Joan of Arc

While I’m usually not one to identify with religious wackos, Joan of Arc serves as a remarkable example of the power of the individual.

The “Hundred Years’ War” was a series of conflicts between France and England that occurred from roughly 1335-1450 (115 years’ war isn’t as catchy, is it?). These two countries decimated each other over who owed allegiance to whom, and Joan of Arc was born amid the rubble in the small village of Domrémy, France, in 1412.

Born a virtual nobody and peasant (her family operated a small farm… her father was the equivalent of a policeman), she became a standard bearer, warrior, and commander of armies at the age of sixteen.

Her history is complicated but brief… She experienced a religious “vision” of three saints who instructed her to drive out the British. Imagine that… you’re a twelve year old farm girl surrounded by enemies and God calls upon you to do something about it.

So she did something.

By disguising herself as a male, she made her way through hostile territory to Chinon, where she sought to petition French commanders to tell her story. She was eventually granted a meeting with them only because a prediction she made about the battle of Orleans came true.

Sensing that the entire regime was about to be defeated, Charles II actually put her in charge of French forces… and while she most often served as a “standard bearer” or one who holds the flag and rallies support, she always dressed in full knight regalia and was known to kill many on the battlefield. Once, she was shot in the neck with an arrow, fell back to staunch the wound, then fought on to the final battle. In the battle of Paris, she suffered on despite a crossbow bolt in her leg.

The French, under her brief guidance, won victory after victory and effectively reversed the direction of the Hundred Years’ War.

She was captured… of her own will. She remained the last on the field of battle in 1430 (a position of extreme honor for a knight) and was captured after her horse was felled by an archer. She refused to surrender even then.

She was then moved around a lot. She once jumped eighty feet from the tower where she was imprisoned, only to be recaptured. An English Lord tried to rape her in prison, but he was, ahem, unsuccessful.

Once the political power began to sway back toward the British, she was put on trial for heresy in regard to her religious “visions.” When asked if she was in God’s grace, she famously replied, “’If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.” Her answer stupefied the court, since the statement was not heretical, but they found her guilty and burned her at the stake at the age of nineteen.