A Teenage Girl Terrified Medieval Armies
In the first half of the fifteenth century, France was demoralized after a string of humiliating defeats at the hands of the English during the Hundred Years War. The victorious English were rampaging through the French countryside, and the French throne was in dispute between the French Dauphin, or heir to throne, and the English king, Henry IV.
To France’s rescue came an incongruous savior: a teenage girl with no military experience. Joan of Arc (1412 – 1431) appeared seemingly out of the blue, and by the time her brief life was over, she had become France’s national heroine, and history’s most famous female warrior. She led French armies into battle, and terrified the English by winning a series of miraculous victories against them, fighting in the front ranks. She restored French morale, revived France’s national spirit, and turned the tide of the war.
Joan was born into a peasant family, and was passionately religious from an early age. She began seeing visions from saints, who told her to save her country from English domination. So she left home at age 16, and travelled to join the Dauphin. In 1429, she convinced the French heir to give her an army, which she took to relieve French forces besieged by the English at Orleans. There, she led her forces in a whirlwind campaign that broke the siege in nine days, and sent the English fleeing. It was a turning point victory, which ended an English drive to conquer France.
Following her victory at Orleans, Joan convinced the Dauphin to crown himself king of France. She then set out on a variety of military expeditions, always leading from the front. In one such expedition in 1430, she was thrown off her horse and captured by Burgundians. Her captors kept her for several months, while negotiating with the English, who were eager to get their hands on the teenage girl who had terrified them so much.
Despite having saved her country, the French king did little to try and ransom Joan, and when she was sold to the English, she was abandoned to fend for herself. The English charged her with witchcraft and heresy, and set out to break her spirit and will by locking her in a dark and dirty cell. Despite incessant harassment and prolonged interrogations day and night, Joan refused to confess to wrongdoing.
Unable to extract a confession, or to prove witchcraft or heresy, Joan’s accusers switched their focus to the male garb she wore in battle. They argued that such cross dressing went against the Bible, and convicted her of that. At age 19, Joan of Arc was placed on a cart and taken to an execution site in Rouen, where she was burned at the stake on May 30th, 1431.
Decades later, a Pope ordered a reexamination of her trial. The reexamination cleared her posthumously, and declared her a martyr. In 1803, Joan was made a national symbol of France Napoleon Bonaparte. She was beatified five centuries after death, in 1909, and canonized as a saint in 1920. Today, Saint Joan of Arc is one of the patron saints of France, and the most famous female warrior of all time.