Excerpt
From Chapter Eight: The Siege of Orléans
In the last week of April 1429 Jehanne d’Arc set out from Blois at the head of an armed convoy of several thousand men escorting wagons laden with supplies for the relief of Orléans. It must have been an extraordinary sight, calculated to inspire her own troops and strike terror into the English. In front of the column walked a group of priests under a standard painted with the image of Christ crucified, which had been made for them on Jehanne’s instructions: as they walked they sang the great ninth century invocation to the Holy Spirit, ‘Veni creator spiritus’, a hymn more usually associated with the coronation of popes and kings. In recent memory only Henry V, who also believed God was on his side, had given the clergy such a prominent role in his military campaigns.
Behind them came the Pucelle herself, riding on a charger. Slight but unmistakably feminine in figure, with her hair cropped in the unflattering above-the-ears pudding-bowl style favored by gentlemen of the time, she wore a suit of plate armor made for her at Tours, on the dauphin’s orders, at a cost of 100l.t. (£5833). She carried in her hand her white standard which, as her voices had commanded, depicted Christ in judgment, one hand holding the world and the other blessing the lily of France, proffered to him by angels on either side, and emblazoned with the sacred names ‘Jhesus Maria’. At her waist she bore the sword of Charlemagne’s grandfather which her voices had told her would be found behind the altar of the chapel at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois. The chapel had been founded by Charles Martel as an act of thanksgiving for his crushing defeat of Muslim invaders at the battle of Tours in 732 and had become a popular place of pilgrimage, especially for wounded soldiers. Jehanne, prompted by her devotion to Saint Catherine, had visited the chapel on her way to Chinon in February 1429, attending masses and staying in the hospital and almshouses for pilgrims built in 1400 by Marshal Boucicaut, who had been captured at Agincourt and died a prisoner in England in 1421. She had not then asked for the sword but, after receiving the dauphin’s seal of approval for her mission, she sent word to the clergy of the chapel telling them where they could find it and asking them to give it to her.
It is unclear whether the monks already knew of the legend that Charles Martel had also donated his sword or indeed that it was missing, but the sequence of events, together with Jehanne’s curious choice of an armorer as messenger and the fact that she had to describe the sword, with its five engraved crosses, so that it could be identified, all suggest that its miraculous discovery owed more to human intervention than divine. The magical uniting of a sword with its destined owner was, after all, a commonplace of medieval chivalric literature. Charles Martel’s sword was not Excalibur, but it had been sanctified in a Christian victory over Muslims and was therefore the ideal weapon for another savior of France to wield against impious invaders. The discovery was especially opportune as the more evocative alleged sword of Charlemagne, which had been used in the French coronation rites at Reims since 1270, was in English hands at the abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris.
Whatever the truth of the story, it was rapidly circulated, adding considerably to the Pucelle’s reputation as a prophetess. Rumors that her own coming had been foretold were also assiduously cultivated by Armagnac propagandists, even to the extent of rewriting one of the typically obscure prophecies attributed to Merlin to make it explicitly fit Jehanne’s mission. That the dauphin ordered and paid for her armor to be made by his master-armorer also suggests a deliberate attempt to identify her with the armor-wearing Pucelle foretold by Marie Robine, especially as the initiative to adopt armor, rather than simply male clothing, does not appear to have come from Jehanne herself.