The type of song that hits the sweet spot of drama and dysfunction. The subject matter may be petty and sometimes trifling, but the lyrics are sung with verve and, tellingly, the song always strikes a nerve. You can't look most of these singers in the eye such are the stories they tell.
I'm genuinely scared of Ann Peebles, she really is to be feared. Her mixture of ferocity and vulnerability will disarm the most hardened of hearts. And Memphis soul never hurt so bad (that voice, Willie Mitchell's production! Those horns!)
Talk about petty. She'll take what she feels is hers and taunt you in the morning. Sexy and attention grabbing, she doesn't care. "Call me what you like", she sings. It may hurt, but those are the breaks; you learn as much on the playground.
Well, is the jealousy justified? Was the look innocent? "When you cleared your throat, was that your cue?" Soul's premier storyteller paints a picture of suspicion with restraint and economy.
Cinematic storytelling, he gets down to the sweet business of betrayal. The legendary breakdown is most quoted part of the song but the silky soul setup and refrain make it worth the payoff. "I saw you (and him) / walking in rain / you were holding hands and I'll / never be the same"
The apotheosis of Philly soul is this classic tale of adultery. The poet laureate of human weakness is not ashamed about the "thing" they've got going on. This is grown folks business, matters of the heart must be attended to.
Lady Day shushes the scoundrel she's in love with. "Skip that lipstick, don't explain". The terseness of wounded feeling. Note the slight pause before she sings "right or wrong don't matter". The effort hurts. Talk about battered women syndrome.
I prefer Millie's version of Luther Ingram's opus of longing. The Caught up album is choc full of drama, and with the reversal of perspective, she found the formula that made her reputation: the conflicted soul.
But then, unrepentant, she added The Rap, a monologue where she revels in being the other woman, outlining the subversive pleasures in wearing the scarlet letter. And society's disapproval can hardly hold a candle to the excitement of the affair.
Relationships aren't easy by any measure. When your man quits his job, you can certainly understand why a diva like Gwen Guthrie would sing "Ain't nothing going on but the rent". Here, on the other hand, Marlena Shaw holds court, "Go away little boy", she sings. And how she sings. But, one wonders, does she really mean it?
The departure here is not of betrayal but of sweet obsession. By inclination, our greatest songwriter was more uplifting and personal in his writing. He simply can't get her out of his mind. And the chorus does the same duty as an earworm.
Dysfunction laid bare, the phone call with the other woman. The song that spawned dozens of answer records. The back and forth with Barbara Mason and others made this the definitive talking piece. The rarefied heights of drama.
Bitter, petty, and endowed with a highly specific vindictiveness. Cross her at your peril. If this is what the reaction is like when she's "just a little bitter", god help you. A woman scorned, she sets a new standard for righteous fury.
Genius songwriting. I mean "What would I do if we were perfect? / Where would I go for disappointment?" is hard to top. Messy and complicated. A strange relationship for the ages
By this stage, Luther was showing off. First doing the definitive cover of Brenda Russell's If only for one night then outdoing Stevie Wonder, no less, on the very next song. And check out the call and response with Darlene Love on background vocals. Creepin'
The heart desires, but practicalities arise. Timing is everything. Dilemmas of the "awkward situation". In life as in her art, Erykah Badu's entanglements are legendary. Call her the Elizabeth Taylor of the hip hop world, the best rappers were all moths to her flame.
The classic tall tale of the conflicted cad. Dimples's soft voice is perfectly pitched, the voice of a the set-upon. Then Betty Wright walks in on him hearing him pine for someone else and lays down the law. Yes, she's got papers on him. And rightly so!
Prince goes all-in and even takes it to the courtroom, a funny prosecution of heartfelt jealousy. The breakdown is worth the wait. There's a remix with Eric Leed's flute that leavens the bitterness of the original somewhat. Also: that guitar solo at the end...
Confessing upfront her fickleness, she's the very definition of trouble. Guilty as charged, yet you still can't resist the pleasures and turmoil she promises. She's a diva. Well, what did you expect?
The reaction of the crowd the first time they heard this song live overwhelms. This was manna for the Essence crowd. Erykah took it to the streets. She's done with you. Surely you know who to call
You really can't avoid R Kelly when it comes to musical drama and this production of Ronald Isley is the prototype for the later Trapped in the closet series. Aimed straight at the chitlin circuit.
From an album titled Black-Eyed Blues which announces just how problematic things will be. Like Etta James, her subject matter is trouble, love and loathing. The album closes with Tangle in your Lifeline which says it all as far as dysfunction goes.
Why do people do this to themselves? Infidelity is an inherently unstable affair (pun intended) but Barbara fully embraces it. "You want your cake and eat it too". Consider also "From his woman to you", her answer record to Shirley Brown's Woman to woman.
Taking matters into her own hands, begging Jolene to "please don't take my man / even if you can". That she manages to sell the idea that she, Dolly Parton, would play second fiddle to anyone is testament to her ear for drama
She still loves him despite everything. The soundtrack of rationalization. She actually sings "Don't blame Mr. Charlie, Mr. Charlie is just a man. And he's doing the best he can". I mean, we need an intervention here, come on.
1972 was a good year for adultery. Sounding the same theme as Me and Mrs Jones, Luther is not willing to compromise for anything, for she means that much to him. All obligations, vows and responsibilities be damned.
Some say Nina Simone, but I go with Nancy Wilson's interpretation of Irving Berlin's song. The delusion is strong with this one. Regret is all, I don't even believe the words for one second. She's stuck on him
Featuring the immortal break beat, her's is the cautionary tale of "making it easy for the clean up woman". It's an odd perspective really and quite reactionary too: regret and the blame game for dumping the man.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears revisited, Sisqó and company made the most of the ubiquity of this club classic. Even today, dance floors fill up immediately at the bass line. "Somebody's sleeping in my bed". Let the bump and grind begin. Drama
She turned him out. The player persona couldn't stand contact with this fly girl. Shaniqua got him whooped, turned him into a square and put his pimp days behind him, By the end, The Juice even admits he's "straighter than six o'clock". Big Daddy Kane sympathizes with him.
I just discovered that he actually shot a video back in 1990, albeit it's the edited version of the song, without Kane's rap (Kane does make an appearance in the video). Still, who knew?
The ménage-a-trois here is trifling, the stakes are not so high. One wonders if the titular boy is even worth fighting over. The vocal performances are the real battle in this case. Fighting words, perhaps, but I prefer Monica, she has a little spite in her approach. Brandy is all sugar.
It starts with "Why are you sleepin' with my woman?" and devolves from there. Caught, busted. The sound of jealous rage is the old favorite trope of the blues, revived here for the hip-hop age. The last line is genius
A very knowing comic masterpiece, a tall tale about the goings on in Infidelity, Georgia. The Wife would complain when I used to play this song in front of the kids. I demurred, the humour is universal even if racy. Effortless storytelling.
[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
When the prefect of Alexandria’s daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn’t as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against her. She was smart, she was pretty (beautiful, even) and she had connections. So long as she kept quiet, Catherine could have a comfortable life.
This comfortable, maybe?
She didn’t keep quiet. When the Emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and, of course, the best part - feeding Christians to lions. The prefect’s daughter telling the Emperor he was wrong to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable softheartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable. He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though (and, in fact, he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her - a useful alliance and she had brains and guts) so instead he called on his top fifty philosophers to outargue her.
Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed. That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she’d change her mind and be sensible. Instead she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison; when he deprived her of food she was fed by a dove, when he had her tortured her wounds miraculously healed. When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted and the Emperor had to have her killed, too, so since the slot was empty he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine. She told him she had a better husband - Christ - and at that insult he condemned her to death. The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch; the second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.
Except that this story is almost certainly fiction. Our oldest source is six hundred years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact. These stories grow in the telling, more and more miracles added with every retelling to the point where some people question whether St. Catherine even existed. When our sources are good they look like the Venerable Bede’s Life of St. Cuthbert, chronicling how he saw visions of angels, prophesied the future and also controlled the weather, which Bede based on a single chronicle written down within twenty years of the death of St. Cuthbert. This is to say that if we are lucky we got it thirdhand. (We are rarely lucky.)
A saintly teenage girl who outargues a roomful of philosophers with no training, merely divine inspiration, is absurd. There’s no chance at all that such a saint might have existed, let alone been interviewed by a team of experts (under oath) about her entire life, and of course if this team of experts did interview her they would no doubt end up concluding she was a fraud, though of course we can’t expect them to mail copies1 of the interview to every monarch in Europe to prove it.
And definitely nobody would ever, ever be so angry at irregularities in the first interview that they would try to themselves interview everyone she'd ever met2about her (still under oath) and mail a copy of the updated and revised version to every monarch in Europe to prove that all her miracles actually happened.
Meet Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans. Yes, yes, she defeated an invincible army and is a feminist hero and also one of the national saints of France, fine. More importantly, Joan of Arc is documented! She's a miracle-working saint who has evidence! She might have more evidence than any other non-monarch before the printing press! This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence3 for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.
(The reams and reams of documents are there, they're just invisible. Trust me.)
Let’s start with the legend of Joan of Arc: A poor peasant girl in France is chosen by God, goes to fight the English, defeats them in a series of battles while performing random miracles, is captured by them and burned as a witch, The End. Maybe you add the epilogue about how eventually the Church made her a saint. All completely impossible and all guaranteed to be nonsense.
The funny thing is the extent to which it isn't.
Around 1412, a female child "named Jean or Jeanette" was born in the tiny village of Donremy, on the marches of Lorraine in eastern France. She appears to have had half the village as her godparents, based on the number of people who testified later. This many godparents wasn't actually unusual - the job of godfather or godmother was half "it takes a village to raise a child" and half "witness that this person actually exists" - but it helpfully means that we know more about the birth of Joan of Arc than we do about the birth of Alexander.4
She grew up in an ordinary way. She was quiet and pious and... quiet... and... pious. It didn’t matter which side was asking questions about her, people had real trouble coming up with other things to say about her! A few stories leak through, though, about her being more than the normal kind of pious. Her village priest reported that she bribed him with wool to stop slacking off at his job; she occasionally snuck off from her work to spend extra time in church; she gave a great deal of alms. The most extraordinary event in her life was when a man sued her for breach of promise of marriage, which is the opposite of what usually happens; in an interesting piece of foreshadowing, she successfully defended herself in court by claiming that she had made no such promise. It was not a very remarkable life.
Then she ran off to save the country from the English because God told her to, which is the step that requires some explaining. Why did the country need saving?
Part One: “That brought great harm to the kingdom of France.”
The first thing you need to understand that France is cursed.
According to legend5, this curse was incurred by Philip the Fair6, King of France around 1300, when he had the Knights Templar abolished and all the officers of the order burned for heresy so he wouldn't have to pay back his debts.7 From the flames, the last Grandmaster of the order cursed him with his dying breath that he would "see him before God's tribunal before the year was out" and Philip duly died within the year. His sons would follow him, and their sons, each in inexorable succession passing the crown to the next before dying in turn. The last of the Capet princes managed to make it almost fifteen years past Philip's death before succumbing to that old favorite, "unknown causes."8
This produced a succession crisis. The two available candidates to succeed him were the Duke of Guyenne, son of Philip the Fair's daughter Isabella,9 and the Count of Orleans, son of Philip the Fair's brother Charles of Valois. Since the Duke of Guyenne was Edward III, King of England, and the Count of Orleans wasn't, the choice was obvious and France declared that the law had always been that the throne could never pass through a woman. Edward III was sixteen, in England, and busy, so he raised no meaningful objection, and Philip of Valois, called "The Fortunate" because he got to be king, inherited. Twelve years later, Philip eyed Guyenne, the last bit of France left in English hands from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s inheritance, and, observing the English busy in Scotland, he made his move.
This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover10 and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?
The answer was, as it happened, that the Edwards first and third had spent the past sixty years building the most professional army in Europe. England, like the rest of post-Roman Europe, had been founded on a military basis of feudal levies, with each vassal providing soldiers at his expense to fight alongside the king’s personal retinue. These soldiers could be called out for long enough to stop marauding Vikings but not for much longer, so any attempt to raise an army for even a single year's campaign required agonizing negotiations with each individual leader and, worse, meant that the troops were all either sullen conscripts or proud knights eager for glory and jealous of their honor. These knights might fight like the devil - as everyone from Greece to Egypt to Tunis had learned to their cost - but leading these men was like herding cats.
In England, however, the practice of scutage (nobles paying money to get out of raising troops) had arisen, and also in England there existed that fantastically useful tool of kings for raising money, the English Parliament.11 With the combination of carrot - redress of grievances - and stick - pay or I'll impose costs on you perfectly legally - augmented by the patriotic pride of Englishmen who might not want to kill Frenchmen themselves but really wanted the Frenchmen dead, Edward collected money and used it to pay professionals drawn from England and Wales, and these professionals fought.
The English army was never large, somewhere between seven thousand and fifteen thousand men at its height.12 Even the Scots could muster more soldiers - but the Scots army was largely lightly-armored and poorly-trained spearmen and bowmen, and the English were all armored and well-armed, with plenty of time to train and no loyalties running against their loyalties to their king and their pay, and when well-led they demolished the Scots.
This was the army that landed in France. Since France had about five times as many people in it as England, this army was wildly outnumbered. The chroniclers describe the French army as variously seventy-two thousand or a hundred and twenty thousand men - to hysterical laughter from modern historians, who think they only had twenty or thirty thousand - but it was clear that when the armies met it would inevitably be a slaughter.
