Joan of Arc: The Peasant Girl Who Crowned a King

In the spring of 1429, a teenage peasant girl in a borrowed suit of armour rode into the besieged city of Orleans and, within about a week, did what France's seasoned commanders had failed to do for months: she broke the English siege. She could not read. She had never fought a battle in her life. She claimed she was acting on the direct instructions of saints she heard speaking to her. Two years later she was burned alive as a heretic. Five centuries after that, the Catholic Church declared her a saint. Almost nothing about the life of Joan of Arc is ordinary, and remarkably, almost all of it is documented.

That last point is worth pausing on. For most medieval figures we are squinting at fragments: a chronicle here, a charter there. Joan is different. We have the records of two full trials, including hundreds of pages of testimony, much of it her own words taken down by notaries as she spoke. We can read her replies to her judges. That makes her one of the best-documented people of the entire fifteenth century, and it means we can get unusually close to who she actually was.

A kingdom on its knees

To understand why a peasant girl could matter so much, you have to understand how desperate France had become. The Hundred Years' War, a long, on-and-off dynastic struggle between the kings of England and France, had been grinding on since 1337. By the 1420s it was going catastrophically for the French. In 1415, the English king Henry V had annihilated a much larger French army at Agincourt. The French royal house then tore itself apart in a civil war between two factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, and the Burgundians allied themselves with England.

The result was the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which effectively disinherited the French crown prince, the Dauphin Charles, and recognised the English king as heir to the throne of France. By 1429 the English and their Burgundian allies controlled Paris and most of northern France. The Dauphin Charles had not even been crowned. His cause looked all but lost, and the great city of Orleans, a gateway to the still-loyal south, was under English siege. If Orleans fell, many believed, so did France.

The girl from Domremy

Joan (Jeanne in French) was born around 1412 in the village of Domremy, on the frontier of the fighting, to a reasonably prosperous peasant family. She was devout, hardworking, and, by every account including her own, completely without formal education. From about the age of thirteen she said she began to experience visions and to hear voices, which she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. These voices, she insisted, told her she had a divine mission: to drive the English out of France and see the Dauphin crowned king at Reims, the traditional coronation city.

It is hard to overstate how implausible this was. A teenage girl with no rank, no money and no military experience, proposing to save the kingdom. And yet she was so persistent, and so strangely convincing, that she talked a local garrison commander into giving her an escort to the Dauphin's court at Chinon. There, according to the famous story, Charles tested her by disguising himself among his courtiers, and she reportedly picked him out anyway. Whatever actually happened at that meeting, Charles, a desperate man clutching at any hope, decided to take a chance on her.

The miracle at Orleans

Before they would let her near an army, Charles's advisers had Joan examined for her orthodoxy and, pointedly, for her virginity, since a virgin could not (in the thinking of the time) be in league with the Devil. She passed. Kitted out in armour and carrying a white banner, she was sent with a relief force to Orleans, arriving in late April 1429.

What happened next startled contemporaries. With Joan present, urging relentless and aggressive assault, the French stormed the English siege fortifications. In early May 1429 the key English strongpoints fell, Joan herself was wounded by an arrow to the shoulder but returned to the fighting, and on the 8th of May the English abandoned the siege and withdrew. Orleans was free. A city that had been slowly strangling was relieved in a matter of days after Joan's arrival. To the French it looked unmistakably like a miracle, and Joan became, overnight, the most famous person in the kingdom.

She pressed her advantage. In June the French won a sharp victory at Patay, smashing an English field army. Joan then urged Charles to march deep into hostile territory to Reims, so he could be crowned where French kings had always been crowned. It was a bold, almost reckless move, and it worked. On the 17th of July 1429, Charles VII was anointed and crowned King of France in Reims Cathedral, with Joan standing nearby holding her banner. The disinherited Dauphin was now, by the oldest and holiest French ritual, the king. It was the high point of her life.

Captured, sold, and put on trial

From there things turned. An attempt to retake Paris later in 1429 failed, and Joan was wounded again. Her influence at court waned. Then, in May 1430, while defending the town of Compiegne, she was captured by Burgundian forces. This was a disaster, because the Burgundians were allied to the English. After months of captivity she was sold to the English for a large sum of money. King Charles VII, the man she had crowned, did essentially nothing to ransom or rescue her, a silence that has stained his reputation ever since.

The English wanted Joan dead, but they wanted her destroyed in a particular way: not as a prisoner of war, but as a heretic, so that the king crowned through her efforts would be tainted by association with witchcraft and heresy. So she was handed to a Church court at Rouen, presided over by Pierre Cauchon, a bishop loyal to the English and Burgundian cause. It was, by any honest reading, a political trial dressed in religious robes.

