Joan of Arc

[cruororism]

Once upon a time, in the early 1400's,there lived a teen-aged peasant named Joan, in the village of Domrémy, in northern France. One day she was out tending her father's sheep when she heard "a worthy voice", and saw "a great light that came in the name of the voice." "Great things are expected of you", the voice said. "You must leave your native village and go to aid your king."
The closest thing to a king in France at that time was the Dauphin, who, having been proclaimed a bastard by his own mother, sat weak-limbed at Chinon while French and English soldiers, international mercenaries, and free-ranging criminals fought over the territory of France.

So Joan scraped the sheep manure off her feet, cut her hair "short and round in the fashion of young men", went to her uncle, Robert de Baudricourt, and persuaded him to provide her an escort to Chinon. He gave her a horse and a dagger slender enough for her maiden's hand, along with a tunic and trousers, boots, and a boy's black cap. He heard her six-man escort swear an oath that they would see her safely to Chinon; they wrapped their horses' feet in rags to muffle their clops and set off.

Twelve days later, they arrived at the Dauphin's court. Joan immediately located the Dauphin (he was the spindliest man there.) "I am called Joan the Maid," she told him. "Give me soldiers and I will raise the siege of Orléans." So the Dauphin had armor made for her, and a banner with the image of Christ on a rainbow and her motto, Jhesus--Maria. Joan revealed that the sword she intended to carry lay buried at the church of St. Catherine at Fierbois; it would be recognized by the five crosses cut into its blade. And so it was.

With around three thousand soldiers and some of the Dauphin's best knights, she travelled to Orléans. In the midst of battle Joan had her foot on the first rung of a scaling ladder when a winging arrow plunged through her shoulder, close to her neck. Her knights carried her from the field and cut the iron tip off the arrow. Joan tugged the shaft out of her flesh herself, climbed up on her horse, and rode back to victory.

Joan battled her way to Reims, so that the Dauphin, trailing along behind her, could be crowned. He could not be crowned with the crown of Charlemagne, since the English had already stolen it; but the canons of the Cathedral of Reims dug up a modest substitute. His barons draped him in a blue mantle embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis, and the archbishop anointed him. He was now Charles VII, King of France.

Joan's voices told her that she would be captured by June 24. "Then let me die quickly without a long captivity", she pleaded with them. "Do not be frightened," the voices said. "Resign yourself." On May 23, 1430, Joan was at Compiègne, fighting a force of Burgundians, who were allied with the English. She was captured by a Burgundian archer, to whom she surrendered only when he assured her he was of noble birth. The Burgundians turned her over to the English, who turned her over to the Church to be tried for heresy. Joan appealed to the Pope, the one in Avignon, not the one in Rome; but it was no use. True to form, Charles VII made no attempt to save her.

Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, well-fattened at the trough of ecclesiastical preferments, was her persecutor. With malicious cunning he set out to prove her voices were the work of the devil; that they were not the intangible, ethereal messengers of God, but the gross corporeal messengers of Satan. So he led Joan to identify her voices as St. Catherine, St. Margaret, and the Archangel Michael. Did they have hair? "It is a comfort to know that they have." Was Michael naked? "Do you think God has nothing with which to clothe him?" She insisted on keeping her boy's clothes, "to the scorn of feminine modesty", giving them up only briefly to be taken through the compulsory steps of first recanting, and then returning to, her heresies.

In spite of everything she remained loyal to her voices to the end. "Everything good that I have done, I have done at the command of my voices." She was convicted, and "relaxed" to the secular authorities for execution. On May 30, 1431, she was burned alive at the stake, with a paper cap on her head proclaiming her "Heretic, Relapsed, Apostate, Idolatress." She was about nineteen years old.

Joan was canonized in 1920. Her previous condemnation for heresy was set aside on the grounds that the judges who condemned her had belonged to the wrong faction of the schismatic Church.