On the 8th May 1429,
the town of Orleans in France erupted in celebration.
For seven long months, it had been under siege by the English,
but now, after just four days of fighting,
the town had been liberated
and the people of Orleans knew they had witnessed a miracle.
The speed of their liberation was astonishing enough,
but what confirmed it as a miracle was the identity of their liberator.
Her name was Joan.
She was a truly extraordinary figure - a female warrior
in an age that believed women couldn't fight,
let alone lead an army.
Take care what you do, for in truth,
I am sent by God and you put yourself in great danger.
These are Joan's own words, recorded in a contemporary manuscript.
Six centuries after her death,
her words transport us back into her life and times.
To understand Joan's story, we need to explore a world
where God and the Devil are real.
Today, we're more aware than we've been, perhaps for centuries,
of the power of faith to drive people
to do extraordinary things for good or ill.
And in a world where God's will is at work, anything is possible.
# Tu dis que tu es mon juge
# Mais je ne te crois pas
# Alors tu dis que je suis une sainte
# Mais ce n'est pas moi
# J'entends des voix... #
Over the centuries, Joan has become an icon to almost everyone -
to the left and the right, to Catholics and Protestants,
traditionalists and feminists.
# Joan of Arc
# Jeanne d'Arc, ah-ooh
# Tell the boys their time is through
# Joan of Arc
# Jeanne d'Arc, ah-ooh... #
She's captured the imagination of novelists, playwrights,
artists and musicians and her fame has spread all over the world,
taking her from France to Hollywood.
# Joan of Arc
# Jeanne d'Arc, ah-ooh
# Tell the boys I'll follow you
# I'll follow you... #
I've been studying the medieval world for almost 30 years
and I feel pretty confident in saying she's had more pop songs written about her
than anyone else from the Middle Ages.
But for all the images of Joan that have been created since her death,
only one picture of her survives which was made in her own lifetime.
And it's here - a drawing, almost a doodle,
in the margin of the records of the Paris parliament.
It shows what a remarkable and troubling figure Joan was.
The clerk knew that the army at Orleans
had a young woman with them, who was carrying a banner and a sword.
But he'd never seen her.
Either he didn't yet know or couldn't quite believe
that Joan actually, shockingly, had short hair and wore mail armour.
Instead, he's made her look as a woman should, with long hair,
modestly wearing a dress.
But while there's only this one faint image of Joan,
unusually for anyone in the Middle Ages, let alone a lowborn woman,
a great deal was written about her by her contemporaries.
Even more importantly, her own words have reached us
through the centuries with an astonishing strength and clarity.
And one of the most remarkable and revealing documents of all
is the transcript of Joan's trial for heresy in 1431.
This is the most detailed record
that survives from any medieval trial
and through it, we can hear Joan's own voice.
Here, she describes the first time she heard a message from God
when she was just 13 years old.
At first, I was very afraid.
The voice came at midday in the summertime in my father's garden.
The voice came from the right-hand side towards the church
and I seldom hear it without a light.
The light comes from the same side as the voice,
but all around, there is a great light.
It seemed to me to be a worthy voice
and I believe it was a voice sent from God.
Once I heard the voice three times, I knew it was the voice of an angel.
We might ask, "Was Joan mad or ill?"
But for the people of the Middle Ages,
the issues were entirely different.
They knew that angels and demons DID communicate with people of completely sound mind.
The problem wasn't how to explain Joan hearing voices that weren't there.
The problem was how to tell
whether the voices came to her from God or the Devil.
Joan received her first vision
when she was living with her family in Domremy,
a small village in the east of France.
But the France that Joan was born into
wasn't nearly as peaceful as it looks now.
It was a country torn apart by war.
For generations, England and France had been fighting
in what we call the Hundred Years' War.
Land, including the countryside where Joan lived,
was fought over by the two sides.
And the English even claimed the crown of France.
During Joan's childhood, France was very much on the back foot.
In 1415, when she was three,
the French suffered a dreadful defeat at the hands of Henry V
on the battlefield of Agincourt.
The French army vastly outnumbered the English,
but as the flower of the French nobility advanced,
they were mown down by a barrage of English arrows.
History has attributed the English victory at Agincourt
to the supremacy of their archers,
but at the time, the French saw it differently.
For the people who were there,
the explanation for this astounding victory was the will of God.
Henry claimed that God was on the English side,
but the French knew that couldn't be right.
So how were they to explain this bloody defeat?
Perhaps it was God's punishment for their sins
because France was convulsed in civil war.
The old king, Charles VI, was mad and incapable of ruling.
