Joan_Of_Arc

A long time ago in France's hour of greatest need there rose a hero in the least likely of packages. Joan of Arc was neither a noble nor a warrior. She was an illiterate farm girl that came from the far South of France. Her father was a farmer and a tax collector and her mother stayed on their 50 acre farm to breed and raise their children. Joan of Arc made her decision to enter the battlefield solely based on what she believed God had asked her to do. At the age of 12, she had a vision in the middle of a field of wheat where Gabriel and his angels came down to her and told her that she had been chosen by God to crown Charles VII the new King of France. And of course as it was in those times, when God tells you to do something, you do it.

And so she rose against all naysayers and when France was at their most dire of straits and all of their nobility, when every single available general had suffered dishonor in defeat...Joan of Arc was granted control of France and her armies on the basis that she alone had been granted by God divine providence to defeat her enemies. And while she faced resistance from the male commanders hoping to cling to what little honor they had left and they restricted Joan from many war counsels where they spent time talking about what to do...Joan instead led the army out into the field to many victories.

Through her bravery and the many battles she fought, she suffered many injuries including: Being shot in the leg by a crossbow bolt, being stabbed in the back while charging through enemy ranks, being shot in the head by a stone cannonball while climbing a castle, being shot in the neck by a English longbow, being shot off her horse three times in a single battle, among several other injuries untold in history that would have broken the will of any lesser man. Yet there is not one recorded injury in history that prevented Joan of Arc from returning to the field.

In battle Joan of Arc was the first one to arrive at the head of the army and the last person to leave the field. She directed her armies like an extension of her body, every movement bringing death to thousands of screaming Englishmen. Through many successive victories, she turned the fate of the Hundred Year War around in just a few years, cutting a path through the English-captured territory towards the sacred land of Reims where the new French King Charles VII was crowned...then on towards Paris so he could be settled on his throne.

And at the end after she had single-handedly saved France from it's fate after all others had given up...she was betrayed by the one who she had had made King. After a brief ceasefire with the English was broken, she was captured in battle and brought to England...who proceeded to indict her in a heresy trial that could be described as nothing other than a complete mockery of justice. For several days the English bishops examined and cross-examined her, looking for any small fault in her actions to use to condemn her to death.

Forever recorded in her trial records are proof of Joan of Arc's remarkable intellect. Asked if she knew she was in God's grace, she answered: 'If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.' The question is a scholarly trap. Church doctrine held that no one could be certain of being in God's grace. If she had answered yes, then she would have convicted herself of heresy. If she had answered no, then she would have confessed her own guilt. Notary Boisguillaume later testified that at the moment the court heard this reply, "Those who were interrogating her were stupefied."

In the end, no effort was made by the French nobility to save her. The French King stalled and eventually actively resisted any attempts for the French nobility to offer up a bounty for her, as if he was afraid of having a new political rival. Her attempts to appeal directly to the Catholic Pope himself was rejected and kept silent by the English. And though they could not find any immoral action to convict her, she was sentenced to death by burning of the stake simply because they had been defeated by her in battle and they were afraid to face her again. Joan of Arc was only 19 years old when she died.

While she would later be posthumously declared innocent by an inquiry re-trial led by the Pop himself, nothing could reverse the terrible crimes the English performed. She remains in France a legendary figure to this day, especially to those that know her story. She is a true testament of courage to anyone that doubts the tenacity of a woman when it is so required.