A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [381]
The phenomenon of Jeanne d’Arc—the voices from God who told her she must expel the English and have the Dauphin crowned King, the quality that dominated those who would normally have despised her, the strength that raised the siege of Orléans and carried the Dauphin to Reims—belongs to no category. Perhaps it can only be explained as the answer called forth by an exigent historic need. The moment required her and she rose. Her strength came from the fact that in her were combined for the first time the old religious faith and the new force of patriotism. God spoke to her through the voices of St. Catherine, St. Michael, and St. Margaret, but what He commanded was not chastity nor humility nor the life of the spirit but political action to rescue her country from foreign tyrants.
The flight of her meteor lasted only three years. She appeared in 1428, inspired Dunois, bastard son of Louis d’Orléans, and others of the Dauphin’s circle to attack at Orléans, delivered the city in May 1429, and, on the wave of that victory, led Charles to the sacred ceremony of coronation at Reims two months later. Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430, she was sold to the English, tried as a heretic by the Church in the service of the English, and burned at the stake at Rouen in May 1431. Her condemnation was essential to the English because she claimed to have been moved by God, and if the claim were not disallowed, God, the arbiter in the affairs of men, would have been shown to have set His face against the English dominion of France. All the intensity and relentlessness of the inquisitors was pitted against her to prove the invalidity of her voices. Before the trial, neither Charles VII, who owed her his crown, nor any of the French made any effort to ransom or save her, possibly from nobility’s embarrassment at having been led to victory by a village girl.
Jeanne d’Arc’s life and death did not instantly generate a national resistance; nevertheless, the English thereafter were fighting a losing cause, whether they knew it or not. The Burgundians knew it. The installation of Charles as anointed King of France, with a re-inspired army, changed the situation, the more so as the English were distracted by rising frictions under an infant King. Recognizing the implications, the Duke of Burgundy gradually went over to the French, came to terms with Charles VII, and sealed an alliance by the Peace of Arras in 1435. Within a year, by action of an energetic new Constable, Paris was regained for the King, a signal to the realm of re-unification to come. No one could have said that the spark lit by the Maid of Orléans had become a flame, for her significance is better known to history than it was to contemporaries, but renewed hope and energy was in the air. The war did not end, and in fact grew more brutal as the English, out of the obstinacy that overtakes conquerors when the conquered refuse to succumb, persisted in an effort which the Burgundian defection from their cause had made hopeless.
All this time the dominant intellectual effort of Europe was engaged in continuous, contentious, and intense activity to end the papal schism and bring about reform within the Church. Both aims depended on establishing the supremacy of a Council over the papacy. As long as both popes persistently refused to abdicate, an agreed-upon ending of the schism was impossible, leaving a Council the only alternative. It was equally apparent that no Pope and College of Cardinals would override vested interests to initiate reform from within; therefore, only by establishing the authority of a Council could an instrument of reform be obtained. Serious theologians struggled seriously with these problems in a genuine