Two factions, known as the Burgundians and the Armagnacs,
were fighting for control of his government.
In the medieval world, everything came down to God.
Whose side was he on?
Just five years after Agincourt,
France was so bitterly divided
that the Burgundians were prepared to believe
that God did back the English and made an alliance with them.
But Joan and her family supported the Armagnacs,
led by the French king's son, the Dauphin,
and believed God was with them.
And so the civil war went on.
For eight years, defeat followed defeat
until the Dauphin and his Armagnac supporters were pushed back,
south of the great curve of the River Loire.
For Joan, as for the rest of the people of France,
the war was a frightening reality.
Her home, Domremy, was an Armagnac village
surrounded by English and Burgundian territory.
At one point, the village was attacked by enemy soldiers
and Joan, her family and friends had to take refuge for a few days in a nearby town.
So, perhaps it's no surprise that when Joan began to hear voices,
they talked about the war. They said she must go to the Dauphin.
He would give her an army
and then she must drive the English out of France
and lead the Dauphin to his coronation.
Joan wasn't unique in claiming to hear heavenly voices.
She wasn't the only person in 15th-century France
who came forward with a message from God.
What was remarkable was what Joan's voice was telling her to do -
to fight and to lead.
This was an impossible proposition.
Joan was young, she was poor and she was female.
And to put her mission into action,
she had to reach the Dauphin
across more than 250 miles of enemy territory.
Surely, it couldn't be done?
At some point during 1428, Joan managed to reach here,
the town of Vaucouleurs,
a little more than ten miles north of Domremy,
which housed the nearest garrison loyal to the Dauphin.
But its captain sent her away with a flea in her ear.
"The girl was clearly a fantasist.
"Her family," he said, "should take her home and give her a few slaps."
But Joan wouldn't give up.
Word of her mission began to spread
and when she came back to Vaucouleurs in February 1429,
the captain agreed to send her to the Dauphin's court.
What had happened to change his mind?
The evidence isn't at all clear.
When Joan eventually set off from Vaucouleurs,
the people here gave her a horse and an outfit of men's clothes
to keep her safe on her dangerous journey.
Clearly, THEY believed in her.
But that wouldn't be enough to secure access to the Dauphin himself.
We can't be sure exactly what happened,
but there is one more clue.
One of the six men who were given the job of escorting Joan
was a messenger from the Dauphin's court.
It seems that someone there had heard of Joan's claims
and now the Dauphin wanted to hear more.
Like all medieval leaders,
the Dauphin knew that his authority was bestowed on him by God.
He went to Mass twice a day
and looked for signs of God's will in the world around him,
wherever they came from.
The truth is the Dauphin was also desperate
and it had to be said that by now, anything,
even the ravings of a peasant girl, was worth a try.
As Joan set out on her perilous journey to the Dauphin's court in Chinon,
the situation for the Armagnacs was getting worse.
For five months, the English had been besieging Orleans,
a key Armagnac stronghold on the River Loire.
If Orleans fell, the Dauphin's lands in the south of the kingdom
would lie open to English attack.
On the 12th of February, 1429,
a skirmish between the two sides ended in a massacre.
More than 400 of the Dauphin's soldiers died that day.
The English casualties numbered just four.
The Dauphin was here in his fortress at Chinon
when he heard the terrible news.
He redoubled his prayers, but the siege went on.
And then, just 11 days after the massacre,
a little band of six armed men, dusty from the road,
arrived here at his great castle of Chinon.
With them rode a girl dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short.
She'd come, she said, with a message from God.
Amid the luxury and ceremony of the Armagnac court,
this village girl dressed as a boy was an extraordinary sight
and her message was as startling as the girl herself.
If the Dauphin would give her an army,
she would save his kingdom and bring him his crown.
But the Dauphin had a problem.
Her words were intoxicating and terrifying at the same time.
his kingdom of France would be lost for ever.
But if he rejected a true prophet,
the result would be equally disastrous.
Could Joan really have been sent by God?
How to tell whether visions came from God or the Devil
was a hot topic of theological debate.
The greatest contemporary French theologian,
a man called Jean Gerson,
had even written a book on the subject.
This is a 15th-century copy
of Gerson's work De Probatione Spirituum -
"On The Proving Of Spirits".
It's a kind of manual to guide investigators through the process
of establishing whether visions might truly have come from God.
It offers a helpful Latin check list
which sets out the basics of the examination.
"Ask who, what, why, to whom, what kind, whence" -
in other words, ask what the nature of the vision shows
about where they might come from
and what the nature of the person having the vision
suggests about how authentic they might be.
