Joan of Arc Explained

Teenage peasant, visionary commander, convicted heretic, national saint - Joan of Arc's life reads like a legend. Today, Dan digs past that legend to understand who Joan really was, and why her story still provokes devotion, debate and reinvention 6 centuries later. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:29Dan Snow?

  She is the most famous woman in medieval European history. She halted the seemingly unstoppable English juggernaut in its tracks. She raised a French prince to the throne. She won international renown. She provoked both ferocious loyalty and unyielding hatred. She forged a kingdom, yet she could not read or write. And she died, well, she was killed whilst a teenager. She was a phenomenon and remains one 600 years later. She called herself Jeanne de Prousselle, Joan the Maid. Her father was Jacques D'Arc, so we remember her as Joan of Arc.

• 2:17Dan Snow?

  Once for this podcast, I was interviewing Lord Jonathan Sumption. He's a High Court Justice, who are senior judges in the kingdom, author of massive books about the Hundred Years' War. Brilliant man. And he said to me that if it wasn't so well attested in the sources, the chronicles, the court records, then the story of Joan would be so unbelievable that he would have assumed it was made up. This peasant girl, illiterate, with no military experience, in a deeply class-conscious, hierarchical kingdom, an institutionally sexist, misogynist society, that girl convinces the ruling elite

• 2:57Dan Snow?

  to give her command of an army, which she then uses to smash an enemy that's humiliated and crushed the French on dozens of battlefields for years on end. It is one of the most unlikely and extraordinary stories in history. And contemporaries knew it as they lived through it. People listened to reports in distant Constantinople in utter disbelief. One observer was in no doubt that she was sent by God, who, they wrote, "has given her a heart greater than any man's." I'm really lucky to be able to call upon some great books. We've got Jonathan Sumption's books, we've got Helen Castor's excellent recent retelling.

• 3:38Dan Snow?

  So inspired by them, here is the story of one of the shortest, yet brightest careers in military history, one that dazzled friend and foe alike. This is the story of Joan of Arc.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  T minus ten.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the Queen.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  No black-white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

• 4:11Dan Snow?

  Orleans lies at the heart of France. It bestrides the river Loire, the longest river in France, one that runs all the way from the south. Then at Orleans, pivots, turning east-west, roughly dividing the country in half. Orleans is the fulcrum. It's not far off the dead centre of France. So it's the proper place for a reckoning. The right place to thrash out the future of the French kingdom. In 1428, that river was a front line. South of it were the lands of the son of the former king of France, the prince he called himself the Dauphin. He styled himself as king, but he couldn't make that a reality until he'd crossed the Loire and made his way to Reims Cathedral.

• 4:56Dan Snow?

  And here's why. He couldn't truly convince others that he was actually the king until he took physical possession of the crowns of France. He needed the circlets of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, the latter inlaid with the hair of Christ and thorns from the crown of thorns which Jesus had been forced to wear at the crucifixion. In this world, you were not king until you were crowned, until you were anointed with the holy oil in particular, that precious chrism that had been presented in a sacred ampulla to Clovis, the first Christian king of France, a thousand years before, by an emissary from God himself. And all that had to take place, not just anywhere, but at Reims Cathedral.

• 5:40Dan Snow?

  And in 1428, the ampulla, the headwear, the vital setting, Reims Cathedral, they all lay behind enemy lines. They were all in the possession of the Dauphin's enemies. They were in the possession of the hereditary foes of the kings of France. Their blasted poor relations from across the wind-blown, iron-gray northern seas. Those hellhounds for whom the thin soils and watery sun of their benighted island was never enough. They were in the hands of the English and their allies. And without those objects, that divine sanction in that holy cathedral, you were just a guy with a claim. And there were others with a claim.

• 6:26Dan Snow?

  A child sat on the English throne. He also, or rather, his advisers and spokesmen on his behalf, claimed the crown of France alongside that of England. This was, on paper, in principle, thanks to his royal blood that flowed from Charlemagne. But in practice, more realistically, it flowed from the strength of his father's sword, the force and charisma of his leadership. Because that child was Henry VI, and his dad had been Henry V. Teenage prodigy, the man who had commanded armies, taken castles, sent enemies fleeing since puberty. That man had inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at the Battle of Agincourt, and he conquered northern France in the years that followed.

• 7:11Dan Snow?

  If Henry V had lived, he would have inherited the French throne. He may well have crossed the Loire, scattered the armies in the Dauphin, forced him to bend the knee or go to the executioner's block. If he had lived, perhaps England and France would have been one. Imagine that, a super kingdom stretching from the Alps to Anglesey. But he had died of dysentery, which he contracted as he waded through mud and human filth in the drenched winter siege works east of Paris. And so there'd be no unified rule, no super kingdom, just decades of war. In 1428, Henry VI was playing with his toys beneath a nanny's watchful gaze. And his realm in France, well, that was being expanded by his lords.

• 7:56Dan Snow?

  And that brings us back to Orleans. Because one of those lords, Thomas Montague, Earl of Salisbury, he was an astute, aggressive, impressive man. He decided to march on Orleans, seize the town, cross the Loire, and finish off the Dauphin. Orleans, though, was not a soft target. It was surrounded by walls, of course. It had a massive stone bridge crossing the river to the south via an island, the southern tip of which was protected by a mass of stone and iron, a fortified gatehouse complex called La Touraine. Salisbury first outflanked the city. He threw troops across up and down river. There were Englishmen on the south bank of the Loire now, but they needed Orleans before they could strike deep into the entrails of the Dauphin's territory.

• 8:40Dan Snow?

  He swept round to the south and he assaulted the gatehouse, La Tourrel. After nearly two weeks of hammering, the garrison retreated back along the bridge back into Orleans, but they did succeed in blowing up the bridge behind them. Even today, that river is a good 350 metres wide. It's a formidable barrier. That way was realistically now blocked. But it's not entirely out of range, as Salisbury discovered, when a few days later he was pondering the problem and a French cannonball fired from Orleans, perhaps the island in the middle of the river, smashed into the masonry blasting in with debris that tore half his face off. His death was certain. The only surprise was that it took eight agonising days.

• 9:24Dan Snow?

