Francis I (left) and Suleiman I (right) initiated the Franco-Ottoman alliance. They never met in person; this is a composite of two separate paintings by Titian, circa 1530.
As the first non-ideological alliance in effect between a Christian and Muslim state, the alliance attracted heavy controversy for its time and caused a scandal throughout Christendom.[3][4]Carl Jacob Burckhardt (1947) called it "the sacrilegious union of the lily and the crescent".[5] It lasted intermittently for more than two and a half centuries,[6] until the Napoleonic campaign in Ottoman Egypt, in 1798–1801.
^R.C. Spooner, "The Habsburg-Valois Struggle" in G.R. Elton, ed. The New Cambridge modern history: - v.2 The Reformation, 1520-1559 (2nd ed. 1990) pp 377-400, online