"Maid" of piety and patriotism: Joan of Arc, nicknamed "the Maid," was one of history's first modern patriot/nationalists. Her unique blend of piety and patriotism laid the foundation for a free, unified France. (History: Struggle for Freedom).

The afternoon of May 7, 1429 was typical of late spring in France's Loire Valley. The waters of the Loire River, still muddy from the spring rains, ran past newly plowed fields and the emerging foliage of hedgerows and forests. Yellowhammers, chaffinches, and other songbirds sang from the fences. But against the bucolic freshness of the scenery, the city of Orleans stood in stark contrast. The smoke of war hung thickly over the city, located on the north bank of the Loire about 80 miles south of Paris, while carrion fowl circled over the surrounding countryside. Directly across the river from the walled city, a battle had been raging for most of the day. French troops were seeking to liberate the city from the English, who had been besieging Orleans for almost 18 months. They were assaulting the English garrison defending the Tourelles, the two massive towers that guarded the first arch of the bridge leading to the city. But despite wave after wave of attacks on the defensive earthworks near the riverbank, th e French were beaten back. The British defenders, led by the capable Sir William Glasdale, poured cannon-shot, bow, and crossbow fire into the ranks of the attackers. By late afternoon, the French forces were demoralized, and prepared to break off the assault.

As the trumpet began sounding the retreat, a young woman emerged from a nearby vineyard, where she had been praying fervently for victory over the English. Dressed in full battle gear and seated astride a warhorse, she might have been mistaken for a man except for her long flowing hair and slight physique. She carried a gleaming sword and bore a wound received only that morning from a crossbow bolt that had struck her below the collarbone. Seeing the French forces retreat, she rushed forward to the edge of the earthwork and wrested her standard from its bearer. She then raised the standard and shook it vigorously, signaling the troops to rally. Seeing the signal, the French forces turned and resumed their assault on the earthworks with renewed morale.

The people of Orleans, watching the contest from the walls of the city, decided to help out when they saw the latest assault. The bridge between the Tourelles and the city had been partially destroyed 18 months earlier, when the retreating French abandoned the twin towers at the beginning of the siege. Nevertheless, several valiant citizens constructed a makeshift catwalk Out of a long piece of gutter and some wood and used it to cross onto the remaining part of the bridge, intending to attack the English defenders from the rear. Another group of citizens ran a barge loaded with wood, horse-bones, shoes, sulphur, and other unpleasant items under the wooden section of bridge that connected the Tourelles to the bank of the river where the English defenses were concentrated, and set it afire, intending either to burn down the bridge or to smoke the English out.

Either way, the strategem worked. Having resisted fiercely all day, the English suddenly wilted. The young woman in soldier's attire led the final assault, shouting to her adversary within the towers, "Glasdale! Glasdale! Yield! Yield to the King of Heaven! You have called me a prostitute, but I have great pity on your soul and your men's souls!" The French swarmed over the defenses "like a flock of birds lighting upon a hedgerow," as one chronicler is reported to have described the event. The English tried to retreat into the Tourelles themselves, but as Glasdale and his men began crossing the bridge, now ablaze from the fire on the barge, it collapsed into the river. Glasdale and many others, pulled under by the weight of their armor, were drowned.

Led by their woman commander, the triumphant French forces returned to the city of Orleans, where they received a hero's welcome. On the following day, the remaining English forces, after a display of defiance, retreated from their 18-month siege, and the city of Orleans Was liberated. It was the turning point of the century-long pageant of destruction known as the Hundred Years War, and the first, but by no means the last, triumph of the French forces against the English under the leadership of the extraordinary woman-soldier and French patriot, Joan of Arc.

