Jeanne Darc

Alex:
She sits on the mattress and takes her hand out of contact with mine.
— Is Jeanne a woman or a man? – she asks, frowning.
I stay silent.
She snorts in exasperation and squints at me.
— Why don't you give me answers? - She murmurs. - I need to know. I understand that I couldn't face one of you by myself but I would at least be forewarned.
I continue without saying a thing, there a huge knot pressing my throat.
She purses her lips and clenches her hands into fists, her expression changes and now she directs a hateful glance at me.
— She’s one of your ex-lovers, right? – she accuses between clenched teeth. -Do you love her? That's why you’re protecting her. Do you hope to get her back? Answer me!
The walls of the room vibrate. The bed shakes. The air around us becomes heavy, charged with an electricity that makes the fine hairs on my skin rise in tension.
Good, I know exactly how to deal with my little witch when she is enraged. It's when her gaze is blank and her face expressionless that I have no heart to carry on, it makes feel so guilty,doing this to her.
— Jeanne was never my lover, Magissa Mou. - I reply, looking into her eyes. She gives me suspicious look , as if she didn't believe me. I smile sarcastically.
— When I offered to give her a second chance, she had already been savagely raped twice by an English nobleman. She hated men in general and English ones in particular quite a lot. I introduced myself to her as an angel because that would be the only way she would let me get close to her.
Her expression relaxes and she listens to me carefully.
— You see, the Hundred Years War in France began in 1337 as a dispute over the inheritance of the French throne, interspersed with occasional periods of relative peace. Most of the fighting had taken place in France, and the English army's use of destructive scorched earth tactics had devastated the Gallic economy. France's population had not yet fully recovered from the ravages of the Black Death pandemic in the mid-14th century, and its traders were cut off from foreign markets. On the other hand, the English had almost achieved their goal of a dual monarchy under English control and the French army had not achieved any major victories.

— The French king at that time was Charles VI, who suffered from episodes of insanity that often rendered him incapable of ruling. His brother Luis, Duke of Orleans, and his cousin Juan Sin Miedo, Duke of Burgundy, competed for the regency of France and the guardianship of the children heirs to the throne. This dispute included allegations that Luis was having an extramarital affair with the queen, Isabel de Baviera, and that Juan Sin Miedo had kidnapped the heirs to the throne. The conflict culminated in the assassination of the Duke of Orleans in 1407 by order of the Duke of Burgundy.
— Young Charles of Orleans succeeded his father as Duke and was placed in the custody of his father-in-law, the Count of Armagnac. His faction became known as the "Armagnac" faction, and the opposing party led by the Duke of Burgundy was called the "Burgundy faction." Henry V of England took advantage of these internal divisions when he invaded the kingdom in 1415, gaining a resounding victory at Azincourt on October 25 and subsequently capturing many cities in northern France during a campaign in 1417. In 1418, Paris was taken by the Burgundians. , who massacred the Count of Armagnac and some 2,500 of his followers. The future French king, Charles VII, assumed the title of heir to the throne, at the age of fourteen, after the consecutive deaths of his four older brothers. His first significant official act was to sign a peace treaty with the Duke of Burgundy in 1419, but this ended in disaster when Armagnac's supporters assassinated Juan Sin Miedo during a meeting under Charles' guarantee of protection. The new Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, blamed Charles of assassination and allied with the English, after which the Allied forces conquered a large part of France.
— Stop going around it, Alex. What does all this have to do with that bitch Jeanne? - She snaps impatiently.
— Be a little patient, little witch. To understand people you must know the historical context in which they lived. - I whisper, trying to stroke her hair but she moves away from my hand. I release a frustrated sigh.
— In 1420, the Queen of France, Elizabeth of Bavaria, signed the Treaty of Troyes, which granted the succession to the French throne to Henry V and his heirs instead of to his son Charles. This arrangement revived suspicions that the dolphin was the illegitimate product of Elizabeth's rumored affair with the late Duke of Orleans. Henry V and Charles VI died two months apart in 1422, leaving a child, Henry VI of England, as the nominal monarch of both kingdoms. Henry V's brother, John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford, became Regent.