So, 17-year-old Joan was questioned for three weeks
by the best theologians Armagnac France could muster.
From the outset, Joan deeply troubled these men.
Her message was shocking enough.
She dared to say that she had been sent to make war on the English,
despite the fact that God hadn't made women to be soldiers.
But what's more, she wore men's clothes
and the Old Testament said that a woman in men's clothing
was "an abomination unto the Lord".
But one person who doesn't seem to have been anxious,
remarkably enough, was Joan herself.
Here she was, an uneducated village girl, on her own,
hundreds of miles from home,
being questioned for weeks by courtiers and clerics.
It should have been a profoundly intimidating situation.
But in all the contemporary accounts of what Joan did and said,
there's no sign of fear or doubt.
The essence of her message was, "God has sent me.
"I know what I need to do. Let me go and do it."
And it was Joan's certainty
that offered a way out of the problem she posed.
The theologians could find no fault with her conduct,
but they needed a sign, they said,
to prove that her voices truly came from Heaven.
They asked how she would carry out her promise
to take the Dauphin to be crowned at the ancient cathedral of Reims,
given that the besieged town of Orleans lay directly in the way.
Joan's answer was simple.
She would raise the siege herself.
Suddenly, for the Dauphin
and his court at the great fortress of Chinon, everything was clear.
Orleans would be a test of Joan's mission.
If she succeeded, it would be a sign from God
that everything she claimed was true.
If she failed, Orleans would still be under siege,
just as it was now and the Dauphin would know for sure
that her promises were nothing but a delusion.
And so, the theologians reached their verdict.
The Dauphin, they said,
should not prevent her from going to Orleans with his soldiers,
but should have her escorted there honourably,
placing his faith in God.
And now that the decision had been made,
preparations for the task ahead began in earnest.
There were soldiers to muster and supplies to collect.
Clerks scoured the archives for prophecies
that might foretell Joan's coming
and Joan herself asked the Dauphin to send to the nearby town of Fierbois
for a sword that she said lay hidden there in the Church of St Catherine.
Sure enough, and to everyone's amazement,
the sword was found where she predicted.
The symbolism was lost on no-one.
Christian warriors, from King Arthur to Charlemagne, carried holy swords
and this one appropriately came to Joan from St Catherine,
the patron saint of young virgins.
How did Joan know where the sword was?
She said her voices had told her so was this her first miracle?
Well, that's one way of reading the evidence.
On the other hand, she had stopped in Fierbois on her way here
and St Catherine's Church was a place where, over the years,
soldiers had left many offerings, including their swords.
But however Joan had come to know about this sword in particular,
the point was that Joan herself and her supporters
believed it was miraculous proof of her mission.
The Dauphin ordered a fine suit of armour
to be specially made for her slender frame
and a banner for her to carry into battle,
made of shining white silk
with a painted Christ flanked on either side by angels.
During these weeks of preparation,
Joan had a chance to practise riding a horse among soldiers,
to get used to her armour
and to find out more about the war she had come to fight.
But she was no less impatient than when she'd first arrived at Chinon
and now she sent her first challenge to the English.
The challenge came in the form of a letter.
Joan couldn't write so she dictated it to a clerk
and its text survives here in the transcript of her trial.
Joan's fearlessness is unmistakable.
The village girl from Domremy speaks for God
so she has no hesitation in addressing the King of England,
"le Roi d'Angleterre".
Restore to the maid who is sent here by God, the King of Heaven,
the keys to the fine towns that you have taken and violated in France.
King of England, if you do not do this,
I am the military leader and wherever I find your men in France,
I will make them leave, whether they want to or not.
And if they do not obey, I will have them killed.
With her challenge dispatched, Joan and her military convoy
set off along the River Loire towards Orleans.
On the 26th of April, Joan approached the town itself
and for the first time,
the English army at Orleans set eyes on the teenage girl in armour.
To the English, a girl in men's clothes riding among soldiers
could only be a whore and a sign of the Dauphin's desperation.
But to the people of besieged Orleans,
she was a saviour come to rescue them.
The English had too few troops
to enforce a total blockade around Orleans
and Joan was able to slip into the town on the eastern side.
She was welcomed "like an angel from God," one of the townsmen said
and delirious crowds reached out to touch her
as she rode through the streets.
But while Joan smiled at the hopeful crowds,
privately she was incandescent with fury.
She wanted to attack the English,
but the Dauphin was still so unsure of what form her miracle might take
that he'd ordered her soldiers back to their base.