  Now, not for the first or last time in military history, a scheme for a bold, quick, decisive win had not quite worked out. Instead, locking the attacker into a grim, grinding war of attrition. The English, they settled down to besiege Orleans, but they couldn't cut it off from the outside by building trenches all the way around it. Instead, they built strong points and attempted to control access from them, but it was a bit patchy. They also struggled to get enough reinforcements, enough men and food to their army that was besieging Orleans. Those loyal to the Dauphin, I think we can call them French for the rest of this show, they regarded Orleans as existential. Lose it, and they risked losing everything.

• 10:06Dan Snow?

  So they pushed supplies and reinforcements into the town, including a group of Scottish soldiers who were thrilled by the prospect of killing Englishmen wherever they came across them. The Loire, or the Tweed, one much as good as another. The French and Scots tried to intercept a convoy of food coming from the north for the besieging forces, but yet again, English longbows punched through the horses' flanks and found gaps in their armour. Yet again, the field of battle was littered with Frenchmen and the remnant of that Scottish force that arrived to try and help them. The English would eat their supplies. They would feast on herring. The siege would go on. In the Dauphin's court, his nobles were at each other's throats. Literally, some were in fact making war on others.

• 10:48Dan Snow?

  The prince, or the king, as he styled himself, was useless. He was incapable of leadership on or off the field of battle. He was far more comfortable on cushions at court than in the saddle of a charger. And around him, the factions squabbled. In Orleans, the garrison weakened. There was little hope for France. But then, in February fourteen twenty-nine, a peasant girl showed up with a message from God. She was called Joan, and she was here to help. In fact, she said, she was here to save France. Dom Remy was a typical French medieval village. Families lived in wooden dwellings with thatch roofs.

• 11:31Dan Snow?

  Space for the animals at one end of the house, the family slept at the other. People tilled the soil. They sowed, they harvested crops, they tended their animals, they spun wool into yarn. It was typical as well in that it existed in a kind of political ambiguity. It was south of modern Luxembourg, so it sat on a sort of fault line between, roughly speaking, the French world and the sort of German world, that of the Holy Roman Empire. It was in the Duchy of Bar, which was sometimes pulled in the direction of France and sometimes in the direction of the East. It was a little tesserai in the almost infinite mosaic of principalities and juptums and counties that made up Europe at the time. But in the village, they seemed to think of themselves as French, and they were for the Dauphin, and they were against the English.

• 12:16Dan Snow?

  This feeling was intensified by a raid from their neighbouring Burgundians. Cattle was stolen. The Duke of Burgundy was the greatest lord in France. He ruled over great swathes of what's now eastern France, and indeed beyond that, way up into the Low Countries. He met kings as equals. But for reasons that I will spare you, the Duke was allied with the English against the French at this time. The French had murdered his dad in cold blood, which hadn't helped. Anyway, it seems like that brush with war, that Burgundian raid, reinforced the Frenchness of the people of Dom Remy. Among them was Jacques D'Arc and Isabelle Romay, and their daughter, a young teenager called Joan. Later Joan would describe her own childhood.

• 13:01Dan Snow?

  She boasted proudly that no one could best her at spinning and sewing. She helped her father with the plough and the animal husbandry. The neighbours considered them respectable. She was modest and pious. She'd learned the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, the creed, from her mother. Villagers later remembered that she'd been Jeanette as a child, rather than Joan. She'd had a good friend called Hoviet. She loved going to church. In fact, the boys in the village would tease her for praying so often. For the habit, she had it dropping to her knees whenever the church bells rang. The church warden remembered that she would scold him if he forgot to ring those bells and bring him hot cakes when he did ring them.

• 13:42Dan Snow?

  Her life and the trajectory of French history changed when she was 13. She later testified that was the age at which she'd first heard the voices. She was in her father's garden. Suddenly, there was a light coming from the right, coming from the church, then a voice. She was terrified, but it came again and again. She learned not to fear it. It was the voice of an angel, bringing the word of God, and it told her to be good, told her to go to church. Later, she actually experienced visions. She claims that she saw the angels. And when they left, she said, "I wept, and I truly wished they had taken me with them." These voices and these visions would return, and eventually they brought her a surprising

• 14:27Dan Snow?

  message. The Lord God had decided that she, Joan, a teenage peasant, who knew nothing of war or law or high politics, would rescue France from the ravening English. She must go to the French court, go to the Dauphin, and present herself for duty. I always think that the earliest stages, you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with that single step. The earliest stage of this journey must have been the hardest. The first convert must have been the most important. And we don't know how she did it, but Joan did manage to persuade the husband of a cousin, her uncle Durand-Lactard, to take her to the town of Vau-Couleur, where she might meet someone who was, well...

• 15:13Dan Snow?

  A representative of the French state, someone on the first rung of the French political ladder. That representative was the captain in charge of the garrison. His name was Robert de Bodrecourt, and he was not impressed. He sent her home with advice for her father to give her a few slaps. But Joan kept at it. She told more and more people of her mission. Words spread. It reached the ears of the powerful. A despairing kingdom locked in crisis is alert to signs, to hope, to unlikely sources of salvation. It seems that rumours reached the Duke of Lorraine. He expressed an interest in meeting her.

• 15:55Dan Snow?

  Taking his lead, Robert de Bodrecourt changed his mind and agreed to take her to the royal court. Now, there is really important context here. There is a tradition in this period of divinely touched women speaking truth to power. Who among us can ever forget the epic tale of Genevieve who put the spine into the Roman defenders of Paris in 451 A.D. against Attila's Huns? Twenty-eight years old, she rallied the people of Paris. Never surrender, her words echoed through the ages. Let the men flee if they wish, if they are no longer able to fight. We women will pray to God as long as he hears our supplications. Then there had been Armin, a young woman who said she saw angels in the Champagne region thirty years before.

• 16:39Dan Snow?

  Marie Robine of Avignon, who lives a mystic forty or so years before. She'd come to the attention of the so-called Avignon papacy. Just briefly, during a split or schism within the Catholic Church, one pope had set himself up in Avignon, and Marie Robine had had some useful visions implying that God preferred the Avignon Pope. So she was encouraged. In the mid thirteen hundreds, Jeanne-Marie de May had had visions and also been allowed to pursue the life of a ascetic, a bit of a hermit. So this was a world in which God seemed to talk to a lot of people. It was accepted, but this is super important, this bit. It's all very well wondering about saying you're hearing voices, but what makes that go viral are the gatekeepers.

