Joan of Arc: God's Warrior

On the 8th of May 1429, the town of Orleans in France

erupted in celebration.

For seven long months,

it had been under siege by the English,

but now, after just four days of fighting,

the town had been liberated.

And the people of Orleans knew they had witnessed a miracle.

The speed of their liberation was astonishing enough.

But what confirmed it as a miracle

was the identity of their liberator.

She was a peasant girl, and she was just 17

Her name was Joan.

She was a truly extraordinary figure,

a female warrior in an age

that believed women couldn’t fight, let alone lead an army.

Take care what you do for in truth,

I am sent by God and you put yourself in great danger.

These are Joan’s own words,

recorded in a contemporary manuscript.

Six centuries after her death,

her words transport us back into her life and times.

To understand Joan’s story, we need to explore a world

where God and the devil are real.

Today, we’re more aware than we’ve been,

perhaps for centuries, of the power of faith

to drive people to do extraordinary things for good or ill.

And in a world where God’s will is at work,

anything is possible.

Over the centuries Joan has become an icon

to almost everyone, to the left and the right,

to Catholics and Protestants, traditionalists and feminists.

She’s captured the imagination of novelists,

playwrights, artists and musicians,

and her fame has spread all over the world,

taking her from France to Hollywood.

I’ve been studying the medieval world for almost 30 years,

and I feel pretty confident in saying

she’s had more pop songs written about her

than anyone else from the Middle Ages.

But for all the images of Joan that have been created

since her death, only one picture of her survives

which was made in her own lifetime.

And it’s here, a drawing, almost a doodle,

in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement.

It shows what a remarkable and troubling figure Joan was.

The clerk knew that the army at Orleans

had a young woman with them

who was carrying a banner and a sword.

But he’d never seen her.

Either he didn’t yet know, or couldn’t quite believe,

that Joan actually, shockingly, had short hair

and wore male armour.

Instead, he’s made her look as a woman should,

with long hair, modestly wearing a dress.

But while there’s only this one faint image of Joan,

unusually for anyone in the Middle Ages

let alone a lowborn woman,

a great deal was written about her by her contemporaries.

Even more importantly, her own words

have reached us through the centuries

with an astonishing strength and clarity.

And one of the most remarkable

and revealing documents of all

is the transcript of Joan’s trial for heresy in 1431.

This is the most detailed record that survives

from any medieval trial.

And through it, we can hear Joan’s own voice.

Here, she describes the first time

she heard a message from God when she was just 13 years old.

At first, I was very afraid.

The voice came at midday in the summer time

in my father’s garden.

The voice on my right side towards the church

and I seldom hear it without a light.

The light comes from the same side as the voice,

but all around, there is a great light.

It seemed to me to be a worthy voice,

and I believe that the voice was sent from God.

Once I heard the voice three times,

I knew that it was the voice of an angel.

We might ask, was Joan mad or ill?

But for the people of the Middle Ages,

the issues were entirely different.

They knew that angels and demons did communicate

with people of completely sound mind.

The problem wasn’t how to explain Joan hearing voices

that weren’t there,

the problem was how to tell whether the voices came to her

from God or the devil.

Joan received her first vision

when she was living with her family in Domremy,

a small village in the east of France.

But the France that Joan was born into

wasn’t nearly as peaceful as it looks now.

It was a country torn apart by war.

For generations, England and France

had been fighting in what we call the Hundred Years’ War.

Land including the countryside where Joan lived

was fought over by the two sides.

And the English even claimed the crown of France.

During Joan’s childhood,

France was very much on the back foot.

In 1415, when she was three,

the French suffered a dreadful defeat

at the hands of Henry V on the battlefield of Agincourt.

The French army vastly outnumbered the English,

but as the flower of the French nobility advanced

they were mown down by a barrage of English arrows.

History has attributed the English victory at Agincourt

to the supremacy of their archers

but at the time, the French saw it differently.

For the people who were there,

the explanation for this astounding victory

was the will of God.

Henry claimed that God was on the English side,

but the French knew that couldn’t be right.

So how were they to explain this bloody defeat?

Perhaps it was God’s punishment for their sins

because France was convulsed in civil war.

The old king, Charles VI, was mad and incapable of ruling.

Two factions known as the Burgundians and the Armagnacs

were fighting for control of his government.

In the medieval world, everything came down to God.

Whose side was he on?

Just five years after Agincourt,

France was so bitterly divided

that the Burgundians were prepared to believe

that God did back the English

and made an alliance with them.

But Joan and her family supported the Armagnacs,

led by the French King’s son, the dauphin,

and believed God was with them.

And so the civil war went on.

For eight years, defeat followed defeat, until the dauphin

and his Armagnac supporters were pushed back,

south of the great curve of the river Loire.

For Joan, as for the rest of the people of France,

the war was a frightening reality.

Her home, Domremy, was an Armagnac village

surrounded by English and Burgundian territory.

At one point the village was attacked by enemy soldiers

and Joan, her family and friends had to take refuge

for a few days in a nearby town.

So perhaps it’s no surprise

that when Joan began to hear voices,

they talked about the war.

They said, she must go to the dauphin.

He would give her an army

and then she must drive the English out of France

and lead the dauphin to his coronation.

Joan wasn’t unique in claiming to hear heavenly voices.

She wasn’t the only person in 15th century France

who came forward with a message from God.

What was remarkable was what Joan’s voice

was telling her to do.

To fight and to lead.

This was an impossible proposition.

Joan was young, she was poor, and she was female

and to put her mission into action,

she had to reach the dauphin across more than 250 miles

of enemy territory.

Surely, it couldn’t be done.

At some point during 1428, Joan managed to reach here,

the town of Vaucouleurs,

a little more than 10 miles north of Domremy,

which housed the nearest garrison loyal to the dauphin.

But its captain sent her away with a flea in her ear.

The girl was clearly a fantasist,

her family, he said, should take her home

and give her a few slaps.

But Joan wouldn’t give up.

Word of her mission began to spread.

And when she came back to Vaucouleurs in February 1429,

the captain agreed to send her to the dauphin’s court.

What had happened to change his mind?

The evidence isn’t at all clear.

When Joan eventually set off from Vaucouleurs,

the people here gave her a horse

and an outfit of men’s clothes

to keep her safe on her dangerous journey.

Clearly, they believed in her.

But that wouldn’t be enough to secure access

to the dauphin himself.

We can’t be sure exactly what happened

but there is one more clue.

One of the six men who were given the job of escorting Joan

was a messenger from the dauphin’s court.

It seemed that someone there had heard of Joan’s claims

and now the dauphin wanted to hear more.

Like all medieval leaders, the dauphin knew

that his authority was bestowed on him by God.

He went to mass twice a day and looked for signs

of God’s will in the world around him

wherever they came from.

The truth is the dauphin was also desperate

and it had to be said that, by now,

anything, even the ravings of a peasant girl

was worth a try.

As Joan set out on her perilous journey

to the dauphin’s court in Chinon,