In the spring of 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl arrived at the besieged city of Orléans carrying a banner and, according to the exhausted French soldiers waiting inside, something rarer still: hope. She had traveled hundreds of miles through enemy-controlled territory, talked her way past a skeptical garrison commander — twice — and convinced a wary royal court to give her an army. Nine days after she arrived, the English abandoned the siege entirely. The story of Joan of Arc is one of the most remarkable in medieval history: a peasant’s daughter, guided by visions she believed were divine, who stepped into a war she had no business winning and very nearly changed its outcome single-handedly.
A France Torn Apart
To understand what Joan walked into, you have to understand just how dire France’s situation was in the early fifteenth century. The Hundred Years’ War — which had begun in 1337 over English territorial claims in France — had ground on for nearly a century, and nearly all the fighting had taken place on French soil, devastating its economy and exhausting its people.
France’s internal politics made things worse. King Charles VI suffered recurring bouts of mental illness and was frequently unable to rule, leaving the country prey to a savage rivalry between two noble factions: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. When the Duke of Burgundy ordered the assassination of the Duke of Orléans in 1407, France effectively collapsed into civil war. Henry V of England exploited this chaos brilliantly, invading in 1415. By 1418, the Burgundians had taken Paris. A year later, the Duke of Burgundy was himself assassinated during peace negotiations with the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, whose Armagnac partisans were responsible — and the new Duke of Burgundy promptly allied with the English in retaliation.
The Treaty of Troyes, signed during one of Charles VI’s periods of incapacity by his wife Isabeau of Bavaria, dealt the Dauphin a near-fatal blow: it disinherited him and arranged for the French throne to pass to the infant Henry VI of England. Rumors spread that the Dauphin was not even Charles VI’s legitimate son. By the time Joan first sought an audience at court, the Dauphin controlled only a rump of southern France, Orléans was surrounded, and French morale had cratered.
Visions in a Village Garden
Joan was born around 1412 in Domrémy, a small village in the Meuse valley in northeast France. Her father, Jacques d’Arc, was a propertied peasant farmer with about twenty hectares of land who supplemented the family income as a local official. Joan was not taught to read or write as a child, and she grew up doing household chores, spinning wool, and helping in the fields. Her mother gave her a religious education.
The war came to Domrémy when Joan was still young. By 1419 the conflict had begun to affect the area; in 1425, the village was attacked and cattle stolen. Joan later testified that it was around this time, when she was about thirteen, that she had her first vision — a figure she identified as Saint Michael, surrounded by angels, appearing in her garden. She said she wept because she wanted to go with them. Throughout her life, she reported frequent visions of Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine, often when the church bells rang. She testified that she swore a vow of virginity to these voices, and the two female saints she identified were both virgin martyrs known for resisting powerful enemies — women who had preserved their virtue to the death.
By 1428, prophecies were circulating in the French countryside that an armed virgin would come forward to save France. Joan implied she was the promised maiden, reminding those around her of a saying that France would be destroyed by a woman but restored by a virgin. In May of that year, she walked to the nearby town of Vaucouleurs and asked the garrison commander, Robert de Baudricourt, for an armed escort to the royal court at Chinon. He refused harshly and sent her home.
Convincing a Crown
Joan returned to Vaucouleurs in January 1429, was refused a second time, but gradually won over two of Baudricourt’s soldiers, Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy. Their backing — combined, apparently, with the sheer force of Joan’s conviction — finally moved Baudricourt to grant her a third meeting in February 1429. He agreed to let her travel to Chinon. She put on men’s clothing provided by her escorts and the people of Vaucouleurs, and she would continue wearing men’s clothes for the rest of her life.
At the royal court in Chinon, the seventeen-year-old Joan met Charles VII, who was twenty-six. She told him she had come to raise the siege of Orléans and lead him to Reims for his coronation. They had a private exchange that made a strong impression on Charles; his confessor later testified that Joan told him she had reassured the Dauphin of his legitimacy as the true king of France. Still cautious, Charles sent Joan to Poitiers to be examined by a council of theologians, who declared her a good Catholic and a good person. They stopped short of ruling on the divine source of her inspiration, but agreed that sending her to Orléans could be useful to the king and would serve as a test.
Nine Days at Orléans
Joan arrived at Orléans in April 1429, wielding her banner and bringing new energy to the demoralized French force. Orléans was the last major obstacle standing between the English and complete control of the remaining French territory under Charles — its fall would almost certainly have ended his cause. Nine days after Joan’s arrival, the English abandoned the siege. It was a stunning reversal.
Joan pressed the advantage. She encouraged the French to aggressively pursue the English in what became known as the Loire Campaign, which culminated in another decisive victory at Patay. The road to Reims opened. The French army advanced essentially unopposed, and in July 1429, Charles VII was crowned king of France at Reims, with Joan standing at his side. These victories were not just military — they transformed French morale and lent Charles’s kingship a new legitimacy that the Treaty of Troyes had tried to strip from him.
Capture, Trial, and the Stake
Success at Orléans and Reims made Joan a symbol, but the months that followed were harder. An attempted siege of Paris in September 1429 failed, and so did a siege of La Charité in November. These setbacks eroded the court’s confidence in her, and by early 1430 she was organizing volunteers largely on her own initiative rather than leading royal armies.
In May 1430, attempting to relieve the town of Compiègne — besieged by the Burgundians — Joan was captured by Burgundian troops. She tried repeatedly to escape but failed, and in November she was handed over to the English. The trial that followed, presided over by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, charged her with heresy: blaspheming by wearing men’s clothing, claiming to follow visions that were demonic, and refusing to submit her words and deeds to the judgment of the Church. She was found guilty and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431. She was approximately nineteen years old.
Twenty-five years later, in 1456, an inquisitorial court reinvestigated the trial and overturned the verdict entirely, declaring it had been tainted by deceit and procedural errors. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV canonized Joan of Arc. Two years later, she was declared one of the patron saints of France.
What We Still Don’t Know
Even after centuries of scholarship, significant gaps remain. Joan’s exact birth date is unknown, and her own statements about her age were vague. The precise nature of her private exchange with Charles VII at Chinon — the moment that reportedly convinced the skeptical Dauphin — was never fully recorded, and accounts of it rest on secondhand testimony. The true spelling and origin of her family name remain uncertain; the familiar “d’Arc” form was not recorded until 1455, twenty-four years after her death, and she herself may never have been called by that name. Whether the prophetic traditions she drew on shaped her own sense of mission, or whether others imposed them onto her afterward, is a question historians continue to debate. And the nature of her visions — spiritual experiences, symptoms of a neurological condition, or something else entirely — remains, appropriately, beyond the reach of any historical verdict.
Sources
– This article is a synthesis of the Wikipedia article on Joan of Arc (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc), which itself cites the underlying scholarship. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.
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