Her own words, under interrogation

Here is where the documentation becomes extraordinary. The Rouen trial of 1431 was recorded in detail, and what comes through the transcript is a frightened but astonishingly quick-witted young woman, alone, illiterate, untrained in theology, fencing verbally with a room full of hostile university-trained clerics, and frequently getting the better of them. They laid traps; she stepped around them.

The most famous example is a question designed to be a death-trap. They asked whether she believed she was in God's grace. It was a theological no-win: claiming certainty of one's own salvation was itself presumptuous heresy, while denying it would be a confession of guilt.

The notaries recorded that the answer stunned her examiners. It was, as one assessor reportedly admitted, a reply that no theologian could have improved upon, and it pulled her out of the trap without conceding anything. Page after page of the transcript reads like this: a teenage peasant holding her own against the cleverest men her enemies could assemble.

The charge that condemned her

In the end her judges could not make the witchcraft charge stick, so they convicted her on what reads, to modern eyes, as a startlingly thin basis. A great deal was made of the fact that she wore men's clothing (soldier's dress and armour), which her accusers framed as a violation of biblical law and an offence against God's order. Under threat of execution, exhausted and frightened, Joan at one point signed a recantation and agreed to wear women's clothes. Days later she put the male clothing back on (whether by her own renewed conviction or because her circumstances in prison left her little choice is itself debated), and her judges declared her a relapsed heretic.

On the 30th of May 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. She was around nineteen years old. Witnesses recorded that she asked to hold a cross and called on the name of Jesus as she died. The English, taking no chances with relics, burned her body more than once and scattered the ashes in the Seine.

Where historians disagree about Joan

Where opinion splits: What were Joan's "voices"? Believers take them as true divine revelation. Many secular historians treat them as sincerely experienced visions and have floated medical explanations (forms of epilepsy, migraine, or other conditions that can produce auditory and visual experiences), though every such diagnosis-at-six-centuries'-distance is speculative and contested. Others stress that visionary experience was simply a recognised part of late-medieval religious life. What almost no serious historian doubts is that Joan herself wholly believed in them and acted with total sincerity.

There is a second, subtler debate about how much credit for the French revival really belongs to Joan personally. Some historians argue she was, above all, a morale weapon: a living symbol who convinced a beaten army that God was on its side, at exactly the moment it needed to believe that. Others credit her with real strategic instinct, especially her insistence on relentless attack and on the politically decisive march to Reims. The likeliest answer combines both: she was not a trained general, but her conviction, aggression and symbolic power changed what a demoralised army believed was possible, and that turned out to be worth more than experience.

A second trial, and a saint

The story does not end at the stake, which is part of what makes it so remarkable. By 1450 the tide of the war had turned decisively in France's favour, and Charles VII, now secure on the throne Joan had helped him win, had an obvious interest in cleaning up the embarrassing fact that his kingship rested partly on a convicted heretic. A fresh investigation was opened, and in 1456 a Church court formally reviewed the Rouen trial, took testimony from dozens of people who had known Joan, and annulled the original verdict. The trial that killed her was declared corrupt and unjust. Joan was, posthumously, exonerated.

Everyone has claimed her

Joan's afterlife has been almost as eventful as her life. Over the centuries she has been claimed by nearly everyone: French nationalists made her a symbol of the nation, the Catholic Church made her a saint, feminists have seen in her a young woman who shattered the limits placed on her sex, and political movements of wildly different stripes have tried to wrap themselves in her banner. She has been the subject of plays by Shakespeare, Schiller and Shaw, of operas, of films from the silent era to the present. Few historical figures have proved so endlessly adaptable.

But strip away all the later appropriations and the bare facts remain staggering. An illiterate teenage girl from a frontier village believed God had chosen her to save her country, persuaded a desperate court to let her try, relieved a besieged city, saw a king crowned, was betrayed and sold, faced down a stacked tribunal with breathtaking composure, and was burned alive before she turned twenty. And she was right, in the end, about almost everything she set out to do. We don't have to share her certainty about the voices to find the rest of it almost unbearably remarkable. The records are there. We can read her answering back.

Image: a fifteenth-century manuscript depiction of Joan of Arc in armour, from a contemporary illustration (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

Read next: The Knights Templar: The Warrior Monks Destroyed by a King in Debt and Rani Lakshmibai: The Legend and Truth of the Queen of Jhansi.

Sources cited

• Regine Pernoud and Marie-Veronique Clin, Joan of Arc: Her Story (St. Martin's Press, 1998).
• Larissa Juliet Taylor, The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc (Yale University Press, 2009).
• W. P. Barrett (trans.), The Trial of Jeanne d'Arc — an English translation of the 1431 trial record.
• Helen Castor, Joan of Arc: A History (Faber & Faber, 2014).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Saint Joan of Arc"; the records of the Trial of Condemnation (1431) and Trial of Rehabilitation (1456).