The first of those crises was a series of destructive wars between France and England between 1337 and 1453. The conflict began with a long-standing dispute about the proper relationship between the crown of France and several rich feudal principalities within that kingdom’s territory. The problem was compounded by the fact that the two mightiest feudal princes, the dukes of Aquitaine and Burgundy, were also lords of territories beyond the kingdom’s boundaries, which often made them richer in money and military power than their royal suzerain, the French king. The duke of Aquitaine was also king of England, the most efficient monarchy in western Europe; the duke of Burgundy was also count of Flanders and a cluster of of neighboring states in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, scene of some of the most vigorous and profitable activity of nascent capitalism.
Yet more serious was a succession crisis that embroiled the closely related dynasties of France, England, and Burgundy. In 1328 the steady father-to-son succession that had blessed the French monarchy since 996 came to an end. Charles IV, the last of three royal sons of Philip IV (1285-1314), died without surviving sons; Charles IV thus ended the male line of the Capetian family. Upon the death of Charles IV, two assertive cousins claimed the crown of France: Philip of Valois, eldest nephew of Philip IV, the son of that king’s brother Charles of Valois, and thus able to claim unbroken descent in the male line from former Capetian kings; and Edward III of England, whose mother was Isabella, Philip IV’s daughter.
Inheritance law of both countries would have considered Edward the most direct heir to his grandfather Philip IV — that is, had the inheritance in question been anything other than the kingdom of France, then the most populous, largest, and richest realm in Christendom. The equivalent of a French Supreme Court decided in favor of the Valois line and rejected the claims of Edward’s Plantagenet dynasty. Nine years later, in 1337, Edward challenged Philip of Valois, by then king Philip VI, to a trial by combat.
Modern historians generally discern four phases in the Hundred Years War. In the first phase, 1337-60, the Plantagenet party was triumphant. Smashing victories at sea (at Sluis, 1340) and on land (at Crecy in 1346 and at Poitiers in 1356) led to the captivity of the Valois king John II (1350-64) and the Treaty of Bretigny (1360), which awarded Edward Aquitaine and two countries in northern France in outright sovereignty and set king John’s ransom at a sum designed to bankrupt the French treasury. Not surprisingly, many Frenchman outside those conquered territories began to establish links with the English king: they evolved into the Plantagenet faction on French soil.
In the second phase of the war, 1360-1413, king Charles V of France, known thereafter as Charles the Wise, chipped away at the concessions of the Peace of Bretigny and recovered much of the territory his father had lost. He also had to reestablish order within France, badly torn by massive peasant uprisings that were savagely repressed by the nobility. His right hand in those efforts was the Breton knight Bertrand Du Guesclin, a master of guerilla tactics as well as of more conventional forms of warfare. Charles the Wise was assisted by the fact that the eldest son of Edward III- the Black Prince – died before his father, and consequently the unfortunate Richard II (1377-99) acceded to the English throne. Richard was eventually deposed by his cousin Henry of Lancaster, thereafter king Henry IV, as the Plantagenet family generated its own succession crisis.
The Valois recovery of control initiated by Charles V was weakened by the outbreak after the Wise King’s death of fierce rivalry between the faction of duke John the Fearless of Burgundy and that of his first cousin duke Louis of Orleans, a younger son of Charles V and thus brother of King Charles VI (1380-1422). In 1407, Louis of Orleans was assassinated by an agent of John the Fearless. The royalist Valois faction seeking revenge for his not chivalrous murder was led by Count Bernard VII of Armagnac and took the name of ‘Armagnacs’ from him (the country of Armagnac lay on the border between Plantagenet Aquitaine and loyalist France deep in the southern part of the kingdom). All this helped to drive Charles VI mad.
The third phase of the Hundred Years War, 1413-28, lasted from the accession of the second Lancastrian king, Henry V, to the siege of Orleans. Henry V invaded France, won an overwhelming victory at Agin-court (1415), and dictated the terms of the Treaty of Troyes (1420), which awarded him Charles VI’s daughter Catherine and declared that their future son (Henry VI, 1422-61) would be king of the dual monarchy of England and France. That provision disinherited the dauphin Charles, fifth son of Charles the Mad and the only one left alive in 1422. The dauphin fled to Bourges in the geographical center of France. His fumbling efforts to retain some form of control were badly shaken in 1419, when John the Fearless was murdered by an emissary of the dauphin on a bridge at Montereau, where they were supposed to be in a parley under truce. Some Armagnacs saw that as an appropriate act of revenge, but the dauphin was obsessed by guilt for this violation of the laws of chivalry.
The dynamic Henry V died in 1422, but his brother, the duke of Bedford, prosecuted the war in a vigorous manner, greatly assisted by his alliance with duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, with whose cry for vengeance many of the French felt sympathy. In 1428, Bedford laid siege to Orleans to clear the way for an all-out attack on the dauphin’s position at Bourges. By the late spring of 1429, English victory seemed close as well as inevitable.
At that moment, Joan the Maid appeared on the scene. To the astonishment of everyone, she inspired the deliverance of Orleans and led the dauphin Charles to Reims for his anointing and coronation, which weakened decisively the claims of the boy-king Henry VI. Even though leaders of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance engineered Joan’s death at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, they proved incapable of reversing the French military recovery she had started. Four years later, the Treaty of Arras (1435) put an end to the Armagnac-Burgundian feud. This fourth phase of the Hundred Years War ended with nearly complete expulsion of the English from French soil in 1453.