So, she found herself inside the besieged town
with no army to break the siege as she'd promised.
Joan was left kicking her heels,
climbing the town walls to shout to the English
that they should surrender to God.
All she got in return was abuse.
Did she really think, they jeered,
that they should give themselves up to a woman and her pimps?
The Dauphin's captain was in a fix.
The people of the town expected Joan to save them,
but without an army, she could do nothing.
So, he slipped out of the town
and rode to the Dauphin to beg him to send the soldiers back.
It took him four days, but his argument was irrefutable.
How could God send a sign
if Joan had no way of putting her mission to the test?
By the fourth of May, Joan had her soldiers
and at last, the battle for Orleans could begin.
Joan led her men from the front,
carrying her banner and urging them on.
Medieval warfare was brutal and bloody
and for the first time, she saw death in battle at first hand.
That night, her mood was sombre and the next day,
she wrote again to the English enemy, demanding their surrender.
She attached the letter to an arrow
and had it fired into the English camp.
When it dropped to the ground,
the shouts could be heard in the distance.
"News from the Armagnac whore!"
But for all the abuse they hurled her way,
after two more days of fighting, the English were rattled
and finally, on the 7th of May, their day of reckoning had come.
The decisive battle of Orleans was fought here,
where the English held a fortified tower known as the Tourelles.
If Joan could take the Tourelles,
the English hold on Orleans would be broken.
Once again, Joan was up at dawn.
She said her prayers and then led her men into battle.
English missiles rained down from the ramparts
as the Armagnac soldiers hurled themselves into the fight.
Hours passed, but still Joan urged them on
until an arrow caught her between the neck and shoulder.
As they saw her staggering and bloodied, the Armagnacs faltered.
Was this the moment when God would disown the Maid?
But a flesh wound couldn't stop Joan's mission.
She brandished her banner
and pressed forward into the ditch at the foot of the tower.
As her soldiers followed her into the attack,
sudden fear gripped the English.
Their captain lost his footing and toppled fully armed into the river.
As he drowned, panic spread among his men
and by sundown, Joan had won a famous victory.
After seven months of siege,
the Maid had freed Orleans in just four days.
Who could doubt Joan now?
This was proof that God intended her to pursue her mission
and as she and the Dauphin's other captains
prepared to drive the English from the Valley of the Loire,
news of her miracle began to spread.
Just three days after the battle,
an Italian merchant in Bruges wrote to tell his father in Venice
what this maiden shepherdess had done. "It seems," he said,
"that she may be another St Catherine come down to earth."
In February, she had been a simple village girl.
Now it was June and a young nobleman who met her
was dazzled by her charisma, by the presence of one sent by God.
"It seemed to me a gift from Heaven that she was there," he said,
"and that I was seeing and hearing her."
And Joan's determination to pursue her mission was stronger than ever.
Orleans had been her test and victory her sign.
Now came her true purpose - to crown the Dauphin
and to drive the English out of France for ever.
For centuries, French kings had been crowned
in the great cathedral at Reims
and Joan was determined to see her Dauphin crowned there, too.
But Reims lay more than 100 miles north-east of Orleans,
in the heart of English and Burgundian France.
It had been years since the Dauphin had even thought
of riding to war in person.
Now, the Maid was going to take him deep into enemy territory.
Joan and the Dauphin rode at the head of the biggest army he could muster
and the combination of thousands of soldiers,
with Joan's implacable will driving them on, proved irresistible.
Joan's momentum was unstoppable.
Some towns held out for a few days,
others opened their gates straightaway.
On the 16th of July, 1429,
just two and a half weeks after leaving the Loire Valley,
Joan, the Dauphin and the Armagnac army arrived in Reims.
At last, the Dauphin could be crowned
as the Most Christian King of France.
Here in the cathedral in Reims was kept a flask of holy oil
that had been sent from Heaven to France's first Christian king
almost 1,000 years before.
Every French king since then had been anointed with it
during the sacred ritual of his coronation
and now the Dauphin would be no exception.
CHOIR SINGS
A coronation would usually take weeks of preparation,
but there was no time to lose.
The Dauphin's servants worked through the night
and at nine the very next morning,
he entered this sacred space to receive his crown from God.
Just four months earlier,
the Armagnac cause had been at its lowest ebb.
Now, the Dauphin had been anointed
and crowned as King Charles VII of France.
And beside him stood Joan the Maid,
in her shining armour with her banner in her hand.
When the ceremony was over, she knelt at his feet.
"Noble king," she said, "God's will is done."
