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Bloody Mary and Other Fearsome Women From History

Khalid Elhassan October 14, 2023 32 min

A Martyred Saint

Joan of Arc adamantly refused to confess to any wrongs, and her accusers were unable to prove either heresy or witchcraft. In frustration, they turned their attention to the way in which she had dressed in male attire on the field of battle. Her captors claimed that such cross dressing violated biblical injunctions, and convicted her on those grounds. On May 30^th, 1431, she was taken on a cart to Rouen, where the nineteen-year-old Maid of Orleans was burned at the stake.

Two decades after her death, an inquisitorial court was ordered by a new pope, to reexamine Joan of Arc’s trial. The court debunked all the charges against her, cleared her posthumously, and declared her a martyr. In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte made her a national symbol of France. She was beatified in 1909, then canonized as a Saint by the Catholic Church in 1920. Today, Saint Joan of Arc is one of the patron saints of France, and the most famous female warrior of all time.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.