How responsible was the Maid for this unlikely victory? An old debate continues on this point, with most professional historians (such as Edouard Perroy, Bernard Guenee, and Philippe Contamine) conceding her at best a minor role. For such historians, the military expertise of commanders like Dunois and the artillery he eventually had at his disposal were more decisive. Most would agreee that Joan catalyzed popular support for the Valois cause, which had by then become an issue of national patriotism. Some students of the period and many, if not most, amateurs feel that Joan’s role was far more decisive than that of a mere catalyst; Americans mindful of the role of popular resistance to the Vietnamese war tend to this judgment.
It is important to recognize how badly France had suffered by the time Joan entered the story. As recently as a century before, the kingdom of France had appeared to be the ideal Christian state. Its prosperity and internal peace under an unbroken dynasty of kings who dispensed justice rather than oppression (as those values were generally understood) seemed to many a sign of divine approval for the constitution and mores of the French. Yet almost all of the fighting of the Hundred Years War had taken place in France, and the vast majority of the casualties were French civilians. The ferocity of the conflict banished the restraints of chivalric warfare, which for several centuries had sought profitable prisoners rather than mere bloodshed. Between major campaigns, companies of mercenary soldiers made an easy and pleasurable living from pillage, rapine, and the indiscriminate slaughter of a population that had lost the habit of self-defense under the long Capetian peace. ‘Fair France’ had not been so savaged since the time of the Vikings five centuries before, and the devastation spread beyond the kingdom’s borders into Spain, Italy, and Germany. Those who had seen Joan of Arc as an improbable saint, given her conviction that God had sent her to lead the armies of one Christian nation against another, have generally not taken into account the dimensions of the misery suffered by the common people of France and some neighboring countries because of that endless and pitiless war. For some of a radically populist temper, some of them not Christian in any sense, Joan’s mission now seems entirely valid in larger spiritual terms and something of a model for modern movements of popular resistance to colonial imperialism.
Click here to view a chronology of events in Joan’s life and the Hundred Years’ War.
The Great Schism
The other great crisis of European civilization against which backdrop Joan’s drama was staged was the Great Schism of the Roman Catholic church. Between 1378 and 1417, church leadership was claimed by two popes, one residing at Rome and the other at Avignon. From 1409 to 1415, there was also a third claimant. But the roots of the problem and its consequences for believers such as Joan the Maid stretched farther backward and forward in time than those dates might suggest.
One of the victories of king Philip IV of France was the humiliation of the papacy in the person of Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), who died after escaping from a detachment of French troops come to arrest him in Italy. Boniface’s successor, an archbishop of Bordeaux who took the name Clement V, seconded Philip’s major religious policies: he annulled his predecessor’s offensive acts, confirmed Philip’s destruction of the Knight’s Templar, and in 1309 moved the permanent residence of the pope from Rome to Avignon, a papal city of the Rhone River directly opposite the kingdom of France. Public opinion in much of the rest of Europe was so consistently distressed, sometimes outraged, by that surrender of the Papacy’s ancient role and symbolic seat that the papacy returned to Rome in 1376 amid general rejoicing, even in France.
Two years after the return, however, a disputed election split the papacy once more. One line of popes claiming exclusive legitimacy remained in Rome thereafter; another line claiming the same legitimacy returned to Avignon. In 1409 a church council meeting at Pisa succeeded in producing a third claimant. This stubborn scandal was resolved only in 1415 thanks to a major alteration in the constitution of the church, the recognition of a broadly representative Gerneal Council as finally superior to the office of pope. The restored Roman papacy, headed by a native Roman of ancient lineage, Marin V (1417-31), committed itself to undercutting this innovation at every turn.
During the years of the schism, the English king and Parliament had supported the Roman pope, at least partly because the French kings supported the Avignonese pope. Since Scotland was determined to maintain its independence of English pressure, the Scots supported the Avignonese claimant; parallel situations arose throughout Christendom. The Avignonese and Roman popes excommunicated their rivals and their rivals’ supporters, thus denying them the sacraments of the true church. But how could one be sure which pope was the valid dispenser of the sacraments? One apocalyptic preacher even claimed to have been shown in a vision that no one had entered heaven since the Great Schism began.
Some of the best minds and most idealistic spirits of European society committed their hope for the reform of this scandal and of the church as a whole to the institution of the General Council. One such council, attended by thousands of clerics and laymen from every province and interest group in Christendom, met at the city of Constance on the upper Rhine between 1414 and 1417, and a second met at the nearby city of Basel between 1431 and 1437. The intellectual leadership of the University of Paris was overwhelmingly in favor of conciliar reform. Not surprisingly, the majority of that university’s faculty also supported the Plantagenet claimant to the crown of France: a dual monarch would be likely to have his hands so full that he would need to rely on the parliamentary institutions of the two kingdoms. Edward III had shown the way by his cultivation of the English parliament during his long and popular reign (1327-77); his young and insecure great-great-grandson Henry VI would clearly have to go even farther in ruling his French kingdom through the Estates-General, an institution that tended (for good reason) to make the Valois kings nervous.
Modern admirers of Joan who also admire the tradition of representative democracy may feel a certain conflict on that score. The merciless fury of the Paris intelligentsia against the Maid is disturbing, but it is easy to see how she must have represented for them a mindless regression to the inept tyranny of monarchic absolutism, whether royal or papal. This ambivalence makes the reactions of Jacques Gelu and especially Jean Gerson, a consummate intellectual who supported both the General Council and the Valois cause, all the more important to understand.
From: Régine Pernoud and M.V. Clin, Joan of Arc, Herstory in her Context, translated and revised by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. St. Martin’s Press, 1998.