War Without End

By the time Joan of Arc was born, in 1412 in the village of Domremy in the region of Champagne, France had already been at war with the English for more than 70 years. What had begun as a dynastic struggle between the English Plantagenets and the French Valois, with roots stretching all the way back to the Norman conquest of England, had turned into a transgenerational war of attrition played out mostly on French soil. The English, regarded until the outbreak of the war as a barbarous and backward people from an inhospitable, windswept island, shocked the French and the rest of Europe with their battlefield prowess. Relying on the superior technology of the Welsh long-bow, which fired arrows tipped with lethal four-sided "bodkins" capable of piercing armor at 60 yards, the English forces were more than a match for the French with their less effective crossbows. With the battles of Crecy and Poitiers, in 1346 and 1356, respectively, English forces decisively defeated numerically superior French armies. In addi tion, the English carried out frequent chevauchees -- indiscriminate raids across the French countryside characterized by looting, burning, rapine, and murder.

By the early 15th century, the English possessed most of southwestern France -- Aquitaine and Gascony -- including the city of Bordeaux. Moreover, a nasty dispute between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions, which erupted into civil war in the early 1400s, divided France against herself.

Then came the catastrophe at Agincourt in 1415, when Joan of Arc was three years old. The English, led by Henry V and numbering less than 5,000 troops, destroyed a French force of between 40,000 and 50,000 men. The siege of Caen in Normandy followed two years later, in which English forces massacred the city's entire population after battering down the walls. Having witnessed that display of ferocity, the rest of Normandy quickly surrendered.

The final nail in the French coffin, or so it appeared, was the infamous Treaty of Troyes signed in 1420 between the English and the Burgundians. Within a few months, the combined English and Burgundian forces had driven the Armagnacs out of Paris; the French capital, along with the rest of northern France, soon became an English possession. To Joan of Arc and her contemporaries, the final conquest of France must have seemed a certainty; an English regent, the Duke of Bedford, sat on the throne in Paris, and roughly half the country was under Anglo-Burgundian control. France's rightful king, Charles VII, languished with his retinue in the remaining Armagnac-controlled region in the southeast. The English viewed France as English territory, and the French justifiably regarded the English as invincible.

But Providence, or fate, had other ideas. The illiterate peasant girl, Joan of Arc, began at a tender age to have visions, which she ascribed to God, informing her that she was to be an instrument in liberating France. Joan of Arc is a fascinating figure precisely because she was a blend of the medieval and the modern, a humble peasant who claimed to be a visionary and to be on a mission from God, who was nevertheless willing to offend her contemporaries by donning men's clothing to lead the king's armies into battle. Hers was the time of the city-state, the duchy, and the appanage, when national boundaries and civic loyalties shifted like sand, yet Joan herself is often reckoned as one of the first modern patriot/nationalists. She envisioned an independent, unified France, and against all odds, she planted this same vision in the weak and indecisive Charles VII and in most of his generals and noblemen.

Humble Beginnings 

In 1428, Joan was still unknown, aside from her friends and neighbors in Domremy, who marveled at her extraordinary piety and her sweet and innocent temperament. She took communion as often as possible, and prayed constantly. And her visions answered her. They told her to seek out the dauphin, as Charles VII was referred to, and to persuade him to let her lead his armies against the English at Orleans, where she would be victorious. She was then to escort Charles VII to Rheims, in the heart of Anglo-Burgundian territory, to be crowned.

She eventually persuaded a skeptical local nobleman, Robert de Baudricourt, to send her to the dauphin for an audience. Together with a small detachment of soldiers and followers, Joan made the perilous journey, partly through enemy territory, to Chinon, where Charles VII was holding court.

Having surrounded himself with sycophants, manipulators, and outright traitors, the dauphin was reluctant at first to grant an audience to the outspoken peasant girl, at that time just 16 years old. La Tremoille, his favorite minister, was quite possibly in cahoots with the enemy, and worked assiduously to keep Joan away from Charles. The monstrous Gilles de Rais, a Satanist who became a mass-murderer of children and the inspiration for the fictitious Bluebeard, was also among the dauphin's most trusted confidants. Charles himself was homely, stunted, and haunted by doubts over his legitimacy, his mother Isabeau having probably had a lengthy affair with Charles' uncle Louis of Orleans. Moreover, his father's madness had doubtless contributed to a less than ideal upbringing. Contemporaries almost uniformly described the young dauphin as weak, indecisive, and neurotic.