• 17:22Dan Snow?

  What all of these women needed was a patron, a platform, and that is what Joan found. At this critical point, Robert de Bodrecourt, or perhaps some other more shadowy patron, Gave the order. Joan was going to the royal court. She travelled through 270 miles of territory controlled by the hostile Burgundians. She dressed as a man, tunic, breeches, her hair shorn, covered by a woollen hat. Now, when she arrived, the brilliant historian Helen Custer concludes that she met her key patron in the flesh, another woman who was attempting to save France and her own royal line.

• 18:03Dan Snow?

  Yolanda of Aragon, Duchess of Anjou, titular Queen of Jerusalem and Sicily, mother-in-law and principal adviser to the Dauphin himself, Charles. Perhaps she had been the puppet master all along. She had known that the kingdom needed hope. And perhaps this peasant girl that she heard rumours of might just provide it. The myth, then, is that Dauphin Charles tested Joan. He ushered into a room of fabulous courtiers in the middle, of which sat a man on a throne, and Joan took one look at him and turned her back, scandalous. Instead, she walked up to the actual Dauphin, who was lurking on the edge of the crowd, and prostrated herself before him.

• 18:44Dan Snow?

  In fact, we think that she was presented on arrival to a small meeting of the Dauphin and senior councillors. In that meeting, she said simply, "Give me an army, and I will drive the English from France. I will take you to Rheims for your coronation." With his mother-in-law suggesting forcefully that this was a sign from God, that Joan could be used to motivate a new spirit of resistance against the ever-encroaching English, what the Dauphin needed to be sure. Be sure that she was not a false prophet forged by demons, not angels, who are known to be just as active, particularly on the minds of weak women. So he handed poor Joan over to the priests. They asked two women to check whether she was a virgin. Had she not been, well, that was straight red card.

• 19:29Dan Snow?

  God was going to hardly act through a teenager who'd had sex out of wedlock. Early bus home for Joan. Instead, they announced that she was, in fact, intact. And that inspection was followed up by one from Yolanda herself. If the Queen of Jerusalem said she was a maid, she was a maid. The priest then grilled her. The Archbishop, he wasn't sure. Of course, God was going to send help to the most Catholic king, but it was unlikely to be in the form of a teenage peasant girl. She couldn't fight, she couldn't preach. Really, if it was a message from God, it was very well disguised. It was quite an ask. I mean, it was one thing for a woman comfortably ensconced in Avignon to say God had told her the Avignon papacy was great.

• 20:12Dan Snow?

  It was quite another for some rando to arrive and say, "Give me an army." The priests, however, found her to be pious, found her to be honest. She has conversed with everyone publicly and privately, the doctors and bishops reported. But no evil is found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity, piety, integrity, and simplicity. So, a plan came together. They were going to send a relief force, reinforcements to Orleans anyway, so what harm could it do to send Joan along with it? Like a lucky charm, a mascot. These things are not unheard of. Before they set off, Joan released a statement. Now, if you think Trump's pronouncement on Truth Social are a little from the hip, you can take comfort from Joan's first press release.

• 20:57Dan Snow?

  It began, "King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself Regent of France." So she's calling out Bedford, who's the king's uncle, he's in charge of France while the king was still a child. And then she lists some other lords and magnates. "Submit yourself to the King of Heaven. Restore to the maid, who is sent here by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the fine towns that you have taken and violated in France. King of England, if you do not do this, I am the military leader. And wherever I find your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they want to or not, and if they will not obey, I will have them all killed. I am sent here by God, the King of Heaven, to face you head to head and drive you out of the whole of France." It goes on and on.

• 21:41Dan Snow?

  It sounds like it was definitely dictated by a teenager. The propaganda machine went into overdrive. Joan was presented to the king in front of his whole court, and this is the occasion on which it was said she had a supernatural sense that she could tell the fake from the real king. Accounts of her evaluation by the priests were widely disseminated. Scholars worked hard to come up with all sorts of justifications. They reached back to ancient texts for vague allusions about the coming of a warrior virgin. They found one usefully in one of the great sources from British history. Geoffrey of Monmouth, he put a prophecy in the mouth of Merlin, no less, about a virgin who would ascend the backs of archers. Then, according to the propaganda, Joan was able to come up with another miracle.

• 22:25Dan Snow?

  She apparently asked the Dauphin to search the altar of a particular church. She told him they would find a sword, and lo, a sword was found. Francis Arthur now had her Excalibur. Joan's myth was up and running, it was rolling. She moved to Tours, 25 miles closer to Orleans. She was given a squire, Jean d'Orlon, two pages, a chaplain, and some armour. The king's master armourer had made a beautiful bespoke suit for her adolescent frame. An artist painted her banner with "Jesus and Mary" written on it, the fleur-de-lis of France, and the angels sitting in judgment. One of the nobles, the Duke of Alençon,

• 23:07Dan Snow?

  saw her training with weapons and was so impressed he gave her a horse. So, in April 1430, there were glimmers of hope for the defenders of Orleans. First of all, usefully, the English and their Burgundian allies had fallen out over the eventual ownership of the city, and the Duke of Burgundy had removed his units from the besieging force. At the same time, strange rumours started to swirl. There were stories of the maid and how she was riding to the rescue of Orleans. Now, Joan was indeed on the march. She was about to arrive, and she made quite the entry. Her column was led by hymn-singing priests carrying a banner of the crucifixion.

• 23:49Dan Snow?

  Then came the men-at-arms, the soldiers, among them, Joan. She was already insisting on behaviour that was a little unusual for these hard men of war. She would not tolerate swearing or cursing. She would become famous for chasing away the sex workers that she found with the men, beating them with the flat of her sword. Now, as they approached, the English howled curses and abuse at this cross-dressing juvenile abomination, this deranged little wench. If the Dauphin was putting his faith in her, well, things were even worse in the French camp than the English had dared hope. Joan's little force wasn't put off by the insults, and it crossed the river east of Orleans. To the east of Orleans was the gate that the English only had the loosest grip on.

• 24:34Dan Snow?

