Joan of Arc

Joan was born in 1412 in Domrémy, a village on the Meuse river at the edge of the duchy of Bar, in territory loyal to the French crown ^[1]. Her father, Jacques d'Arc, farmed about fifty acres and held minor local offices; her mother, Isabelle Romée, raised Joan and her siblings in an ordinary rural household. Joan never learned to read or write. She later signed documents with a guided hand, and witnesses from Domrémy remembered her spinning wool, tending animals, and attending church with unusual devotion ^[2].

The France of her childhood was fractured. The Hundred Years' War had entered a disastrous phase for the Valois monarchy after the English victory at Agincourt in 1415, and the 1420 Treaty of Troyes disinherited the dauphin Charles in favor of the English king Henry V ^[3]. Burgundian raiders threatened Domrémy itself; on at least one occasion the villagers fled with their livestock to the nearby town of Neufchâteau. War was not an abstraction for Joan. It was the weather of her youth.

Around the age of thirteen, by her own account at her later trial, Joan began to hear voices she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret ^[1]. Over several years these experiences hardened into a specific conviction: she was to go to the dauphin, see him crowned at Reims, and help drive the English from France. For a female peasant with no connections, the ambition was close to absurd, which makes what followed one of the strangest verified sequences in medieval records.

In 1428 Joan traveled to Vaucouleurs, the nearest stronghold loyal to the dauphin, and asked its captain, Robert de Baudricourt, for an escort to the royal court. He refused and sent her home. She returned early in 1429, and this time her persistence, together with growing local belief in her mission, changed his mind ^[2]. In February 1429 she set out for Chinon in male clothing with a small armed party, crossing more than 300 miles of territory held by hostile or Burgundian forces in about eleven days.

At Chinon she was granted an audience with Charles, the disinherited dauphin. Chroniclers later told of Charles hiding among his courtiers to test her, though the details are uncertain; what is documented is that Charles took her seriously enough to have her examined for weeks by theologians at Poitiers ^[3]. The clerics found nothing heretical and advised that she be put to the test at Orléans, the strategic city on the Loire that English forces had besieged since October 1428. Charles equipped her with armor, a banner, and a military household.

Her arrival transformed her from a curiosity into a public figure. Letters she dictated to the English commanders, demanding their withdrawal from France, survive in copies and show the blunt confidence that both inspired her own side and enraged her enemies ^[4].

The relief of Orléans is the centerpiece of any account of Joan of Arc achievements. She entered the city on April 29, 1429, and within days pressed the French commanders toward direct assaults on the English siege forts. On May 7 she was wounded by an arrow above the breast during the attack on the fort of Les Tourelles yet returned to the fight; the fort fell that evening, and on May 8 the English abandoned the siege ^[1]. A blockade that had lasted more than six months collapsed in nine days after her arrival, and contemporaries on both sides credited her presence with the shift in morale.

The Loire campaign that followed was brief and decisive. French forces under the duke of Alençon, with Joan riding alongside, retook Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency in June 1429, then routed an English field army at Patay on June 18, a defeat that broke the reputation of English arms built at Agincourt ^[3]. The road northeast now lay open, and Joan urged the boldest possible use of it.

On July 17, 1429, Charles was anointed and crowned at Reims cathedral with Joan standing nearby, banner in hand ^[2]. The coronation was her mission's declared objective and its greatest political achievement. Whatever the military value of any single engagement, the ceremony converted a disputed claimant into a consecrated king in the eyes of much of France, and it fatally weakened the legal fiction of the Treaty of Troyes. Later that summer an assault on Paris failed, and Joan was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt at the city walls in September 1429 ^[4]. The court's appetite for aggressive war faded, but the strategic balance of the Hundred Years' War had already tilted.

In the spring of 1430 Joan went to the defense of Compiègne, a town resisting the Burgundians, who were allied with England. During a sortie outside its walls on May 23, 1430, she was pulled from her horse and captured by soldiers of John of Luxembourg, a Burgundian commander ^[1]. After months of captivity, and after an escape attempt in which she leapt from a tower at Beaurevoir, she was sold to the English for 10,000 livres and transferred to Rouen, the center of English power in Normandy.