— By 1429, almost all of northern France and some parts of the southwest were under Anglo-Burgundian control. The English controlled Paris and Rouen, while the Burgundian faction controlled Reims, the traditional coronation site for French kings. This was crucial, because none of the contenders for the crown had yet been enthroned. From 1428 Orleans was being besieged by the English, one of the few cities still loyal to Charles VII and an important target, as it occupied a strategic position on the banks of the Loire River and was the last major obstacle to dominating the rest of France. No one was optimistic about the city's resilience.
— For generations there were prophecies in France that promised that the nation would be saved by a virgin from the 'borders of Lorraine', 'that she would work miracles' and' that France would be lost for a woman [Elizabeth of Bavaria] and then restored by a Virgin".
— Are you telling me that that long-awaited "female messiah" was Jeanne?
— Yes. In a way she was. After years of humiliating defeat after defeat, both the military and civilian leadership of France were demoralized and discredited. When the dolphin Carlos agreed to the urgent request of a peasant woman to be equipped for war and put at the head of his army, his decision must have been based on the fact that he knew that any orthodox or rational decision had already been tried and failed. Only a desperate regime would heed an illiterate girl who claimed that God's voice was commanding her to take over her country's army and lead it to victory.
— After her arrival on the scene, the girl effectively turned the prolonged Anglo-French conflict into a religious war, a new course that was not without risks. Carlos's advisers were concerned that if the young woman's firm Faith — that she was not a heretic or a sorceress — was not shown beyond doubt, the dolphin's enemies could easily claim that her crown was a gift from the devil. To avoid this possibility, the dolphin ordered to investigate his antecedents and a theological examination in Poitiers to verify his morality. In April 1429, the commission of inquiry declared her "a girl of irreproachable life, a good Christian, possessed of the virtues of humility, honesty and simplicity." The theologians of Poitiers did not make a decision on the subject of divine inspirations instead, they informed the dolphin that there was a "favorable presumption" about the divine nature of their mission. This convinced Carlos, but they also stated that he had an obligation to put the girl to the test. Thus, they affirmed that "to doubt her or abandon her without suspecting evil would be to repudiate the Holy Spirit and be unworthy of God's help." They recommended that the peasant's claims be corroborated by seeing if she could lift the siege of Orleans as she had predicted.
— She arrived in the besieged city of Orleans on April 29, 1429. Juan de Orleans, head of the Ducal family of Orleans on behalf of his captive half-brother, initially excluded her from the court martial and did not inform him when the army was faced the enemy. However, his decision to exclude her did not prevent her presence in most councils and battles. Her true participation and military leadership continues to be the subject of debate. On the one hand, she declared that she carried her banner in battle and had never killed anyone, preferring her banner "forty times" better than a sword; in fact, the army was always led by a nobleman, like the Duke of Alenzón. On the other hand, many of these nobles went so far as to affirm that she had a profound effect on their decisions because they accepted their advice often in the belief that they were the fruit of divine inspiration. In any case, history testifies that the French army scored important victories during the short time the maiden was with it.
— And am I supposed to admire her for that? - She asks sarcastically.
— No precious. But maybe you will... understand her a little.
— Anyway, the sudden victory at Orleans also gave rise to many new military offensive plans. Jeanne persuaded Carlos VII to allow her to accompany the army with Duke Juan II d'Alençon; In addition, the dolphin gave his permission for a plan to recover nearby bridges over the Loire River as a prelude to a general advance towards Reims, in whose cathedral his consecration as King of France would be celebrated.
— It was an audacious plan because Reims was almost twice as far as Paris and reaching the city forced to advance deep into enemy territory. The Duke of Alenzón accepted Juana's advice on the strategy to follow. Other commanders, such as Juan de Orleans, had been impressed by her exploits during the siege and became supporters of the young peasant girl. The Duke of Alenzón claimed that Jeanne had saved his life by warning him that a cannon from the Jargeau wall was about to fire at him.
— Reims opened its doors to the army on July 16, 1429 and the coronation of Charles VII was celebrated the next morning. Although Jeanne and the Duke of Alenzón urged a speedy march to Paris, the Royal Court preferred to negotiate a truce with Duke Felipe de Borgoña, who violated the purpose of the agreement by using it as a delaying tactic to reinforce the defense of Paris. The French army crossed several cities near Paris during the interim and accepted the surrender of several of them without fighting. The Duke of Bedford led an English force to face the army of Charles VII at the Battle of Montépilloy on August 15, a clash of indecisive outcome. The French assault on Paris took place on September 8, during which Jeanne received a leg wound from a crossbow, despite which she remained in a trench until one of the commanders moved her to safety.