  There was a small detachment of English troops covering that gate, and that unit was then attacked by a sali from Orleans itself to provide cover for Joan to then enter the city with reinforcements and carts of provisions. It was the first little success. As night fell, the people of Orleans thronged the streets. Joan rode among them, the great captains of France either side, her banners shimmering in the torchlight. The people cheered themselves hoarse. It had been a PR coup, but one person was left totally unmoved by it. Joan, she was not interested in PR. The French elite had taught themselves into believing that Joan's impact would be largely moral, but Joan herself was there to fight. She

• 25:17Dan Snow?

  wrote again to the English commander, Lord Talbot, "Abandon the siege, go home to England or face defeat by the maid." Talbot replied that she was the one that should go home. "Go and herd your cattle, you trollop," he said. And he also wrote that if the little blasphemer fell into English hands, they would burn her. By May the 4th, she persuaded the French that unless they actually did something, the sheen was going to wear off her act. And so the commanders reluctantly agreed, and Joan of Arc went to war. The French decided to attack that same siege works on the eastern side of the town that had been so isolated and thinly held by the English. Joan, clinging to her standard,

• 26:00Dan Snow?

  rode into her first battle. For the first time, she would see the butchery of the medieval battlefield. Limbs cleaved, helmets stove in with mighty blows, spears that punched through men's stomachs and drove them to perdition. She would have watched men bleed and vomit and empty their guts, scramble to hold in tendrils of intestines that blades had torn open. She watched as other men fought and died, knowing that the outcome would make or break her. She couldn't recover from a shameful failure, but she was victorious, just. But that's what counted. It was enough to allow people to believe. And she sent another message.

• 26:45Dan Snow?

  "You men of England," she stormed, "who have no right in this kingdom of France. The King of Heaven orders and commands you, through me, Joan the Maid, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your own country. If not, I will make a war cry that will be remembered forever. I'm writing this to you for the third and last time. I will write no more." She had it wrapped around an arrow and shot into the English camp. On the sixth of May, she led a force out of Orleans to assault the English fortifications on the south bank of the Loire. After a savage battle, she captured an English siege work next to that powerful stone-built gatehouse that controlled the southern end of the bridge that stretched from Orleans but was now broken. The next day, it was the turn of that gatehouse.

• 27:29Dan Snow?

  This was the real test. The French hurled themselves at the walls with scaling ladders, but were repulsed again and again. Missiles were hurled down. Arrows picked out victims in the attacking forces. Joan was hit by an arrow between the shoulder and the neck. Down she went. The French wavered, but then she was back on her feet. Hands gripped her standard and down she went into the ditch, willing the French on, on, back up the ladders, up onto the walls, get that toehold on the rampart above. The English wavered. Their leader fell fully armed into the river and was sucked down to his death. French standards appeared atop the battlement. The fortress was French. It was Joan's. When they marched back into Orleans that night, there was pandemonium.

• 28:14Dan Snow?

  Church bells, singing, cheers, dancing. Joan was injured though, and she needed treatment, but it wouldn't slow her down. At dawn the following day, the sentries reported that there was activity in the remaining English siege works. Heavily bandaged, Joan led the French forces back out alongside the other French commanders. The two armies stood facing each other. The French, feeling the momentum, they begged to attack, but Joan held them back. Then, at a signal, the English turned and marched away. The siege of Orleans was at an end. Did the people there that spring morning, did they sense that the English tide had reached its zenith in the Hundred Years' War? I think they may have done.

• 28:58Dan Snow?

  This seems like one of those days when people feel the gears of history grinding. Joan felt it. I'm sure she never doubted herself. The joy of teenage certainty, eh? But now she looked around her and she saw fellow believers. God had vindicated her, well, events had certainly vindicated her. It seemed as though God had embraced the cause of France and the Dauphin. She was God's weapon in this fight. Chroniclers around Western Europe wrote of the shepherdess who had routed the English. Within days, Joan was back at the court, telling the Dauphin to go with the momentum, to follow up with a daring strike through English territory to Reims, wake of be crowned.

• 29:41Dan Snow?

  That cathedral, the anointing with the heaven-sent oil of Clovis, after that, no one could doubt or contest Charles's kingship. He scrambled to assemble men and supplies. Again, I just want to pause and echo the point made by Jonathan Sumption at the start of this podcast. We have contemporary sources confirming that the energy and the drive and even the operational plan for the campaign was coming from a teenage girl from a peasant background. Royal princes, seasoned military commanders, they were sorting the nuts and bolts out, they were amassing necessary supplies, but it seems clear at this point that Joan was the charismatic, animating presence.

• 30:21Dan Snow?

  It is hard to think of another example of this in the whole of recorded history. You're listening to Dan Snow's History and this is my retelling of the story of Joan of Arc.

• 30:39Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 31:20Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalised, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves.

• 32:04Dan Snow?

  Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, helping to power millions of conversations every day. Ready to transform your customer support? Go to decagon.ai/dansnow to see what Decagon can do for your team. That's decagon.ai/dansnow. Check Decagon out at decagon.ai/dansnow.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound? Means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 34:01Dan Snow?

  By June 11th, they'd marched north and they came to the walls of Jargaux, another town on Loire. Many of the French commanders, they counselled caution. Joan insisted on immediate assault. The English were given a chance to surrender. They declined, but strikingly, they did not shower Joan with insults this time. The Duke of Alençat later confessed that he'd been scared before the walls of Jargaux, but Joan had said, "Fear nothing. She would deliver him home safely to his wife." But, she said, "You should stand somewhere a bit different." She pointed out the threat of a cannon up on the town walls. Moments later, the Duke swore a man was killed on the very spot he'd vacated at Joan's urging. Joan immediately ordered her guns to blast those walls and within twenty-four hours

• 34:45Dan Snow?

  she brought down a section of them. She picked up her standard and dashed into the breach, bellowing that God was with the French. A projectile thrown from the walls knocked her over but she let back up. Up went the French scaling ladders. Young men roused to a frenzy by this delicate armour-clad form of Joan in the midst of enemy fire. Like men possessed, like men certain that God was with them, they climbed the ladders. There were moments when the battle teetered on the cusp of victory and defeat. And in that fine moment of balance, I think that is when belief could be the difference. The French surged on, scratching with their fingernails at the ramparts. And the English, well, did they have a flicker of doubt? Did they side-eye their mates to check their commitment?

• 35:29Dan Snow?

