This violent act, meant both to improve the position of the dauphin relative to his powerful cousin, and as the long-sought retribution for the murder of the duke of Orléans, did not achieve the desired result; rather it sent Charles hurtling along a downward spiral. As a result of the assassination, Isabeau, mistrustful of her son and fearing reprisals from the English, convinced the king to come to terms with Henry V. In a series of letters issued in May 1420, which became known as the Treaty of Troyes, Henry V was married to the princess Catherine, and then Henry was officially adopted by Charles VI in place of the dauphin as regent and heir to the French throne. The English army moved into Paris and held the capital as well as Normandy, Gascony, and Maine, while the dauphin Charles, distraught and disinherited, was exiled to the provincial court at Bourges.
But to Yolande of Aragon, who would be confronted with the aftermath of this fiasco (and the responsibility for cleaning it up), the parallels to the story line of The Romance of Melusine were stunningly obvious. For just like Raymondin, the fictional male protagonist in Jean of Arras’s tale, the dauphin, having participated in the murder of his cousin, the duke of Burgundy, was wandering lost and despondent in the forest of southern France. According to this narrative, Raymondin—that is to say, Charles—would eventually inherit all of the duke’s estates, establish a royal lineage, and become an even greater lord than his murdered cousin. There was just one element missing to turn this fiction into reality.
Upon her return from Provence, the evidence suggests that the queen of Sicily actively sought a Melusine as part of her strategy for reinstating the dauphin as the legitimate heir to the French throne. It is difficult to trace her movements completely, as for political reasons Yolande exercised discretion, but of one fact there can be no doubt.
She knew her when she saw her.
* Interestingly, this is almost the same threat that his older brother, the duke of Guyenne, had used when confronting John the Fearless after the 1413 uprising of the butchers: “Know with certainty that one day you will be sorry, and things will not always turn out as you would like.”
CHAPTER 6
Childhood in
Domrémy
In my town they called me Jeannette, and since I came to France I have been called Joan. As for my surname, I know of none.
—Joan of Arc, in response to an inquisitor’s question
at her Trial of Condemnation, 1431
HE COURAGEOUS YOUNG WOMAN who would one day become known all over France as Joan of Arc was born in 1412, three years before the battle of Agincourt, on a small farm on the eastern frontier of the kingdom. Her baptism was not recorded; the evidence for her date of birth comes from Joan herself. “As far as I know, [I am] about nineteen years old,” she told her inquisitors in 1431.
Very little is certain about her family. Her father, a farmer who apparently also kept some sheep and cattle, was variously known as Jacques Tart, Tarc, or Darc—Joan herself referred to him as “Jacques Tarc.” Her mother, Isabelle, gave birth to four children in addition to Joan: three boys, Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre, and a girl, Catherine, who died in childhood. Joan seems to have been younger than all three of her brothers; probably she was the fourth child born to Isabelle.
The precise circumstances of her childhood are unclear, but the family was not wealthy, as, according to an eyewitness, Joan “dressed in poor clothes.” As for schooling, she had none. “[I] knew neither A nor B,” she once confessed. What little religious instruction she had came from Isabelle. “It was from my mother that I learnt Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo. Nobody taught me my belief, if not my mother,” she told her inquisitors.
There was nothing unusual in any of this. The concept of public education of the lower classes—and especially of girls—would not be embraced for centuries. What was uncommon in Joan’s case was her very high level of intelligence, which manifested itself at an early age. Her verbal byplay, which she later wielded against her inquisitors, displayed enormous gifts—untrained and unschooled, she bested and eluded learned men twice her age who sought to ensnare her in her own words. Her power of speech impressed all who saw her, beginning with her own family; early on, she convinced the husband of one of her mother’s cousins to aid her in her fantastic quest to seek an audience with the dauphin, even though this meant his risking the scorn of the commander of the local fortress, a form of public humiliation. Most telling was the comment of Albert d’Ourches, a member of the provincial gentry from nearby Vaucouleurs. “This girl spoke terribly well,” he said of Joan. “I would really like to have had so fine a daughter.” Birth was everything in the Middle Ages. Members of the underclass were uniformly viewed as vulgar and contemptible. It was singular, even for a member of the bourgeoisie, to set aside these prejudices and admire a peasant.
Her mental aptitude evoked comparison to the better-known female mystics of the Middle Ages, such as Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine nun who became abbess of her convent in Germany, and who also had visions, and Clare of Assisi. But the medieval saint with whom Joan would seem to have the most in common is Catherine of Siena. Born in the previous century, Catherine had been the youngest of twenty-five children. When she was six, she claimed to have been visited by Jesus and knew from that point that she was destined for the Church. Over the strong objections of her family, who wished her to marry, Catherine succeeded in remaining a virgin and finally entered a convent at the age of seventeen. There she taught herself to read and write in the vernacular and subsequently inserted herself aggressively into international politics by conducting a ferocious letter-writing campaign with the pope and various heads of state, in which she lectured her targeted correspondents on the inadequacies of their foreign policies. Among the royal recipients of Catherine’s epistles were Charles V, king of France; Louis I of Anjou (husband of Marie of Blois); Elizabeth, queen of Hungary; and Joanna I, queen of Naples.
