Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (12 page)

Jesus drafted his own death warrant in the temple when he upturned the tables of the moneylenders and berated those who sold doves for holy sacrifice, publicly challenging a corrupt social order that allowed the rich to purchase sacred power—an order swiftly reinvented by the Church that deified him. So now had Joan drafted hers by drawing the attention of both those who made and guarded rules she refused to obey and the multitudes governed by their misogyny.

With the example of Saint Margaret and other virgin martyrs before her, Joan sheared off her hair; by doing so, she announced she had removed herself from the company of other unwed girls, who were expected to leave their heads uncovered in public, their hair undressed and falling down their backs as an advertisement for prospective suitors. At a time when women didn’t get their hair cut, ever, Joan’s barely covered her ears. Hers was the original bob, the haircut assumed by flappers as a symbol of female liberation and still known in France as
la coupe à la Jeanne d’Arc.
It would have been possible for Joan to preserve her hair’s length and still wage war, especially as women and girls often wore plaits coiled over their heads. Arguably, it would have been a comfort, or even a precaution, to have an extra layer of padding under a metal helmet designed not only to deflect arrows but also to preserve a knight’s skull from the impact of a rock dropped on his head from a parapet.

But Joan didn’t want a woman’s hair any more than she wanted a woman’s fate. By the time she accomplished her mission, Joan would have attended the highest state function mounted on a white horse, dressed in armor, and cloaked in red velvet as she processed before courtiers and nobles, escorting her
gentil dauphin
to the altar
of Reims’s cathedral, where he would be anointed Charles VII, his title secure, as no mortal could undo what God ordained. Unarmored, Joan wore clothes that befit a national heroine: conspicuously stylish and costly, as noted both by her worshipful, approving followers and by her enemies, who would call attention to her dress as evidence of decadence and, worse, pride. As they understood it, Joan had seized a set of symbols she didn’t merit, and what delight they would take in the role a golden cloak would play in her capture and defeat, how outraged at the vanity and self-indulgence they saw in its rich weight on her shoulders.

What Joan wore—and what she didn’t—announced what was more powerful for not being spoken aloud. Under interrogation, she said she dressed as a man as a practical concession to a life spent making war among men, but Joan wore male clothing under all circumstances, among soldiers or not. Schiller’s Joan seizes a helmet before leaving home to embark on her crusade; from it
“warlike thoughts” pour into her head and make her eyes flash, her cheeks red. The costly male costume in which Joan cloaked her virgin female body transcended the pragmatic. It was the physical manifestation—the announcement—of her refusal to abide by patriarchal strictures, a defiance that was absolute and uncompromising, and both Joan and her judges knew that. The extravagant attention the inquisitorial trial paid her clothing and the role her cross-dressing would play in the decision to execute her reveal how subversive and genuinely dangerous the clerics who ruled society considered Joan’s assuming the right to wear male attire. No one, especially not Joan, thought her dressing as a man was “a small, nay, the least thing,” as she dismissed the topic when under interrogation.

Womanly duties, as Joan thought of them, were fine for girls who imagined themselves as Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties, good girls rewarded for menial housework and, in the case of Sleeping Beauty, a passivity so profound it was deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose. There were, as Joan observed, enough of those women already. Only shackles and a prison cell would halt the trajectory of a young woman who understood herself as the leader of a holy quest, summoned by the patron saint of the crusaders, Saint Michael—whose slaying of the dragon was considered
“the primordial feat of arms” from which
knighthood sprang—to join Perceval, Lancelot, and Galahad, especially Galahad, the Christ figure of medieval romance. When Galahad came to King Arthur’s court, he saw that a single seat at the Round Table stood vacant.

“It belongs to one who hasn’t yet come,” the knights assembled told him. “It belongs to the Virgin Knight who will find the Holy Grail.” Others had come before him, the knights told Galahad, they’d wanted to take the one seat left at the table, and all had died upon touching it.

Galahad sat down at the table and lived.

A sacred vessel borrowed from a Celtic myth about a magic cauldron, the Grail first appears in an unfinished romance,
Perceval le Gallois
, by Chrétien de Troyes, who used the vessel to represent and contain God’s grace.
Galahad wore flaming red armor when introduced to King Arthur’s court on Pentecost, the feast that celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles in the form of tongues of fire. Galahad does indeed fulfill Merlin’s prophecy that it would be he, and no other, to find the Holy Grail, but before he can return to King Arthur’s court bearing the Grail that is his alone to find, he is visited by
Saint Joseph of Arimathea, who claimed Jesus’s crucified body from Pilate and gave his own tomb for Jesus’s burial. The rapture to which Galahad succumbs in the presence of the saint is so intense that he begs to die in its embrace and is taken up to heaven by angels.