  And in that flash, in that tiny waver, did the French sword tip, spear tip, fist force cracks into the enemy wall of resistance? Such are the seconds on which medieval sieges and battles turn. "Onto the walls!" the French clamoured. The Englishmen were butchered or threw down their weapons. The mighty Earl of Suffolk, William of the illustrious De La Pole family, one of the greatest lords in the kingdom, he gave himself up. He would spend the next two years in French captivity. Joan moved to attack another English fortress, which surrendered. A relieving force of Englishmen sent down from Paris heard the news and turned round. They marched north but Joan was in headlong pursuit.

• 36:11Dan Snow?

  At the village of Pate, English scouts reported that Joan was in striking distance. The English stopped and started to dig in. The situation was quite similar to Agincourt, so the English must have preyed. A narrow valley, wooded on the other side, hundreds of archers, ready to rain down iron-tipped death on the men and horses if the French attacked. In front of them, the English put sharpened wooden stakes into the ground, the medieval barbed wire. They must have been feeling reasonably confident. But the French scouts were too close. And rather than give the English time to bed themselves in to protect themselves, the French, you can sense their optimism here, their hunger, their certainty, they charged on in there. The English line was not ready and it collapsed into a rabble of fleeing men.

• 36:53Dan Snow?

  And in medieval battles, when cohesion is lost, well, you're just a random mob. You're a crowd of victims. The French surged in. The English leaders, Sir John Fullstaff, where he galloped away, Lord John Talbot, another glittering oligarch, he was captured. Pate was the French agent corps. In seven weeks, Joan had reversed the strategic picture. She had swept the English off the north bank of the Loire. She'd pushed deep into their territory and she'd annihilated an English field army. Helen Castor, who is so clever about citing sources, not from later recollections or haggler graphic accounts, but from the actual events from the time, has quoted this one source in full, that's really important.

• 37:38Dan Snow?

  This is from a knight who actually fought with the English at Pate, and he wrote, "Before the battle, by the renown of Joan the maid, the hearts of the English were greatly changed and weakened. And it seemed to them fortune was turning her wheel harshly against them. She acquired so great praise and renown that it really seemed to all men that the enemies of King Charles would have no power of resistance in any place where she was present." So that's what some of those English troops are thinking at the time. And he correctly identifies her next task. Reims and the crown. Some said that the French would strike at Normandy, but Joan was an unstoppable voice at court. So at the urging of that young woman, the King Julie set out through enemy territory to Reims in late June.

• 38:23Dan Snow?

  He marched at the head of a powerful force, its ranks swelled by willing believers. At Auxerre, the garrison simply switched sides and admitted them without a shot being fired. Joan forbade looting. She would not touch food that had been stolen from peasants, whose lot she could obviously sympathise with, appreciate. She gave churches her special protection. At Troyes, the garrison held firm. A letter from Joan demanding their immediate surrender was mocked and burned. The royal leadership paused for thought, but for Joan, there'd be no pausing. She was astonished that they did it. There was a king to crown, these obstacles would be swept aside. Instead, she rode out and directed the soldiers to fill the town's moat with great bales of wood. Artillerymen sighted their guns.

• 39:07Dan Snow?

  These ostentatious preparations, sure enough, crystallised the thinking of the people of Troyes. They did not want a violent storming of their city. If the maid was touched by God, what hope do they have? They opened their gates. And by doing so, they opened the floodgates. Charlons, when they learned, made the same decision. And that in turn persuaded the decision-makers in the all-important town of Reims to do the same. Joan did not have to lead one assault as a cascade of towns had simply opened their gates to their forces. The Dauphin's path to Reims Cathedral had now been cleared. It was a Sunday, the morning of the seventeenth of July, 1429.

• 39:48Dan Snow?

  Four fully armed, mounted knights rode into the cathedral and presented the Holy Ampulla, containing that legitimising sacred oil of Clovis, to the Archbishop. He then applied it to the head and torso of the Dauphin, transforming him in the eyes of God and plenty of men into that which he had always claimed to be, but could now do so with far greater confidence: the most Christian King of France, Charles VII. At his side throughout the service, a teenager, who six months before had been tending sheep and spinning at her mother's side in an overlooked corner of the countryside that was barely France.

• 40:31Dan Snow?

  At the service's end, she knelt to him, and said through tears, "Noble King, God's will is done."

• 40:40Dan Snow?

  She was still seventeen. It's difficult really to imagine the mood in the English camp. In the space of a couple of months, the strategic geography, the balance of forces, the momentum, and probably most importantly, the vibe, had been transformed. The Duke of Bedford was always short of men. He had been short of men before Orléans, he hadn't wanted to besiege Orléans, and now he was watching, helpless, as the French prince pranced through the heart of what should have been territory committed to the boy-king Henry VI. The whole thing was inconceivable, but conceive it he must.

• 41:17Dan Snow?

  As the French king was being crowned in Rennes, Bedford added layers of defence to the mighty stronghold of Paris. Reinforcements were rushed to the city, cannon added to the walls. Bedford issued a proclamation telling the people of Paris that the so-called Dauphin was consorting with Joan, abominable in the sight of God, a reprobate, a slutting woman of ill repute, dressed as a man and dissolute in her conduct. Joan and the French approached Paris in August. Bedford led his army out to meet them. He banged stakes into the ground as his brother had done at Agincourt. The French faced the English across the field, daring the English to advance out from behind their staked-out positions.

• 42:01Dan Snow?

  Bedford refused. Joan rode up to the English and invited them to fight. They stayed sullenly in their lines, then withdrew back towards Paris. Bedford had a big problem, he was now playing whack-a-mole right across his French possessions. Even Normandy saw forces loyal to the French king Charles making gains. Bedford had to dash back to relieve a siege. Meanwhile, Charles maintained his progress around Paris, capturing castles with little opposition. By late August, Joan and the French had reached the walls of Paris. The French king and his council had been enraging Joan by protracted negotiations with the Duke of Burgundy, who they believed they could tempt back into the French fold. His attitude would be decisive right the way through this period

• 42:46Dan Snow?

  and to the outcome of the war. But anyway, those talks had slightly stalled in late August, which Joan was very happy about. She saw war through a simple lens of killing, capturing and expelling anyone disloyal to Charles VII. Now, thanks to those negotiations not working out with the Duke of Burgundy, the king was allowing her to have a go at Paris. In early September, just in case she was able to deliver another miracle. She was not. Up to the walls she charged on the 8th of September. Cannon roared, as ever she urged her men forward. They threw bundles of wood into the moat as men above hurled projectiles and shot arrows down into them. At dusk, she yelled up at the walls that they must surrender immediately or she would storm the city and put them all to death. "Shall we, you bloody tart?", came the shout from above

