Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint Read Online Free

birthright through the female line. Legal as well as military courts on both sides accumulated arguments in favor of Philip or Edward, but a French high court decided in favor of the Valois line and rejected the claims of the Plantagenet dynasty.
    For King Edward, France was not merely a symbolic hereditary ornament for England; it was the wealthiest and most heavily populated country in Christendom. His goal was, therefore, to make the English monarch ruler of both France and England, thereby expanding and confirming bonds that had existed since the Battle of Hastings and continued through Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, which for a time had brought most of southwest France under English rule. And so, as the new Valois dynasty surely expected, Edward did not abandon his imperial aspirations. In 1337 he sent troops to engage Philip, now King Philip VI, in outright combat. Nothing less than the future of a country was at stake.
    For the next twenty-five years, the English were consistently victorious in episodic battles, annexing more and more French territories. Charles V of France recovered much of the land gained by England, but this advantage was subsequently lost after his death in 1380, when feudal rivalries erupted between factions loyal to the Duke of Burgundy (aligned with England) and the Duke of Orléans (loyal to France).

    W HEN J OAN WAS a child, her king was the unfortunate Charles VI; aptly called Charles the Mad, he was occasionally lucid but was mostly a lunatic. With the literal and legal breakdown of the French court and the demoralization of French troops, it was comparatively easy for the English to win complete victories in 1415 and 1417, when Joan was still a child. Their successes gave the Anglo-Burgundian alliance control of the Aquitaine and all France north of the Loire except for a few loyalist towns, and Paris fell to the English in 1419. Thus Henry V of England became the single most powerful political and diplomatic authority in Europe.
    When Jean, Duke of Burgundy, was assassinated in 1419 the partisans of Charles VI and his son, the dauphin or rightful heir, were blamed for the murder. For this reason Jean’s son Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, no longer supported the Valois and gave his allegiance to England. He and those on his side were known as Burgundians, while those loyal to the crown of France were known as the Armagnac party, which took its name from Bernard, count of Armagnac.
    That same year Burgundians ravaged Armagnac strongholds and even the modest homes of ordinary pro-Valois citizens. Anticipating possible skirmishes and worse near Domrémy, Joan’s father and another farmer pooled their resources in order to use the Château de l’Île, a modest fort on an island in the Meuse, where they planned to house local families and livestock in the event of pitched battle in the village.
    In 1420 Philip of Burgundy threw his support behind the Treaty of Troyes, which gave Charles VI’s daughter to Henry of England to be his wife; the treaty further stipulated that their heir would be king of the single but twofold realm of England and France. This contract effectively annulled the right of Charles’s surviving son—the dauphin, or direct heir to the throne, also called Charles. Among those Burgundians who helped negotiate the treaty to the benefit of the English was a clergyman named Pierre Cauchon, who was rewarded with the bishopric of Beauvais.
    Both Henry V and Charles VI died within weeks of one another in 1422, but the war was zealously prosecuted on the English side by Henry’s brother, John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford, who was regent for Henry’s son, the infant King Henry VI. Cauchon, all the while, labored on behalf of the English government in France, which was headquartered in Rouen, northwest of Paris in Normandy.
    The dauphin was now nominally King Charles VII, but he was uncrowned, and in this state of royal limbo he remained for seven