PLEnlist

Joan of Arc: the Maid of Orléans

France · The Maid of Orléans · c. 1412 to 1431 · ~7 min read · Updated October 2026

By

Joan of Arc in armor, holding her banner, stands beside Charles VII as the archbishop crowns him in Reims Cathedral

Jules-Eugène Lenepveu, The Coronation of Charles VII at Reims, Panthéon mural, about 1890 (cropped). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, Centre des monuments nationaux, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

At a glance

Also known as
The Maid of Orléans
Lived
c. 1412 to 1431
Role
Leader with the French royal army, 1429 to 1430
Famous for
Lifting the siege of Orléans in 1429
Signature
Her white standard, carried into the assaults
Legacy
Rehabilitated in 1456, canonized in 1920
Part of the collectionWomen Who Changed WarsQueens, soldiers, pilots and a nurse, from Boudica to the Night Witches, with the record kept apart from legend.
Quick answer

Who was Joan of Arc?

Joan of Arc (about 1412 to 1431), the Maid of Orléans, was a French peasant girl who said voices from God sent her to drive the English from France. In 1429 she helped lift the siege of Orléans and saw Charles VII crowned at Reims. Captured in 1430, she was burned at Rouen in 1431 and canonized in 1920.1

Her time in the field lasted about thirteen months, from April 1429 to May 1430, late in the Hundred Years War. She entered Orléans with a relief convoy and fought in the attacks that broke the siege of Orléans, rode with the army that defeated the English at Patay, was wounded in the failed attack on Paris and was captured during a sortie from Compiègne.2

Early life: Domrémy and the voices

Joan was born in the small Lorraine village of Domrémy, the daughter of Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée. Larousse dates her birth to 6 January 1412, the date also given in T. Douglas Murray's chronology; at her trial in February 1431 Joan said she thought she was about 19. Like the other peasant girls of her village, she could neither read nor write.3

The war reached her home. Joan told her judges that she had once left her father's house for fear of the Burgundians and stayed in the town of Neufchâteau, and a witness from Domrémy testified at her retrial that the villagers had gone there together because of the soldiers.4

She said she first heard a voice from God when she was about 13, and she came to identify her voices as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. They told her to go to France and to raise the siege of Orléans; in Larousse's summary, they also ordered her to have the dauphin Charles crowned at Reims.5

The stakes were high. Under the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, the French crown was to pass from the dauphin to the heirs of Henry V of England. When Henry V and Charles VI both died in 1422, the infant Henry VI was proclaimed king of France, and Charles remained uncrowned.6

From Vaucouleurs to Chinon

In May 1428 an uncle took her to Vaucouleurs to ask its captain, Robert de Baudricourt, for an escort to the dauphin. Baudricourt sent her home. She came back early in 1429; by her own account he refused her twice and gave her an escort on her third request.7

Dressed in men's clothes and carrying a sword Baudricourt had given her, she left Vaucouleurs in February 1429 with a small escort and reached Chinon after a ride of about eleven days through hostile country. Larousse dates her arrival to 23 February; Murray's chronology puts it on 6 March.8

At Chinon, Joan said, she recognized Charles among the many people in the room and told him she wanted to make war on the English. Before using her, he had her examined by churchmen at Poitiers for about three weeks; they found no evil in her. At Tours she received a military household and a white standard painted with an image of Christ, angels and the words Jhesus Maria.9

Colored historical map of northwestern France with English and French held regions
Detail of a historical map of northwestern France at the time of Joan's mission of 1429 to 1430, with Normandy and the other English-held lands shaded yellow and Orléans at the right edge. Public domain. Auguste Longnon, Gallica, via Wikimedia Commons.

What was Joan of Arc famous for?

Joan of Arc is famous above all for the relief of Orléans. Besieged by the English, the city was freed on 8 May 1429, nine days after she entered it. She then pressed Charles to march to Reims, where he was crowned on 17 July 1429 with Joan in the cathedral.10

Joan entered Orléans with supplies on 29 April. On 4 May she joined an attack already under way on the English fort of Saint-Loup, and the French took it; on 6 May she and La Hire seized the fort of the Augustins. On 7 May the French attacked Les Tourelles, the fortified bridgehead. Joan was hit by an arrow between neck and shoulder but kept fighting. In the evening, when Dunois wanted to break off the attack, she asked him to wait, returned to the edge of the ditch with her banner, and the position fell. The next morning the English marched away.11