• 43:30Dan Snow?

  as a crossbow bolt smashed into her leg. Another hit her standard bearer full in the face. Bellowing that she would continue, she was dragged back as the French sounded the retreat. Paris had been worth a massive gamble. If anyone could somehow beat the odds and storm one of Christendom's greatest strongholds, it would have been Joan. The French king had let her try, and now he withdrew her forces. Joan was furious. She'd assumed the assault would go on, but now she discovered that Charles was packing up for the season, marching back to L'Oréal for a winter of banquets. Paris was a turning point. That extraordinary year had seen Joan arrive at court, win over key allies, lead the French

• 44:13Dan Snow?

  armies in a whirlwind of conquests, Orleans, Pâtes, Troyes, Rheims, but obvious defeat before the walls of Paris chipped away her all-important aura of invincibility. And the French court now had to manage their rock star commander, who was obviously human after all. She returned south to L'Oréal with her king. It was a frustrating time. Here's a nice snippet, though. There was another holy woman, Catherine de la La Rochelle, claiming that she was having heaven-sent visions, telling her that the king Charles should make peace with the Duke of Burgundy. And Joan did not welcome a fellow visionary. No, she said she should return to her housework. Joan was very sad. She was not allowed to accompany a force which was striking into Normandy, presumably

• 44:57Dan Snow?

  in case she gambled everything, an all-or-nothing assault on the English capital Rouen. Instead, she was sent on a bit of a side mission to deal with annoying mercenary captain who'd set himself up as a petty tyrant. Deal with him she did. She stormed his stronghold on the Fourth of November and moved to besiege another rebel town. There, at La Charité, she got locked into a hellish winter siege. The king refused to send supplies and reinforcements. Joan was trapped in siege warfare for a month. Just before Christmas, she was forced to abandon that siege. She heard that the king had raised her family and all their male and female descendants to noble rank. Coming hard on failure, it must have felt strangely ominous.

• 45:41Dan Snow?

  A thank you for services rendered. Were they hoping to marry her off to a knight, cheer her and sideline her? The spring of fourteen thirty was equally frustrating. We have fascinating letters from Joan. The people of Rheims wrote to her saying, hey, we opened our gates to you. And now your king has retreated back to the Loire. We're terrified of an English counterattack or one from the Duke of Burgundy. And Joan made a fascinating and tragic reply. She said, worry not, you only have to say one word and I'll be there. I will make them put on their spurs in such haste that they won't know what they're doing. She told them to close their gates and she would ride to their relief. Isn't that so interesting?

• 46:22Dan Snow?

  The people of Rheims and Joan herself are giving her an agency that she really didn't have. She was a messianic military leader, but without her own force, with her own military. The world thought she was a lord of war. The French crown thought she was a useful standard bearer. And you see that again, the same month, showing that her renown had spread far beyond the borders of France. Just check this out. This is another letter we have. It is one of my favorite Joan of Arc primary sources. She is writing a letter threatening a sect of so-called Hussites. Now, I know you all love history, but me attempting to explain to you the Hussite approach to Catholicism would go A, far beyond my meager powers and B, bore you to death.

• 47:07Dan Snow?

  So minute doctrinal disputes that led to actual war and upheaval in the Middle Ages are a real feature of that period. Suffice it to say that the Hussites disagreed with the Catholic orthodoxy on a few points. You can think of them, if you like, as sort of proto Protestants, you won't be far off. The key point is that the Pope was angry at the Hussites. The Pope had announced a crusade against them. And there had been a war raging for around a decade, devastating swathes of what is now the Czech Republic and surrounding areas. And that spring Joan of Arc was Christendom's most famous Catholic enforcer. And so get this, she weighs into the Hussite crusade. The controversy with a very stern letter.

• 47:48Dan Snow?

  She said, for a long time now, common knowledge has made it clear to me, Joan the maid, that from true Christians, you have become heretics and practically on a level with the Saracens, i.e. Muslims. You have eliminated the valid faith and worship and have taken up a disgraceful and unlawful superstition. For my part, I tell you frankly, if I wasn't busy with the English wars, I would have come to see you long before now. But if I don't find out that you have reformed yourself, I might leave the English behind and go against you. So that by the sword, if I can't do it the other way, I will eliminate your false and vile superstition and relieve you either of your heresy or your life. Just check her out.

• 48:33Dan Snow?

  She had pan-European ambitions. Meanwhile, the attempt to come to terms with the Duke of Burgundy looked to have failed by the late spring. The Duke was laying siege to the town of Compiegne. The king reluctantly agreed to send Joan there to lift the siege, as she had done at Orleans the year before. The twenty-third of May found Joan in Compiegne, galloping out of the city, which like Orleans had not been entirely cut off from the world, so she was able to get in and out. She spurred her horse that day into the heart of the Burgundian and English troops. They were pushed back. It seemed as if Joan still had that divine backing, but then something shifted. There must have been moments like this in medieval battles.

• 49:15Dan Snow?

  Moments when, despite the heavy befuddling helmet that limited your sound and vision, you just sensed something change. The brain would have noted this continuity. Maybe the noise changed. Maybe the body language of those nearest you, maybe that slightly shifted. And that morning, Joan felt a change. Hidden off to the flank was a body of enemy troops. They allowed the French to advance past them and then they fell upon them. Joan's force was trapped in a pincer. The enemy worked their way around the French rear. Joan bellowed that God was still with them, but the sight of enemy spearmen between you and the safety of your base, well, that will shake the faith out of even the most devout. Eventually, the commander of the gatehouse, the city of Compiegne,

• 49:58Dan Snow?

  eventually made the terrible decision to shut those gates and pull up the drawbridge. The enemy was threatening to storm the town, having cut Joan off. Down went the portcullis, up went the drawbridge. Joan was stranded, surrounded by a rising tide of her foes.

• 50:16Dan Snow?