Into the presence of this pathetic figure Joan was finally admitted on the evening of February 25, 1429. Unbeknownst to Joan, the king and his courtiers had devised a test to find out whether the peasant girl had any gifts of discernment. A cousin of Charles, the Count of Clermont, was arrayed in royal robes and seated on the dauphin's throne. According to a later account given at Joan's trial, "she at once saw that it was not the king, and that she would know him well if she saw him, although she had never till then seen him. And afterwards a squire was brought, and they feigned that he was the king, but she well knew that it was not he." Astonishingly, Joan picked Out Charles, shabbily dressed and skulking behind a group of more gaudily attired noblemen and, going up to him, removed her hat. When Charles insisted that he was not the king, Joan, unruffled, replied "in God's name, gentle prince, it is you and no other."

As a result of this miraculous act of recognition and a subsequent private conference with the dauphin, Charles was persuaded that Joan was no ordinary peasant girl, and might possibly be able to help him. He sent Joan to Poitiers for church authorities to examine her. After several days of probing questions and even a physical examination to prove her virginity, Joan returned to Chinon with an ecclesiastical endorsement.

Charles, reassured though still fearful, at last gave Joan the army she had requested, vested her with full authority over the troops, and gave her leave to march to the aid of Orleans. Joan's extraordinary gifts now came to the fore. Although she had no equestrian training, she quickly mastered horseback riding, handling her steed with the confidence and skill of a seasoned cavalryman. Her piety was more than skin deep; besides spending hours daily in prayer and worship, she insisted on godly conduct among her men. She drove prostitutes out of camp and forbade the use of profanity. She even brought priests on the campaign, to travel with her at the head of the army, praying and singing psalms.

And her men responded. The 4,000 or so soldiers in her army, led by the Duke of Alencon, believed devoutly in Joan and in her mission. Of special note was the piratical battle-hardened veteran La Hire, known for his appalling profanities and attitudes toward religion that, for the day, bordered on blasphemy. Yet he became devoted to Joan, surprising everyone by meekly submitting to Joan's request to confess his sins regularly and to refrain from using obscene language.

Prior to the campaign, Joan had already dictated a letter to the Duke of Bedford, regent of France, demanding that he withdraw from Orleans. Using the nickname by which she became universally known, "Ia Pucelle" ("the Maid"), Joan ordered Bedford to "deliver up to the Maid sent by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken and violated in France." She continued boldly, "I have been sent by the King of Heaven to throw you out of all France," and concluded the letter enjoining the proud English regent to "take yourself off to your own land, for God's sake, or else await tidings from the Maid whom you will soon see to your hurt."

Liberation of the Loire Valley

Bedford doubtless assumed that his men at Orleans would make short work of this ignorant, headstrong girl. It was not the last time he would underestimate the Maid. When Joan and her forces arrived at Orleans, they were mocked by the English in their makeshift siege fortresses, or bastilles, that ringed the city. Joan approached the Tourelles from the destroyed bridge leading out from the city, and, according to eyewitness Louis de Coutes:

She addressed the English opposite, requesting them in God's name to retire, otherwise she would drive them away. And one called the Bastard of Granville answered Joan most abusively, asking whether she expected them to surrender to a woman, and calling the French who were with Joan "unbelieving pimps."

To the chorus of abuse Glasdale himself is reported to have added his voice, insulting Joan's honor and promising to have her burned as a witch. To this Joan responded that Glasdale was a liar and would die unshriven -- that is, without the benefit of extreme unction or "last rites."

After a brief but fierce battle, Joan and her forces defeated the English garrison occupying the bastille of Saint-Loup, raising the hopes of the citizens of the hard-pressed city. There followed victories over the forces in the bastilles of Saint-Jean-Le-Blanc and Augustins. The latter was a particularly sharp affray. Joan, though taunted by the English and wounded in the foot by a caltrop (a spiked ball left to cripple horses), led her men into battle, calling "go forward boldly in the name of God!" Inspired by her extraordinary courage, the French waded through the storm of arrows and successfully assailed the English stronghold.

The next day, Joan and her men arose early to assault the Tourelles. As already recounted, the daylong battle ended with the defeat of the English and the untimely death of Joan's tormentor Glasdale. The news of the Maid's success spread rapidly across France; the campaign of Orleans was the first English reversal in decades, and seriously tarnished the veneer of English invincibility.