BELLS RING
It was a triumph, but Joan's mission was far from finished.
Joan wanted to drive the English out of France for ever.
To do this, she needed to unite the country
under the newly-crowned king.
And France was still divided by civil war.
The Burgundians, under the Duke of Burgundy,
looked to the King of England as their sovereign.
So, Joan wrote to the Duke to ask him
to acknowledge her king as the rightful King of France.
I bring you word from the King of Heaven that you will win
no battle against loyal Frenchmen,
and all those who wage war against the holy Kingdom of France
wage war against King Jesus, the King of Heaven and the whole world.
Know surely that no matter how many men you bring against us,
they will win nothing at all,
and great sorrow will be the result of the great battle.
The Duke of Burgundy didn't deign to respond to this presumptuous letter.
Any change in his position would be on his own terms,
not those of a peasant girl.
As for Joan's king, he was in a stronger position
than he could have dreamed of just a year earlier,
and, behind-the-scenes, courtiers from both sides were beginning
to make diplomatic overtures.
But Joan had no interest in compromise.
She was doing God's work
and the mission he'd given her was not yet complete.
With all the certainty of faith and youth -
she was still only 17 -
she saw the world in black and white.
If the Duke of Burgundy would not submit to her king,
he'd find her ready to fight.
The kingdom's capital remained in Burgundian hands.
It was time for another miracle.
Just as Joan had taken Orleans, now she would take Paris.
Reluctantly, Joan's king agreed to give her the chance,
but Paris was a very different challenge from Orleans.
It was the most heavily fortified city west of Constantinople.
This is one of the few remaining sections
of the massive walls that surrounded Paris.
There were fortified towers and gun placements on top of the walls,
which lay behind an immense ditch that encircled the whole city.
And it was defended by English soldiers
and native Parisians, who hated the Armagnac whore every bit as much
as the people of Orleans had welcomed her as a delivering angel.
But Joan didn't hesitate.
As always, her strategy was simple - attack in the name of God.
And the day of the assault could only be a good omen -
8th September, the holy feast day of the Nativity Of The Virgin.
As at Orleans, she led the way into the great ditch,
brandishing her banner while a storm of arrows and stones
rained down from above.
After hours of brutal fighting,
Joan called urgently to the enemy soldiers on the walls above.
Surrender quickly in the name of Jesus,
for if you do not surrender before nightfall
we will come in there by force, whether you like it or not.
And you will be put to death without mercy.
"Shall we, you bloody tart?"
came the response, and a crossbow bolt ripped through her thigh.
Joan staggered and fell.
Her standard bearer took an arrow in the face and died beside her.
She didn't stop shouting for her soldiers to continue the attack,
even when the trumpet sounded the retreat
and she was carried, bleeding, from the field of battle.
Joan wanted to continue the fight, to attack the next day,
but her king wouldn't allow it.
He'd given her just one day to take the great city of Paris.
It was an impossible task, but this had been her chance,
and she'd failed.
She was distraught.
How could she, how could anyone, understand what had happened?
Was this a sign that God had abandoned the Armagnac cause?
For Joan's king that was unthinkable.
It was far more likely that God had abandoned Joan.
Heaven's help had brought triumph at Orleans and Reims,
perhaps now God expected the King to help himself.
And if diplomacy was the way forward,
then Joan's determination to fight was fast becoming a liability.
By the end of September, a six-month truce was agreed,
a breathing space for the Armagnacs
and the Burgundians and their English allies,
and Joan had little choice but to limp back
to the safety of the Armagnac lands south of the Loire.
After the failure of her attack on Paris
it suddenly becomes hard to trace Joan's movements.
We do know that she was sent on some minor skirmishes but
it seems as though the King didn't quite know what to do with her.
If Joan were no longer performing miracles,
then what place did a woman have in an army?
Perhaps he hoped that the Maid might choose this moment
to retire gracefully from the public stage.
But Joan herself had no doubts, whatever anyone else might think.
Her mission still stood.
And when the truce expired in the spring of 1430
she was ready to fight, wherever she had the chance.
In May, news reached Joan that the Duke of Burgundy had attacked
the Armagnac town of Compiegne, north of the capital.
Undeterred by the fact that she no longer had the clear support
of her king or a royal army of thousands,
Joan believed that God still wanted her to complete her mission.
So, she rode here, to Compiegne, with a group of loyal followers.
Joan arrived under cover of darkness on the night of the 22nd May.
The next morning, she called for her banner and gathered her little band
of soldiers to attack the enemy outside the gates.
Joan rode out across the bridge and charged at the Burgundians.