  On they came. Joan's companions, those closer to her, must have felt that terrible inevitability of that moment. The hopeless fight, each of them having to choose if and when to surrender. Joan was dragged from her saddle. In desperation, she found an enemy of high status to surrender to as befitted her rank: Joan the maid, France's talisman, its enforcer. She surrendered. She was in the hands of the enemy. Joan was a prisoner. We'll be back with Joan of Arc after this. Don't go away.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com. Optum.

• 51:28Speaker 06

  Ready to feel more energized and in control of your health? If you've tried diet and exercise but still aren't seeing the results you're looking for, it may be time to explore a different approach. At orderlymeds.com, you can connect with licensed medical providers through a simple virtual process, all from the comfort of home, and find out if a GLP-1 treatment may be right for you. Learn more at orderlymeds.com. That's orderlymeds.com. Compounded medications are not FDA-approved. Eligibility determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details.

• 52:08Dan Snow?

  It had been 13 months since she'd arrived in Orléans.

• 52:13Dan Snow?

  Over the next few months, she was exposed to endless visits by pretty much the entire, deeply curious elite of the Anglo-French world. First among them, on the day of her capture, was the Duke of Burgundy. He released a communiqué telling the world that he had the maid, and said, "Let that be a lesson to anyone foolish and credulous enough to have believed her." Speaking of credulous, Joan may well have believed, her king, the man who she had crowned, at whose side she had stood as he was bathed in the holy oil, she may have believed he would rescue her, ransom her. That was the practice at the time for high-status prisoners. Would King Charles honour his debts? The signs were bad.

• 52:55Dan Snow?

  Within a day, the Archbishop of Reims, King Charles's chancellor, announced the news to the French kingdom. Joan had been captured, and it was her fault. She was too willful, hot-headed. She wouldn't listen to wise advice. Furthermore, get this. The king had happily just met another messenger from heaven, a young shepherd from the mountains. He had brought good news. The enemy would be defeated, no need to worry. But God had withdrawn his favour from Joan because she'd got distracted by luxury and her own pride. She'd followed her own course. She'd ignored God. So that's why she had ended up in prison.

• 53:36Dan Snow?

  Let us just pause here to marvel at that lack of gratitude. It is grotesque. And with that, the French state washed its hands of Joan of Arc. They just moved on. King Charles, the timid, feckless, battle-shy muppet, did not deserve that young woman. In retrospect, I must say it's a bit hard to believe that God chose to intervene decisively in European history at that exact point to put Charles on the throne. Of all the people at all the times, very odd. Aristocratic men, oh, they ransom back their own. They brought back their brothers and cousins. But Joan, the teenage peasant girl... She was cut adrift.

• 54:21Dan Snow?

  By the way, interesting footnote on that miraculous boy, William the Shepherd he was called. He was ambushed by the English a few weeks later on. He was captured and he was dragged into Paris as a captive in the wake of the boy king, Henry VI, when he made a triumphal entrance to Paris. He visited his French capital for the first and only time in December 1431. Like a trophy captive at a Roman triumph, he was shown to the people and he disappears after that. Rumour had it that he was drowned in the Seine. Anyway, back to Joan. The French crown did not want her, the English crown did want her. Very, very much indeed.

• 55:01Dan Snow?

  They wanted to try her, expose her frauds, tear her down, annihilate her myth. The very idea that God favoured the house of Valois over the house of Lancaster. We know little of Joan's captivity. She attempted to escape twice, once by jumping out of a window high in a tower. She badly injured herself in the fall. By November, the English had stumped up the cash to buy her off the Duke of Burgundy. Paris was too close to the enemy, it was too dangerous, so she was sent to Rouen, capital of English-occupied Normandy, for what would be a show trial. The charade began in January 1431. Learned Christian scholars, bishops, theologians, meeting together to comb through Joan's

• 55:43Dan Snow?

  life and sayings and testimony in minute detail, cross-referencing it with Christian writings. A vast endeavour by a horde of clever men with only one conceivable outcome. The grim-faced lords of war allowing the pen pushers to come up with some justifications and sophistry before they stepped in to terminate this enemy of the state, as they were always going to do. Joan was cross-examined endlessly. She underwent another physical examination to check whether she was indeed a virgin, one conducted by the Duchess of Bedford herself, aunt of the king, wife of the ruler of English France, sister of the Duke of Burgundy.

• 56:23Dan Snow?

  Now, eighteen years old, Joan went into that room, submitted to that questioning day after day, and fended them off. She was shackled every night, English soldiers in her cell, she was roughly handled, she was humiliated. Great lords like Warwick and Stafford entered her cell, they taunted her with false rumours of her imminent ransom, they attempted to sexually assault her. She fought off rough hands, they grabbed her breasts or tried to get inside her clothes. At the trial, they asked her again about her visions and voices. They were particularly upset, it seems, about the wearing of male clothes. I mean, really? You're consorting with the devil and wearing men's clothes? One of these things, you might think, a little more serious than the other.

• 57:08Dan Snow?

  Anyway, on May the night, they brought her into a room filled up with the tools of torture: blades, prongs, jagged-edged swords, sharpened tips, crushing pincers. She fixed the lead prosecuting bishop with a stare and said calmly, "In truth, if you were to have me torn limb from limb and my soul separated from my body, I still won't tell you anything more. And if I did tell you anything else about this afterwards, I would always say that you had made me say it by force." That knocked him back.

• 57:42Dan Snow?

  He seemed to agree. She was ushered out. There would be no torture.

• 57:47Dan Snow?

  On May the 23rd, though, the process did reach its inevitable conclusion. She was dragged in front of the assembled priests, the rap sheet was presented to the world. Her visions were either lies or diabolical. Either, then, she was a liar or in league with Satan. Both bad. She was an idolatra, her claims about angels were presumptuous. Her claim to know the future was sorcery, divination, superstitious. Her wearing of men's clothing, blasphemous. Leaving home, while that broke holy strictures about honouring father and mother. Jumping out of the tower had been a suicide attempt, very bad. She'd encouraged the making of war against the English, which, and this I love, was against biblical strictures to love thy neighbour.

• 58:32Dan Snow?

  How they delivered that with a straight face, I will never know. The English are historically notorious for their national pastime of fighting their neighbours at any given opportunity on any pretext whatsoever. You ask, the Welsh, the Irish, the Scots, the Bretons, the French, the Flemish, what they thought of their English neighbours, and overburdened with love is not making it into the word cloud. She was also a schismatic, she'd cut herself off from the Holy Church, and she finally was an apostate. The question was, would Joan recant, confess, beg forgiveness?