Following the liberation of Orleans, Joan and her forces set out to drive the English from other cities and towns along the Loire. Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency fell in rapid succession, as the French, buoyed by their conviction that Providence was aiding their undertaking, overwhelmed garrisons of English soldiers increasingly convinced that Joan of Arc was a witch or a fiend sent by the devil to torment them.

The high point of the Loire campaign was at Patay, where Joan exhorted the dauphinist commanders to use their spurs in the attack, and promised them that they would be guided to their greatest victory yet. Alerted to the whereabouts of the English by the shouts of some soldiers who had flushed a stag from the woods, the French forces caught their adversaries completely by surprise and overran English positions before their vaunted archers could dismount and position their bows. The battle turned into a rout, with over 2,000 English killed and at least 200 taken prisoner, while only a handful of French died. Joan did her best to prevent her men from committing battlefield atrocities, at one point comforting a mortally wounded English soldier and protecting him from the French with their "misericords," small daggers used to dispatch the enemy wounded.

With the decisive victory at Patay, the tide of war had turned in favor of the French. The English retreated north towards Paris, and Joan at last persuaded Charles to accompany her to Rheims, deep in enemy territory, to be crowned. Joan escorted the dauphin north with an army of 12,000 men, receiving the surrender of many Burgundian towns and cities along the way. Arriving at Rheims, Charles VII was formally crowned king of all France, with a beaming Joan of Arc beside him. His coronation, though a purely political act muted by the reality of continued English occupation, was an act of courage and decisiveness that propelled Charles VII to greatness. As a newly crowned monarch, he began to seek to make peace with his Burgundian rivals. In the years to come, it was this oncetimid, reluctant ruler who forged an alliance with the Burgundians against the English and eventually drove the invaders from France, except for the enclave at Calais.

Capture and Trial

But Joan of Arc's career was to follow a different trajectory. From Rheims, she returned to her campaigning, and soon attempted an assault on Paris. However, the English repulsed her forces and Joan was discouraged by warnings from her visions that the enemy would soon take her, and that she would suffer a martyr's death. Undaunted, she continued to fight the English until, as she had foreseen, Burgundian forces captured her in battle near Compiegne and turned her over to the English.

The final phase of Joan's short life was both tragic and triumphant. Imprisoned at Rouen, she was in constant peril from her guards, who threatened her and attempted on more than one occasion to rape her. Under such conditions, she insisted on continuing to wear men's clothing, believing, as she told her captors, that they would be better protection than a woman's dress.

Her trial began in February of 1431. The English intended the trial to be a mere formality to muster the necessary evidence that Joan was a witch and a heretic. They planned to humiliate and discredit the Maid before putting her to death. But Joan upstaged her inquisitors during the trial, displaying a keen intellect coupled with a genuine and guileless bearing completely at odds with the slanders that the English had circulated against her. She sparred with her tormentors from the first over the matter of her oath to tell the truth. She stoutly refused to answer questions concerning her visions, which she held to be too personal or too sacred to discuss, and she told the inquisitors so.

Though denied the right to receive communion, Joan remained unswervingly true to her faith and to her God, frustrating attempts to condemn her as a heretic. On one occasion, one of her interrogators, hoping to entrap her, asked Joan: "Do you believe you are in a state of grace?" The question was a theological trap: Either she admitted she was not in a state of grace, or she presumed to know God's mind on the subject. But Joan, perceiving the pitfalls, replied, with an adroitness that stunned the judges, "if I am not, may God put me in it; and if I am may God keep me in it."

As the trial dragged on, Joan won many admirers, even among her enemies. On one occasion, Joan, responding frankly to a question as to whether she had ever seen English killed, replied: "In God's name, yes. How gently you talk! Why don't they leave France and go back to their own country?" Hearing this, a certain English lord in the audience is said to have commented: "Really, this is a fine woman. If only she was English!" Another witness remarked, after Joan had confounded the judges through several days of grueling interrogation, that "up to now I have seen nothing but good and honour in her and know nothing reprehensible: but I do not know what will happen at the end. God knows."