Mural of Joan of Arc in armor raising a banner before a castle gate amid soldiers
Joan of Arc at the siege of Orléans, a mural painted by Jules Eugène Lenepveu between 1886 and 1890 for the Panthéon in Paris. Public domain

Joan of Arc's greatest victories

Her greatest victories came in the summer of 1429: the relief of Orléans in May, the storming of Jargeau on 12 June, the capture of the bridge at Meung and the surrender of Beaugency, and the battle of Patay on 18 June, where the English were routed and their commander John Talbot was taken prisoner.12

The royal council would not march on Reims until the Loire towns were cleared, and the duke of Alençon was given command of the army. At Jargeau the earl of Suffolk was captured. Larousse judges that without Joan's insistence Charles and his council would not have dared to meet the English in open country at Patay.13

The march to Reims left Gien on 29 June. Troyes surrendered on 9 or 10 July, Châlons opened its gates on 14 July, and on 17 July 1429 Charles VII was crowned in Reims Cathedral. Joan attended the ceremony, and her standard was carried into the cathedral.14

Painting of Joan of Arc in armor holding a banner beside an altar
Joan of Arc at the coronation of Charles VII in Reims Cathedral, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in 1854 (Louvre). Public domain

Did Joan of Arc ever lose a battle?

Yes. Her attack on Paris on 8 September 1429 failed and she was wounded, and Charles soon called off the attack. In November she took Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier but then had to abandon the siege of La Charité-sur-Loire, and on 23 May 1430 she was captured during a sortie from besieged Compiègne.15

After the coronation Charles preferred to negotiate with the duke of Burgundy, and on 28 August 1429 he agreed a truce with him.16

Was Joan of Arc a military commander?

Not formally. Larousse notes that she seems never to have held official command: the captains led the army, with Marshal de Boussac escorting the relief convoy in April 1429, Dunois in charge at Orléans and the duke of Alençon commanding on the Loire. Her part, in Larousse's account, was to push the captains to attack and keep them at it.17

Before fighting, she sent letters summoning the English to leave. Her letter to the English before Orléans was sent to their commander, Lord Talbot, and a copy was read to her at her trial, where she objected only to a few words in it.18

Joan fought beside some of the best captains of her time; read about them among the great commanders of France.

How did Joan of Arc die?

Joan was burned alive as a relapsed heretic in the Old Market square of Rouen on 30 May 1431, aged about 19. Captured at Compiègne in May 1430, she had been sold to the English and tried by a church court under Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, which condemned her after she put on men's clothes again.19

Compiègne was besieged by the duke of Burgundy. On 23 May 1430 Joan led a sortie which, by her own account, twice drove the Burgundians back before English troops cut off the road behind her company. Covering the retreat, she was dragged from her horse by an archer and surrendered to the Bastard of Wandonne, a Burgundian man-at-arms in the service of John of Luxembourg. The canonization bull of 1920 dates the capture to 24 May.20

Illuminated manuscript page: an armored horseman seizes Joan of Arc in front of a fortified town gate, with soldiers behind, between lines of verse
How the Maid was taken before Compiègne and sold to the English: the capture of 23 May 1430 in Martial d'Auvergne's Vigiles de Charles VII, illuminated about 1484. Public domain. Martial d'Auvergne, Vigiles de Charles VII, about 1484, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 5054, fol. 70r, via Gallica and Wikimedia Commons.

Luxembourg held her at Beaulieu and then at Beaurevoir, where she leaped from a tower and was hurt but survived. Late in 1430 he sold her to the English for 10,000, a sum the trial record gives in francs and historians in livres or écus, and in December she was taken to Rouen.21

Cauchon, in whose diocese she had been captured, judged her with the vice-inquisitor Jean Le Maistre. The trial opened on 9 January 1431, and Joan was first questioned on 21 February. She had no counsel. The prosecutor's 70 articles were reduced to 12, centered on her voices and her men's clothing. On 9 May she was shown the instruments of torture and answered that anything she said under them she would afterward declare had been forced from her.22

Some of her answers became famous. Asked whether she knew she was in God's grace, she replied: "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me."23

On 24 May, on a scaffold in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, she marked an abjuration with a cross and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Days later she was wearing men's clothes again and told her judges that her voices had reproached her for abjuring to save her life. On 29 May she was declared a relapsed heretic, and on 30 May she was burned in the Old Market square. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine.24

Painting of Joan of Arc tied to a stake raising her eyes to the sky
Joan of Arc at the stake in Rouen, 1431, as imagined by the German painter Hermann Stilke in 1843 (State Hermitage Museum). Public domain

Why is Joan of Arc a saint?

Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920. The way had been opened in 1456, when judges appointed by Pope Calixtus III declared her trial and condemnation null. She had been beatified in 1909, the last step before sainthood.25

Her rehabilitation began after Charles VII entered Rouen: in 1450 he ordered an inquiry into her trial. Her mother, Isabelle, and her brothers then petitioned the pope, and in June 1455 Calixtus III appointed judges to review the case. They heard more than a hundred witnesses, 115 by Larousse's count and 123 in the canonization bull, and on 7 July 1456 declared the trial and its sentence null.26

Orléans has celebrated its deliverance every 8 May since 1429. Larousse traces how later ages reshaped her memory: a Catholic heroine in the Wars of Religion, a national heroine from the Romantic era onward, claimed by left and right alike. The records of both her trials survive, and Larousse calls them a key source for historians. Her story can be set beside those of other women who went to war in the Middle Ages.27

Notes

A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.

  1. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  2. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  3. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  4. W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  5. W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”. ↩
  6. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  7. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. ↩
  8. W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  9. W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  10. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. ↩
  11. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  12. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  13. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  14. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  15. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. ↩
  16. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. ↩
  17. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  18. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc. ↩
  19. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  20. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  21. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  22. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  23. W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”. ↩
  24. Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; W. P. Barrett, The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”. ↩
  25. Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩
  26. T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France; Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”. ↩
  27. Benedict XV, “Divina disponente”; Encyclopédie Larousse, “Jeanne d’Arc”; T. Douglas Murray, Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans, Deliverer of France. ↩

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Who was Joan of Arc?

Joan of Arc was a French peasant girl from Domrémy, born about 1412, who said voices from God sent her to save France in the Hundred Years War. In 1429 she helped relieve Orléans and saw Charles VII crowned at Reims. Captured at Compiègne in 1430, she was burned at Rouen in 1431.

How old was Joan of Arc when she died?

She was about 19. At her trial in February 1431 she told her judges she thought she was nineteen, and she was burned at Rouen on 30 May 1431. Larousse dates her birth to 6 January 1412 at Domrémy, the date also given in T. Douglas Murray's chronology of her life.

What did Joan of Arc's voices tell her?

Joan said the voices, which she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, first came to her when she was about 13. They told her to go to France, to raise the English siege of Orléans and, in Larousse's summary of her account, to have the dauphin Charles crowned at Reims.

Where was Joan of Arc captured?

Outside Compiègne, on 23 May 1430. She had led a sortie against the Burgundians besieging the town; when English troops cut off the road, she stayed in the rear to cover the retreat and was dragged from her horse by an archer. She surrendered to the Bastard of Wandonne, a Burgundian man-at-arms serving John of Luxembourg.

Who sold Joan of Arc to the English?

John of Luxembourg, the Burgundian lord whose men had captured her. He held her at Beaulieu and Beaurevoir and late in 1430 sold her to the English for 10,000, a sum given in francs in the trial record and in livres or écus by historians. In December 1430 she was taken to Rouen for trial.

Why was Joan of Arc burned at the stake?

A church court at Rouen tried her for heresy, chiefly over her voices and her wearing of men's clothes. On 24 May 1431 she abjured, but days later she put on men's clothes again and said her voices had reproached her. The judges declared her a relapsed heretic, and she was burned on 30 May 1431.

Could Joan of Arc read or write?

No. A witness at her retrial said she could neither read nor write, and the canonization bull of 1920 notes that she did not know how to write. When she abjured in May 1431 she marked the document with a cross. Larousse describes her as one of the unlettered peasant girls of her village.

Battle honors of your homeland

The turning points of history

Marathon, Gaugamela, Cannae, Constantinople, Waterloo, Stalingrad: the days the world changed course.

The Battle of Marathon, 490 BCThe Battle of Gaugamela, 331 BCThe Battle of Cannae, 216 BCThe Fall of Constantinople, 1453The Battle of Waterloo, 1815The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942-1943

Based on your country, which we do not store · why? ·

Turn the Hundred Years War

Echoes of Battle brings the great battles of history to life, scene by scene on the real map. Enlist below and we will send word to your inbox the day it launches.