• 59:11Dan Snow?

  No, she would not, she said, not even if the executioner was lighting the flames of her pyre. So, on the next day, twenty-fourth of May, she was brought, bound, to the centre of Rouen. Dukes and prince bishops were gathered alongside the citizens of the town. In the squares to the scaffold, it was announced that this woman, guilty of abominable crimes, would be purified by fire. Suddenly, Joan spoke up. The crowd went silent. Joan recanted. She said she was prepared to repent, she was happy to return to the Holy Church. She would obey the bishop.

• 59:56Dan Snow?

  She denied her visions. The shadow of the scaffold was upon her, she did not want to burn. The crowd wanted to see a burning, they wanted blood, but the Church wanted her soul. They brought a document for her to sign. And she confessed her sins, she repudiated her past behaviour, her crimes. She was given quill and ink and she marked the document in place of a signature. The presiding bishop told the baying crowd that Joan had repented and would live, but she would spend the rest of her life in prison. She was returned to her cell, women's clothes were brought, she agreed to submit and wear them. The Church had broken the maid.

• 1:00:41Dan Snow?

  Or had they? Three days later, the bishop was summoned to the castle. He was taken into Joan's cell. There was Joan, wearing men's clothes. She protested that she thought she'd be allowed to go unshackled. She'd be allowed to go to mass. Instead, she was still chained up in here with her leering guards. She was denied communion. She thought they'd had a deal. There must have been a pregnant pause felt by all present before the bishop asked his next question. Had her voices spoken to her since she had confessed all? "Yes," she said, "they had." And with those words, she condemned herself. She went on. She said that she had spoken falsely to save her life.

• 1:01:26Dan Snow?

  She had damned herself. Her confession had been false. It had been driven by fear of the fire. "I told you the truth about everything in the trial," she said. So, on the morning of the thirtieth of May, 1431, the executioners once again stacked up brushwood in the centre of Rouen as a cart rolled across the cobbles. In it was Joan. On her shaved head was a cap which said "Relapsed Heretic Apostate Idolatra." The bishop told the crowd that like a dog returning to its vomit, so Joan had returned to her sin. She was tied to a pillar and she prayed.

• 1:02:09Dan Snow?

  One story suggests she asked for and was given a wooden cross by an English soldier. The fire beneath her was lit. Priests later claimed, when opinions of Joan had flipped, that they fetched a crucifix from the nearby church and held it before her eyes. The fire caught on. The wood crackled. The heat built. Above the noise of the flames, the crowd could hear Joan. They heard her calling out, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." Smoke and flame gnawed at Joan's body, competing as to which would kill her first. One writer in Paris heard that after she'd died, but before her body was consumed,

• 1:02:54Dan Snow?

  the executioner raked back the burning wood so the crowd could see her naked body and show that she was indeed a woman. Then he built back the fire so high to destroy every last vestige of her. There must be no relics. The ashes were thrown in the river Seine. Never before or since have the English gone to as much trouble to defeat, discredit, humble, shame, and eradicate the legacy of a teenage girl. It was a final gruesome compliment in which she can have taken no comfort. The war would rumble on, but the tide had turned. It had turned decisively at Orleans and Joan's lightning campaign that followed.

• 1:03:38Dan Snow?

  Eventually, the English would be driven out of every possession they had in France, aside from the impregnable bastion on the northwest coast, visible from the white cliffs, the town of Calais. Henry VI, the boy king, the only English king to be crowned king of France in Paris, grew to be an ill, indecisive, kind, gentle, rather pleasant, and therefore wholly unfit medieval king. Spurred by his shortcomings and failure in France, his reign descended into a horror of internecine violence, civil war in which royal and aristocratic cousins denied the opportunity to do so in France, hacked each other to death in English fields. Joan had turned the tide. The English had felt that shift,

• 1:04:23Dan Snow?

  and that is why they hated Joan. Years later, the Duke of Bedford, who had been in command in France, wrote to his nephew, King Henry VI, to explain what had really happened there. He said, "All things had prospered for you there until the siege of Orleans. Then had come a great stroke upon your people, caused in part by a lack of steadfast belief and of the erroneous doubt that they had of the disciples and followers of the fiend called the maid that used false enchantment and sorcery."

• 1:04:55Dan Snow?

  For which stroke and discomforture not only lessened in great part the number of your people there, but as well withdrew the courage of the remnant, and encouraged your adverse party and enemies to assemble forthwith in great number. Basically, the maid put hearts into the French forces and broke the morale of the English. Now, perhaps the English could never win the Hundred Years' War, perhaps it was too big an ask, perhaps Orleans was overreach anyway, their Burgundian allies were too inconstant, little old England didn't really have the resources to swallow up its powerful, larger neighbour, Henry VI couldn't really command his own faculties, it's still less a conquering army, so perhaps all that is true.

• 1:05:35Dan Snow?

  But we don't really need to speculate, because Joan made all that moot. She breathed hope and purpose into the French at their lowest point. An illiterate peasant from the fringes of the kingdom made the warriors of France believe, while putting fear and doubt in the hearts of their enemy. And on such things are kingdoms won and lost. The French would eventually come back around to Joan. Her mother's urging, the embarrassed French king asked his clergy to wane on Joan, as the English crown had asked their predecessors to do so, and surprise, surprise, they obliged with a reversal of the previous court's opinion. Some of its members, embarrassingly, were still alive.

• 1:06:19Dan Snow?

  "We were just obeying orders", they said, very original. This new court also met in Rouen, now in the summer of 1456, and announced their findings. Joan, they said, had been condemned on trumped-up charges. It had been fraudulent, malicious, corrupt, deceitful, slanderous. You never lack a superlative when it comes to Joan. The sentence against her was pronounced null and void, and they stuck a cross in the market place in Rouen, on the spot where she was burned. It stands there still. I hope you enjoyed my retelling of the story of Joan of Arc for Dan Stone's History. If you've enjoyed this episode, why don't you leave us a review on whatever podcast player you use. Don't forget to hit follow for more episodes and I tell you my favourite stories from history. Thanks so much for listening, everyone, see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  Pessimism. It's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care, and help lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 1:08:36Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.