It was. In the other direction. The King of France raised his levies, called up the royal knights, hired mercenaries, invited in allies. All mustered beneath the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of Charlemagne, and this massive army went to catch the English, the English backed off rapidly while looking for defensive terrain, the French pushed on, the English started planting stakes and caltrops, the French attacked - and the English massacred them.
The English, you see, had the longbow.
The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research13 suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,1415 five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers16 as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor17 wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.
The French, naturally, put together another army, which was beaten in almost exactly the same way at Poitiers. Again and again it repeated itself - Agincourt, Verneuille, Aljubarrota18 and dozens of minor fights - and every one of them was, in essence, a repeat of Crecy. Minor variations occurred - at Poitiers the French attacked on foot, at Verneuille they detached troops to attack the English baggage train - but these didn’t help.
The French were saved from immediate disaster by three things. The first was the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe. This had effects wildly beyond the scope of our story but also demolished the tax bases of every state in Europe. This shrunk the size of armies and thereby as an incidental side effect meant that all existing castles were heavily overbuilt, since they were intended to defend against half again the force that would actually be present, which slowed the pace of war tremendously.
The second was a strategy adopted by the French kings in which they did not fight the English. They would just let the English field army march wherever it liked and loot and burn whatever it liked, and meanwhile their troops would be burning and pillaging everywhere the English held and the English field army wasn't. This was extremely unpopular among the people being pillaged, but the English did run out of money before the French ran out of castles and that meant the French could go around taking English castles in France while the English army was in England.
And the third was that the English army depended on good leadership, and when Edward III died the English wouldn’t have it for another forty years, until Henry V took the throne. This two-generation timeskip provided enough time for the population to partially replenish and also for the French to completely forget Lesson Two, an error of memory which produced Agincourt.
Agincourt was the standard model of battle - Henry V "made it his course to busy the minds of his people with foreign quarrels", to misquote Shakespeare, landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns. When the French went up to engage him, Henry attempted to withdraw, took up a position on good ground and when the French attacked the English broke them utterly. Halfway through the battle the order was given to kill the prisoners instead of holding them for ransom, and so the battle was not merely a defeat for the French, but a disaster, with a generation's worth of military leaders dead in a single day.19
And then they all died.
The disaster was made worse by the fact that the French nobility at the time of Agincourt was trapped in an internal feud that was rapidly coming to resemble civil war. Between the time of the battles of Crecy and of Poiters, Philip the Fortunate had given the rich duchy of Burgundy in fief to his faithful son Philip the Bold, but Philip was faithful to his father, not to France. As the years rolled on and the throne of France passed from Philip the Fortunate to his son and grandson, the interests of the Dukes of Burgundy began to diverge from those of the Kings of France, and so in the age of the long truce the bold Dukes of Burgundy won lands through conquest and through marriage until their wealth and power nearly matched that of their ostensible monarchs. Under the three great Dukes of Burgundy who ruled in sequence, their realm became the leading state of the Renaissance, the continent's greatest sponsor of art and music and the true cultural heartland of Europe.20
But all these accomplishments had been won by the power of the Kingdom of France, which during the pause in the Hundred Years' War had cheerfully spent men and treasure conquering and protecting these lands for the Burgundians, allowing them to spend their treasure on paintings and sculptures and dance manuals. The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France (Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson), who at that time was seriously mentally ill21 and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs.22 Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption23 and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered - but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded, the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government, and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.
This is fine.
This was an act that made no political sense, an act that could only really be justified by blood vengeance, and the Burgundians, understandably, snapped. They held Paris by that point and with it physical control of the King and the Queen, and there was an army that had just taken Rouen that was available to their service if they had the wit to use it.
Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin24 Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous25 affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.
At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.26 Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.
Then Charles the Mad died. Then Henry the Conqueror died. The new King of England, son of Henry and his newlywed queen, was not yet one year old.
Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to take it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings,27 and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion,28 not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.
This was the state of France - leaderless, beaten, disorganized, a country that would need a miracle if it was going to survive.
Then it got one.
Part Two: The Life of Joan of Arc
2.1: “There lives a maid between Coussey and Vaucouleurs that will see the King crowned within a year.”
When Joan was thirteen, she started hearing voices.29
The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent. She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet (or good) smell. She had not had a very eventful life and no one particularly noticed; her father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms; her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.
When she was fifteen:
[The] voice told me, twice or thrice a week, that I, Joan, must go away and that I must come to France30 and that my father must know nothing of my leaving. The voice told me that I should go to France and I could not bear to stay where I was. The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orleans… And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.31
She was sixteen when she took action, going from her village with her uncle to the Armagnac-held town of Vaucouleurs to tell the commander of the garrison, Robert de Baudricourt, that God had sent her to save the kingdom of France and that it was the will of the King of Heaven that she be delivered safely to Bourges, where the Dauphin Charles was, and could he please provide her with a horse, a sword, men's clothes and an armed escort? He sent her home with instructions for her uncle to beat her more so she'd stop running off. She, undaunted, returned after a few months, and this time Robert sent her away but for... some reason... let her stay in Vaucouleurs, instead of sending her back to her family again.32
This gave her the opportunity to hit everyone in town with Charisma 18 Diplomacy checks.
I [Jean de Metz, a squire] spoke to her, saying, ‘My dear girl, what are you doing here? Must it not be that the King be cast out of the kingdom and we become English?’ And the Maid answered me, ‘I am come here to a King’s Chamber’ (i.e., to a royalist place) ‘to talk with Robert de Baudricourt that he may be willing to lead me or send me to the King, but he pays no attention to me nor to my words. And yet, before we are in mid-Lent, I must be at the King’s side, though I wear my feet to the knees. For indeed there is nobody in all the world, neither king nor duke, nor daughter of the King of Scotland,33 nor any other who can recover the kingdom for France. And there will be no help (for the kingdom) if not from me. Although I would rather have remained spinning at my mother’s side, for it is not my condition, yet must I go and must I do this thing, for my Lord wills that I do so.’ I asked her who was her Lord. And she told me that it was God. Whereupon I, Jean, who bear witness here, promised the Maid, putting my hand in hers in a gesture of good faith, that, God helping, I would lead her to the King.
So when she came to de Baudricourt the third time he had her exorcised.34 When that didn't stop her he said yes and either gave her or had crowdfunded for her everything she asked for - sword, horse, men's clothes, knight, squire (Jean de Metz, quoted above) and either four servants or three servants and an archer, depending on which source you prefer. The entire town chipped in to get her what she asked for, and de Baudricourt himself gave her a sword as she prepared to leave.
It's not wholly clear why de Baudricourt did this. The state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate, and yes, there were rumors that "it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marches"35 but really when you think about it, what are the odds it's this virgin? How does he even know she is a virgin? Even in the middle ages they knew most prophecies were fake, because you could go around just claiming anything you felt like was a prophecy. Maybe it's just charisma? That might explain what happened next, which is that the knight who took her had planned on raping her along the way, just on general principles,36 but somehow he... couldn't do it:
Every night she lay down with Jean de Metz and me, keeping upon her her surcoat and hose, tied and tight. I was young then and yet I had neither desire nor carnal movement to touch woman, and I should not have dared to ask such a thing of Joan, because of the abundance of goodness which I saw in her.
And so, dodging men-at-arms as they went on the assumption that they were probably hostile to everyone just by default, they made their way to the Dauphin's court.
2.2: “Thou art true heir of France and King’s son.”
The story of her arrival at the Dauphin's temporary capital at Chinon is legendary. Even people who know very little about Joan of Arc have often heard about it; it's one of the most famous scenes of her life, a subject of paintings and stories. (Age of Empires II practically starts with it.) The story tells that Joan approached the Dauphin in a room full of fine lords and noblemen where he was dressed plainly, that he denied his identity and she persisted that he and he alone was the trueborn king of France, and by this sign of her gifts convinced all that she was a saint chosen by God to bring him victory.
Or:
“Then, Joan, who was come before the King, made the bows and reverences customary to make to the King, as if she had been nurtured at court, and this greeting done said, addressing her speech to the King: ‘God give you life, gentle King,’ whereas she knew him not and had never seen him. And there were (present) several lords, dressed with pomp and richly and more so than was the King. Wherefore he answered the said Joan, ‘Not I am the King, Joan.’ And, pointing to one of his lords, said, ‘There is the King.’ To which she replied, ‘By God, gentle prince, it is you and none other.’ ”
How can it be false if it’s painted?
Yeah, that probably never happened. Sure, sure, it's sourced to a contemporary French historian (Jean Chartier, quoted above) who we know had met the Dauphin a decade or two after his coronation and could very easily have talked to eyewitnesses and gotten the story from them, and so it's on a much better foundation than ninety-nine percent of what we believe about history. But we have eyewitnesses. Here's one:
Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of the King’s household, eighty-five years of age or thereabouts: “I was present in the castle and town of Chinon when the Maid arrived, and I saw her when she presented herself before the royal majesty, with much humility and great simplicity, the poor little shepherdess, and I heard the following words which she spoke to the King: ‘Very noble Lord Dauphin, I am come and am sent by God, to bring succour to you and your kingdom.’
No mention of the denial, no mention of the King's dress. Where did the story come from? The probable explanation lies in Joan's own testimony during her first trial by the English:
[A]fter a meal I went to my King who was in the castle. When I entered my King’s room, I knew him among the others by the counsel of my voice which revealed him to me. I told my King that I wanted to go and make war against the English.
So if she's to be trusted her voices did indeed point him out - but if we're a cynic, she could have been guessing by his body language. Still, it's enough so that we can see the story growing from there.
Either way, Charles was initially skeptical, but Joan addressed him as the true and rightful heir to the kingdom of France and then took him aside and gave him some sign, and this deeply rattled him. We aren't sure what the sign was; Joan told her interrogators that she had sworn an oath to keep the details secret and so she couldn't swear another one to tell the truth on this matter and that if the English wanted to know they could ask her King, and when they pressed her repeatedly to tell them the sign she gave her king she switched to making sarcastic comments, like "the sign you need is for God to deliver me out of your hands, the most certain sign He could show you." Nor did any of her other contemporaries write down what the sign was.37 But whatever it was, it clearly rattled the Dauphin - he was sure she had access to some kind of magic, he just couldn't tell if it was white or black. Just as Robert de Baudricourt had ordered an exorcism, so the Dauphin Charles called for an examination and sent for the doctors of theology at the University of Poitiers to interview her, so that they could tell him if it was ethical to recruit her.
Unfortunately, the record of the examination at Poitiers doesn't exist any more. It definitely existed then! Joan repeatedly tells her interrogators at the first trial "That's in the book at Poitiers" and one of her examiners survived to testify at the second (posthumous) trial, but unfortunately most medieval manuscripts don't exist any more and this is one of them. It would be an invaluable source if we had it, but all we've got left is what one elderly Dominican remembered at the second trial. One fragment is:
“Master Guillaume Aimeri interrogated her: ‘Thou hast said that the voice told thee that God wishes to deliver the people of France from the calamities which afflict it. If he wishes to deliver it, it is not necessary to have men-at-arms.’ Then Joan answered him: ‘By God the men-at-arms will do battle and God will give victory.’ With this answer Master Guillaume held himself satisfied...
And we have their final conclusion, which was:
“That in her is found no evil, but only good, humility, virginity, devotion (devoutness), honesty, simplicity.”
Well, fair enough.
And the elderly Dominican continues:
"We reported all that to the King’s Council, and were of opinion that, given the imminent necessity and the peril in which the town of Orleans stood, the King could well use her help and send her to Orleans.
I like this response because… One is not allowed to declare a living person a saint. The saints are the people in Heaven. According to Catholic theology, a living person might at any point use his God-given free will to do evil and not repent of it. This is therefore about as close as they can get, and it's pretty far!
On the other hand, we all see the other side of the story, right? The desperate gambler who realizes that his stack's almost out and he might as well bet against the odds he'll make a flush, because probably he won't but if he folds he’s out anyway, right?
Since the Dauphin wasn't quite desperate enough to risk his soul to win, he also had her checked over by women of his wife's household to confirm that she was a virgin, both because of the belief at the time that virginity was the sign of sainthood and because if she's lying about that she's clearly just full of shit on every other topic, too. She passed the test, of course. Joan's opinion on the multipronged inquiry into her origins and character was that "she was not pleased with all these interrogations and that they were preventing her from accomplishing the work for which she was sent and that the need and time were come to act.”38 Once again: Fair enough.
And it seems to be only at about this point that the Dauphin Charles has Joan given basic training in the arts of a soldier and of a captain, which she has never had the opportunity to get before.39 But he can't get her much of it, because she shows up in February or March and goes to the front in late April, giving about a month to teach her how to move in armor, fight with a sword, ride a warhorse, command infantry, command cavalry, command artillery.40 Fortunately, she appears to... already know most of this? Or something? Because, in the judgement of Joan's peers:
Thiband d’Armagnac or de Termes, Knight, bailiff of Chartres: "Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent. But in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience."
[The Duke d'Alencon, French nobleman and general]: "In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple, but in the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years’ experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently."
[Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan's landlady at Chinon] "And from all that I know of her she was absolutely ignorant except in the matter of arms. For I have seen her ride a horse and wield a lance as well as the finest soldier, and the soldiers themselves were most astonished by this."
Dunois (Bastard of Orleans) gives up and flatly says that she's so good that
I believe that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in the war were the fruit of divine inspiration rather than of human agency. . . . And this is why:
And then he gives one actual miracle as evidence (we'll get to that) and everything else is cases of her being so good at war that
I swear that the English, two hundred of whom had previously been sufficient to rout eight hundred or a thousand of the royal army, from that moment became so powerless that four or five hundred soldiers and men at arms could fight against what seemed to be the whole force of England.