She drove her men on and on,
calling out that God was with them.
But another detachment of enemy soldiers closed in behind her
and cut her off from the bridge.
Surrounded by the enemy, Joan was pulled from her saddle.
Now, she was a prisoner.
This was not how Joan's mission was supposed to end.
And for the Armagnacs, the fault could only lie with Joan herself.
Charles was still the true king, anointed by God,
but Joan, they said, had become too proud and wilful
and so God had allowed her to be taken.
Keeping the Armagnac faith meant abandoning Joan to her fate.
But what would that fate be?
The Burgundians and the English wanted Joan
to be discredited for all to see, but deciding what to do with her,
who should try her and on what charges, was no simple matter.
It took months, and for all that time,
Joan was kept in captivity and ignorance.
These were Joan's darkest days.
She knew that God had sent her to save France from the English
and the false French who supported them,
but now God had delivered her into those same enemies, what did it mean?
Perhaps God meant her to help herself.
During the long months of her captivity,
Joan tried and failed to escape.
And then, seeing no other way out,
she jumped from the window of the tower in which she was locked.
She survived the fall but her injuries took some time to heal.
And she was still a prisoner.
In December 1430, Joan was taken to Rouen in Normandy,
the capital of English France.
It would be here that she would be tried and her fate decided.
What happened next was carefully written down
and we can follow it all, word for word,
through the transcript of her trial.
Joan's fame was so great that the eyes of the world were on this case.
Joan was put on trial by her enemies
but she wasn't accused of war crimes.
This was a show trial about faith,
a process designed to get at the truth as her enemies saw it,
to demonstrate that God was not on Joan's side.
And for us it's an astonishing source.
Through this unique text, we can trace,
question by question and answer by answer,
the interrogations to which Joan was subjected.
It takes us right into the courtroom.
Her main interrogator was a man named Pierre Cauchon.
He had supported the Burgundian cause since the beginning of the civil war,
and he was a loyal counsellor of the English King of France.
But Cauchon was also a bishop.
For him, this wasn't just a matter of politics,
it was a matter of faith.
Cauchon's faith was as strong as Joan's.
He wanted to prove that Joan was a heretic,
that she'd deviated dangerously from Church doctrine.
And if he could get her to admit her guilt,
he might even save her soul from eternal damnation.
On 21st February, 1431, Cauchon was ready.
At eight that morning,
Joan was brought from her cell to face a panel of judges.
The might of the Church was ranged against her.
Silence fell, and suddenly she was there,
a girl dressed as a boy, with her hair cut short.
42 men of the Church
were gathered there with Cauchon to hear her speak.
She was the only woman in the room, by far the least educated,
and the youngest by years.
But she'd got used to all that since leaving Domremy.
Joan's judges might be ready, but so was she.
And the words they spoke were all recorded in the trial transcript.
Will you swear an oath, touching the holy Gospels,
to tell the truth about the things we ask you that concern the faith
and all other things that you know?
I don't know what you want to question me about.
Perhaps you might ask me things I will not tell you.
For both sides, her revelations from God were the heart of the matter.
Those, she said, she had only ever told her king,
and she wouldn't speak of them now.
Cauchon's first day of questions yielded very little,
and the second day started the same way.
I took an oath for you yesterday, that should be enough.
I advise you to swear, for no-one who is questioned
on a matter of faith, not even a prince, can refuse to take an oath.
You burden me too much.
In the end she swore a limited oath, and the questions started slowly
Often she answered, but sometimes, from one question to the next,
she blankly refused.
Was it well done to attack the city of Paris on a holy feast day?
Move on.
But as the judges wove their web of questions around her,
gradually, little by little, something began to shift.
They wanted to prove that her revelations were false,
but Joan, who was back on the battlefield,
even if this was a different kind of war,
wanted to prove that they were true.
So now, despite her protests,
she began to talk about her messages from God.
The voice came at midday in the summertime in my father's garden.
The voice came from my right-hand side towards the church
and I seldom hear it without a light.
The light comes from the same side as the voice,
but all around there is a great light.
It seems to me to be a worthy voice,
and I believe it to be a voice sent from God.
And once she'd begun, the thread was there to be pulled.
Bit by bit, as they asked and asked again,
she began to offer up more details of the voice she heard,
and on the fourth day of the trial, what she said was extraordinary.
Is the voice that speaks to you the voice of an angel
or the voice of a saint? Or does it come directly from God?
It is the voice of St Margaret and St Catherine,
and their forms are crowned in beautiful crowns,
very rich and very precious.
