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…