6. A Fierce Medieval Female Warrior
France’s national heroine Joan of Arc, also known as the Maid of Orleans (1412 – 1431), is the world’s most famous female warrior. As a teenager, she personally led French forces into combat. She won a series of miraculous victories that revived the national spirit, and turned the tide of a war that until then had been going badly for France. Born into a peasant family in Lorraine, Joan was noted for her piety since childhood. In her teens, she saw visions from various saints, who directed her to save France from English domination. At the time, France was exhausted, downtrodden and reeling from a series of massive defeats at the hands of the English. The French crown was also in dispute between the French Dauphin, or heir to throne, and the English monarch, Henry VI.
Joan left home at age sixteen, and led by voices and visions from the saints, travelled to join the Dauphin. In 1429, she convinced the French heir to give her an army, which she took to relieve the city of Orleans, which was besieged by the English. Endowed with remarkable mental and physical courage, Joan of Arc led her men in a whirlwind campaign against the invaders. She lifted the siege in nine days, and put the English to flight. It was a momentous victory that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France. Then Joan, now known as “The Maid of Orleans”, convinced the Dauphin to crown himself king of France. She was then sent on various military expeditions, but in one of them in 1430, she was thrown off her horse and captured by the Burgundians.