Dunois here is speaking from experience. The last time French and English forces had clashed in any serious way was about a year before Joan showed up at court, when the pride of the French army was defeated by a convoy of pickled herrings.41 Dunois was present at that debacle; he managed to dodge the blame and in fact from the Siege of Orleans up to, what, the mid-fifteenth century42 or so, he's one of the leading French generals. So he and d'Alencon can be considered expert testimony, and the expert testimony is that she is unfairly good.
The Bastard of Orleans thinks that this isn’t fair.
This is where a lot of the conspiracy-theory stories about Joan really get started, because her "riding a horse and wielding a lance as well as the finest soldier" skills are patently ridiculous if they have ten years of training and she has one month, to say nothing about her command skills, so they claim she must've had advance training. But we're recounting the evidence here and saving our desperate attempts to come up with an explanation for a later section, so we can just recount the consensus and move on to what her leadership looked like.
2.3: “A Maid sent by God to drive out the English.”
It looked like charisma-enforced puritanism. d'Alencon, who is one of my favorite sources, recounts in the tone of a man missing a dear departed friend that Joan kept upbraiding him for his blasphemous swearing and he kept guiltily stopping whenever he noticed her in earshot. She made sure the soldiers all went to Mass regularly, drove those of the camp followers who wouldn't marry their men from camp with the flat of her sword43 and absolutely forbade looting and cruelty towards prisoners. She was not actually in charge of the army, but only of one company of troops; she was given arms and a banner (God upheld by angels blessing a fleur-de-lis) and a couple squires and a few hundred men to escort supplies into the city, but somehow before her force made it very far it was her force. She ruled less by royal or official authority than by the fact that before long everyone would do whatever she wanted because are you going to tell the Maid no? It started with only her own few hundred troops, but before long it spread to anyone in earshot of her voice.
This was important because the transitional system of military organization used by the French in the early fifteenth century appears to be terrible. So far as I, who am not actually an expert on the fifteenth century, can tell, the system in use was that the essential person is the captain, who can be a royal appointee leading state troops, or a nobleman with his vassals or a mercenary leading his own employees (to the extent these are distinct categories), and who commands a force of, oh, three or four hundred men. If the king is present, he's in charge. Otherwise the Constable of France is in charge, when he isn't under strict orders to stay away from court due to a blood feud with one of the king's chief advisors;44 alternatively or if he happens to be absent, then the king can designate one of the captains as an overall commander,45 but in practice all captains are equals but the King and if the King is indecisive46 they solve all problems produced by a divided command by bickering, and we saw how well that worked at the Battle of the Herrings.
When compared to this mess, Joan's system of command-by-charisma was a tremendous success, and even leaving aside the claims of miracles (and her implausible untrained artillery skills) we can see why. First, unlike earlier French armies, Joan's troops would neither charge nor rout without orders. Second, she'd given them a logical hypothesis for why they kept losing battles (they'd offended God), then changed the behavior that lead to it (no swearing, no fornication, no hurting the innocent) and so they should logically expect to start winning instead of losing.
But also she kept doing miracles, and this terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English. Most of them are minor things - calming a horse with the Cross, hearing a soldier who would die in the next engagement blaspheming and saying "do you swear, and you so near to death?", predicting when she'd be injured in advance, not dying of infection when shot, telling the Duke d'Alencon "move or you'll get hit by a cannonball,” he moves and a couple of minutes later there's the cannonball47 killing someone else, and so forth and so on. And then there was the sword. Joan sent a letter to the town of Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois requesting that they kindly look behind (or under, she doesn't remember exactly what she said) the altar for a rusty sword with five crosses on the hilt, clean the rust off and send it to her. So they did. (We have reports of this from both Joan and the priest who mailed it to her.) Rumors that this was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, demonstrate decisively that there no lily that someone will not determinedly gild, but whatever the sword's provenance it became part of the legend of Joan of Arc.
Her arrival at Orleans was also part of the legend. The English had built or taken a number of forts around the city and were bombarding it with their artillery, but they didn't have the numbers to completely encircle it and so when Joan arrived the siege was moving pretty slowly. Jean Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, was in charge of the city's defense, and he gave orders that her convoy of supplies and reinforcements enter the city by a circuitous route to avoid the English garrisons before riding out to join them. When he arrived Joan, metaphorically breathing fire, angrily demanded he explain why he'd ordered her troops redirected when the simplest solution was that they just sailed upriver. Dunois explained very patiently that, yes, the city's captains had taken counsel together and they had concluded that given that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the most sensible option was to avoid the risk of fighting the English and they thought that was best and safest -
"In God's name, the counsel of the Lord your God is wiser and safer than yours," said Joan.48
Forthwith and as in the same moment, the wind which was contrary and absolutely prevented the boats from moving upstream, in which were laden the victuals for Orleans, changed and became favourable.
So after the wind directly and miraculously reversed, Joan and her troops were able to enter the city. They held a parade (we have a journal from one of the burghers of Orleans, which is a Useful Eyewitness Source separate from the two trials), Joan went out under flag of truce to demand that the English surrender to God (and got laughed at),49and Dunois left to fetch even more reinforcements. Meanwhile Joan - stuck with Dunois nominally in charge and people unwilling to go attack in defiance of the commander-in-chief's orders - was firing up her troops. Dunois returned with his reinforcements and news that the English would be getting reinforcements of their own directly,50 and that night as she was drifting off to sleep Joan woke up her squire by loudly crying out. He muzzily rose and asked her what it was, and she said that her voices had told her to attack the English immediately but not where to do it!51At which point they rushed out and discovered that there was a skirmish already underway and gathered all their forces to join it, swiftly turning it against the English and driving them from one of their forts...
... After which she ordered that none of the prisoners be executed, and wept since so many of the English had died without confessing their sins, and so she made sure that on the next day (the feast of the Ascension) all the French troops took confession and avoided sinning.
(It is after this skirmish that "a valiant and notable knight" whose name our source politely avoids mentioning suggests that maybe they should stop pushing their luck and call this good enough. "You have been at your counsel and I at mine; and know that my Lord’s counsel will be accomplished and will prevail and that that (other) counsel will perish," said Joan, and goes onwards with the next attack.)
If you’ve only got a month’s training, carrying a banner instead of a sword is just good sense.
This set the tone for the rest of the siege - rapid French assaults on the English fortifications each independently as Joan's visions directed her, with the Maid's fanatical charisma to keep morale up. At the next major bastion the English repelled the French until Joan managed to get the fleeing French to turn and make another attack which actually succeeded, at the next Joan was wounded holding a scaling ladder and the attack faltered, but she returned to it and it succeeded. At the next she bore her banner again, and at the next most of the English defending the fortification died when the bridge they fled over broke under them.
The English responded by giving up their siege and risking all on a pitched battle. The French could attack each fort in turn and so destroy them in detail, and seeing this, the remaining English soldiers burned their forts and withdrew all their companies together into a single formation, planted their stakes52 and offered battle on the open field.
This time the opinion of the Armagnac captains was for war, but Joan said, no, it was Sunday, they should respect the Lord's day and not shed blood on it. The English withdrew, and Joan was a legend.
She was a legend in France, where a leading poetess came out of retirement to pen a new poem in celebration of her great victory. She was a legend in England, where the regent, Bedford, wrote to the young king to update him about the new danger from that "disciple and lyme of the Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fais enchauntements and sorcerie”.53 She was a legend in Venice, where the representatives of the Morosini bank sent back reports because they'd be useful in planning voyages.54 And her legendary nature had concrete consequences. After her arrival at Orleans a militia had risen to support the French army; volunteers flooded into camp every day, some of them writing gushing letters home recounting how they had seen her, talked to her. The Duke of Brittany, long a neutral in the conflict, sent his confessor over her to reassure her that the Duke would send his son with a mighty army to the King of France's support.55 People invented the most heated rumors about her origins, full of wild speculation as they try to come up with coherent theories to explain how she ended up with all the skills she possesses.
This legendary status gave her a lot of influence with her fellow soldiers and officers and random commoners,56 but less with the Dauphin. The Dauphin Charles seems to have been the sort of person who agrees to anything the person who talked to him last wants,57 and he had a peace party as well as a war party contesting for influence at his court and they thought he should stop reraising on this one good hand and accept his gains and try to negotiate some kind of final end to the war. Joan was equal to the task, though, and interrupted the middle of a strategy meeting to fall upon her knees and beg for him to come to Rheims and there be crowned. Charles made plans for this before anyone managed to talk him out of it, placing the Duke d'Alencon in charge (who seems to have been an early convert to Joan's cause, eager to do whatever God wanted since apparently God wanted to do exactly what he wanted to do except with better tactics) and he and Joan rushed off to organize a campaign for Rheims.
They did not do this without objections, and serious ones, from the peace party but also from military men not suddenly struck by Joan's charisma. And these men had good reasons to object. If you happen to be a cold-blooded bastard with a deep understanding of the nature of supply lines and logistical warfare who naturally thinks in terms of realpolitik, marching straight for Rheims is obviously a really stupid idea. It means taking an army through English- and Burgundian-held territory where their cavalry can harass your lines of communication, your back to the river, where one battle risks encirclement and destruction, overcoming or bypassing a tremendous number of strong English fortifications including Paris, all for a wholly intangible gain because Rheims isn't even a very large city. Instead they could try to seize key forts, attack Paris and take the capital, go to Normandy to harass the lines of communication of the English, move against the Burgundian capital to break the alliance - why are they going to Rheims?
Because, according to ancient tradition, kings of France must be crowned in Rheims. This sacred ritual is what establishes that the King is the King, chosen by God. As the Dauphin, Charles is head of the Armagnac party; as King Charles VII, he would be King of France, especially since his rival Henry VI is a small child and furthermore a small child in England who therefore hasn't been properly crowned yet. Joan has faith they can overcome the material obstacles and that pulling this off will give them huge spiritual gains, and if you replace "spiritual gains" with "gains in morale," she is clearly right. The French army marches off with the King, ready to gamble everything on this one stroke.
They take an elaborate circuitous route to avoid the main English strongholds and attack minor English strongholds, each reduced one by one. In each fight the French engage the English garrison, attack it and drive it from its fortifications in the town; in each they are victorious and the English fall back. As they advance volunteers flood to them, providing them with supplies, and captains long absent - including the exiled Constable of France58 - join the campaign, spirits revitalized and ready to return to the fray. Meanwhile the main English field army gathered to attack them, coming up to meet the French at the woodlands near Patay. The day before both sides had camped a safe distance, well aware of their opposition, and then as the next day broke the French and English field armies mustered for the climactic battle of the campaign.
Unfortunately for the English, the Battle of Patay is the single most one-sided climactic battle I have ever encountered in all my studies of history. I'm not sure exactly why; the accounts of the battle (in secondary or primary sources) disagree with each other even more than they normally do, but so far as I can tell from the accounts and histories I've read, it happened something like this.
The English army had been divided into three forces when it camped, and as the English drew up in the morning to fight they gathered together. The French assembled faster, in defensive formation to take an attack from the English, and then the Duke d'Alencon asked Joan what to do.
And the French rushed on the English vanguard with incredible speed, which was not quite finished joining the rest of the English army. Shocked to see the French, who they though were waiting for them, already rushing out of the woods, the vanguard routed instantaneously. The French pursued them into the second force, which, seeing the first disintegrate, routed itself, and meanwhile the commander of the rearguard, Sir John Falstaff, implemented a tactical withdrawal in good order, thereby extricating his force and wrecking his military career, ending up as the scapegoat for the entire doomed campaign and a comic relief character for Shakespeare. The casualty figures are staggering; the English lost "two to four thousand men" killed or captured, the majority of their force, while the French army had three deaths. This, to be clear, is about the number of men you expect to accidentally trip over their own stirrups dismounting and break their necks. The French swept onwards to Rheims, every town they reached surrendering within the day, and the Dauphin Charles was crowned King Charles VII of France before crowds cheering or weeping at the extraordinary victory, with Joan having the place of honor beside him. Crowds flocked to the king and the mood in the country was ecstatic.
What is that thing in her hair, seriously, what.
2.4: ‘By my martin, the place would have been taken.’
At which point the French court agreed to a truce for two weeks and their armies stopped campaigning for a while while the English and Burgundians raised more armies.
No, really. If at any point I have given you a positive impression of the competence of the French court, I do revoke it! King Charles rode around accepting the fealty of various towns while Joan constantly urged him to march swiftly on Paris and finish the war. Joan's councils failing, she begged him for the chance to retire; she had successfully accomplished all of her prophesied tasks, the Duke of Orleans had been ransomed, Orleans had been relieved, the King crowned. Could she go home now? Her voices didn't have any more tasks for her, "take Paris instead of dithering" was just common sense.
Instantly vetoed. Of course she couldn't leave! She was his best general! Instead the King gave her brothers arms and lands and knighthood and made her follow the army around instead of going home. Occasionally during the long periods of truce she had a job to do like investigating a fake saint,60 and when the campaign eventually resumed she was with the army again, but he didn't listen to her and he didn't let her go.
