Joan of Arc: Letter to King Henry VI of England

Joan of Arc was born to a peasant family in a village called Domrémy in northeastern France in 1412. She was raised in a religious household and, at the age of twelve, claimed to have had the first of many recurring visions. She told her astonished family members that an angel had directed her to lead the beleaguered French in their ongoing conflict with the English, and that she had been ordered by God to retake her homeland from English occupation. At the time of Joan’s vision, much of France was under the control of the English and their Burgundian allies after repeated French defeats in the Hundred Year’s War; Henry VI, still a child, had inherited the title of king of England and France in 1422 as a result of the Treaty of Troyes two years earlier. Joan was convinced that it was her divine mission to take the eldest son of France’s former king Charles VI of France, also named Charles and called the Dauphin, to claim his rightful throne in the city of Rheims. For years, her claims were ignored by secular and religious authorities. Joan continued to have religious visions through her teenage years. Eventually, as a result of her astonishing persistence and conviction, she was granted an audience with the Dauphin and the members of the French court. After convincing the Dauphin that she was a prophetess from God, Joan was given command of a small army to relieve the besieged city of Orleans, which held symbolic significance for both the English and the French. Joan astonished contemporaries and won a decisive victory over the English, shattering their myth of invincibility. She subsequently achieved a series of quick military victories, providing a much-needed morale boost to the French army and halting English expansion into France. In 1430, she was captured by Burgundian soldiers, who then gave her to her English enemies. Accused of heresy and tortured by her captors, she was publicly burned alive at the stake in Rouen in 1431. Twenty-five years later, Pope Callixtus III decreed that Joan was not a heretic, and in 1920 she was made a saint of the Catholic Church.