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A little girl's dreams: With her friends in frilly dresses, she becomes a beaming princess at her birthday party. She shops with her mother for a princess costume on Halloween. But the real story of a princess rarely fits the fantasy. So it was with Princess Renée of France.

"Had I had a beard I would have been the king of France," she fumed. "I have been defrauded by that confounded Salic Law." Renée was convinced that she was as fully qualified to succeed her father as a male heir.

The Salic laws of the Franks had been codified some 1,000 years earlier. Most often cited was the law excluding females from ascending the throne. Renée would become an important figure in the political and religious wrangling of the 16th century, but not as Queen of France. In fact, she would be the Protestant Reformer John Calvin's leading lady—a strategically positioned woman with influence in both France and Italy.

As much as a contemporary feminist might want to grasp the hand of Renée and make her one of us, she lived in a vastly different world. Hers was at the crossroads between medieval and modern, and hers was a world of royalty with all its refinement as well as its reprehensible rules and customs.

Born in the autumn of 1510, Renée was a year younger than John Calvin and was less than a week shy of her seventh birthday when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Her father was King Louis XII of France. In many respects, he could be classified as a good king. A devout Catholic, he was known as "the Father of the People" for his tax and legal reforms.

Her mother, Anne the Duchess of Brittany, was a shrewd administrator, a devoted mother, and regarded as the richest woman in all of Europe. She fought hard to keep Brittany out of reach of her husband's control and hoped to have Renée succeed her. But she died before Renée reached the age of four. Her husband granted her realm to his successor, thus bringing Brittany under French control.

Renée had every reason to be miffed by the Salic Law that made her third cousin, Francis, king after her father died. None of her father's three wives bore him a son; thus his nephew would inherit the throne. But a daughter was valuable in other ways. In foreign policy, Louis XII was an expansionist. It was in this arena that Renée became a prized pawn.

The process of matchmaking began when Renée was a young girl. At 17 she was married to Ercole II of Italy, the son of none other than femme fatale Lucrezia Borgia. Lucrezia's father was the infamous Rodrigo Borgia (a.k.a. Pope Alexander VI), and her brother the even more infamous Cesare Borgia.

Before she reached her teen years, Lucrezia had twice—through her father's schemes—become engaged only to have both weddings called off. Her first marriage was annulled because it had not been consummated, though Lucrezia was pregnant with the child of another man—some say her brother Cesare. When the little boy was three, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull establishing the boy as the son of Cesare, but he quickly changed his mind and issued another bull (kept secret for many years) claiming the boy was his own son. Lucrezia's name was left entirely out of the Pope's bulls.

Lucrezia married again but became a widow after her husband, according to rumor, was murdered by Cesare. She then married the Prince of Ferrera, Alfonso d'Este, the man who would become Renée's father-in-law. Imagine having Lucrezia for a mother-in-law! Lucrezia died in 1519 when Renée, living in France, was only nine. Nevertheless, Renée surely must have been aware of the gossip surrounding this most celebrated and scandalous woman—a woman whose life has since been widely portrayed in art and literature and film.

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