And then she reverted to the mean. Not all the way, of course. But Patay was a miracle, and the miracle didn't recur. Her voices would tell her if other saints were fakes or not, and occasionally they'd start warning her that she'd be taken prisoner eventually, but for military advice they gave her no help, and without them she was merely a very good general. When she finally got her chance to make her attack on Paris it looked like she'd win but the English negotiated another truce over her head and Joan was a loyal vassal of her king, so that was that. Her actual capture - in a minor skirmish with the Burgundians, with her leading the vanguard on the way to the attack and the rearguard on the way back - was an anticlimax, and while we have a witness he politely declined to comment on the scene.61
That left the Duke of Burgundy with the question of what to do with her. The ethical thing to do by the laws of war would be to ransom her back, but that would also give the French back their best general, and so Duke Philip was somewhat reluctant to do that. That reluctance was aided by the fact that Charles was back to mostly having the peace camp in the room with him instead of the war camp,62 and they viewed Joan's existence as a provocation to war all by itself.63 Joan wasn't ransomed. Instead the Burgundians imprisoned her as a legitimate war captive for a while and then arranged for a prisoner transfer in exchange for moderate compensation, which is to say they sold her to the English.64
The English and their French subordinates, who had been desperately writing letters begging the Burgundians to give them Joan so they could BURN THE WITCH were, as you would expect, absolutely overjoyed.65 No woman could possibly have won Joan's victories, so either she's a saint or a witch, but if Joan was a saint, clearly the English government was in the wrong and any Frenchman working with them is a traitor. Since the English government was clearly in the right and they were not traitors, therefore she was a witch and had to be burned. They got the local inquisition (which they controlled) to set up a trial immediately, known to history as the Trial of Condemnation after its inevitable result.
2.5. ‘I appeal before God, the Great Judge.”
It was going to be a kangaroo court, of course. Now, you might think that inquisitions are just naturally kangaroo courts, but by the standards of the Inquisition, this was a kangaroo court; there were rules in place, and the English intended to follow them only insofar as these rules would not interfere with the result they intended. She was supposed to be judged by the bishop of her diocese; since the bishop of her diocese was pro-Armagnac, that was out, so they had her tried by the bishop of the place where she was taken - only the bishop of the place she was taken wasn't on their side, either, so they misrecorded where she was taken so that she could be tried by the Burgundian bishop of the neighboring diocese, Pierre Cauchon. She was legally allowed a defense attorney,66 which she didn't get; she was spied on during the confessional, two of the judges vanish halfway through and at the Trial of Rehabilitation the witnesses report they were fired for being too sympathetic to the defendant, she was guarded in a military prison by English men-at-arms instead of by churchmen or respectable women, and the list just goes on and on and on. They were supposed to have her tried in her home territory so everyone who knew her could give testimony, but they couldn't do that because it was held by the other side, so they declared that the room she was being tried in was legally speaking part of the diocese in which she was captured and pretended that was good enough. They were supposed to interview everyone in her home province to see if she had a good reputation, but somehow they never recorded their results; twenty years later at the Trial of Rehabilitation a Lorraine merchant recounted that one of his countrymen in Rouen came to him full of bitterness that Cauchon hired him and then refused to pay him because “in the course of his inquiries he had learned nothing about Joan that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister.”
This did not stop the trial from being a great show. It really is one of the great achievements of this or any age. I could say great artistic achievements, but that would suggest that anyone was aiming at art; it is beautiful not in that it was made to be beautiful, but in that watching someone - anyone - perform at the top of a game - any game - is beautiful. Of the 400-odd pages in my edition, about 130 or so are the introduction and the background (including biographies of everyone mentioned in the trial), then another hundred or so are the bureaucratic minutia of listing who is present at the start of every day of the trial, and then the remaining 170 pages is Joan of Arc being lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire and, without saying anything heretical,67spending these 170 pages trolling them.
Does this woman look like a troll to you?
Asked if the people of Domrémy sided with the Burgundians or the other party, she answered that she only knew one Burgundian; and she would have been quite willing for him to have his head cut off, that is if it had pleased God.
Asked if the voice told her in her youth to hate the Burgundians, she answered that since she had known that the voices were for the king of France, she did not like the Burgundians. She said the Burgundians will have war unless they do as they ought; she knows it from her voice.
Asked whether in her youth she had any great intention of defeating the Burgundians, she answered that she had a great desire and will for her king to have his kingdom.
Did she say that God (who is Love) told her to hate the party of the Burgundians? No. Did she intend to defeat them, prior to her revelation? No. Did she want them dead? Well, yes, but only if it pleases God.
(Her judges are Burgundians.)
Asked what blessing she said or asked over the sword, she answered that she neither blessed it herself, nor had it blessed; she would not have known how to do it.
Asked if she ever put her sword on the altar, and if she did so to bring it better fortune, she answered no, as far as she knew.
Asked if she ever prayed for her sword to have better fortune, she answered: “It is well to know that I could have wished my armor (in French mon harnois) to have good fortune.”
(Blessing it is heretical because she's not a priest, going to effort to have it blessed might be idolatry if you really want to stretch it, and praying to be better at killing people is kinda sinful.)
Asked whether, since her voices had told her that in the end she should go to Paradise, she has felt assured of her salvation, and of not being damned in hell, she answered that she firmly believed what the voices told her, namely that she will be saved, as firmly as if she were already there.
Asked whether after this revelation she believed that she could not commit mortal sin, she answered: “I do not know; but in everything I commit myself to God.”
And when she was told that this was an answer of great weight, she answered that she held it for a great treasure.
(The belief that she's immune to sin is heresy. The belief that she can go to Heaven in a state of mortal sin is heresy. The belief that she'll eventually go to Heaven can't be heresy because Jesus told specific people they would go to Heaven.)
Asked if God ordered her to wear a man’s dress, she answered that the dress is a small, nay, the least thing. Nor did she put on man’s dress by the advice of any man whatsoever; she did not put it on, nor did she do aught, but by the command of God and the angels.
Asked whether it seemed to her that this command to assume male attire was lawful, she answered: “Everything I have done is at God’s command; and if He had ordered me to assume a different habit, I should have done it, because it would have been His command.”
Asked if she thought she had done well to take man’s dress, she answered that everything she did at God’s command she thought well done, and hoped for good warrant and succor in it.
Asked if, in this particular case, by taking man’s dress, she thought she had done well, she answered that she had done nothing in the world but by God’s commands.
She is simultaneously utterly direct, so exceedingly Christian that on no point of doctrine can they call her out, and qualified to perfectly sidestep every single question they ask her. It must have been infuriating.68
She started everything off by quibbling about the oath they wanted her to swear (she'd previously sworn to keep King Charles's secrets, and so she needed to clarify that she would only swear limited oaths to tell the truth about things that touch on the trial and don't touch on the king) and then when the bishop judging her asked her to say the our father she said she would - if he'd hear her in confession.
(He obviously couldn't prosecute her if he was her confessor! That would violate the seal of the confessional! Also, he can't really refuse because this is his job. He tries to offer her someone else hearing her confession and eventually drops the point.)
Entertainingly, she does this without apparently knowing anything except war and, uh, now theology somehow? They ask her if she'd tell the Pope anything differently than she tells them and she immediately demands to be taken to the Pope.69 They ask her which Pope and she goes... the pope in Rome?
(The Avignon schism was, metaphorically speaking, last week, and in a couple decades the people trying her are going to schism briefly and elect their own Pope because they dislike the Roman one.)
The thing about all this is, though, that it's totally irrelevant to the actual situation. She can beat all the inquisitors in the room in debate, sure. That doesn't matter. The English bought her so they could kill her, ideally in a way that disgraces her king, and they aren't going to just let her go. She's the enemy's best general! When she answers all their absurd trick questions correctly, they respond by... writing down different answers than the one she gave and having her convicted based on them.70 They end up concluding that she must be a heretic because she (a) wears men's clothes and (b) refuses to submit to the Pope,7172 then they convict her of heresy and witchcraft, tell her that if she doesn’t repent they’ll burn her and if they do they’ll let her go, then when she “repents,”73 they throw her back in prison and only give her men's clothes to wear,74 and convict her of relapsing into heresy when she wears them instead of going naked. Then they burn her!
The sense of atmosphere we get for the burning is that of a garrison in hostile territory who is pretty sure there’s about to be a riot. She warned Cauchon that she had made her appeal for justice to God75 before taking a last communion, spending her last moments with a sympathetic priest confessing her sins before being hurried down to the fire by eight hundred armed men; none of the usual cries of eagerness at a burning are reported, only yelling at the English and crying for her.
As she was hurried down she begged for a cross to hold; an English soldier gave her one, and as soon as Cauchon had declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the secular power they hauled her down to the logs to be burned. For some reason in all the rush they let her make a final speech,76 which took half an hour and involved forgiving everyone involved and begging them to forgive her all evils she did them; it’s a wonder the city didn’t riot. Her last words were prayers to the saints and to God, ending with cries of “Jesus!” Once the flames had died down the English swept her ashes into the river, so there wouldn’t be any relics.
She was nineteen. In all the haste of the day, the English had never actually convicted her of any crime.77
Shortly afterwards,78 the executioner79 rushed up to a monk, telling him "God help us, we have burned a saint. God help us, we have burned a saint."
History has tended to agree with him.
2.6: “Rejoice, free kingdom of France, for now God fights on your side.”
History has tended to agree with him - eventually.
The English and their allies didn't publish the full trial transcripts. A copy was kept in Rouen, where the trial took place; another copy was sent to Rome, where I suspect the very busy Pope put it in a file drawer somewhere; and I would guess a third copy went somewhere. What they published was the concluding section: The twelve articles of heresy they accused her of, her responses to them, and the conclusion of the judges ("burn her!"). The consensus of Catholic Europe was to assume it was a perfectly normal inquisitorial trial that convicted a perfectly normal heretic of perfectly normal heresy, and an embarrassed silence descended upon the French court on the topic of Joan of Arc. She might have won their battles, but her death made them look bad, and so they were silent.
A few decades passed. She was burned in 1431; in 1435,80 after French victories alternating with long truces, an attempted tripartite council between the French, Burgundians and English ended with the outcome least favorable to England - Bedford, the regent of England, dead of an illness and the Burgundian-Armagnac feud put on pause while they ganged up on England. 1436 saw the fall of Paris to the French and now the French armies were unstoppable, racking up victory over victory while the English collapsed into the internal feuds that would lead to the Wars of the Roses.
Meanwhile, the records of the first trial remained in Rouen in their metaphorical file drawer. In 145081 the French took Rouen, and in their metaphorical file drawer the files rested.
But there was a right for families of a condemned victim to request to reopen trials, and Joan of Arc still had friends. A few preliminary stabs had been taken to reopen the trial in 1450 and 1452, but in 1454 her mother and brothers82 petitioned the Papacy for the case to be reopened. An inquiry was slowly started, but it accelerated when they saw the Rouen files and realized what had actually happened in the first trial. 1455 saw the second trial unleashed in full, with 115 witnesses being interviewed, including everyone in Joan's village old enough to know her and all the people who had conducted the first trial and were willing to accept an offer of safe-conduct.
This trial - the "Trial of Rehabilitation," after its result, the overturning of the verdict of the first trial - is the source of the interviews that comprise most of our evidence. We have the records of the original trial, but the only reason we have the original handwritten notes is that the Trial of Rehabilitation found them.83 All the records of the Trial of Rehabilitation are still there and we've quoted them regularly in the essay.
This means there's a giant vulnerability in our sources. What if the Trial of Rehabilitation was a show trial, but in the opposite direction? What if all that evidence was made up? In that case, most of what I've quoted would be unreliable. We'd be down to the Orleans burgher's journal and the Venetian letters and those other sources, most of which aren't eyewitnesses.
All I can say is: I don't think so. I'm not a forensic linguist, but I've read a lot of it and it sounds like it's in different voices and I've read a lot of histories and they take it seriously as a source and I bet a forensic linguist could get a lot of citations publishing a paper saying "Retrial of Joan of Arc Proved Fraudulent!"
But if we're going to take our sources seriously, that means we need to try to grapple with what our sources say, and our sources describe a lot of miracles..
First, a warning: Remember when I said I was reviewing the evidence for Joan of Arc? I lied.84 I reviewed the evidence for Joan of Arc available in English. We've got two translations of the Trial of Condemnation (I read the free one) and then a couple of books pasted together from primary-source quotes, mostly from the Trial of Rehabilitation, and then we have like fifty different modern popular historians writing books about how cool Joan is that I read a bunch of. I didn't review all the evidence for Joan of Arc, and I invite someone else to, because the evidence was in a mixture of medieval French, modern French and Latin and in spite of all my efforts I am tragically monolingual.
Still, with the evidence we’ve seen, let’s try to come up with some solutions for this.
Part Three: “And we know that all she has said has always come to pass.”
First, though, there’s one more thing I need to cover.
One thing which kept coming up in earlier sections, and I kept cutting so it wouldn't interfere with the flow, is that Joan of Arc keeps making predictions about the future and they keep happening.85
Most of them are pretty explicable. Quoth the Duke d’Alencon:
[W]hen I left my wife to come to the army with Joan, my wife said to Joan that she was very much afraid for me, that I had been taken prisoner before, and that they had had to pay so much money for my ransom that she would have liked to beg me to stay. Then Joan answered her, “Have no fear. I will return him to you safe and sound, and in the state he is in now or in a better one.”
“During the attack on the town of Jargeau, Joan told me at one moment to retire from the place where I was standing, for if I did not “that engine”—and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town—“will kill you.” I fell back, and a little later on that very spot where I had been standing someone by the name of my lord de Lude was killed. That made me very much afraid, and I wondered greatly at Joan’s sayings after all these events.”
