Franco-Ottoman alliance

The Franco-Ottoman alliance, also Franco-Turkish alliance, was an alliance established in 1536 between the king of France Francis I and the Turkish 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 lasted for more than two and a half centuries, until the Napoleonic campaign in Ottoman Egypt, in 1798–1801.

The alliance was exceptional, and caused a scandal in the Christian world.Carl Jacob Burckhardt (1947) called it "the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent"; nevertheless, it endured since it served the interests of both parties.

Following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmet II and the unification of swaths of the Middle East under Selim I, Suleiman, the son of Selim, managed to expand Ottoman rule to Serbia in 1522. The Habsburg Empire thus entered in direct conflict with the Ottomans.

Some early contacts seem to have taken place between the Ottomans and the French. Philippe de Commines reports that Bayezid II sent an embassy to Louis XI in 1483, while Djem, his brother and rival pretender to the Ottoman throne was being detained in France at Bourganeuf by Pierre d'Aubusson. Louis XI refused to see the envoys, but a large amount of money and Christian relics were offered by the envoy so that Djem could remain in custody in France. Djem was transferred to the custody of Pope Innocent VIII in 1489.

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