Thanks for downloading the NRTIME podcast. For more details about NRTIME and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, in the spring of 1526,000 English men, women and servants followed their king across the sea to France.

They weren't part of an invasion force, but were attendance to King Henry VIII, traveling to take part in the greatest and most conspicuous to play a display of wealth and culture and courtly sports that Europe had ever seen.

They were met by Francis I, a France, and 6,000 French noble men, women and servants. On English soil in northern France, the English erected a temporary palace.

There were elaborate tents, jousting, pavilions, and golden fountains spouting perpetual clarity. For just over two weeks, they created a temporary town, the size of Norwich, then England's second most popular city, on the camp, new drab door or the field of the cloth of gold.

What drove the French in the English to create such an extraordinary event? What did the two sides do when they got there and what did anything was achieved?

With me to discuss the field of the cloth of gold is John Guy, fellow of Clark College University of Cambridge, Stephen Gunn, fellow and tutor in history at Merton College Oxford University, and Penny Roberts, senior lecturer in history at the University of Warwick.

Stephen Gunn, can we start with an outline of the European geopolitics of the time, around 1520, where are the main powers?

Well, there were three leading powers in Western Europe in the early 16th century, and of those three England was the smallest. England had been quite an aggressive political power in the 14th and 15th centuries, had a well-established system of government, but its population was only about two and a half million.

France, on the other hand, was much larger, a population something like 16 million, had expanded dramatically over the previous 70 years, places like Brittany, Gascony, Normandy, Provolse, being taken under the control of the French crown.

France had a tax system, which was able to raise taxes without the consent of Parliament, of the Parliament, the kind the English kings had to go to, and France had a standing army.

And then the most unpredictable in a way of the European powers was the new multiple monarchy being put together by Charles of Habsburg.

Charles of Habsburg had been ruler of the Netherlands since he was six. When he was 16, he became king of the Spanish kingdoms, which he inherited from one of his grandfathers.

And when he was 19, he inherited the Habsburg hereditary lands in Austria, southern and western Germany, from his other grandfather, and he was then elected Holy Roman Emperor, Emperor of Germany.

So Charles of Habsburg had put together the biggest empire in Europe for 700 years, and nobody knew quite what he was going to do with it.

Clearly he was a rival of France, there were territorial disputes along the Pyrenees in Italy, in the border between what's now Belgium and France.

And one of the big questions at the field of cloth of gold was which side would England find itself on in that dispute?

That's extremely clear, so we have tiny England, expanding in powerful and confident France, and then this huge empire, as you say, the biggest in Charlemagne for 700 years, but just to put it in, we didn't develop this at the moment at all.

On the east, lurking on the east were the Ottomans, who in 1529, nine years after the field of cloth, were at the gates of Vienna.

And so they were out there having some sort of bringing some sort of pressure in from the east.

The Ottoman Empire had been expanding in a way like the French Monarchy very dramatically over the previous 70 years, taking Constantinople, overrun Serbia, Bulgaria, were about to overrun Hungary, and already by the 1490s, you could see the fires lit by the Ottoman raiding parties if you went up to the top of the church towers in Venice.

...