Joan of Arcs story really fasinated me when Earl, my tour guide, started to talk about her. I was excited about Joan of Arc, because I remembered her mostly from playing Age of Empires.
but she was kind of another one of those stories that I've always heard about, but I guess I never really payed attention to the full story, or maybe it was just that I was in France in the cities where she fought some of her famous battles in that made the story seem more important and impressive. Joan of Arc wasn't a wealthy woman... she was born to peasants. She had been having dreams for quite sometime, but one night she had a vision that she was going to save France from the invading English. She convinced the governor that she had to have an audience with the king because she was the choosen one and God wanted her to save France. The man was impressed and wrote her a letter that would get her admittance to the king. Well the king and his court thought that it was hilarous that a young peasant woman was going to come talk to him and tell him that she could save France... so they decided to play a trick on her. Joan of Arc had never seen the king so they dressed another man up to look like he was the king, and the king wore regular clothes. They figured that Joan of Arc would go straight to the wrong man because if she was the "choosen one" wouldn't her God tell her who the correct man was? Well, that is exactly what did happen. Joan of Arc walked into the room and was approaching the fake king, stopped midstep and turned to the real king and addressed him as her king. After that day she got a huge following, because everyone believed her. She was a great motivational speaker, and it appeared as if she was really getting advice from God. Her generals would want to do a type of attack and she would go completely against them and do something else... and it would turn out to be the perfect move. This is the case with the city Orleans, and her tactics ended up saving the city alas she is called the Maid of Orleans. Can you believe she was 20 years old at the time. Sadly, her story isn't a happy one. Her troops were losing a battle and she went to motivate them, and she got captured. The English church were sick of her by this point... not only was she costing them the war, but she was also suggesting that she had direct communication with God... which undermined the church, because the church claimed that the only way to speak with God was to speak to him inside of a church, and Joan of Arc went against this... so they wanted to get rid of her. She got sentenced in court and was ordered to never wear mens clothing again. In order to burn her at the stake they tricked her... while she was showering someone stole her clothes and left only mens clothes in there place. Of course when she came out of the shower covered in the clothes the whole English parliment happened to be walking by and witnessed it. They burned her at the stake for it. Seems a bit of a harsh punishment for wearing mens clothing doesn't it?? But what truely fasinated me about Joan of Arc was the fact that her whole story is only over a 2 year time frame. She impacted the world and so many people so greatly in such a short span of time, and everyone knows her name.... or knows her story in some form. There are monuments, and churches in multiple cities dedicated to her... then the nicknames that she has, The maid of Orleans, Joanie and her ponie, etc... it's just amazing to think that one person can make that kind of impact on a country in such a short span of time, and still be so remembered and cherished by people even today. And to think she was just a 20 year old peasant girl. Amazing.
Here is the statue of Joan of Arc in Orleans. I thought this was an impressive statue until I arrived in Paris and saw the statue they have of her... completely in solid gold. I wish that I would have been able to gotten a picture of it, but I was in such a rush and I wasn't able to run over to it to grab the picture, and our bus passed it too quickly to get a proper picture. But I thought that was worth it's own blog.