Perhaps because Joan’s acuity did not have a scholarly or creative outlet—books or a teacher were required for literacy, and she had access to neither—her talent came out in her speech, and in her instinctive perception of the world at large. Her cognitive process was obviously rapid and comprehensive. It was as though she had an internal antenna that picked up all sorts of disparate signals, unconsciously set to work organizing them into a coherent narrative, and then later replayed them in her head, like a song on a radio.
JOAN’S ENTIRE CHILDHOOD and adolescence were spent on her parents’ farm and in the tiny village in which she was born. She learned to sew and spin thread and to help her mother around the house; she also worked with the livestock. “When I was quite big and had reached the years of reason, I did not generally guard the animals, but I did help to take them to the meadows,” she reported. This pastoral existence seems to have provoked misconceptions about Joan’s degree of isolation from events in the outside world. Because of its location—Domrémy was situated on the eastern border separating France from the Holy Roman Empire—historians as a rule have generally assumed the village to be a provincial backwater, a hamlet so poor and far away from Paris that its inhabitants could not hope to understand or care about the complex political and military situation in which France found itself. “Life [in Domrémy] was like the countryside itself, barely undulating, dull, where all strangers were foreigners and potential enemies, and all new ideas suspect,” wrote John Holland Smith, one of Joan’s biographers. “How had provincial France declined into this miserable condition?”
But to believe this is to ignore one essential aspect of the village’s existence. Domrémy was situated in the duchy of Bar, ancestral home of Yolande of Aragon’s mother, Yolande of Bar, and an area as vital to the French crown in the fifteenth century as it had been during the reign of Yolande of Aragon’s grandmother, Marie of France. As before, half the inhabitants—those who lived, like Joan and her family, to the west of the Meuse River—were loyal to the French king, while those who lived to the east of the waterway gave their allegiance to ne
xt-door Lorraine, technically subject to the Holy Roman Emperor. Except, in Joan’s day, the duke of Lorraine, a weak, fearful man much given to gout, had allied himself—or rather been bullied into allying himself—with the duke of Burgundy. So Joan and those like her living on the western bank of the Meuse identified those of her neighbors living on the eastern side not as citizens of the empire, but as Burgundians. Far from being removed from the Armagnac-Burgundian controversy that plagued the rest of France then, Domrémy was actually on the front lines of the conflict, literally face-to-face with the enemy across the river. Joan herself affirmed the accuracy of this portrait of her birthplace later, at her condemnation trial. Asked by an inquisitor, “Did the people of Domrémy take the Burgundian side or that of their opponents?” Joan replied, “I knew only one Burgundian there and I could have wished his head cut off—however, only if it pleased God.”
In 1419, when Joan was seven years old, a political event of some importance took place in the duchy. The former duke of Bar (Yolande of Aragon’s uncle) having been killed four years earlier at the battle of Agincourt, the duchy had devolved upon another of Yolande’s uncles, the duke’s younger brother, cardinal Louis, bishop of nearby Châlons-sur-Marne. Being a clergyman, however, the new duke of Bar had no children, and could not expect (at least legitimately) to beget any in the future, so to remedy this problem cardinal Louis agreed to adopt a male heir. Concurrent with this adoption, it was also decided that the young man chosen as cardinal Louis’s successor would marry Isabelle, the daughter of the duke of next-door Lorraine, with the understanding that after the deaths of the present dukes this couple together would inherit and rule both Bar and Lorraine.
There then only remained the question of whom cardinal Louis should elect to succeed him. In the summer of 1419, just before she left for Provence, Yolande of Aragon deftly used her family ties to put forward her own aspirant and successfully contrived to convince her uncle of the merits of her candidate. The lucky young gentleman chosen to inherit the prestigious and lucrative territories of both Bar and Lorraine was none other than Yolande’s second son, artistic little René.
With this one diplomatic stroke, Yolande managed through René not only to hold Bar for the dauphin Charles, but also to make inroads into rival Burgundian territory. The duchy of Lorraine was integral to John the Fearless’s political ambitions, and although there is no record of his reaction, he must have been furious to have been outmaneuvered in this fashion by his longtime enemy, the queen of Sicily. “Bar and Lorraine could provide invaluable links between [the Burgundians’] northern and southern blocks of territories and the sudden appearance of a Valois prince [René] loyal to the dauphin Charles was the worst thing that could have happened to their plans for consolidation,” medievalist Margaret L. Kekewich ob served matter-of-factly. Before his assassination, John the Fearless had hoped that one of his English allies would succeed in winning the duke of Lorraine’s daughter and had exerted pressure in this direction, but to no avail. “Yolande had pulled off a double coup in the face of stiff competition since Henry V of England had asked for the hand of Isabelle for his brother, the duke of Bedford,” Kekewich continued.
And so in the summer of 1419, ten-year-old René left his childhood home in Angers and came to live with his great-uncle in Bar as preparation for one day assuming the lordship of the duchy. He was only three years older than Joan herself. His mother, who was expected in Provence, could not come with him, but she sent him with an entourage of trusted Angevin counselors to ensure his safety and training, just as she had once surrounded the dauphin Charles with advisers loyal to herself and her family while he was still a boy under her care.