We can nearly explain that marvel with his memory being unreliable after twenty years, turning general good advice into confident predictions. Similarly, one of the bits of the Poitiers examination that I had to cut above is her most explicit summation of her goals, recounted by the elderly Dominican, Seguin Seguin:
"I told Joan that it was not God’s will that she be believed if nothing appeared by which it should seem that she ought to be believed, and that the King could not be advised, on her mere assertion, to entrust her with soldiers that they be placed in peril, unless she had something else to say. She answered: ‘In God’s name, I am not come to Poitiers to make signs; but take me to Orleans, I will show you the signs for which I have been sent,’ adding that men be given her in such number as should seem good to her and that she would go to Orleans. Then she told me, me and others present, four things which were then to come and which thereafter happened. First, she said that the English would be defeated and that the siege which was laid to the town of Orleans would be raised and that the town of Orleans would be liberated of the English... She said next that the King would be crowned at Rheims. Thirdly, that the town of Paris would return to its obedience to the King; and that the Duke of Orleans would return from England. All that I have seen accomplished."
On the one hand, if this testimony is to be trusted Joan is behaving very well by rationalist standards! She's helpfully calling her shots in advance to avoid the sharpshooter effect, making many specific predictions of individual events. There’s just two problems with this. First, all these predictions are correlated - the Duke of Orleans is more likely to be ransomed if they have lots of prisoners to trade for him, which is more likely if they're winning the war, they're not likely to win the war without raising the siege of Orleans, and any victory will inevitably involve the king being crowned and Paris returning to French control, so most86of this reduces to “I predict the war will go well because I’m going to win it for us,” which is less of a prophecy than a promise.
And, second, while we can’t exactly expect medieval Frenchmen to carefully write down all their predictions as soon as they make them when our own government doesn’t, we have the major problem that all these predictions are written down after they occurred, which means that the good brother's memory might not be reliable.
Now, we do have other people quoting other, simpler versions of the same prophecies:
Then we asked her why she had come, and she answered, “I have come in the name of the King of Heaven to raise the siege of Orléans and to lead the King to Rheims for his coronation and his anointing.”
or
She said that she had two (reasons) for which she had a mandate from the King of Heaven; one, to raise the siege of Orleans, the other to lead the King to Rheims for his sacring.
But, again, they're all recorded in the Trial of Rehabilitation, after that has happened. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Joan made some predictions in advance, recorded by her enemies, all carefully recorded in a file drawer in Rouen, so we could see how accurate she was?
Yeah, she did.
JOAN: Before seven years be passed, the English will lose a greater gage than they had at Orleans, and they will lose all in France. And the English will even suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France and this will be by87 a great victory which God will send to the French.
Question: How do you know that?
JOAN: I know it well by a revelation which has been made to me, and it will happen before seven years; and I should be very vexed should it be so long deferred. I know it as well as I know that you are there in front of me.
Question: When will this happen?
JOAN: I know not the day nor the hour.
Question: In what year will it happen?
JOAN: That too you shall not have, but I would that it might be before Saint John’s Day.
This is a pretty good prediction. But it's not perfect. It's written down in early 1431 and presumably made in early 1431, too, by the date of the trial. The relevant dates for her prediction: May 1435, French win a small-scale victory at Gerberoy, killing a leading English general; September 1435, Bedford dies of natural causes and the Burgundians switch sides again; April 1436, French take Paris with support from inside the city; 1441, the last English stronghold within the Ile de France falls; 1453, every English stronghold in France falls except the debatably French Calais; 1558, Calais falls.
It's true that, "before seven years be passed," the French would win a great victory; talking the Burgundians into switching sides and the fall of Paris both count. And it's arguable that the English would suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France, since when Henry V died his brother Bedford could replace him, while there was no qualified replacement for Bedford. On the other hand, he died during a truce in the war, and I doubt it was a result of "a great victory." The English lost more men at Patay than Gerbois, so Joan certainly couldn't claim it was a greater loss than Patay, though see footnote 86. The fall of Paris can certainly count as "a great victory" and I wouldn't be surprised if in "number of Frenchmen under their control" it was the most important victory for the French, but not in losses among the English.
But you'll note that they don't lose all in France - even in the Ile de France - "before seven years be passed," unless Joan has a different definition of the Ile than Wikipedia does.
It's not a perfect prediction. But it's pretty good.
Asked what promises they made, she answered: “That is not in your case at all.” And amongst other things, they told how the king would be reëstablished in his kingdom, whether his enemies wished it or not. She said also that they promised the said Jeanne to bring her to Paradise, and she had asked it of them.
The last section is uncheckable. The rest is a very simple prophecy that boils down to “we’ll win the war.” To the extent it predicts anything more specific, it’s “we will win in this generation, before the throne passes to the king’s heir.”
Asked if the voices had told her that within three months she would be delivered from prison, she answered: “That is not in your case; however, I do not know when I shall be delivered.”
Asked if her counsel had not told her that she would be delivered out of the present prison, she answered: “Ask me in three months’ time; then I will tell you.” She added: “Ask the assessors, on their oath, if that concerns my trial.”
Asked afterwards, when the assessors had deliberated, and unanimously concurred that it did, she said: “I have already told you that you cannot know all. One day I must be delivered.”
This sure looks like she's making an incorrect prediction: That she'll escape prison. If true, this would sink her case.
The only problem is that the text goes on:
And beyond this the voices told her she will be delivered by a great victory; and then they said: “Take everything peacefully: have no care for thy martyrdom; in the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.” And this her voices told her simply and absolutely, that is, without faltering. And her martyrdom she called the pain and adversity which she suffers in prison; and she knows not whether she shall yet suffer greater adversity, but therein she commits herself to God.
Which sure sounds to me like “they told her she would be martyred, in the sense in which we use the term today and not just in the older sense of suffering, and she completely misunderstood ‘delivered from the pains of Hell' as ‘delivered from the jail cell you are currently in.’” The great victory spoken of can either be her victory in the debate or, frustratingly, the victory of Jesus over death. Stupid prophecies.
So, are there any prophecies where she is just unambiguously wrong? I think I’ve managed to track one down:
Question: What was the cause for which you leapt from the tower of Beaurevoir?88
JOAN: I had heard say that all they of Compiègne down to the age of seven years were to be put to fire and to blood, and I preferred to die rather than live after such destruction of good people, and that was one of the causes of my leaping. And the other was that I knew that I was sold to the English and I would rather have died than to be in the hands of the English, my adversaries.
Question: Did you make that leap on the advice of your voices?
JOAN: Catherine told me almost every day that I must not leap and that God would help me and also them of Compiègne. And I said to Saint Catherine that since God would help them of Compiègne, I myself would (like to) be there. Then Saint Catherine said to me: “Without fail, you must accept your lot (be resigned, take what is happening in good part), and you will not be delivered until you have seen the king of the English.” And I answered her: “Truly, I would rather not see him, and I would rather die than be put into the hands of the English.”
This is the prophecy that seems to me like the best evidence against Joan’s divine inspiration. She says that her voices flatly tell her something that never happens. On the other hand, the context is that she needs to not try to escape and not confess; if we want to defend her we can either suggest memory error (she was told this just before jumping out of a tower window and badly injuring herself), translation error (she does see the leader of the English, Bedford, briefly, but he's regent for a king who’s a small child89) or point out that this is a conditional, and she disobeyed the voices. But I take it as pretty good evidence against the divine theory, just - frustratingly - inconclusive.
3.2: “We wish to know the truth of this matter.”
What are we to make of this?
I tend to have three models in my head when I review this. In deference to C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma, I have tended to call them Saint, Schemer and Schizophrenic.
By the first model, she was both honest and correct when she described what was going on: Saints in heaven can and do petition God to produce miracles, and out of all the wars in history, God decided to put his hand down really, really hard on this one by handing a random holy peasant detailed instructions on how to win battles, unparalleled persuasiveness and the ability to go around asking saints questions and getting answers on semi-arbitrary topics.90 Once she'd done enough to win the war for her side He stopped giving her useful support, but did make sure that events helpfully provided an extremely complete and detailed record of her deeds to the future, just so future historians would not have the slightest excuse for not believing in miracles.
In the second model, she was a military genius out of nowhere who decided to play saint because that was the way society would listen to her. She says - and I believe her - that there were already rumors going around that "the kingdom that has been lost by a woman will be regained by a virgin from the Lorraine marches", and there's people who will say "then let that be me."
But this doesn't actually explain half of what needs explaining about her! How did she learn military riding, how did she learn to wear armor and fight in armor, how did she learn the theology that lets her win debates with inquisitors? You need to put a conspiracy together, with elements of the Armagnac government deliberately prepping her in advance of her public appearance, but how did they know she was a military genius? Or, if actually the entire time that was Dunois or some other officer whispering in her ear, how did they know she was so charismatic? And how large is this conspiracy, anyway? If she didn't spend the first fifteen years of her life in a village, why do so many people testify she did in so many different words? Why couldn’t the Burgundians find any evidence to the contrary? What about her mother and father and her brothers, were they all in on the conspiracy? Why didn't any of the people who rebelled against Charles VII later in life, like the Duke d'Alencon or Jean Dunois or as far as I can tell every other nobleman in France, ever spill the beans? And why is she so crazy about religion? She spends all her time praying and when she's on trial she spends, like, an hour a day haggling over the terms of her oath of honesty!
In the third, she's mentally ill. We know that being slightly manic is a common trait of Very Successful People; the drive to push past all obstacles and do the impossible tends to correlate with lots of energy, absolute self-confidence and a sort of hypnotic charisma. By this theory, she's slightly more manic than that. Hallucinations are culturally mediated; she hallucinates saints telling her to Do Good at first and then, later, save the world. Of course, this doesn't explain her being a completely untaught military genius, or a completely untaught theology genius. Generously, it explains part of her charisma, and charisma is certainly useful for warfare - but she's clearly very intelligent, too, which this doesn’t predict, and we also need to ignore all the testimony about prophecy and miracles or claim it was all coincidental. There’s some pretty huge complexity penalties91 here.
All these models involve her being very charismatic because she is very charismatic. It's very hard to read her and not fall under her sway. Mark Twain was a member of her fan club; so was George Bernard Shaw; so am I. Twain was an unconventional Christian at best and Shaw was a full-blown atheist, but her charisma is strong enough to reach across the gap of ages and ensnare us all. We know she was charismatic. The question is - given that, how can we explain everything else?
Obviously, if you're a Catholic, you can be content with the first model, and indeed can be very smug that is exactly what your religion would predict. Non-Catholic Christians might want to consider switching sects, or just might want to say that Joan is before Protestantism and we don't know what she would have thought of it.92
The rest of us have a harder problem. Neither of the other two theories make sense. Specific points that I debate back and forth with myself:
3.3: “Thus spake the people, but whether she had done well or ill, she was burned that day.”
(Enter ARUNDEL, who believes Joan is mad, and BASILICA, who believes she is a saint, halfway through a long argument.)
Arundel:Why this war?
Basilica: You mean, out of all the wars for God to put his finger on, why should He put it here?
Arundel: Yes! The Armagnacs are crooks. Charles VII is a pretty terrible king. The knight who was her bodyguard was planning to rape her on the road! Sure, the English suck, but everyone in this entire story sucks. If you want to say that God cares more about religion than morality, that doesn't even help. Everyone here's a Catholic, they're just really bad at it. How can you possibly come up with a predictive model of God that predicts this?
Basilica: You mean, instead of intervening here, God could intervene when the weak are oppressed by the strong - as in the Holocaust, or Tokugawa's persecutions of the Japanese martyrs, or if He is specifically trying to spread the Christian religion He could make the Crusades a success. If God doesn't discriminate by Christian sect, He could preserve the Byzantine empire, and if He's specifically Catholic, He could have the Thirty Years’ War last just five years and end with a permanent Catholic Holy Roman Empire.
Arundel: Exactly!
Basilica: Well, first, you don't know that He didn't interfere at the Crusaders' Siege of Jerusalem -
Basilica: - or the first dozen times Constantinople held off attack, or in aid of the defense of Malta?
Arundel: Sure, if you're religious maybe your model says he does that. But this still doesn't predict God the way that good guys/Christians winning every battle they ever fight against bad guys/pagans does, and they don’t. But even if he is, why, in addition, do it here? To prove that miracles are real? God clearly doesn't want to do that, or He would just do miracles in some really obvious way today, and then we wouldn't need to trust the discrimination of 15th-century Frenchmen.
Basilica: Look, leaving aside the age-old debate over free will and why God doesn't solve our problems for us - I realize "mysterious ways" is a cheap shot, but this is one of the hinge points of history. There's no reason to believe the English would stop rolling over France if they took Orleans, and no reason not to expect they'd hold on if they took it.93 If England rules France - or, more accurately, an Anglo-French King rules both - what does the Protestant Reformation look like? The colonization of the New World? The rise of democracy? If God wants to butterfly history into our path, there's a thousand different ways we could have missed the goal if the Hundred Years' War goes differently.
Arundel: Joan of Arc is a lot more than a butterfly.
Basilica: Ironically, this is where the corruption and ineptitude enter play on the other side. Maybe there wasn't a butterfly that would do it. Maybe the French screwed up every single chance they got to solve problems with only very subtle miracles, and so it took a blatant one to do it.
Arundel: That is a hell of a complexity penalty.
Basilica: On the other hand, so’s any theory that denies her miracles.
Arundel: Some of them have good explanations.
Basilica: Such as the weather control? We’ve got eyewitness testimony.
Arundel: Written down twenty years later.
Basilica: Sure. But the fact that the wind changed direction had meaningful military consequences.
Arundel: And yet most of the Popular Histories About How Cool Joan Is don’t mention this miracle! They just say she got the convoy in.
