She was eighteen years old when she rode out of Chinon at the head of a French army, dressed in white armor, carrying a banner embroidered with lilies. In less than two years she had lifted the siege of Orleans, escorted the French king to his coronation, been captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English, convicted of heresy, and burned alive in the market square at Rouen. History has very few lives as concentrated as hers.
In 1429 France was losing. The Hundred Years War had been going long enough that it had stopped feeling like a war and started feeling like a permanent condition β English forces controlling Normandy and Paris, a Burgundian faction allied with England, the French king Charles VII holed up in Chinon without even the ceremony of a proper coronation because the traditional coronation city of Rheims was in enemy hands. Into this situation walked Joan of Arc. She was seventeen, from the village of DomrΓ©my in Lorraine, the daughter of a farmer. She could not read. She had never been to war. She told the people around her that she heard voices β she identified them as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret β and that these voices had given her a mission: lift the siege of Orleans, escort Charles to Rheims, and drive the English out of France. The remarkable thing is not that she believed this. The remarkable thing is that she persuaded anyone else to believe it too, and then that she was right.
Joan of Arc rode out of Chinon in April 1429 at eighteen years old, mounted on a war horse, clad in white armor, carrying a white banner embroidered with lilies. The French soldiers who saw her later described the effect as something they struggled to put into ordinary language.
Getting Anyone to Listen
Before she could save France, Joan had to convince a local military commander to give her access to the king. This was harder than the battles that came after. She arrived at Vaucouleurs β the nearest garrisoned French town β and told the captain of the garrison, Robert de Baudricourt, that she needed to be taken to the Dauphin Charles. He had her sent home. She came back. He dismissed her again. The third time, in January 1429, something shifted β perhaps the deteriorating military situation, perhaps the intensity she projected, perhaps the specific prophecy she apparently made about a French defeat at the Battle of the Herrings, which came true before anyone in Vaucouleurs had received news of it. Baudricourt gave her men and horses for the journey. She crossed roughly three hundred fifty miles of largely enemy-controlled territory in eleven days in winter, dressed as a man for safety, reached Chinon, and talked her way into an audience with Charles. According to accounts from the meeting, she picked him out of a crowd where he had deliberately tried to disguise himself among his courtiers. Charles was cautious. He had Joan examined by theologians for three weeks, who found no evidence of heresy and no evidence that she was possessed. He then agreed to let her lead the relief expedition to Orleans.
Orleans and the Battles That Followed
Orleans had been under English siege since October 1428. The city was not surrounded completely β the French could still move supplies in and people out along the Loire β but the English ring was tightening, and the strategic situation was bad enough that the loss of Orleans would likely have ended any realistic hope for the French cause. Joan arrived in late April 1429 with a relief army and supplies. The effect on the garrison's morale was, by multiple accounts, immediate and striking. The rough soldiers who had been demoralized by months of siege reportedly cleaned up their language and behavior around her. Whether this was genuine piety or simply a response to the extraordinary circumstances β a teenage girl who spoke with calm certainty about divine mission β the effect was the same. She was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow during the assault on the English fortifications surrounding the city. Her soldiers started to pull back. She pulled out the arrow herself, had the wound dressed, went back to the field. The English fort fell the next day. The siege broke on May 8, 1429. The Loire campaign that followed in June 1429 was even more decisive β a series of battles that cleared the English from the Loire valley and opened the road to Rheims. Joan was at the front of every engagement, carrying her banner rather than a weapon, which was a deliberate choice: she later testified at her trial that she had never killed anyone and that her banner meant more to her than her sword. Charles VII was crowned at Rheims cathedral on July 17, 1429, with Joan standing beside him holding her white banner. She reportedly wept. When the ceremony was over, she knelt at his feet and told him her mission was complete, and asked to be allowed to go home.