Scott Alexander (author/host)
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
then changed the behavior that led to it.
No swearing, no fornication, no hurting the innocent, and so they should logically expect to start winning instead of losing.
But also she kept doing miracles, and this terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English.
Most of them were minor things, climbing a horse with the cross, hearing a soldier who would die in the next engagement blaspheming and say, do you swear and you so near to death?
predicting when she'd be injured in advance, not dying of infection when shot, telling the Duc d'Alencon, move or you'll get hit by a cannonball.
He moves and a couple of minutes later there's the cannonball, killing someone else, and so forth and so on.
If that was a specific prediction and not just general good advice, I want to note that the cannoneer couldn't do that.
15th century artillery is only a precision weapon insofar as the ball will probably not land behind the gun.
And then there was the sword.
Joan sent a letter to the town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Friarbois requesting that they kindly look behind, or under, she doesn't remember exactly what she said, the altar for a rusty sword with five crosses on the hilt, clean the rust off and send it to her.
We have reports of this from both Joan and the priest who mailed it to her.
Rumours that this was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, demonstrated decisively that there was no lily that somebody would not determinedly gild.
But whatever the sword's provenance, it became part of the legend of Joan of Arc.
Her arrival at Orlans was also part of the legend.
The English had built or taken a number of forts around the city and were bombarding it with their artillery, but they didn't have the numbers to completely encircle it, and so when Joan arrived, the siege was moving pretty slowly.
Jean de Noir, bastard of Orléans, was in charge of the city's defence, and he gave orders that her convoy of supplies and reinforcements enter the city by a circuitous route to avoid the English garrisons before riding out to join them.
When he arrived, Joan, metaphorically breathing fire, angrily demanded he explain why he'd ordered her troops redirected, when the simplest solution was that they'd just sailed upriver.