Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint

by Donald Spoto

  The medieval tradition of serfdom had mostly disappeared; instead of owing their labors and lives to a vassal or lord, French peasants in places like the Meuse Valley could become as affluent as aristocrats: they had property to which they paid cash rent to a local seigneur, but they enjoyed the benefits of ownership and could increase their landholdings.

  In 1400 Jacques d’Arc was an enterprising, respected landowner in Domrémy; by 1423 he was also the local doyen, bearing both the honor and responsibility of collecting village taxes and supervising the defense of citizens and livestock in times of assault. He was born about 1375 in Ceffonds, twenty miles west of Domrémy, but some historians theorize that his parents must have lived in Arc-en-Barrois, farther south. Their argument is based on the assumption that this location explains d’Arc, indicating the place from which Jacques came—a nom d’origine, often given to notable or honored citizens. But if Jacques had indeed hailed from Arc-en-Barrois, the local Latin manuscripts (the first to mention the family) would have identified him as “Jacques de Arco,” in the contemporary style of patronymics. Further complicating matters is the fact that before the invention of printing in 1440 spelling was not standardized, and so the family name appears variously as Darc, Dars, Day, Darx, Dare, Tarc, Tart or Dart.

  After living in Domrémy several years, Jacques had what might be called middle-class status. He owned about fifty acres of farmland and pasture on the edge of the village as well as cattle, sheep and a furnished home. The house was typical, with a slate roof resting on wooden beams, a hard-packed dirt floor inside, and a few rooms, some of them with a small window; year-round, the place tended to be damp and fetid. A single fireplace, in the main room just inside the front door, was used for warmth and cooking; here too the family dined and the parents slept. Water had to be hauled up from the river, and of course there was nothing like a bathroom: instead, people found all kinds of uses for the backyard. A wooden staircase led to an attic used for storing grain. At that time the d’Arc house would have been considered almost luxurious.*

  The small home was sufficient to accommodate a few pilgrims (without fee) or merchants (for a modest fee) who stopped in the village on their way to more prestigious towns. According to witnesses, visitors were treated with legendary kindness and warmth by Jacques’s wife, Isabelle Romée, who had come from Vouthon, four miles from Domrémy; her second name was commonly conferred on those who had completed a religious pilgrimage to Rome. For centuries, such a pious journey had indicated profound devotion: traveling to sacred sites—to Rome, for example, where the apostles Peter and Paul were believed to have been martyred—was difficult, expensive and unsafe in any season. Women, even in the company of clergy, were easy targets of brigands, rapists and highwaymen.

  At home, Isabelle’s primary task was to raise her children as good Christians and to see that they knew their prayers. She and Jacques had three boys and two girls: Jacques or Jacquemin; Jehan or Jean; Pierre or Pierrelot; Jehanne or Jeanne; and Catherine. Jean and Pierre appear later in the story; of Jacques and Catherine almost nothing is known except that the latter married at about the age of sixteen and died soon after.

  The name Jehanne is rooted in the late Latin Johanna, the feminine of Johannes, or John; in English the name takes many forms, among them Joan, Jean, Joanne or Jane. Jehanne was often (and eventually always) written as Jeanne, which was how the name was and is pronounced (the h being silent). “In my country,” she said, referring to her region, “people called me Jeannette [the affectionate diminutive for Jeanne], but they called me Jeanne when I came into France,” which meant, at the time, the central part of the kingdom, where the royal court could be found and the monarch resided.

  As for her established name in history, chroniclers and poets of her time (and she herself) never referred to “Joan of Arc.” The appellation “Johanna Darc” was first used twenty-five years after her death, at the trial striking down the validity of the court that sentenced and condemned her. The first accounts in English simply translated what was considered to be her father’s nom d’origine, and so she was identified as Joan of Arc. The use of surnames was unusual at the time, but had she assumed or been given one, it would very likely have been, as was the custom, her mother’s, Romée. For her part, things were much simpler: Joan referred to herself as simply “the Maid.”