Basilica: They are atheist cowards and this is why you should always go back to the primary sources.
Arundel: Or they read alternate testimony not included in Pernoud’s collection that disagreed with Dunois’. Or maybe they think she just guessed the wind would change and got lucky when it did.
Basilica: Complexity penalty!
Arundel: Any theory that doesn’t require a God who sees the fall of every sparrow will involve some coincidences somewhere.
(They pass under an archway, and for a moment you can’t hear them. As they leave, the conversation resumes -)
Basilica: At her trial, she outargued a room full of theological experts with no formal training or defense counsel.
Arundel: She came up with clever ways to avoid their questions. When you look at the ability of police today to convince people to confess to crimes they haven't committed, I agree this is extraordinary and suggests she was very smart and had great social skills, but if she was very smart and had great social skills, that means we need to explain fewer miracles, not more.
Basilica: Did you ever read Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village?
Arundel: I did not.
Basilica: As part of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition interviewed every single person in an Occitan village about what they believed.
Arundel: And they were heretics?
Basilica: Yes, but the interesting thing is that they weren’t mostly Albigensian heretics! They'd independently invented six different kinds of atheism or gnosticism or wilder beliefs (the four great evils are Satan, the Pope, the King of France and their bishop) and just went on thinking that until they were asked. Any one of those people - ordinary people in an ordinary village - would have been burned at Joan's trial in five minutes flat. Nobody without theological training would survive.
Arundel: I have been regularly told by Christians that theology is basically just logic and deducible from the premises of the religion, and very smart people are good at logic.
Basilica: I'm a Christian and I don't buy it. Brilliant people in the fourth century and in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth century study their Bibles, read theologians, and come up with heresies conclusively condemned by Athanasius. Indeed, we observe that all these brilliant people assembled in the fourth century produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape to whatever was most politically useful, and then later centuries saw hundreds of extremely corrupt papal elections between would-be Popes where the Cardinals were paid vast sums to vote for the candidate who paid most, some of which produced Popes who made historically-vital rulings for utterly cynical reasons. If God is real, maybe the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired; but if God isn't real, theology is men looking at their reflection, quarreling about it, and then voting to decide who to kill for being in the minority. If everyone who doesn't study theology in the twelfth century is a heretic, and everyone who doesn't study theology in the twentieth century is a heretic, shouldn't Joan have just been a heretic?
Arundel: I agree that this is adding a lot of complexity to the atheist theory! But Joan was very pious. All you need to argue is that her village priest wasn't a heretic - which if the Catholic Church is any good at its job, he shouldn't be - and that any other errors she made were corrected at Poitiers, and she pays attention and learns the right answer and then remembers it later.
Basilica: I am touched by your faith in the simplicity and purity of the Christian doctrine and the ability and honesty of the Catholic church.
(ARUNDEL laughs.)
Basilica: And the artillery! Imagine, Arundel, that you hear that Google has just offered a $1 billion a year salary to a new employee, a young woman from a small tribe in Africa who was illiterate until the age of fifteen.
Arundel: This seems unlikely.
Basilica: Yup. Would you guess she was hired to be their new top programmer? The first ballistae were invented by a devoted R&D team around 400 BC,94 and ever since then the artillery has been one of the most technical fields of warfare. You give random noblemen commissions in the cavalry and trust to their ability to charge with fervor; the reason Napoleon was an artillerist was because the artillery was where you sent the people with a good mind for geometry and ballistics.
Arundel: Today, I'd expect her not to be a computer programmer - just like in 1800, I wouldn't believe in an illiterate artillery savant being Napoleon. But she wasn't being Napoleon! When you say that they need to know ballistics, you imply that they knew what they were doing. If everyone is calculating by eye, the person with the best intuitive ability to calculate projectiles - which I'll bet you is IQ-correlated - is your best artillerist, and Joan was clearly brilliant.
Basilica: I'm really not sure you're right. I’m no more of an expert on the development of artillery than you are, but this pattern-matches to a lot of "dumb medievals" stories, and this is the late middle ages, not the Dark Ages. They not only have geometry, they practically worship geometry. Why shouldn't they be able to solve this?
What tools would God use to make the cosmos but a compass and straightedge?
Arundel: They probably did. The very first siege where artillery is recorded as being used in western Europe is Orleans! By fifty years after that maybe they have an answer, but not within the year! I'm not saying they're dumb, but it does sometimes take more than a year to solve problems.
Basilica: That's Fletcher Pratt who says it was the first siege and he is not a reliable source.
(Enter CHAROLAIS, who suspects a conspiracy.)
Charolais: Alternatively, she could just have gotten trained by an expert artillerist.
(Two heads turn.)
Charolais(unruffled): I heard you were talking about Joan of Arc. So, Arundel. I take it you support the theory that she was mentally ill?
Arundel: Specifically manic, but yes.
Charolais: Mania is not generally known to result in accurate predictions of the future or extraordinary horse-riding, lance-using skills.
Arundel: You'd rather discard all the testimony of her village?
Charolais: Yes, I think so. Neither you nor I have read the untranslated sections of the Trial of Rehabilitation, and we aren't trained in forensic linguistics. There are two points where if you’re wrong your theory falls - your intuition that you can do a good enough job at amateur forensic linguistics to tell that the characters in the Trial of Rehabilitation have different voices, and your belief that Regine de Pernoud is a reliable source. If we discard one leading French historian of the period as reliable, we can conclude that, actually, Joan was recognized at an early age by someone in the Armagnac camp as super-capable, trained up for her job, and that the religion was a cover story.
Arundel: I feel like there's dogs that ought to bark there that don't. There are quite a lot of other historians who would love to expose a leading rival as inept.
Charolais: Yes, but were they translated into English?
Arundel: They don't have to be. Pernoud was translated into English because she was a leading historian of Joan's age. She’s writing against the trends by focusing so hard on the texts in an age of economic history and social history, so it would have been easy and profitable to shoot her down.
Charolais: This is speculation and we both know it.
Arundel: The fact that when Cauchon sent people to investigate Joan’s reputation in her home province, they found nothing?
Charolais: Travel was difficult and unsafe, and the Trial of Rehabilitation made up the testimony by the people who went and claimed to find a good reputation.
Arundel: Epicycles.
Charolais: Smaller ones than “within a month she learned six skills to a professional level.”
Arundel: Actually, we don't know she was any good with a lance.
Charolais: Three sources...
Arundel: They testify twenty, thirty years after her death. If she was a faster learner than anyone they've ever met - which is still a complexity penalty but not much of one, we're both admitting she's brilliant - they might remember that as "very good."
Charolais: That gets you one. When she's good at every skill of war, why not admit that she probably had more than a month to learn them?
Arundel: Because she's hardly the first shockingly brilliant teenage general! Sure, Alexander had Philip, but he died when Alexander was young and half of what Alexander did he had to invent for himself. The middle ages was an age of apprenticeships, and that means we don't have the formalized art of war that we will in another two centuries, only what fathers teach their sons. It's not that improbable she invents it herself.
Charolais: It absolutely is!
Basilica: Or you could admit it's a miracle.
(Arundel laughs).
Basilica: Since you've joined the conversation, Charolais! Let's talk about the death of Joan of Arc.
Charolais: At her trial, she defended herself with the skill of a brilliant theologian. Therefore she was a brilliant theologian. Therefore she had training.
Basilica: Not the trial, the death. The point where everything is lost and she goes to the flames and is burned alive. She could save herself by confessing!
Charolais: She tried that.
Basilica: No, she signed a document and the record was altered. We have six witnesses. If she'd confessed to the entire conspiracy - that she was trained up by their enemies, that she’d faked all her miracles, that she was lying from the start - she could have saved her life and probably gotten pretty heavily paid, as one of our sources testifies. It sure looks like Cauchon is stretching her death out so this very thing will happen, and it doesn’t!
Charolais: Martyrs do go gladly to their deaths, sometimes.
Basilica: For something they believe in. In this period, that's the Catholic faith. Or the Muslim faith, or the Cathar faith, or the Hussite faith. They don't die for nothing.
Charolais: Personally, as an atheist, I'm inclined to say that most martyrs die for "it would be really embarrassing not to after I've gone this far," occasionally mixed with "to hell with these people in particular.”
Basilica: Read the records of the day of her death! If she surrendered to Cauchon, she might have lived. If she’d tried to whip the mob into a frenzy, she might have lived. Instead she asked them to forgive her murderers. That is not the behavior of a fraud, but of a sincere believer.
Charolais: Mmm…
Arundel: I want to make another point. If it’s a conspiracy, why didn’t the Duke d’Alencon or Dunois spill? They rebelled against the King eventually, but never said a word about Joan being any sort of fraud.
Charolais: Joan was their friend. They were neck and neck with her in it, and they didn’t want to incriminate themselves or betray her.
Arundel: Charolais, you’ve read about this court - its rapid changes of policy, its sudden and inexplicable shifts of method, Charles VII’s inability to make any decision without second-guessing it, all shot through with Venetian spies. Can you actually believe anyone in it is qualified to run a conspiracy without it being exposed five minutes in?
Charolais: Okay, I’ll admit that part’s tricky.
-
3.4: “She is in truth come to accomplish magnificent things in this world.”
I think this is where I'm supposed to put what I learned from Joan of Arc.
First, I learned that she's really, really cool. I talk about "God stretching down His hand to alter history," and I'm really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.
I also kind of feel called out by God. "So, you say you're a rationalist? You're dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won't consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports?95 You won't believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?"
On the other hand, I still do have my atheist model. Here, I suppose, is what it recounts:
Imagine that you sort all the people in the world by how good evidence they are for God. If you restrict yourself to people alive today, you expect one in eight billion people is going to be so extraordinarily good evidence you would only expect one in eight billion people to be that impressive by chance.
Now sort everyone who has ever lived by how good evidence they are for God.
It isn't quite as impressive as it looks. Most people lived before recorded history; we can only expect the level of evidence we have for Joan in areas after the invention of the printing press and with people of historical importance, and the further you get from the English-speaking world the less likely I am to have access to sources on them. But that’s still a lot of people, and Joan’s at the head of the list. You aren’t reading about Joan because she’s a random person, you’re reading about her because she’s fascinating precisely because she’s such unusually good evidence for miracles - she’s not the product of random chance,96 she’s the product of a “sort the entire planet by how miraculous they seem”97 function.
I am genuinely conflicted. This seems to me to be sufficient evidence that I can’t just handwave it as “well, sometimes people will make shit up.” No! Making shit up doesn’t do this! Is this really just coincidence? Is this really just mania? Did God exist, and stretch out his hand for this war in particular? Why? I genuinely can’t say.
But, since I can’t say, let’s move on from the question of my spiritual agonies to useful lessons we can learn from this historical incident.
First, Pierre Cauchon doesn’t seem to have been a very wicked man. Wikipedia warns against rounding him off to a cartoon villain, and I’m inclined to agree. He seems to have been a perfectly ordinary politician in bishop’s clothes, loyal to a great Renaissance prince and patron of the arts who in many ways deserved men’s loyalty, interested in preserving the authority of Church councils against the unchecked authority of the Pope.
Therefore he murdered a saint because she was politically inconvenient for his goals, and was furious with her when she wouldn’t go along with it and just die, and celebrated when he finally managed to find a way to kill her off. Great evils aren’t done by extremely wicked men. Bedford was a competent statesman trying to protect his family, Philip the Good was one of the finest princes of the Renaissance, and with Cauchon they all carried out Joan’s destruction. You can be an ordinary good person and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a hero you never believed you’d ever see, and murder her because she’s politically inconvenient, and, having done so, not even get the benefits you sold your soul for. And that’s a lesson that no men, at any time, can ever hear too much.
Second, that in a maze of backstabbing politics, ineptitude, brutal criminality and betrayal within and without the government, of authorities who act like bandits and bandits who act like Huns, a saint can suddenly appear with the strength to rewrite history. When everything looks hopeless… you’re probably screwed! But you might not be. A saint might appear. It’s happened before. It can happen again.
And, third and finally? If you’re looking at these sources and seeing stories grow and change, seeing how the sources twenty years later are just slightly more polished than the contemporary sources, seeing how secondhand accounts distort the story and contemporary chroniclers include exciting incidents that never actually occurred, and you’re panicking?
Then I have a dreadful, doleful warning for you: This is just about as good as it gets. There are a few modern cases - the World Wars, say - where we have better information, where the participants published newspapers and kept diaries and sent each other letters and even didn’t burn most of the letters, but if you go back very far, or pass into a country without cheap paper and the printing press and an extremely literate population, you will quickly discover that the evidence for Joan of Arc is stronger than the evidence for everything else. All of our historical sources before the printing press and most afterwards have gone through the same evolution as the evidence for Joan of Arc, and the difference between the life of Augustus and the life of Joan is that with Joan we can see the evolution, captured in amber. The life of Alexander the Great that we have now shouldn’t be compared to Jean Chartier’s narrative; chronologically, it’s closer to the fix-fic written seventy years later in which after the coronation at Rheims, Paris surrenders without a fight and they march into Normandy and Charles VII promises to listen to Joan forever and orders the army to always do what she says.98 If you want to know the truth about Joan of Arc, you can read the chronicles of the time, or the modern histories that laboriously try to disentangle the evidence from the invention and the reality from the superstition, and you can hope they got the right answer.
Or you can look at the book where the French clerks interviewed a hundred and fifteen witnesses and wrote down the results. Who knows? Maybe one of them got it right.
