Jeanne d'Arc: Warrior Maiden

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Recommended: Religious conflict and war

Over five hundred years ago, during the year 1407, France was governed by a manic king, Charles VI, and was torn to pieces by two factions: the Party of Burgundy, which was led by the Duke of Bedford, and the party of Armagnac. The Armagnacs supported the French model of government and the Dauphin, the rightful monarch of France, and the son of Charles VI. The Burgundians, meanwhile, were all for the English administrative methods. The two factions eventually divided town from town and village from village, while foreign English troops simultaneously took advantage of these disputes, and overran the land. For the next twenty-two years, the entire French nation was divided, and enveloped in great sorrow. Little did the wretched inhabitants of France suspect that God had appointed Jeanne d'Arc, a modest, devout girl from the southern town of Domremy, to redeem the country. Born in the year 1412, Jeanne d'Arc was a singularly pious child, grave beyond her years, and showed an intense and ever-increasing devotion to things holy. Even as a young girl, she never wearied of visiting the nearby churches in and about her native village, and she passed many an hour “in a kind of rapt trance before the crucifixes and saintly images in these chapels.”1 If at dusk the evening bells sounded across the fields, Jeanne would kneel devoutly, communing in her heart with her divine Master and adored saints. “She loved above all things these evening bells, and, when it seemed to her that the ringer grew negligent, would bribe him with some gift to remind him in the future to be more instant in his office.”2 That this trait in Jeanne is true, we have the testimony of the bell ringer himself to attest. This devotion to her religious duties... ... middle of paper ... ...rote, “the captain (of Compiegne), seeing the great multitude of Burgundians and Englishmen ready to get on the bridge.. raised the drawbridge of the city and barred the gate. So the Maid of Orleans was shut outside, and only a few of her men were with her.”11 Later accounts suggest that the governor of Compiegne was in the pay of the English and that ` Jeanne had been set up. Howsoever it happened, she was forced to surrender, and was taken captive to the Duke of Burgundy's fortress at Morigny. In the minds of the English and Burgundians, she was the force that had resurrected the Dauphin's army; she had to be not just removed from the war, but discredited. So Jeanne was treated not as a prisoner of war, but as an unrepentant heretic accused of “many crimes, sorceries, idolatry, intercourse with demons, and other matters relative to faith and against faith.”12

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