The maid of Orleans
Joan's military campaigns
The siege of Orléans has been going on for months. The English have the city surrounded. The Dauphin's forces have failed repeatedly to relieve it. The city is running out of food and hope.
Joan arrives with a relief force in April 1429. She is seventeen years old, in white armor, carrying a white standard painted with the image of Christ. She has been given command — technically she is an advisor to the military commanders, but in practice she drives the strategy with a directness that the professional soldiers find alternately inspiring and infuriating.
She is wounded by an arrow in the shoulder during one of the assaults. She pulls the arrow out herself and returns to the fighting.
Orléans is relieved on May 8, 1429 — a date still celebrated in the city as a national holiday. The English are driven from position after position in the weeks that follow. The Dauphin is crowned Charles VII at Reims cathedral in July, with Joan standing beside him holding her standard.
She weeps at the coronation. When asked why, she says: I have done what God sent me to do.
Her military campaign continues into 1430, when she is captured during a battle at Compiègne. She is sold to the English by their Burgundian allies for ten thousand livres.
Charles VII, whose crown she won, does not pay the ransom. He does not attempt to rescue her. He does nothing.
She is tried for heresy and witchcraft in Rouen. She is nineteen years old.
“I would rather die than do something I know to be against God's will.”
— Joan of Arc, during her trial, 1431 AD
“David said, the LORD who delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. Saul said to David, Go, and the LORD shall be with you.”
Joan accomplished what she was sent to do. She got the Dauphin crowned. Then she was abandoned by the man she crowned and handed over to his enemies.
The betrayal by Charles VII is one of the most cold-blooded acts of royal ingratitude in medieval history. He owed her everything. He gave her nothing.
She apparently did not expect otherwise — or if she did, she did not let it change what she did. Her obedience was to the voice, not to the king. The king's ingratitude could not retroactively make the calling wrong.
This is the hardest kind of faithfulness: to serve well and be abandoned by those you served, and to find that the abandonment doesn't change what was true about the service.
Have you been abandoned by someone you served faithfully? And what does Joan's response suggest about what that abandonment does and doesn't mean?