We have no histories from contemporaries of Alexander the Great, just inscriptions, fragments quoted in later histories, et cetera. There were histories written, to be clear! We know they were written! We even know his general Ptolemy wrote one claiming to be his half-brother! We just don't have them any more because all existing copies have been lost or destroyed. Blame the Huns and the Goths, I suppose.
Which built much of its powers in the reign of his great-grandfather, Henry III, who wasn't the first weak king to accidentally build strong institutions and won't be the last.
… In Europe. The Mongols and their fellow steppe nomads were quite as good archers as the English and had even better bows, and I have never seen a head-to-head comparison of who could shoot faster.
15: Interestingly, one author of the French Revolutionary Wars - some four hundred years after our story - recommended the British ditch the single-shot musket for the longbow on these grounds. This probably would have been a mistake, since longbows didn't come with bayonets, but given that nobody but a few cuirassiers was wearing armor by that point I suspect Pitt's government would have gotten a good deal by recruiting any hobbyists still practicing with the weapon and having them fire on enemy infantry and cower inside a bayonet square whenever cavalry threatened.
This is an interesting one which I included chiefly because no American has ever heard of it. The English and the French were allied with the main contenders, the Portuguese and Castillians, but in spite of this it looked remarkably similar to any of the battles of the Hundred Years' War, complete with the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance routing enemies that outnumbered them six to one using archers, defensive terrain and their enemies' rashness.
To pick an element purely because I happen to know something about it: We have dance manuals in the fifteenth century from two places: Italy and Burgundy. They don't show up elsewhere in Europe until the sixteenth century, or for laggardly places like England, the seventeenth.
The name came from the title of Louis of Orleans's son’s wife's father Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, who lead the faction for a time. You do not need to remember his name.
Corruption by the standards of the period, yes. It was also suspected he was sleeping with his brother's wife on the side, but that was probably just hostile slander, especially if you're Catholic. (We’ll get to that.)
That they appealed and were de facto ignored is my supposition; there are people mentioning that they hold out hope Castile will help them, and they were allied with the Castilians in the last bout of the war, but I have failed to track down any evidence of any help Castile actually gave them.
Our source for this is her own testimony - up until her journey to Vaucouleurs, she didn't tell anyone angels spoke to her. The most she managed was the crypting hinting to a friend of hers that we get the section title from.
One of the persistent problems with the language of every figure in this period, Joan included, is that France wasn't very well defined, in rather the same way an American could say "New York" to mean New York State or New York City, except worse. So "France" could mean either all of the territory held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory rightfully held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory in the ancient Kingdom of France, which had more different borders than I could shake a stick at, or just the Ile de France, the region surrounding Paris that was the heart of the domain of the French kings. Joan talks about herself as French and also talks about going into France from Lorraine, and plenty of others from this period talk about going from Normandy into France or France into Flanders. I can't ask them to talk more precisely than I speak myself, but it's still really annoying.
Most first-person quotes are from the two books Regine Pernoud wrote on this topic, Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses - my favorite Joan of Arc book because it's mostly a primary source compilation - and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, also a primary source compilation but more focused. This one is from By Herself And Her Witnesses, but a bunch of others will be from The Retrial. The third-person quotes are mostly from the W.P. Barrett translation of her trial.)
At this point, Joan of Arc got dragged into a sidequest when the Duke of Lorraine (her theoretical liege-lord) heard rumors there was a miracle-worker around and decided to ask her to come visit him to heal his poor health. She went to him and told him he should stop sinning with his mistress and take back his wife, but that if he gave her an armed escort to Bourges she'd pray for him. He, having lived with his mistress for what I would guess was more than a decade at this point and having had five children with her, gave her four francs and sent her back to Vaucoleurs.
Catherine Le Royer: “I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, and Messire Jean Fournier, come into my house. I heard it from Joan that the latter, a priest, had brought a stole and that he had conjured her before the captain, saying that if there was any bad thing in her that she go hence from them, and that if there was a good thing then let her approach them. And Joan approached this priest and went down on her knees; and she said that this priest had not done well, since he had heard her confession.” Joan of Arc by herself and her Witnesses, page 44.
“They said that in the beginning they wanted to require her to lie with them carnally. But when the moment came to speak to her of this they were so much ashamed that they dared not speak of it to her nor say a word of it.”
Warning, this footnote is kind of boring - not every writer is Joan. But if you want our best guess to what the sign was, the chronicler Pierre Sala, writing a couple generations later, writes that a man who had served Charles in his youth told him that:
"In the time of the great adversity of this King Charles VII, he found himself (brought) so low that he no longer knew what to do. . . . The King, being in this extremity, entered one morning alone into his oratory and there he made a humble petition and prayer to Our Lord in his heart, without utterance of words, in which he petitioned devoutly that if so it was that he was true heir descended from the noble House of France and that the kingdom should rightly belong to him, that it please Him to keep and defend him, or, at worst, to grant him the mercy of escaping death or prison, and that he might fly to Spain or to Scotland which were from time immemorial brothers in arms and allies of the Kings of France, wherefore had he there chosen his last refuge. A little time afterwards, it came about that the Maid was brought to him, who, while watching her ewes in the fields, had received divine inspiration to go and comfort the good King. She did not fail, for she had herself taken and conducted by her own parents even before the King and there she gave her message at the sign aforesaid (dessusdit) which the King knew to be true. And thenceforth he took counsel of her and great good it did him.”
Which gets some notable parts of the story wrong, but if the heart of it is accurate it would be a sign that - consciously or unconsciously - could be delivered through the wholly non-miraculous skill of cold reading.
One of the recurring elements I find in the biographies of great generals is how insanely pissed off they are whenever politics deprives them of an opportunity to exploit military opportunities.
It's plausible she learned to ride a plowhorse as a child since Lorraine is horse country, but riding a warhorse is a specialized skill, and it's plausible she had a month or two at Vaucouleurs to practice swordsmanship, but I don't think there was anyone at Vaucouleurs to teach her command.
"Wait, artillery? Aren't these people medieval knights with swords and lances and full plate?" Yes. Gunpowder is older than plate armor(*). Our oldest recipe for gunpowder is 11th-century Chinese but it's writing down something that already existed, probably since the ninth century. In the thirteenth century it spreads to Europe and the Middle East, probably via the Mongols, but gunpowder weapons take a long time to get good, only exploding in popularity in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, siege artillery first, field artillery second, handguns third. Joan of Arc is right at the point where artillery is starting to be important, with the Siege of Orleans being the earliest siege I know of where artillery played a major role.
* Sub-footnote: Older than medieval plate armor, technically. Bronze plate armor dates back to Agamemnon, it just kind of sucked compared to iron chain or lamellar. The high and late Middle Ages saw an improving economy giving knights the ability to spend more and more on heavy armor to keep enemy spears and arrows and bullets and crossbow bolts out, and this demand was served by the arms and armor manufacturers of Milan and the Rhine competing in an arms race to develop better armor, with the first ambiguous plate appearing in the 12th or 13th century. The peak of personal protection is probably the beautiful suits of Gothic plate from around 1525, worn by the French cavalry at the Battle of Pavia, who in spite of the toughest armor in the world still can’t ride their horses over Spanish pikemen or deflect bullets from German handguns, and from this point on the level of armor used by soldiers steadily decreases right up until steel helmets to deflect shrapnel return in the first World War and the pendulum's arc reverses again.
The details of the Battle of the Herrings are plot-irrelevant but hilarious. The troops besieging Orleans needed regular resupply; since Lent was approaching, they'd want preserved fish to eat on all those long meatless days, so the wagons were loaded up with pickled herring and sent with sixteen hundred troops or so as escort and reinforcement. The French under the Count of Claremont tried to hit the supply lines with four thousand of their own complete with heavy cavalry and artillery and Scotsmen, but the English commander, the oft-maligned Sir John Falstaff, drew up his wagons in a ring and had all his troops fight from the shelter of the wagons, and that threw the French into confusion. You can't lance a wagon. They tried an artillery bombardment, which was basically sensible, but their troops got bored partway through, charged and were decisively defeated, to the ruin of the French interception, the morale of the Armagnacs, and, of course, the career of the Count of Claremont.
"Once, near to the town of Château-Thierry, having seen the mistress of one of the soldiers, a Knight, she pursued her with drawn sword. She did not, however, strike the woman, but warned her gently and charitably that she be no longer found in the company of the soldiers, otherwise she would do something to her which would not please her.” We have another eyewitness to another event but I'm not going to quote him here because this essay is much too long.
If that was a specific prediction and not just general good advice, I want to note that the cannoneer couldn't do that. Fifteenth century artillery is only a precision weapon insofar as the ball will probably not land behind the gun.
She continues: “You thought to deceive me and it is yourself above all whom you deceive, for I bring you better succour than has reached you from any soldier or any city: it is succour from the King of Heaven. It comes not from love of me but from God himself who, at the request of Saint Louis and Saint Charlemagne*, has taken pity on the town of Orleans, and will not suffer that the enemies have the bodies of the lord of Orleans and his town.’” Which is when the wind changes direction.
*: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.
“‘Bastard, Bastard, in God’s name I command thee that, as soon as thou knowest that Falstaff [commander of the relief force] is come, thou shalt make it known to me, for if he pass without my knowing of it, I promise thee I will have thy head taken off!’ To which answered the lord of Dunois that she doubt not, for he would indeed make it known to her.”
I find it really really easy to imagine this exchange, between an energetic teenager and the veteran officer of noble birth with ten years on her* and without god whispering in his ear.)
“After these exchanges, I who was weary and fatigued cast myself down on a mattress in the Maid’s chamber, to rest a little. And likewise did she, with her hostess, on another bed, to sleep and rest. But while I was beginning to take my rest, suddenly the Maid rose from the bed, and making a great noise, roused me. At that I asked her what she wanted. She answered me: ‘In God’s name my counsel has told me to go out against the English and I know not whether I must go against their fortification (bastide) or against Falstaff who is to revictual them.’ Upon which I arose at once and, as swiftly as I could, put the Maid into her armour.”
“Disciple and limb of the Fiend, called the Pucelle [Maid or Virgin], that used false enchantments and sorceries.” Consistent spelling is an anachronism.
I love the Venetians. They've got some of the best spy networks in Europe by this point and they use them to deliver cargo safely and price loans accurately.
Joan, naturally enough, told the Bretons that "the duke should not reasonably have waited so long to send his men to help the King with their services.”
He ends up called "Charles the Well-Advised," because "Charles The Guy Where God Wanted Really Wanted Him To Have His Father's Throne In Spite Of His Many, Many, Many Personal Failings" doesn't really roll off the tongue. Yes, spoiler, this guy wins.
Entertainingly, everyone still had orders never to work with him, ever, so the Duke d'Alencon said they'd have to withdraw if his reinforcements were coming to join them. Joan vetoed this because it was incredibly stupid and they negotiated something better. My favorite bit is where the two meet: the Constable's chronicler says that when they saw each other,
“He [the Constable] spoke to her and said: Joan, I have been told that you want to fight me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God I fear nothing from you, for God knows my good-will. If you are from the Devil, I fear you even less.”
At which point (the Duke d'Alencon says)
“Joan said to the lord constable: ‘Ah! Good constable, you are not come for my sake, but because you are come you will be welcome.’ ”
This is a rephrasing. The exact words, from The Retrial of Joan of Arc:
"Then my lord the Duke of Alençon, in the presence of the lord constable, of myself, and of several others, asked Joan what should be done. She answered him loudly with the words, “See that you all have good spurs!” When those present heard this they asked her, “What did you say? Are we to turn our backs on them then?” “No,” answered Joan, “it will be the English who will put up no defense. They will be beaten, and you will have to have good spurs to pursue them.” And it was as she said. For they took to their heels, and they lost more than four thousand men in dead and prisoners."
There was a woman named Catherine de Rochelle going around fundraising "for the war"; she claimed she had a God-given power to find hidden treasure and she'd use it on anyone who didn't contribute to the war effort (via her) enough, and then she'd publicly reveal all their hidden wealth (and they, implicitly, would be under enough pressure from their neighbors to donate it). This worked to get donations and give her a comfortable living, but the King of France heard of her and, already having been bailed out of a crisis by one miraculous Maid, asked Joan to check if she was real. Joan's voices said no, but she went and talked to her and spent two nights watching her every moment and saw no angels, and reported back "I have no evidence she is."
This situation would eventually be resolved years after Joan's death when the Constable of France, one of the leaders of the war party, just flat-out illegally arrested his archnemesis de la Tremoille, head of the peace camp, and seized the status of the king's chief advisor for himself. He got away with this with no consequences whatsoever.
They were, of course, quite right, given how she would not shut up about how all of France should return to allegiance to its king and God would see him victorious; they were also quite wrong if they thought the English intended to stop fighting themselves.
For the conditions of her captivity, we have the report of a Burgundian knight:
“I saw Joan for the first time when she was shut up in the castle of Beaurevoir for the lord count of Ligny. I saw her several (many) times in prison and on several occasions conversed with her. I tried several times, playfully, to touch her breasts, trying to put my hand on her chest, the which Joan would not suffer but repulsed me with all her strength. Joan was, indeed, of decent conduct (honnête tenue) both in speech and act.
As opposed to Discord conversationalists, who say things that I as an agnostic can be pretty sure are heretical, like, every six seconds. I bet a Catholic could get it down to two or three.
"She seemed to me to be subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety," said the judge Jean Beaupere. Source: page 263 of Regine Pernoud's The Retrial of Joan of Arc.