Talk still turned to the crusades, as it did to any means of propitiating the divine, and the ideals described in
The Book of Chivalry
remained as influential as they were when first listed by Geoffroi de Charny in the middle of the fourteenth century: largesse, prowess, courtesy, and loyalty. Chivalry was a system of ethics that applied to both war and love, a system that governed all of noble life. That this code was, like the strictures of the Church,
“about four parts in five illusion made it no less governing for all that.” The trial record shows the reward Joan anticipated for her faith and service in the armies of God was the same as what Pope Urban II promised the sixty thousand
crusaders he dispatched from Europe in 1095 to save Jerusalem from the infidels: absolution from sin and eternal salvation. She, too, believed that
“the worst conceivable crime for a member of a Military Order was apostasy, denying the Cross, even to save his life.” An army sixty thousand strong was extraordinary in its size; the sight of it was enough to inspire terror in a people for whom an army of five thousand was large.

Writing during the twelfth century, the prelate William of Tyre described the conditions that inspired the crusades, the first of which emerged during a period of violence and unrest analogous to that of the Hundred Years War. Eleventh-century Europe had yet to emerge from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire: raids were the rule; murder went unpunished; the Church presented the sole means of social cohesion. The only story that could be relied upon not to change was the one at the center of the Church, the Gospels that gave meaning to the sufferings of the Church Militant and pointed the way to paradise. In the name of Christ, crusaders took up their swords and rode east to reclaim Jerusalem, where the Son of God rose from the dead and where they practiced siege warfare little different from that of fifteenth-century Europe, waged for heavenly gain and characterized by
“massacre and torture,” “the mounting of heads on posts or even use of them as missiles.” Raymond d’Aguilers, contemporaneous chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote,
“Dismembered bodies lay in the houses and streets, trampled by knights and men-at-arms … Crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.” By the time the war was won, they had murdered thirty thousand Muslims, who still hear the word “crusade” as twenty-first-century Westerners do “jihad,”
^*4
an act of terrorism perpetrated by benighted barbarians living in a dark age of superstition and fear.

The Church Militant had officially endorsed mass murder, whitewashing it as an act of piety.

Dressed in her new finery, Joan was ready for her visit to the Duke of Lorraine, who, having heard of the divine company she entertained, summoned and provided her safe conduct because he was ill and wanted her to intercede with God on his behalf. For her part, Joan accepted the duke’s invitation as an opportunity to campaign for his support and, as Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan’s hostess for three weeks following Charles’s coronation, testified, “told him she wished to go to France. And the duke questioned her about the recovery of his health; but she said she knew nothing about that … She told the duke nevertheless to send his son and some men to escort her to France, and she would pray to God for his health.” The widow of Charles VII’s financial adviser, Marguerite said Joan told the duke
“he was sinning and that unless he reformed his ways he would not be cured. She urged him to take back his good wife,” the notoriously pious Margaret of Bavaria, whom he’d abandoned for a mistress, Alison Dumay, in the town of Nancy, a quick coach trip to the south. If the duke knew anything at all about his outspoken guest, the caution to govern his lust could hardly have come as a surprise. He withheld the gift of his son-in-law’s conscription, but Joan returned to Vaucouleurs the richer by four francs, “a horse with a black coat,” and another ally among the aristocracy.

From the time she arrived in Vaucouleurs in early January 1429 until her departure for Chinon on February 13, subtracting two weeks for her visits to the courts of Bar and Lorraine, Joan was left with a month to fill, and it’s assumed she received instruction in riding and carrying a lance from the knights stationed in the garrison there.
“She was very bold in riding horses … and also in performing other feats and exercises which young girls are not accustomed to do,” said Jean de Wavrin, a Burgundian who fought against Joan at Patay.

To master a knight’s necessary skills, ordinarily acquired over years, Joan had the four weeks at Vaucouleurs and would be granted an additional three at Poitiers, when not being interrogated by the clerics assembled there to assess her claim of a divine vocation. Even a strong rider with native talent would be remarkable in achieving so high a level of expertise in six weeks. The girl who had protested
that she “knew not how to ride nor lead in war” was praised universally—by comrades and enemies alike—for her adroit handling of a destrier. The expression Joan used for “ride” referred to a horse not as a garden-variety
cheval
but as a knight’s courser: strong, swift, and bred for battle. A destrier was a specialized horse, as different from a harness animal as a Thoroughbred from a Clydesdale. It was a knight’s deadliest weapon, plunging into the fray to rear up and come down kicking with forelegs powerful enough to kill an enemy with a single blow from an iron-shod hoof. Despite their relative prosperity, Joan’s family was unlikely to have kept any but work animals. Oxen plowed; horses pulled wagons to market. Even an athletic girl who loved being outdoors and going off alone into the woods, a girl in the throes of chivalric fantasies, wouldn’t have had the means to learn to ride a warhorse.