A reply to /u/WuhanWTF

The Great Michael was mentioned in Angus Kostam's Sovereigns of the Sea, a fantastic read on Renaissance shipbuilding in Europe.

The Scottish King James IV was a modernist king in every sense. He supported studies of science, especially as relevant to military technology. He founded a gun foundry, a college of surgeons, universities, and even a printing press (the first in Scotland!).

At the same time, he followed an aggressive foreign policy. The Wars of the Roses was not long ago, and had left Henry VII as king of England. This was the father of Henry VIII who was to lead the separation of the Church of England from Roman Catholicism.

James IV supported a rival claimant to the English throne, effectively declaring war on England. The problem was, England was much richer than Scotland. As England started to build her fleet, James' ambition was checked temporarily. He then became obsessed with founding a royal Scottish navy in response to English plans for naval invasion of Scotland. This seemed like a good idea, as it would also help Scottish merchant fleets to trade with Europe.

James hired French shipbuilders and started to build a small navy, starting with the Margaret, of comparable size to the English Mary Rose. His ambition still grew, to the point the Scots needed a new shipbuilding site to facilitate an even larger ship. The chosen site was Newhaven, and the new even-larger ship was the Michael. How big was the Michael? This is in contention. Some say it's about 2.5x larger than the Margaret and Mary Rose. Some say this was an impossibility given the techniques of the time. But no doubt it was quite a bit larger and very impressive.

Henry VIII could not allow this threat to remain unanswered, so he commissioned the Henri Grace a Dieu, another fantastically large ship, to compete with the Michael. In tonnage, this was even larger than the Michael, and completed not in double time but in triple time. So Henry meant business, great business for his shipbuilders.

The French saw the Scots as an erstwhile ally, offering a treaty by which Scotland was to invade England if England was invading France. As this happened, the Michael and Margaret joined the French fleet to bombard an English stronghold in Ireland. At the same time, James IV led a land campaign where he was caught in battle and died.

This led to the Michael being sold to the French in 1514, after all she was in French waters as part of a French naval contingent at that time.

There is no mention of that ship being used in a crusade and I am not aware that James IV ever had any plans to join in a crusade, nor that Louis XII did, either. This may be a great showcase why Wikipedia isn't a great source of information.