounded by Habsburg power in Spain to its south and the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire to its east, proposed a military alliance to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. It was the same strategic concept that caused Catholic France a hundred years later to align itself with the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years’ War. Suleiman, viewing Habsburg power as the principal obstacle to Ottoman ambitions in Eastern Europe, responded favorably, though he treated France’s King Francis I as an unmistakably junior partner.
