page_title: Franco-Ottoman alliance
section_title: Failed coordination in the campaign of 1542
hierarchical_section_title: Franco-Ottoman alliance / Alliance of Francis I and Suleiman / Italian War of 1542–1546 and Hungary Campaign of 1543 / Failed coordination in the campaign of 1542
caption_attribution_description: English: Grand_culverin_of_Francis_I_140mm_307cm_Algiers_recovered_in_1830
context_page_description: The Franco-Ottoman alliance, also Franco-Turkish alliance, was an alliance established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Suleiman the Magnificent. The strategic and sometimes tactical alliance was one of the most important foreign alliances of France, and was particularly influential during the Italian Wars. The Franco-Ottoman military alliance is said to have reached its peak around 1553 during the reign Henry II of France.
  The alliance was exceptional, as the first non-ideological alliance between a Christian and Muslim state, and caused a scandal in the Christian world. Carl Jacob Burckhardt called it "the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent". It lasted intermittently for more than two and a half centuries, until the Napoleonic campaign in Ottoman Egypt, in 1798–1801.
context_section_description: In early 1542, Polin successfully negotiated the details of the alliance, with the Ottoman Empire promising to send 60,000 troops against the territories of the German king Ferdinand, as well as 150 galleys against Charles, while France promised to attack Flanders, harass the coasts of Spain with a naval force, and send 40 galleys to assist the Turks for operations in the Levant.
  A landing harbour in the north of the Adriatic was prepared for Barberousse, at Marano. The port was seized in the name of France by Piero Strozzi on 2 January 1542.
  Polin left Constantinople on 15 February 1542 with a contract from Suleiman outlining the details of the Ottoman commitment for 1542. He arrived in Blois on 8 March 1542 to obtain a ratification of the agreement by Francis I. Accordingly, Francis I designated the city of Perpignan as the objective for the Ottoman expedition, in order to obtain a seaway to Genoa. Polin, after some delays in Venice, finally managed to take a galley to Constantinople on 9 May 1542, but he arrived too late for the Ottomans to launch a sea campaign.
  Meanwhile, Francis I initiated the hostilities with Charles V on 20 July 1542, and kept with his part of the agreement by laying siege at Perpignan and attacking Flanders. André de Montalembert was sent to Constantinople to ascertain the Ottoman offensive, but it turned out that Suleiman, partly under the anti-alliance influence of Suleyman Pasha, was unwilling to send an army that year, and promised to send an army twice as strong the following year, in 1543.
  When Francis I learnt from André de Montalembert that the Ottomans were not coming, he raised the siege of Perpignan.
caption: Grand culverin of Francis I, caliber: 140mm, length: 307cm, recovered at the time of the Invasion of Algiers in 1830. Musée de l'Armée, Paris.
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