Which was the first voice that came to you when you were 13 or so?
It was St Michael that came before me and he wasn't alone,
but well attended by the angels from heaven.
Did you see said Michael and the angels bodily and really?
I saw them with my bodily eyes, just as I see you.
When they left me I wept and truly wished they had taken me with them.
This was exactly what Cauchon wanted to hear.
The Church accepted that angels and demons could be seen by humans,
but it was a tricky thing to know which was which.
After centuries of debate, the theological principle
accepted by the Church was that an angel was not a physical being
but a spiritual one, so the more real, physical details
Joan described, the more like a demon her vision sounded.
But Joan stood no chance of understanding this scholarly argument,
and as she tried to demonstrate the truth of her visions, by adding
more and more detail, she damned herself in the eyes of her judges.
Cauchon was inching closer to proving that Joan's messages
came from the Devil, not from God. But he wanted more.
It was time for a change of tactics.
For a week, Joan was left to wait in her cell,
alone with her English guards,
her feet chained even when she slept.
Then, there was a knock at the door.
The interrogations would continue, but now the court had come to her.
Cauchon had decided that he would deny her a public stage.
Now, he and a handful of colleagues would crowd her
in the confines of her own prison.
Here, surely, they would make the pressure tell.
Cauchon believed that when Joan first went to her king
she must have given him proof of her Heaven-sent mission.
What sign did you give your king when you came to him?
One that is fair and honourable and most believable and good,
and the riches that there is in the world.
Does the sign still exist?
It will last for 1,000 years and more.
The sign is in my king's treasury.
Is it gold or silver?
Precious stone or a crown?
I will not tell you anything more about it.
No-one can describe a thing as rich as the sign is.
And, in any case, the sign you need is that God will deliver me
from your hands, and it's the most certain one that he can send you.
Joan's words make it heartbreakingly clear that she still believed
that help was coming, that God would perform another miracle
and save her.
But Cauchon knew he was getting closer.
He pushed again on his next visit to her cell
and then again the next day,
and finally, she offered up her story.
She said that when she'd first been at Chinon after Easter in 1429,
an angel had come to bring her king a crown of pure gold.
The angel had walked up the stairs into the King's chamber
with a company of other angels that only Joan could see.
Joan had said to the King,
"Sire, here is your sign, take it."
And this crown from God meant that the Kingdom of France would be
restored to him if he would give Joan soldiers and put her to work.
For Cauchon, this was a breakthrough.
An angel who could physically walk up stairs,
speak to the King's court, and hand over a crown?
This must be the conjuring of the Devil.
This, like her descriptions of her saints,
was a story Joan had never told before.
Why was she telling it now?
Alone under interrogation she needed to vindicate her mission,
to give detailed proof of the truth of what she claimed.
But for Cauchon, the Devil was literally in these details,
and it was the details in the end that proved what the bishop already knew,
that Joan was guilty of heresy.
The punishment for heresy was clear.
She would be burned at the stake.
But there was a chance that Joan might still live.
Cauchon's hardest task lay ahead.
If he could persuade Joan to admit her guilt,
he would save both her life and her immortal soul.
For two weeks, Cauchon tried everything to win Joan round.
Kind persuasion, reason and argument,
and eventually, even the threat of torture.
Joan was led to a room in the castle
where terrible implements were laid out, ready for use.
But Joan was unmoved.
In truth, if you were to have me torn limb from limb
and my soul separated from my body, I wouldn't tell you anything more.
And if I did tell you anything else about it,
afterwards, I would always say that you made me say it by force.
Cauchon knew that Joan meant what she said.
He sent her back to her cell.
Time was running out.
The Church had done its work, but it couldn't take a life.
The sentence would be carried out by the English,
as they were impatient to get on with it.
On the morning of 24th May, 1431,
Joan was brought from her prison in Rouen Castle
to this square in front of the Abbey of Saint-Ouen.
Here, in public, she would be sentenced
and then handed over to the English authorities to be burned.
Everyone would see the fate of a heretic.
The whole of Rouen turned out to watch as Joan was bound
on a tall platform, with the executioner's cart standing by.
A sermon was preached, and once again, Joan was asked
if she would submit to Holy Mother Church.
Joan had been so sure that God would rescue her,
but still help hadn't come.
She needed to buy time.
But there was no more time.
Cauchon began to read the final sentence,
and suddenly Joan raised her voice.
I wish to obey the church of my judges.
The Church says my visions are not to be believed
so I will not uphold them.
I submit to Holy Mother Church, I submit.
There was uproar.