— In the following months a truce with the English was in force. The truce with England quickly came to an end. Jeanne traveled to Compiègne the following May to help defend the city against an English and Burgundian siege. On May 23, 1430, she was with an army force that attempted to attack the Burgundian camp at Margny, north of Compiègne, when she was ambushed and captured.
— She was imprisoned by the Burgundians in the castle of Beaurevoir. She made several attempts to escape, in one of which she jumped from the 21-meter tower in which she was confined and fell onto the soft earth of a dry moat. After this escape attempt, he was transferred to the Burgundian city of Arras. The English negotiated with their Burgundian allies the transfer of their custody. Bishop Pierre Cauchon de Beauvais, a supporter of the English, assumed the leading role in these negotiations and their subsequent trial. The final agreement required the English to pay the sum of 10,000 Touraine pounds for the delivery of the maiden. It was sold by people from her own country. She was betrayed by the very people she had fought for and tried to free.
— I'm glad. - Jolie whispers in an unconvincing tone.
— The English took her to the city of Rouen, which was their center of operations in France. The French from the armagnac faction tried to rescue her several times.
— The heresy trial to which she was subjected was politically motivated. The court was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clergymen, and supervised by English commanders, including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. The English Crown intended this trial to be "a ploy to get rid of a strange prisoner of war with the utmost embarrassment to her enemies, the French." Legal proceedings began on January 9, 1431 in Rouen, the seat of the English government of occupation. The procedure was suspect on several points, which would later provoke criticism of the court by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.
— Several members of the court later declared that some important parts of the transcript were falsified to harm Jeanne. According to inquisitorial guidelines, she should have been confined in an ecclesiastical prison under the supervision of female guards, that is, nuns. Instead, the English kept her in a secular prison guarded by their own soldiers. The twelve articles of impeachment summarizing the court's findings contradicted the court record, which had already been tampered with by the judges. Under threat of immediate execution, the illiterate defendant signed an abjuration document that she did not understand, after which the court replaced that abjuration with a different one in the official file of the case.
— Heresy was only a crime punishable by death if the offense was carried out more than once. Because the court sought to end Juana's life, they prepared an accusation for the crime of transvestism, according to eyewitnesses. Jeanne agreed to wear women's clothing when she abjured, which created a problem because until then she had worn soldier's clothing in prison, some members of the court later said. Men's clothing could be fastened in such a way as to discourage guards from attempting a rape because of the difficulty in ripping off the garments. She was probably afraid of shedding those clothes because the judge would confiscate them and therefore she would be left without that protection. A woman's dress did not offer that security; in fact, a few days after her abjuration, she told a member of the court that "an important English lord had entered prison and tried to take it by force.’ She dressed as a man again, perhaps to try to avoid sexual abuse or, according to Jean Massieu's testimony, because the guards had removed her dress and she had nothing else to wear.

—They cheated her from the beginning.- Yolie whispers in a slightly more compassionate tone.
— Yes. The fact that he returned to wearing men's clothing was interpreted by the court as a relapse into the crime of heresy for transvestism, although the inquisitor who presided over the appeals court that examined the case after the war disagreed on this. Medieval Catholic doctrine held that cross-dressing should be evaluated based on context, as established by the Theological Summation of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which says that necessity would be a permissible reason for cross-dressing. This would include wearing clothing as protection against rape. In doctrinal terms, it was justified that the girl had dressed as a page during her trip through enemy territory, also wearing armor in combat and male clothing as protection in the camps and in prison. She was condemned and sentenced to death at the stake on May 30, 1431. Tied to a high pillar in the Place Vieux-Marché de Rouen, she asked the friars Martin Ladvenu and Isambart de la Pierre to hold a crucifix before her. An English soldier made a small cross that she placed in front of her dress. Once dead, the English spread the embers to expose her charred body so that no one would claim that she had escaped alive. They then burned her remains two more times to reduce them to ashes and prevent them from being collected as relics, after which they dumped her remains into the River Seine.
Jolie frowns.
— Alex, I'm not an expert in medieval history, but... - she licks her lips.- Are you telling me that my... enemy... the person who caused my grandmother’s death, the person who murdered so many women belonging to my family, the dreaded and terrible Jack the Ripper is... Joan of Arc?!