Joan of Arc
1412 – 1431
Medieval Era
I was a peasant girl who heard saints in my father's garden and turned that voice into an army. I crowned a king at seventeen and burned at the stake at nineteen. I would not deny what I heard, not for a dress, not for my life.
Chapters
Chapter 11337 – 1412
A Kingdom Cut in Half
France has been at war with England for seventy-five years. Now it is also at war with itself, and a child is about to be born into the wreckage.
Chapter 21412 – 1429
The Voices in the Garden
A village girl hears saints in her father's garden. By seventeen, she is standing in cropped hair and a man's tunic before armed soldiers, asking for an escort to a king.
Turning points
Speak the Mission to Armed Men1429
Joan is seventeen, standing in a man's tunic before the garrison commander who already laughed her out once. Her uncle is behind her, asking her to come home. The soldiers are watching. The next sentence she speaks will either commit her publicly to a divine mission or send her back to the kitchens forever.
Chapter 31429
The Sign at Chinon
A teenager rides 350 miles through enemy country to find a king who isn't sure he's a king. In one private conversation, she has to convince him.
Turning points
Reveal the Sign Meant Only for Him1429
Joan is alone with the Dauphin in a private chamber. Her voices have given her something to say to him, the answer to a prayer he has spoken in secret to God. Speaking it will either crown her mission or end it.
Chapter 41429
The Maid at the Moat
A peasant girl walks into a starving city with a banner and walks out a commander. The arrow that should have stopped her becomes the proof she was sent.
Turning points
The Arrow at les Tourelles1429
Joan kneels in a trench on the south bank of the Loire with the arrow just drawn from above her breastbone. The sun is dropping. The Bastard of Orléans is calling the assault off for the night. The soldiers are watching her, not him.
Chapter 51429
The Road to Reims
After Orléans, the road opens and closes in the same season. A teenage girl drags a hesitating prince toward a cathedral he is not sure he deserves.
Turning points
Normandy or the Reims Road1429
Late June 1429. The English army is broken at Patay. At Gien the Dauphin's war council bends over the maps. Alençon and the Bastard of Orléans push for Normandy. La Trémoille whispers for negotiation. Joan, in her white surcoat, demands a march to Reims through unsubdued Burgundian country to crown a king who is not yet a king.
Chapter 61429 – 1430
After the Crown
The prophecy is fulfilled and the war I was sent to win begins ending without me. The king I made starts negotiating away the country I bled for, and I ride out one last time without his name on my orders.
Turning points
The Closing Gate at Compiègne1430
A failed sortie outside the walls of Compiègne. The drawbridge is rising to save the town. Joan is in the rearguard in her gold surcoat as the Burgundian line closes around her, a nobleman's hand already on her cloak.
Chapter 71430 – 1431
The Tower and the Trial
Sold across enemy lines and chained in a Rouen cell, Joan faces forty assessors trained in canon law. She answers them with peasant French and unbroken wit. Then they walk her to a cemetery where the stake is already built.
Turning points
The Dress or the Doublet1431
Four days after signing an abjuration she could not read, Joan wakes in her cell to find her dress gone and a man's doublet and hose folded on the straw. The guards have already tried to assault her. Clerks wait outside the door to record which garment she puts on.
Chapter 81431
The Old Market
A nineteen-year-old girl in a long white robe is walked through Rouen to a pillar built too high to be merciful. She calls one name, six times, into the smoke.
Chapter 91431 – 1920
The Maid Who Would Not Die
A peasant girl burned for heresy outlives every empire that judged her. The Church that killed her would, five centuries later, kneel and call her a saint.
Key Relationships
Charles VII of France (the Dauphin)
patron
The king Joan made — and who let her burn. Her mission's entire legitimacy flowed through him, and his political pragmatism after Reims left her without backing at Compiègne and Rouen.
Robert de Baudricourt
patron
Garrison commander of Vaucouleurs; the first authority figure who had to take her seriously. His eventual decision to provide an escort to Chinon is the historical hinge of her public life.
Jean, Bastard of Orléans (later Count of Dunois)
collaborator
The seasoned commander at Orléans who initially handled her as a morale piece and ended the campaign listening to her advice on artillery and timing.
John II, Duke of Alençon
collaborator
Her closest military partner during the Loire campaign and the march on Reims; the captain who treated her most as an equal.
Yolande of Aragon
patron
The Dauphin's mother-in-law and the political force behind the Armagnac cause; she vouched for Joan's virginity and financed parts of her mission.
Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais
adversary
The pro-Burgundian bishop who organized and presided over her heresy trial; the man whose procedural manipulations she out-thought scene by scene before they killed her anyway.
Isabelle Romée
family
Joan's mother — the source of her religious formation and, twenty-five years after Joan's death, the petitioner who opened the rehabilitation trial.