The Maid was recanting.
Cauchon asked if she was ready to confess her sins,
and an official of the court stepped forward with a document
acknowledging her heresy and a pen for her to sign it.
She made her mark on the paper.
It was done.
Now, Cauchon delivered a different sentence.
Joan would live, but she would be kept imprisoned for the rest of her life,
doing penance for the sins she had committed.
Joan was bundled back to her cell.
Her submission was complete.
After more than two years of dressing as a man,
she took off her male clothes and put on a dress
and she bowed her head so that her short hair could be shaved off.
There could be no clearer sign that her mission was over.
Cauchon's work was done.
The Maid's soul was saved,
and now her misguided claims could be safely forgotten.
That should have been it, but there are more pages still to turn.
Here on 28th May, four days after the dramatic events at Saint-Ouen,
Cauchon was called back to the castle.
It says that he found Joan "habitu virili" -
dressed once again as a man
and her state of mind was profoundly disturbed.
Here the bishop questions her again,
but all Joan's calmness and confidence had gone.
Now, her answers are tangled and much harder to follow.
Something had happened in those few days.
Later, witnesses suggested that once she was dressed in women's clothes,
she'd been assaulted or raped in her cell.
But what's clear above all is the overwhelming distress
she felt at having given up on her truth and denied her voices.
And the clerk noted in the margin that what she said next
was the "responsio mortifera" -
her fatal reply.
God has sent me word of the great pity of my betrayal.
I have damned my soul to save my life.
If I had said that God hadn't sent me,
then I would be dammed for I was truly sent by God.
My voices tell me I have done harm by saying what I did is wrong.
Whatever I said and recanted, I did it only through the fear of fire.
This time Cauchon knew there could be no going back.
Joan was a relapsed heretic,
she would be handed over to the English to be burned.
Early in the morning of 30th May,
Cauchon and some of his fellow clerics
visited Joan in her cell for the last time.
Her life was now beyond hope, but perhaps there was still a chance
that her soul could be saved if she would finally tell the truth.
And this record of what Joan said in the last hours of her life
is extraordinarily moving.
All her certainties are gone.
Rescue hasn't come.
She knows she'll die. And yet, telling the truth
means she can't let go of her voices and visions.
Is it true that you heard voices and received apparitions?
Yes.
Whether they were good or evil spirits, they appeared to me.
I heard the voices most of all when the church bells rang in the morning and the evening.
And the apparitions? The angels?
They came in a great multitude of the tiniest things.
What of the angel who gave the one you call your king a crown?
I was the angel.
I promised my king that if he put me to work, I would see him crowned.
Over the centuries, there have been as many ways of reading
Joan's trial as there are people to read it.
It's even been suggested that this last conversation
on the morning of her death was a fabrication,
made up by Cauchon to undermine her message.
But, to me, there's a truthfulness to it.
Joan's story of an angel bringing her king a golden crown
doesn't seem plausible to us, and it didn't to her judges either.
But if Joan was the angel, and the crown, her promise of a coronation,
it makes much more sense, as a way for Joan, alone among her enemies,
to make her mission real in the world.
But Joan's truth and Cauchon's were incompatible.
And that's why Joan had to die.
Joan was brought here to the marketplace in Rouen,
where a pyre had been prepared.
A cap was placed on her head, bearing the words,
"Relapsed heretic, apostate, idolater."
Joan was tied to a stake on a high scaffold
so that everyone could see her burn.
As the flames took hold,
she called the name of Jesus over and over again.
Once she was dead and her clothes had burned away,
the executioner raked back the fire
to show the crowd that she was just a woman.
Then he stoked the flames so there'd be nothing left of her but ashes.
Joan's body was gone.
But her story wouldn't die.
Her belief in her visions
and her extraordinary courage remained an inspiration.
By 1456, just 25 years after her death,
the political tide had turned.
France was reunited under Joan's Armagnac king
and Joan's case was heard in court once again.
This time, Joan was found not guilty of heresy.
Since then, Joan has become a legend, and an icon.
In 1920, she was even made a saint.
Now, she is almost an empty vessel
into which we pour our own preoccupations,
whatever they may be.
But if she becomes all things to all people,
we risk losing the human being.
The girl who burnt in this place
was a ferocious champion of one side in a bloody civil war.
She was able to do what she did,
to achieve what should have been impossible for someone of her class
and sex, because she and all those around her believed
they were fighting a war in which God's will was at work.
And perhaps it's there,
in the possibilities that faith can create,
and in the violence it can bring,
that Joan's world and ours don't seem so very far apart.