Early sixteenth-century Western Europe was dominated by a trio of powerful and ambitious monarchs. Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), the first English king to be addressed as ‘majesty’, was courted by both the French king and the Holy Roman Emperor, and famously broke with the pope. Francis I (r. 1515–47) reinforced the absolutist claims of his immediate predecessors as King of France and unsuccessfully challenged Charles V for the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks under Suleiman