Francis I (French: François Ier) (12 September 1494 – 31 March 1547) was King of France from 1515 until his death. During his reign, huge cultural changes took place in France and he has been called France's original Renaissance monarch. His permanent rivalry with the Emperor Charles V for hegemony in Europe was the origin of a long and ruinous military conflict that gave rise to the Protestant revolution.
Francis was an ally of Suleiman the Magnificent, with whom he formed the Franco-Ottoman alliance. His great rivals were King Henry VIII of England and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
An equestrian statue is a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin "eques", meaning "knight", deriving from "equus", meaning "horse". A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an "equine statue". A full-size equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, more recently, military commanders.