«The Silver Age of Piracy»: French pirates in the Atlantic in the first third of the XVI century

The purpose of the study was to find a causal relationship between the activities of king Francis I and the large-scale pirate actions of the captains of the French merchant fleet, Jean Ango. This was necessary to show piracy as a fusion of the military and diplomatic policies of France against Portugal and Spain with the naval experience of warfare on the seas and in the oceans, which had the captains of the merchant fleet of Jean Ango. We can see this connection by the captured and looted of hundreds of ships in Portugal and Spain with the full support of piracy from the French crown. The goal was also to show how France, through piracy and its promotion at the state level, destroyed the system of international agreements and Royal oaths in the Christian world for the sake of its commercial advantage. The author studies and gives examples of numerous acts of piracy, numbering in the hundreds of captured, robbed, and sunk ships, the reasons and conclusions are given why Francis I began to demand «Open seas and oceans» and why he demanded a revision of the borders of the world in the XVI century. The author has considered and found the answers to the questions of what caused the rupture of international treaties, on the part of Francis I. The author has also revealed and shown the facts of multiple penetrations of France on the territory of Portugal and Spain, which later led to attempts by France to establish settlements in Brazil in 1555–1559 and Spanish Florida in 1563–1565, contrary to all international norms and agreements – the Pope’s bulls of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 and subsequent ones. The paper shows that the scale and scope of the pirate actions of French pirates in the Atlantic contributed to the formation of piracy as a mass phenomenon and can be called the «Silver age of world piracy», which falls on the 16^th century, and anticipates the «Golden age of piracy» of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. This term is quite appropriate to introduce for this time, especially if it is considered together with the even larger-scale pirate actions of Berber pirates in the Mediterranean, which are quite well known and described in the scientific literature.