How do we know this? Why, because the Rouen archives weren't destroyed, and that means the French-language handwritten notes of the scribe who recorded her testimony ("the French Minute") were still in the archives, and we can compare that - and, as importantly, the French at the Trial of Rehabilitation could compare that - with the official Latin version broadcast for publication. The physical notes didn't survive the centuries, alas - if my memory is right the original Minute was lost in a WW2 bombing - but copies of it did. Basically, every time she demands her legal rights that she has no plausible way of knowing about but they’re honor-bound to grant her, they leave it out of the official transcript.
This is the bit they changed. She in fact said she would submit to no authority's judgement as to the authenticity of her visions other than the Pope, which is barely not heretical.
There were a few more things on their list of accusations, but the men's clothes were clear proof of defiance of the court and the refusal to accept the judgement of the Pope was clear proof of heresy, and the rest they couldn't really make stick.
By signing a small note when all the bishops present tell her to. With an X, which was her symbol for “disregard this, the letter is a lie.” While laughing at them.
This is actually the less nasty of the two narratives about why she went back to wearing men’s clothing. The nastier is that she was assaulted by her jailers while she was in womens’ clothing and wore men's clothes because she could defend herself better this way. She blamed the bishop for not keeping her in a civilized ecclesiastical prison instead of guarded by English soldiers, which one witness of the trial said Cauchon hadn't done because it would offend the English.
You may have heard that God took vengeance on him, but in fact he died of a heart attack at the age of 71. It was a different one of her accusers who mysteriously turned up dead in a sewer.
Pernoud theorizes Bishop Cauchon was hoping she’d break at the last minute and disclaim all of her visions as fraud, which would have strengthened his hand. The notary testifies that he attempted to edit the record after the trial to claim she did, but he was unwilling to notarize that since it didn’t happen.
In the middle ages, the Church lacked the legal power to execute people. All it could do was hand them over to the secular authorities - pronounced “cops” - with a warning that they were unrepentant heretics, and the judge was then supposed to pronounce them guilty of the crime of heresy on that evidence and sentence them to be executed, and only then was the executioner to get to work.
According to the monk involved. According to someone who heard the story secondhand, it was the King of England’s secretary, a much more important person.
I think. If my sources give an exact date I missed it, but the Normandy campaign that secured all of the duchy for the French was '49-50 and most of the action was in 1450.
The scribe who wrote them down at the first trial offered them up to the court at the second. I can't tell if it was genuine patriotism, desire to avenge an injustice, desire to have the authorities owe him a favor, or if he was worried he'd be in a court case ten years later and someone would ask him "did you collaborate with the English occupation?" and he wanted to be able to defend himself.
I also want to cover one non-prophetic miracle she testified about, which is that she prayed a stillborn child would live and it woke up and breathed for exactly long enough to be baptized, which is one of these miracles that says frankly appalling things about the state of the world.
The specific word “by” is found in Joan of Arc: By Herself And Her Witnesses, but absent in my complete translation of The Trial of Joan of Arc. It changes the meaning significantly and I am guessing the more recent translation is better but I don’t actually know.
I have heard the rumor Henry VI briefly saw her trial but have no source for it at all. Since he’s in Paris for his coronation in December of 1431 and Joan is burned in May of 1431, it’s certainly not impossible, but I have seen no evidence it’s true.
"Asked if she calls them or if they come without being called, she answered that they often come without being called, and sometimes, if they did not come, she would pray to God to send them. Asked if she sometimes had called them without them coming, she answered that she never needed them, however little, but they came to her."
That is to say that:(a) the more complex an explanation has to be to explain Joan’s marvels, the less good it is, and (b) a simple explanation that relies heavily on coincidence is actually a complex explanation in disguise.
Actually, she wrote the Hussites a very angry letter telling them she’d campaign against them when she had free time, and at one point - I think it was in the Trial of Condemnation but it might have been while she was very frustrated with the French peace party and its truces - she offered to go into exile and actually do it. So this suggests she's pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant, though of course we don't know what would have happened if she'd had the chance.
Arundel: Actually, what about the Wars of the Roses? Wouldn't France get free while the red and white roses fought?
Basilica: Countries that lose wars and thereby lose territory have revolutions, as the populace looks for scapegoats for the disaster and the dispossessed elites managing the occupation flee to what remains of their country to compete for status with their already-established rivals. Countries that win wars do so much less regularly, and so an English victory here would probably prevent them.
The story is that it was invented for Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse, a patron of the arts and sciences, who hired engineers to devise him clever weapons for his wars with Carthage.
I’m presently inclined to believe Mark and John are eyewitnesses, but that we also have the Synoptics as a unit drawing on the plausibly-eyewitness author of Q, as well as Josephus and Paul's letters.
To you! I, on the other hand, encountered her in a perfectly ordinary history book talking about perfectly ordinary history, so the evidence is somewhat stronger for me than for you.
Dense knots at times but often barely woven in the main
The textures of memory laid out haphazardly
For humanity could survive on their bed of frayed blankets
The well worn patches were not essential to protect
Their comfort rather came from the sheen of nostalgia
Its gauzy patina born of approximation and careful neglect
Attention wanders and the details are fuzzy
Who needs deep inquiries into imprinted testimonies
Lossy then, this fabric,
Full of improvised identities
Extra premiums are due for error correcting
Recall, the claims adjuster works for the insurance company
The duty of care is yours alone,
As is the responsibility
...
The burden of restraint, and the avoidance of pain too pertains
Such is our compulsion for storytelling
The necessity of inventing those good old days
The wax prints celebrating what were minor victories
Decorations of faded traditions rather than the famines
Rather than the droughts that brought hunger season
Rather than the bush fires that caused an exodus
The painful lessons learned. And the knowledge lost in the migration
Indigo fades over time,
it is said to be a repository of wealth
The dye procedures passed down across the ages, it seems like forever
Occasionally, however, the warnings of the perils are overlooked
But later generations can extract the solutions with a little work
Encoded as they are in the stitching of those famed cloths
...
The ancients were prescient when they sewed
And in their designs, they built in redundancy,
Keen treatments for the fabric of memory
The Israeli military said
There had been a "technical error"
With a strike targeting an Islamic Jihad "terrorist"
That caused the munition to fall
Dozens of metres from the target
...
An initial inquiry
Regarding injured individuals
Suggests fragments from a shell
Fired during operational activity in the area
Hit the church mistakenly
...
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said
It was aware of the "claim
Regarding casualties in the area as a result"
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The IDF "regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians"
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Israel deeply regrets
That a stray ammunition:
Hit Gaza's Holy Family Church
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The IDF directs its strikes solely at military targets
And makes every feasible effort
To mitigate harm to civilians and religious structures,
And regrets any unintentional damage caused to them
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Every innocent life lost is a tragedy.
We share the grief of the families and the faithful
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The IDF works to mitigate civilian harm "as much as possible"
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Israel remains committed to protecting civilians and holy sites
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Children Among at Least 10 Killed in Israeli Strike in Central Gaza, Officials Say
The victims were gathered near a water distribution point, health workers said
July 13, 2025
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Israel says it regrets deadly strike on Catholic Church in Gaza
July 17, 2025
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Israeli Strike on a Gaza Church Kills Three
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Israeli forces killed at least 27 people in attacks in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, including the three killed in the church strike, according to medics and church officials.
In a time, then, of intense ferment and revolutionary fervor
When bishops were imprisoned, and judges were being murdered
Amidst vituperous outbursts, obscenities, from the leaders of the junta
Who would set upon any opposition their cadres, commandos, and militias
It took personal bravery from this eminent historian
More inclined to dusty archival work than the realm of the politician
But everyone had to play their part, not just the journalists
The man on the streets, even the poets and the satirists
The call still resounded after six years to stand up and be counted
For, even in those days of despair, the challenge had to be mounted
In the face of random, yet purposeful, terror and violence
To confront head-on the prevailing culture of silence
Up stood the good professor to give those memorial lectures
Political parties were banned, so they were couched as educational sessions
Our intellectual life in those days reduced to Green Book study lessons
Featuring long-winded missives from our friends in Cuba and Nicaragua
East German ideologues too gave input, as did theoreticians from Romania
It's fair to say that this minor act of defiance prompted a revival
A reappraisal, in many ways, of Ghana's philosophy of survival
Methodically and deftly explained with his customary sensitivity
What we choose to remember and forget, the workings of cultural memory
He stepped up to outline the essence of these fraught histories
Provided the background to give strength to quiescent identities
We owe him a debt of gratitude, this mild mannered man of qualities
For laying out the Ghanaian context of the sphinx modalities
Vance Boelter, it turns out, had a life. Vance Boelter had secrets, even to himself. Vance Boelter changed, and no one knows quite why.
He was an ordinary guy until the day he wasn’t. He met an evangelist who said something to Vance Boelter, but we aren’t sure what, except that he became intensely Christian afterwards. He was now “all in for Jesus”. He burned most of what he owned up to that point. Though Boelter himself has told the New York Times that it wasn’t the evangelist, it was the government of the United States who approached him with a secret mission.
The evangelist went to Zimbabwe to bring blankets to people. People in Zimbabwe killed the evangelist. Nevertheless, Boelter seem to have gotten the idea that going to Africa—in his case, the Democratic Republic of Congo—was one way to fulfill his faith. He enrolled at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Pentecostal institution whose student body was significantly international. A religious studies scholar says that the Institute’s curriculum encourages its students to see themselves “as agents of the supernatural, while also blending this sense of God-given power with an entrepreneurial spirit and a distrust of many mainstream Christian denominations”.
Boelter blended a life of dramatic charismatic preaching with a gig-economy pursuit of entrepreneurial success. He was a factory manager and supervisor. He flipped houses. He started nonprofits and a security patrol company. He created a business to support Christian outreach in Congo. He collected bodies for funeral homes. The elders in one U.S. church that he attended regularly believed that he was providing Africans in Congo with “fishing boats”.
The New York Times sums it up as “never quite getting it together”, suggesting it was all a kind of downward spiral into economic desperation and then into mental illness. Boelter’s mood “darkened”. He started to believe that Donald Trump was being persecuted, that a civil war in America was looming. He went back to Congo in February of this year but then came right back. He started planning his campaign of murder. And then he assassinated legislators and their families, including a pet dog.
I offer this summary of a detailed New York Times profile of Vance Boelter to demonstrate one major point: a far-right white man who engages in political violence that could fairly be called “terrorist” always warrants individuation after they have committed their crimes. They are never abstracted, never made to stand in for a category of persons whose ideologies and identities are seen as a general danger. The explanation of their violence is always located in the particular and peculiar, in the specifics of their biographies.
This profile is a perfect case of this approach. The authors go out of their way right at the outset to say that Boelter’s violent acts were not the result of his faith, but instead of a baffling rupture between him and his faith that happened as his circumstances grew more difficult and he became susceptible to disinformation. “[His Christian faith] was a lifelong commitment he would just as suddenly violate 40 years later.”
Boelter himself says otherwise to the NYT authors: his conversion to evangelical Christianity and his recruitment to fight a secret war against social enemies happened at the same time, at the end of his teenage years. Boelter is in many ways the perfect picture of Christian nationalism as it has emerged and strengthened over the last three decades in American life. I read the profile and I think to myself: this is not the story of a sudden break into madness, this is a man who has been devoted to Christian nationalism his whole adult life. He radicalized into active assassination and terrorism because suddenly he found himself in alignment with political leaders who achieved national power for the first time in his life, but 2025 was not the first time he thought that way. This is not an isolated man, this is a revolutionary coming home to his revolution and acting out of long-developing devotion to it.
Let me be clear. I’m not against individuating Vance Boelter, against understanding the distinctive human life he has led. But it is impossible to miss that people like Boelter, like Dylann Roof, like Timothy McVeigh, like Brenton Tarrant, like Anders Breivik, so often seem to warrant being written about in this way. There are frequently heroic efforts by their profilers to make them out to be “lone nuts”, serial killers whose ideology is seen as just being a schtick like sending cryptograms and letters to the police, whose only motives are personal, in their madness and sadness and failure, in the circumstances of their lives. They aren’t taken ever as representing movements or institutions or social categories, and their causality is never attributed to other people except family members who might have hurt them or ignored them or offered them their first gun. It doesn’t even matter if they not only explicitly claim loyalty to an ideology and movement but had strong patterns of prior association with like-minded people.
Brown and Black men, in contrast, are relentlessly typified when they are associated with political violence. Their individual lives rarely matter, it is rare for them to be profiled. Their causality is always collective, communitarian, ideological, categorical.
This is also substantially true for whites who commit political violence that is coded as “left”. In fact, it’s even the case whether someone has actually committed political violence or not: mere association is enough. Using a phrase that the mainstream media has decided always and inevitably connotes violence is seen as a confession of near-future violent action, regardless of whether the person saying it insists it means otherwise. “Left” means your life, your details, your experiences, don’t need attention or explanation or exploration.
A Vance Boelter can be in the company of people calling for murder of their enemies, for a war against the unrighteous, for all of his life, but if those are sermons and he’s in church, it never counts. He can listen to programs that call for enemies to die, he can read books that define liberals and progressives as “unhumans” who must be eliminated, he can harken to a man who says it’s time to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of political enemies, but he will in all the time still be just one man who is having one man’s individual troubles. He’s a normal guy with deep faith until, you know, he’s not making enough money and he’s not a big enough success as a magical prophet and he gets seduced by disinformation designed to pray on the mentally ill.
Either we want to know the stories of every individual who commits a political crime, and understand the interplay between structure and agency in all of them, or we should just typify away about everything that seems to point the way towards assassination and terrorism. Profile all the dangers or understand all the humans.
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