  IT HAS BEEN customary to fix Joan’s birth in 1411 or 1412. Not long before her death in 1431 she was asked her age: “Nineteen or thereabouts,” she replied, which was a customary formula: Latin court records during the Middle Ages noted a person’s age as vel circiter, vel circa, vel eocirca—“thereabouts.” People had no care for their precise age, nor did they make any effort to establish it. Our modern concern for specifics such as date, place of birth, and legal status was unknown to medieval society. In Joan’s time, as one scholar has noted, “Historiographers and chroniclers were just beginning to record the birth dates of kings and very great noblemen; at the same period, parish registers were beginning to be kept here and there,” but this was rare, and most church registers did not start recording data until the late sixteenth century.

  As for the month and day of her birth, that was later put at January 6, for symbolic reasons. The Western Christian liturgical calendar marks the Feast of the Epiphany on that date, the revelation to the world of the heavenly kingship of Jesus Christ. It was natural for Joan’s partisans to indicate a parallel between that religious feast and her birth, for it was she who eventually arranged for the formal anointing of Charles VII as earthly king.

  Until she was twelve or thirteen, there was nothing remarkable about Joan’s life. Those who knew her and her family gave sworn testimony years later as to basic facts. Joan’s parents, according to a neighboring farmer named Jean Moreau, were “faithful Catholics and hard workers with a good reputation.” As Joan herself told her interrogators, so Moreau testified: she was baptized by the local priest, Jean Minet, in the parish church of Saint-Rémy, for whom Domrémy was named. The name Jeanne honored two of her godmothers and five godfathers named Jean.

  The title of godmother or godfather, as today, was honorific and indicated a witness to baptism rather than a spiritual teacher; Joan always insisted that her mother was her sole source of religious instruction. On the first day of her trial, Joan said quite plainly that she had learned only from her mother the words of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria and the Credo. “From childhood,” Moreau added, “she was raised in the faith and imbued with good morals.”

  Like almost everyone at the time—except for men with clerical, university or court jobs in sight—Joan was not taught to read or write, and only later could she sign her name to a document. Apart from what she heard in parish sermons, she had no schooling except from her mother, who taught her the domestic arts of spinning and sewing, at which she became quite adept; as Joan told her accusers in 1431, she did not think any woman in Rouen could teach her anything about these crafts. She also helped her father and her siblings take the livestock out to pasture. As for religious education, she would have learned about the sacraments from the village priest, and she knew Bible episodes through sermons at Mass. Regular and frequent churchgoing also provided a kind of religious education through paintings, statues and church windows, whose images told of events in the life of Christ and the saints.

  “Sometimes she went off to church when her parents thought she was in the fields,” Moreau continued, “and she went to Mass quite often.” In her religious exercises she was both exact and faithful, and her piety was marked by a willing spontaneity. As a neighbor called Béatrice Estellin remembered, there were no airs or attitudes in her conduct, nothing of compulsion or trepidation, nothing merely dutiful. Girlhood friends like Hauviette and Mengette remembered Joan as “good and sweet…. She went devotedly to church, but she kept herself busy, did the housework, and watched over her father’s flocks.” A local plowman named Simonin Musnier had endured a number of childhood illnesses; as he recalled, “When I w
as sick, Joan came to comfort me.” Isabellette d’Epinal added that Joan “willingly gave money to the poor and welcomed them [to the family house]. She preferred to sleep under the mantel so that the poor could have her bed.”

  As for this evident piety, it was not so rare at a time when faith and its practice were mainstream aspects of medieval life; indeed, to be a European meant to be a citizen of both the temporal and spiritual realms comprising Christendom. The intellectual notions of agnosticism or atheism did not exist; it was universally accepted that the world belonged to God and was permeated with His presence. Hence the language of faith was like a common country in which all people lived, and this gave them a certain stability and social cohesion, whatever the state of the region or the institutional Church. Joan was diligent regarding prayer and worship, but she had no connection to monasteries or convents, and apparently she never considered becoming a nun.

