The Peasant Girl Who Crowned a King

Joan of Arc was born around 1412 in Domrémy, a small village in the Meuse valley of northeastern France, to Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée. Her father was a propertied peasant farmer who worked about twenty hectares of land and supplemented his income as a village official, collecting taxes and heading the local watch. Joan had three brothers and a sister. She was not taught to read or write, and she dictated her letters throughout her life, though she may later have learned to sign her name.

She grew up amid the Hundred Years' War, a conflict between England and France that had begun in 1337 and devastated the French countryside. France itself was fractured: King Charles VI suffered recurring bouts of mental illness, and rival factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, fought for control of the regency. When the Duke of Burgundy allied with the English, Charles VI's son, the Dauphin (later Charles VII), was declared unfit to inherit the throne. It was into this fractured, desperate France that Joan stepped when she asked to be taken to Charles VII in 1428.

Joan testified that she was guided by visions of the archangel Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine, who told her to help the Dauphin reclaim France from English domination. Convinced of her sincerity and purity, Charles sent the roughly seventeen-year-old Joan to Orléans as part of a relief force. She arrived in April 1429 carrying her banner, and her presence lifted the spirits of a demoralized French army. Nine days later, the English abandoned the siege.

Joan pushed the French to pursue the retreating English aggressively during the Loire Campaign, which reached its high point in a decisive victory at Patay. That victory cleared the road to Reims, where Charles VII was crowned King of France with Joan standing at his side. The coronation and the victories leading to it boosted French morale and helped set the stage for France's eventual triumph in the Hundred Years' War decades later.

But Joan's momentum did not last. She took part in an unsuccessful siege of Paris in September 1429 and a failed siege of La Charité in November of that year. These defeats eroded the court's confidence in her. In early 1430, she organized a company of volunteers to relieve Compiègne, which Burgundian forces — allies of the English — had besieged. On 23 May 1430, Burgundian troops captured her. After a failed escape attempt, she was handed over to the English in November.