As if the Hundred Years’ War had not provided enough excitement for Europe, the century following its conclusion featured a frenzy of monumental historical events. The cultural and intellectual innovations of the Renaissance blossomed across the continent, as scholars and artists harnessed the inquisitive spirit of antiquity and cast aside moribund medieval traditions. European sailors found a vast American continent to explore and exploit, and circumnavigated the globe for the first time. The thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire drew its dying breath with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized the dispersal of knowledge and language to the masses, and Copernicus challenged humankind’s existential foundations by insisting the sun did not revolve around the Earth. And, not unrelated to all of these events, the Protestant Reformation challenged the legitimacy and authority of the Catholic Church, spawning a vicious rivalry that left Europe soaked in blood for several centuries.
At some inexact and unheralded moment during this period, the Middle Ages came to an end, and the early modern era began in Europe, especially in France, then its strongest state. To be modern at that time essentially meant believing in human progress. People increasingly challenged ossified political and religious dogma and the medieval assumption that the boundaries of human knowledge were fixed. As new experiments and discoveries began to expand people’s understanding of the world and improve their lives, the belief that human reason and ambition could yield an ever-better future began to spread widely. So while many things are associated with modernity, like strong nation-states, market economies, and the scientific revolution, they are all predicated on this gradual yet epochal transformation in how people viewed themselves and the human capacity for improvement.
No single individual better captures this transformative era than Leonardo da Vinci, a man of extraordinary and wide-ranging talents. He was the heart of the Italian Renaissance, producing masterful paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper while also inventing marvelous engineering contraptions and creating detailed anatomical studies of the human body. Perhaps less well known is that he spent the last three years of his life in happy residence at a gracious Loire Valley château, at the invitation of one of France’s grandest kings. Indeed, the tomb of this Renaissance giant lies there still, on the grounds of the beautiful royal château in Amboise. The manor house he dwelt in is dedicated to his life and legacy, and you can learn here that Leonardo may have been a vegetarian, and that he encouraged moderate consumption of simple meals and watered-down wine to maintain good health.
Amboise conceals other remarkable Renaissance treasures as well. It is here, in the château gardens, that the first orange trees in France bloomed, a thousand years after the Romans first discovered that the citrus fruits of Asia and Africa could be grown on European shores in primitive greenhouses. Initially the trees in Amboise did not actually produce oranges, but cultivating the trees themselves was still considered a great success, and a kingly tradition began of constructing ever more elaborate and productive greenhouses, called orangeries. This competition culminated in the grand Versailles Orangerie, twelve hundred feet long, built for Louis XIV. Louis loved few things more than oranges and orange blossoms, and thanks to his orangerie, he could easily enjoy them year-round. (The average commoner could not do the same until the twentieth century.) Today, France produces very few oranges compared to its southern neighbors, but they are a well-loved fruit. The French often end a satisfying evening meal not with an elaborate chocolate dessert but with a simple orange, peeled at the table.
Leonardo da Vinci Park, on the grounds of Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, features several dozen large replicas of the great artist’s drawings and contraptions, including this double-tiered bridge. © Aagje De Jong (Dreamstime Photos).
Indeed, if one seeks the cradle of the French Renaissance, it is in Amboise and the Loire Valley that one must look. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the French kings spent much of their time not in Paris but in the beautiful royal palaces that were constructed along what became known as the Valley of Kings. In part, this was a legacy of the Hundred Years’ War, and Charles VII’s lengthy residence in places like Bourges and Chinon. But it was also a way for the kings to escape the intrigues and dangers of Paris, a city infested with unpredictable mobs and scheming nobles. The Parisians were, in the words of Rabelais, “upon any slight occasion so ready to uproars and insurrections that foreign nations wonder at the patience of the Kings of France.”1
In the late fifteenth century, King Louis XI, son of Charles VII, installed his wife and heir at Amboise. Louis, who had been forced to endure his father’s public dalliance with Agnès de Sorel (and was rumored to have poisoned her), did not permit women to play an influential role in his court. He was a generally unlikable sovereign, nicknamed the “Spider King” for his ruthless and manipulative ways. He was eventually succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, who was widely seen as a physical and mental weakling—and yet, in hindsight, he actually had an enormous impact on the development of France.
When Charles VIII decided to invade Italy in 1494, he could not have known that he was playing a critically important role in easing his country from the medieval to the modern. Yet while his military campaign yielded few lasting advantages—and, in fact, led subsequent French kings down a lengthy and disastrous series of Italian wars for more than half a century—it was his sojourn in Italy that kick-started the French Renaissance. Charles was captivated by the artistic and scholarly innovations he encountered during his march through Italy to the kingdom of Naples, to which he claimed dynastic rights and briefly reclaimed. While in the end he was rather ignominiously chased back across the Alps, he returned to France with a host of Italian artisans, architects, and gardeners, determined to replicate their achievements in his homeland. He installed many of them in his childhood home, the château of Amboise.
It was one of these Italian experts, a monk and master gardener named Pacello da Mercogliano, who coaxed those first orange trees to bloom in the Amboise orangerie, the first in northern Europe. A quintessential Renaissance fruit, oranges appeared frequently in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance masters (including Leonardo da Vinci, who placed a somewhat anachronistic dish of eels and oranges on the table of The Last Supper). Legend has it that Charles brought a host of other foods back from Italy, from melons to pasta and parmesan, but most of these tales are exaggerated: while the French entanglement in Italy did indeed have a culinary impact, as Italian foods and tastes became fashionable, it is not likely that Charles himself introduced these foods to the French court.