Finally, Joan's inquisitors persuaded her to sign a statement of abjuration, which her detractors have interpreted as a sign of fickleness. In Joan's defense, it must be remembered that she was only 19 years old, and had been subjected to months of extreme psychological torment. She had always indicated unwavering faith in her church and her religion, and loyalty to the ecclesiastical authorities. On this occasion, she told the inquisitors: "In what concerns submission to the Church, I have already replied to them. Let the record of everything I have said and done be sent to Rome, to [the Pope]. I submit myself to him and in the first place to God. And as to my words and my actions, I said and did them moved by God.... [A]nd if there is some fault [with them], then it is mine and no one else's." She remained loyal to Charles VII, insisting that he was "a good Christian." Nevertheless, faced with the prospect of being burned alive that very day, with the executioner standing by with his cart, Joan, claiming no t to understand its articles, reluctantly signed the abjuration.

The English were furious at this unexpected reversal. They meant to make an example of Joan, but now she had eluded their grasp; the sentence now pronounced was imprisonment instead of death. But Joan's enemies knew that, if she could be induced to put on men's clothing once again, she could be accused as a relapsed heretic. They therefore contrived to replace the woman's attire in her cell with a bag of men's clothing, leaving Joan with no alternative to protect her modesty. Joan doubtless knew that to put on the clothing was a death sentence, but she believed that God was disappointed in her for succumbing to very human fears.

Joan was immediately dragged before the jubilant inquisitors, who turned her over to the civil authorities to suffer the cruelest form of death that human deviltry has ever devised. Told of her final sentence, Joan broke down and wept like the delicate 19-year-old young woman she still was:

Alas! Am I to be treated so horribly and cruelly that my body, which has never been corrupted, must today be consumed and reduced to ash! ... If I had been in the ecclesiastical prison to which I submitted myself, and if I had been guarded by men of the Church, and not by my enemies and adversaries, this misfortune would not so miserably have come to me. Oh, I appeal before God, the great judge, the great wrongs and injustices done to me. She was taken and burned beneath a sign accusing her of heresy, boasting, blasphemy, and sorcery -- even as she clasped a crucifix to her bosom. Her last utterance was the word "Jesus!" It was May 30, 1431.

While Joan of Arc's mortal mission came to a tragic end, the seeds she planted with her courage and convictions lived on. The reconciliation that Charles VII had initiated with Philip of Burgundy during Joan's lifetime culminated four years after her death with the Treaty of Arras which, coupled with Charles VII's newfound willingness to fight for France, spelled the beginning of the end for the English occupiers. Only months after the treaty was signed, Paris fell to the combined forces of King Charles and his new Burgundian allies. Slowly but steadily over the next decade, Charles' forces liberated France from English occupation. Finally, in 1449 Charles invaded Normandy with 30,000 troops and rapidly retook town after town, eventually laying siege to Rouen -- the city where Joan of Arc was martyred -- and capturing the entire English garrison. The final major hammer blow of the Hundred Years War occurred at Formigny in April 15, 1450, where French forces routed the English, costing the latter nearly 4,000 dead. It was the worst defeat the English had suffered since Bannockburn nearly 140 years previously, and it broke the back of the century-long English occupation of France.

Joan of Arc, who died the death of a heretic and a traitor, and whom Charles did little to save, was vindicated only 20 years after her death. Charles VII convened a Trial of Rehabilitation on her behalf, and her name was cleared by the testimonies of many who had known her personally, and could attest to her piety and virtuous character.

More recently, in the early 20th century, she was canonized by the church she loved and was loyal to her entire life. But she was also one of history's greatest patriots, a remarkably gifted young woman who combined with her faith a devotion to her king and country.

Though an illiterate adolescent girl, she humbled the greatest military power of the age, and gave her country a king to lead them out of bondage. To believers, Joan's successes and miracles are evidence of divine assistance, and to skeptics, of a powerful and unique personality. In either case, Joan of Arc was a patriot's patriot, evidence that, from time to time, the meek and the lowly do indeed triumph over the strong.