Though France succeeded in making with new allies, the pope and Venice, the League of Cognac, [Sidenote: May, 1526] and though Germany was at that time embarrassed by the Turkish invasion, the ensuing war turned out favorably to the emperor. The ascendancy of Charles was so marked that peace again had to be made in his favor in 1529. The treaty of Cambrai, as it was called, was the treaty of Madrid over again except that Burgundy was kept by France. She gave up, however, Lille, Douai and other territory in the north and renounced her suzerainty over Milan and Naples. Francis agreed to pay a ransom of two million crowns for his sons. Though he was put to desperate straits to raise the money, levying a 40 per cent. income tax on the clergy and a 10 per cent. income tax on the nobles, he finally paid the money and got back his children in 1530. By this time France was so exhausted, both in {187} money and men, that a policy of peace was the only one possible for some years. Montmorency, the principal minister of the king, continued by an active diplomacy to stir up trouble for Charles. While suppressing Lutherans at home he encouraged the Schmalkaldic princes abroad, going to the length of inviting Melanchthon to France in 1535. With the English minister Cromwell he came to an agreement, notwithstanding the Protestant tendencies of his policy. An alliance was also made with the Sultan Suleiman, secretly in 1534, and openly proclaimed in 1536. In order to prepare for the military strife destined to be renewed at the earliest practical moment, an ordinance of 1534 reorganized and strengthened the army. Far more important for the life of France than her incessant and inconclusive squabbling with Spain was the transformation passing over her spirit. It is sometimes said that if the French kings brought nothing else back from their campaigns in Italy they brought back the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Reformation] There is a modicum of truth in this, for there are some traces of Italian influence before the reign of Francis I. But the French spirit hardly needed this outside stimulus. It was awakening of itself. Scholars like William Bude and the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets like Marot, were the natural product of French soil. Everywhere, north of the Alps no less than south, there was a spontaneous efflorescence of intellectual activity.