Charles died, rather stupidly, in 1498, after banging his head against a low doorway in the château of Amboise. As he had no living heir, he was succeeded by his cousin, the new King Louis XII (who also promptly married Charles’s widow, Anne of Brittany). Louis had a series of disastrous Italian wars of his own; Machiavelli actually cites them at length in The Prince, in order to illustrate precisely what a ruler should not do when invading a foreign country. But Louis fared much better domestically and became fondly known as “Father of the People” after enacting some popular reforms. He was very frugal in his habits, including his diet, which was said to consist mostly of boiled beef.
King Louis and Queen Anne continued to encourage the development of Renaissance art and scholarship, but the true “King of the Renaissance” was Louis’s cousin and successor, King Francis I. Indeed, the early years of his reign are recounted as among the most splendid in French history, as this young, handsome, and flamboyant king rejuvenated the court. His love of pageantry and pomp was genuine, but it was also a clever means of enhancing his popularity and royal authority. The people thronged to their new young king, especially after his first grand military victory in Italy, at the Battle of Marignano (1515), which brought the duchy of Milan temporarily into the French fold.
After his victory, Francis spent four months in his newly acquired duchy, immersing himself in the radiance of Italian Renaissance culture. It was at this time that he met Leonardo da Vinci, then sixty-four years old. Francis offered him a handsome sum to be First Painter, Engineer, and Architect of the King, an offer Leonardo could not refuse. In 1516, he departed for France, riding a mule over the Alps, the Mona Lisa in his baggage.
Francis remained a great patron of Renaissance arts and letters throughout his life. Humanist luminaries such as Guillaume Budé and Clément Marot were great favorites of the king—and of his sister, Margaret, a renowned writer and scholar in her own right, who offered protection to Rabelais when he was condemned by the Church and the Sorbonne. Francis founded the Collège de France, a humanist alternative to the Sorbonne, and devoted many years to building the glorious châteaus of Fontainebleau and Chambord. His personal library later seeded the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and his art collection now graces Fontainebleau and the Louvre (including the Mona Lisa, which he purchased upon Leonardo’s death). Much of the credit for this lifetime of artistic patronage must go to the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, who ensured that both her children received a stellar education in humanist literature, foreign languages, and the arts from a young age.
There were limits to Francis’s modernity, however. While he initially showed some interest in the arguments of Church reformers, he ultimately rejected the Reformation once it became clear that it represented a political threat to his realm. After the Affair of the Placards, in 1534, when reformist tracts were posted throughout Paris and even on the doors of the king’s own residence in Amboise, a brutal crackdown ensued. John Calvin, the most important French reformist theologian (and eventual progenitor of Calvinism), fled to Switzerland, while hundreds of other reformers were burned at the stake as heretics. But the Reformation was not extinguished in France. As we will see, it would eventually consume the country in a bloody decades-long civil war.
Ultimately, Francis remains a very popular French king today because he represents those qualities most celebrated by the French—he was a cultured, glamorous, and chivalrous warrior-king. But in truth, when the French remember him this way, it is mostly the first five years of his reign that come to mind. The subsequent twenty-seven years, in which Francis waged a brutal and disastrous series of wars against his bête noire, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, are less celebrated. Francis suffered many defeats, one of which led to his imprisonment and near death in Spain, and impoverished his realm.
In the realm of food, Francis is actually slightly outshone by his reclusive, frail yet amiable first wife, Queen Claude, who sadly died young, aged twenty-four, after bearing seven children in eight years. We have already met her namesake, the succulent Reine-Claude plum. It cannot be said whether Francis enjoyed these plums as much as today’s gourmands do, but he appreciated his wife’s gentle and generous nature just as the public who named the fruit in her honor did (though in his case, mostly because she tolerated his predictably outrageous womanizing).
Francis himself is most often associated with a more obscure French artisanal food product known as Cotignac d’Orléans, a sweet jam made of quince (a hard pearlike fruit, much less commonly eaten today). Originally created by a pastry chef from the southern town of Cotignac who moved to Orléans, it was a medieval delicacy traditionally given to noble visitors to the great Loire city—including Joan of Arc, when she liberated it from the English. For this reason, the bloodred jam is sold in small round wooden boxes that are emblazoned with Joan’s likeness. Today only one confectioner still produces Cotignac d’Orléans using the same medieval techniques, in the old village of Saint-Ay, downriver from Orléans. It is delicious eaten on its own, or with a bit of cheese.
Francis was apparently a huge fan of the jam (as was his fictitious contemporary Pantagruel, from the novels of Rabelais). Confectionary of all sorts—from candied spices and fruits to jellies and preserves—became increasingly popular among French nobles during the Valois dynasty, and even more so with the Italian influences of the Renaissance (the Venetians being at the time the undisputed masters of confectionary, thanks to their control of the still-limited supply of sugar into Europe). According to legend, Francis once brought a jar of Cotignac d’Orléans to share with his royal mistress, Anne de Pisseleu, only to discover another man, the Count of Brissac, hiding under her bed. The king left, but not before sliding the quince jam under the bed and exclaiming, “Here you are, Brissac—everyone has to live!”2
The Renaissance had a monumental impact upon French culture, but it did not dramatically transform French gastronomy quite yet. As we shall see, the real revolution in French food came later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and had much more to do with other epochal changes in the early modern era. But it was still a time of new tastes and discoveries, of a burgeoning human spirit that would eventually lift France to the heights of cultural, intellectual—and indeed, gastronomical—innovation.