  Until she was about thirteen, there was very little to distinguish her from her peers or her siblings. She was raised, as the saying went, between home and the fields: she spun and sewed; she helped with household tasks; she took her turn guarding her father’s flocks and assisted with gardening. She played games with her friends, and she sang and danced in the fields and around festival trees, frequently decorated for religious feasts.

  BUT LIFE WAS not usually predictable or secure. The open hostilities of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France defined life for everyone. The tensions and clashes, the battles and quarrels, the negotiations, truces and betrayals had always simmered and once again roiled violently and more widely when Joan was a child. There was also civil war, for France was not yet a unified nation but rather a shifting political entity composed of a number of small realms, duchies, counties and petty states.

  At the core of the Hundred Years’ War lay a long conflict over the relationship between the closely related dynasties of England and France; also at stake was the uncertain rapport between France and its essentially independent feudal princes, the powerful dukes of Aquitaine and Burgundy. Inconveniently, the Duke of Aquitaine was also the king of England, while the Duke of Burgundy controlled that region as well as Flanders, portions of the Low Countries, and areas along the German border.

  The war began over the matter of succession to the French throne. In 1328 Charles IV of France, last of the three sons of Philip IV, died without a male heir. The crown was then claimed by two cousins: Philip of Valois, Philip IV’s nephew; and by King Edward III of England, Philip IV’s grandson by his daughter. But the Valois court invoked the Salic law, which banned royal birthright through the female line. Legal as well as military courts on both sides accumulated arguments in favor of Philip or Edward, but a French high court decided in favor of the Valois line and rejected the claims of the Plantagenet dynasty.

  For King Edward, France was not merely a symbolic hereditary ornament for England; it was the wealthiest and most heavily populated country in Christendom. His goal was, therefore, to make the English monarch ruler of both France and England, thereby expanding and confirming bonds that had existed since the Battle of Hastings and continued through Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, which for a time had brought most of southwest France under English rule. And so, as the new Valois dynasty surely expected, Edward did not abandon his imperial aspirations. In 1337 he sent troops to engage Philip, now King Philip VI, in outright combat. Nothing less than the future of a country was at stake.

  For the next twenty-five years, the English were consistently victorious in episodic battles, annexing more and more French territories. Charles V of France recovered much of the land gained by England, but this advantage was subsequently lost after his death in 1380, when feudal rivalries erupted between factions loyal to the Duke of Burgundy (aligned with England) and the Duke of Orléans (loyal to France).

  WHEN JOAN WAS a child, her king was the unfortunate Charles VI; aptly called Charles the Mad, he was occasionally lucid but was mostly a lunatic. With the literal and legal breakdown of the French court and the demoralization of French troops, it was comparatively easy for the English to win complete victories in 1415 and 1417, when Joan was still a child. Their successes gave the Anglo-Burgundian alliance control of the Aquitaine and all France north of the Loire except for a few loyalist towns, and Paris fell to the English in 1419. Thus Henry V of England became the single most powerful political and diplomatic authority in Europe.

  When Jean, Duke of Burgundy, was assassinated in 1419 the partisans of Charles VI and his son, the dauphin or rightful heir, were blamed for the murder. For this reason Jean’s son Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, no longer supported the Valois and gave his allegiance to England. He and those on his side were known as Burgundians, while those loyal to the crown of France were known as the Armagnac party, which took its name from Bernard, count of Armagnac.

  That same year Burgundians ravaged Armagnac strongholds and even the modest homes of ordinary pro-Valois citizens. Anticipating possible skirmishes and worse near Domrémy, Joan’s father and another farmer pooled their resources in order to use the Château de l’Île, a modest fort on an island in the Meuse, where they planned to house local families and livestock in the event of pitched battle in the village.

