Article: Cleric-diplomats and the sixteenth-century French state.

Most historians of sixteenth-century France now agree that royal authority, despite some of the treatises on politics written during the period, was not absolute. Royal authority, recent historians suggest, was a system of patrons, clients, and brokers of power who formed a network that enabled the ultimate patron, the king, to rule effectively. Since power is usually identified as being political and military, sixteenth-century clergy have been seen as members of powerful families, rather than as figures struggling for power in their own right. This article will recount how many of the upper clergy in sixteenth-century France held political positions that made them major ...

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