Joan of Arc helped lift the siege of Orléans and clear the way for Charles VII’s coronation, changing the course of the Hundred Years’ War.
Joan of Arc was a teenager from a farming family who persuaded the heir to the French throne to let her join a military campaign in 1429. Within months she had taken part in the relief of Orléans and stood at the coronation of Charles VII at Reims. Her contribution mattered because the war was also a dispute over who had the right to rule France. The relief of a besieged city gave Charles’s side a military opening. The coronation helped him turn that opening into a public claim to authority.
How did Orléans help put Charles VII on the throne?
Joan was born around 1412 in Domrémy, on the border of Lorraine and Champagne. She said that heavenly voices directed her to help Charles. By the time she reached his court at Chinon in 1429, the succession had been in dispute for years. The 1420 Treaty of Troyes had excluded Charles from the succession in favor of Henry V of England and his heirs. Henry V and the French king Charles VI both died in 1422. Supporters of the treaty recognized the infant Henry VI, while Charles and his followers maintained his own claim. Joan’s accounts of her voices tell us what she said motivated her, and the surviving records document how people acted on those claims.
English forces had besieged Orléans since October 1428. The city stood on the Loire, and the English occupied a network of fortified positions nearby. One of those positions, Les Tourelles, guarded the southern end of the medieval bridge. Joan entered the city on April 29. The defenders and the relief force included experienced officers such as the Bastard of Orléans, later known as Dunois. Their operations targeted the forts around the city, including Saint-Loup on May 4 and the Augustins position on May 6.
On May 7, Joan was wounded during the assault that recaptured Les Tourelles. The English withdrew the next day, ending the siege. The two dates explain the turning point more clearly than an image of a single charge: first the English lost a position guarding the bridge, and then they abandoned the siege. Joan took part in the fighting alongside an army that had already been defending the city and now had a chance to seize the initiative. Orléans Métropole records that her presence boosted morale and that the French followed the relief with further operations along the Loire.
The victory at Orléans opened possibilities for Charles, but his claim still had to be made visible. After further French successes, including the victory at Patay in June, the campaign turned toward Reims. Joan pressed Charles to go there and was present when he was crowned on July 17, 1429. Reims was the traditional site for French royal coronations. Having the ceremony there tied Charles to an established practice that towns, nobles, and clergy could recognize. For communities deciding whether to acknowledge him, a coronation in that setting carried a different weight from a claim made by his own supporters.
The campaign also showed where Joan’s influence had limits. The attack on Paris in September failed. In May 1430, Burgundian forces captured her near Compiègne and eventually transferred her to English custody. Charles had been crowned, yet the English and their allies still held important positions and could keep fighting. The war continued for more than two decades after Joan’s death. Her most direct contribution came during the narrow window when a threatened city was relieved and Charles could use that momentum to reach Reims.
Why was Joan condemned, and what did the later court decide?
At Rouen, a Church court headed by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, questioned Joan about her voices, her obedience to Church authority, and her use of men’s clothing. The record preserves some of her replies through the work of the court’s clerks. It also reflects the questions the judges chose to ask. The proceedings took place in an English-held city, where her captors had a political interest in discrediting a figure associated with their opponent’s coronation. The court condemned her, and she was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431.
Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, appealed, and Pope Calixtus III authorized a new inquiry. On July 7, 1456, the second court annulled the sentence. The British Library holds one of three official copies of those proceedings, written in Gothic cursive on parchment. The survival of records from both trials gives historians two different institutional views of the same life. The first court sought to judge Joan’s claims and conduct while she was a prisoner. The second examined the earlier proceedings after her death and ruled that the verdict should be set aside.
Conclusion
Joan of Arc changed what Charles VII and his supporters could do at a critical moment. She joined the relief of Orléans, helped sustain the momentum that carried Charles to Reims, and became closely associated with his coronation. Her capture and the failed assault on Paris show how quickly that momentum could run out. The surviving trial records offer another reason to study her. They let readers compare how two courts, separated by a generation, reached opposite judgments about a young woman whose actions had become part of a struggle for the French crown.
Sources & Further Reading
- Cité Royale de Loches, Joan of Arc
- Orléans Métropole, Joan of Arc Heritage Circuit
- City of Rouen, Come Hear the Tale of Joan of Arc
- Fordham University Internet History Sourcebooks, The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1431
- British Library, Proceedings of the Rehabilitation Trial of Joan of Arc, Stowe MS 84