On August 13, 1419, a mere month before the deadly rendezvous on the bridge at Montereau-Fault-Yonne that would take the life of John the Fearless, René was formally invested with the duchy of Bar at a solemn ceremony in his great-uncle Louis’s castle, and the next year married Isabelle, who was a year younger than he. The wedding took place amid general rejoicing on October 24, 1420, in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. “Now it is true that the aforesaid cardinal adopted as his heir his nephew René, and gave to him and relinquished the duchy of Bar and many other beautiful dominions; and by means of these fiefs… the daughter and heiress of the duchy of Lorraine was given him in marriage,” wrote Jean Le Févre, a chronicler of the period. “Because for a long time these dominions [Bar and Lorraine] had endured war and division, and by this marriage would achieve peace and unity under one master.” From this time on, René lived with his wife, residing alternately with his great-uncle, cardinal Louis, and his father-in-law, the duke of Lorraine.
Domrémy was a small village, but not so small that its inhabitants did not know the name of their duke or the relation of his adopted heir to the royal family of France. Medieval courts—particularly regional courts like René’s in Bar and Lorraine—moved frequently from castle to castle and acted as social and political hubs for the surrounding area. Servants and vassals came and went; food and clothing were supplied by local merchants who chatted with the kitchen help or the ladies of the wardrobe; and the duke’s officials and representatives traveled regularly throughout the countryside to check on rents and taxes. In René’s case, the threat from neigh boring Burgundian partisans—not everybody was happy about this marriage—meant that he had a military responsibility to protect his duchy from enemy incursions, so as he grew older, he and his counselors were in constant communication with the many knights and men-at-arms who were stationed in the various fortified castles scattered throughout the duchy. René, of course, also kept in touch with his own family, particularly his mother and his sister Marie and her husband, the dauphin Charles. Royal messengers from Charles’s suite at Bourges regularly braved enemy territory to make the trip to René’s various castles in Bar or Lorraine. As a result, the court life centering around the newly married young couple fairly pulsed with information—family news, military reports, political updates, snatches of overheard private conversations, whispers, gossip, rumor, innuendo—which by degrees made its way out of the aristocratic grand halls down into the depths of the servants’ quarters and finally out into the larger towns of the countryside.
Domrémy might have been too remote to have immediate access to all of these tidings, but inevitably echoes of this intelligence seeped down into the villages. Because later, when Joan had an opportunity to meet the old, gouty duke of Lorraine, she said to him very specifically “that he should give me his son [she meant his son-in-law; the duke of Lorraine had no son] and some men-at-arms for France and that I would pray to God for the restoration of his health,” indicating that she recognized René and was aware that he in particular could be of use to her. So Joan knew enough about René to gauge his relationship to the dauphin, and this knowledge must have come from the regional court. And if Joan from the tiny village of Domrémy knew it, this information must also have been well disseminated throughout the rest of the duchy.
In the end, the queen of Sicily’s decision to hold Bar for Charles was perhaps even more far-reaching than she herself might have realized. For if the English duke of Bedford or some other ally of the duke of Burgundy had succeeded in marrying Isabelle of Lorraine, local sentiment in favor of the dauphin and the Armagnac side in the civil war would likely have been stamped out and Joan’s own political leanings affected. Certainly there was no possibility that she would have been aided in her design by an officer of the court. As it was, the introduction of René into the duchy during Joan’s early childhood served instead to nurture and fan the loyalties of this singular girl and those who lived near her. So when her inquisitors later asked, “In your extreme youth had you great wish to go out against the Burgundians?” Joan answered as Yolande or any of her family would have hoped one of their subjects would answer. “I had a great will and desire that my King have his kingdom,” she said.
BUT IN THE EARLY 1420s, Charles was very far from doing that. The assassination of John the Fearless, m
eant to eliminate the principal threat to his rule, served only to unite his enemies against him. John’s widow screamed her fury and dispatched dozens of letters and embassies to the various heads of state, including the king and queen of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the pope, demanding that justice be done. In December 1420 she managed to have the murderers tried in absentia in Paris and then used the subsequent guilty verdict as justification for the savage torture and death of one of the suspected assailants whom her agents had managed to capture. Her twenty-three-year-old son, Philip, the new duke of Burgundy, was so tormented by the news of his father’s death that he writhed around on his bed in a fit of incoherent rage, swearing revenge, and was unable to compose himself sufficiently to assume his new duties for nearly two weeks. When he finally did emerge, he sent ambassadors to treat with Henry V, who coolly laid out the terms of an English-Burgundian alliance far more advantageous to England than to Burgundy. Henry was to have the princess Catherine in marriage, and to govern the kingdom as regent until the death of Charles VI, after which Henry and his heirs would rule France. If Philip was willing to put aside his own political aspirations with regard to the throne of France and agreed to support this plan, the English king promised to aid him by pursuing and punishing his father’s murderers, and he further offered to marry one of his own brothers to one of Philip’s sisters.
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