  In 1420 Philip of Burgundy threw his support behind the Treaty of Troyes, which gave Charles VI’s daughter to Henry of England to be his wife; the treaty further stipulated that their heir would be king of the single but twofold realm of England and France. This contract effectively annulled the right of Charles’s surviving son—the dauphin, or direct heir to the throne, also called Charles. Among those Burgundians who helped negotiate the treaty to the benefit of the English was a clergyman named Pierre Cauchon, who was rewarded with the bishopric of Beauvais.

  Both Henry V and Charles VI died within weeks of one another in 1422, but the war was zealously prosecuted on the English side by Henry’s brother, John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford, who was regent for Henry’s son, the infant King Henry VI. Cauchon, all the while, labored on behalf of the English government in France, which was headquartered in Rouen, northwest of Paris in Normandy.

  The dauphin was now nominally King Charles VII, but he was uncrowned, and in this state of royal limbo he remained for seven years, in residence at the large castle of Chinon, one hundred fifty miles southwest of Paris. Being uncrowned was not a mere technicality: as long as Charles VII did not travel north to the cathedral of Reims (where French kings had been anointed since 1179), his claim of kingship could be—and was—much contested. At the same time, English forces gained astonishing strength and were prepared to deal once and for all with the dauphin, whose war chest was virtually depleted and whose officers and soldiers were exhausted and ill trained. By 1425 French military discipline was all but nonexistent, and the troops themselves were rapacious and unprincipled: the situation had reached critical mass.

  Given these conditions, the Duke of Bedford made elaborate plans for a blockade and occupation at Orléans, a vital commercial town sixty miles south of Paris; that strategy would provide him with access to the dauphin’s refuge at Chinon. As this news spread, the complete collapse of France seemed imminent.

  DOMRÉMY, UNDER THE jurisdiction of the military governor at nearby Vaucouleurs, supported the Valois dynasty of France and was thus staunchly Armagnac, but just across the Meuse—little more than a brook in the countryside—lay the village of Maxey, ardently Burgundian. The larger engagements of the war often had their complement in the petty fights and rivalries of children who were neighbors.

  As to Joan’s knowledge of the political and military situation, nothing can be said with certainty. She may have learned something from conversations between her parents and among villagers, but what detail was available is impossible to know. The main issue, however, was clear to everyone: there had been a long and bitter struggle to determine if the English and their Burgundian allies would set the crown of France on the offspring of Henry V, or if the partisans of
the Valois would emerge triumphant and France would survive. Just when international consciousness was being seeded all over Europe, the existence of France itself was threatened. Precisely at this time, the ordinariness of Joan’s life was forever altered.

  Visions

  (1424–1427)

  By 1424 conditions favorable to the French cause were rapidly deteriorating, as were the prestige and influence of the Roman Church. To this day people sometimes express astonishment that the pope did not intervene in the conflict between England and France or that bishops were not dispatched to sue for peace or that there seemed to be no Church voices speaking against the threat to the very existence of a people. But the moral authority of Rome itself had been seriously compromised by a lust for power and by frank corruption. At such times, remarkable women often arose whose influence benefited both Church and state; Joan would become but one in a tradition of counselors.

  During the spring of 1378 Bartolomeo Prignano was elected to the papacy, which he assumed under the name Urban VI. As early as that summer, his previous competence as an administrator was diminished by unmistakable signs of a sinister side to his personality: Pope Urban became so mentally unstable and publicly abusive, even toward those prelates who had elected him, that a number of the French cardinals urged him to abdicate. Without waiting for his reply, they put out the word that Urban had been deposed; later he went so far as to arrange for five of these critics to be tortured and executed.

  In October of the same year, the French elected a replacement pope, who took office as Clement VII; Urban, however, remained at his post. So began the Great Western Schism, a forty-year period when at least two men and sometimes three claimed to be pope, each alternately excommunicating the other and accepting money and arms from different European countries in support of their causes. The ecclesiastical chaos was monumental, the demoralization of ordinary Christians pervasive.