Her trial opened in January 1431 before a church court headed by Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, a determined partisan of the Anglo-Burgundian cause ^[5]. The charges concerned heresy: her claims of divine voices, her refusal to submit them to the church's judgment, and her wearing of male clothing. The trial record, which survives, shows an illiterate teenager parrying university-trained interrogators for weeks. Asked whether she knew she was in God's grace, a theological trap either way she answered, she replied that if she was not, she prayed God would put her there, and if she was, that God would keep her there ^[5].

Threatened with immediate execution in late May, Joan signed a form of abjuration she likely could not read, then days later resumed male dress in prison and reaffirmed her voices. The court declared her a relapsed heretic. On May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake in the Vieux-Marché square of Rouen, calling on the name of Jesus as she died, according to witnesses who testified decades later ^[2]. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

Joan left no writings in her own hand beyond a signature, so her personality reaches us through two remarkable bodies of testimony: the 1431 trial transcript and the depositions gathered for the retrial of 1455 and 1456, when dozens of people who had known her, from Domrémy villagers to fellow soldiers, described her under oath ^[6]. They portray a young woman who was direct, quick in reply, sometimes sharp-tempered with the army's hangers-on, and rigorous about confession and the Mass. She wept for the enemy dead, several soldiers recalled, and insisted the men around her give up swearing.

She called herself Jehanne la Pucelle, Joan the Maid, and her virginity, verified by matrons at both Poitiers and Rouen, was central to her public identity in an age that linked chastity with spiritual authority ^[3]. She never married. A suit for breach of promise brought against her in a church court at Toul, before her rise, ended in her favor, and she said at trial that she had made no promise. Her male clothing, practical for riding and a protection in captivity, became the legal pretext for her death, though the underlying quarrel was always about her voices and her obedience.

Joan of Arc facts often surprise readers who know only the legend. She was probably about seventeen at Orléans and about nineteen when she died; she gave her age as roughly nineteen at her trial, and no baptismal record survives ^[1]. She carried a banner into battle in preference to using her sword, and she testified that she had never killed anyone.

The verdict of Rouen did not stand. After French forces retook Normandy, Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial that had condemned the woman who helped crown him. With papal approval, a formal retrial known as the nullification or rehabilitation trial gathered testimony between 1455 and 1456, driven in part by a petition from Joan's aging mother, Isabelle ^[6]. On July 7, 1456, the court declared the 1431 proceedings tainted by fraud and legal error and annulled the conviction entirely.

The rehabilitation restored Joan's name but served royal interests too, since a king crowned with the aid of a condemned heretic had an obvious stake in the outcome. Historians therefore read both trials critically, as documents shaped by the politics of their moments. Even so, the paired records give Joan a documentary footprint almost without equal for a fifteenth-century commoner, and they anchor every serious Joan of Arc biography written since ^[5].

Joan's afterlife has been as eventful as her life. She remained a regional and religious memory for centuries, honored each May in Orléans, before the nineteenth century turned her into a national emblem contested by French republicans and Catholics alike ^[7]. The church opened her cause in 1869 at the urging of Félix Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans; she was beatified in 1909 and canonized by Pope Benedict XV on May 16, 1920 ^[8]. That same year the French parliament established a national holiday in her honor, observed on the second Sunday of May.

Her story has fed an enormous cultural output: plays by Schiller and Shaw, Mark Twain's admiring novel, Verdi's opera, Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and a steady stream of scholarship that keeps testing the sources ^[7]. Statues of her stand from Paris to New Orleans, and her name has been claimed by causes across the political spectrum, a sign of how flexible a symbol she became.

Stripped of legend, the verifiable core still astonishes. An illiterate teenager from a border village reached a king, altered the course of the longest war of the Middle Ages, and left trial records vivid enough to speak in her own voice across six centuries ^[1]. That combination of documented fact and enduring mystery explains why Joan of Arc remains one of the most studied lives of the medieval world.