The kingdom of France in early 1429, showing the division of territory between English, Burgundian and Armagnac rule.
Charles VI of France, the Mad and Well-Beloved. Charles retained the love of his people and his title as the ‘most Christian king’, despite the intermittent psychosis that left him unable to rule and his kingdom in the grip of civil war. This exquisite figure is from an enamelled gold altar-piece which the queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, gave to her husband as a New Year’s gift in 1405. The image of the king kneeling before the Virgin and Child not only demonstrates his blond good looks (and his concern to disguise his receding hairline), but seems, in his wide-eyed gaze, to hint at his mental fragility.
Henry V of England, the challenger to Charles’s possession of the French throne, and ‘God’s own soldier’, as he was called by one of his chaplains. This profile portrait gives a sense of his stern and implacable will, but shows no sign of the scar left by the wound he suffered in battle when he was just sixteen: an arrow struck him in the face, penetrating deep into the bone to one side of his nose, and it took weeks to remove the arrowhead with a specially constructed surgical device. His recovery from this injury is likely to have fuelled the king’s belief in his divinely sanctioned destiny. He sports the cropped, round haircut popular among fashionable young men in the early decades of the fifteenth century.
The powerful dukes of Burgundy, John the Fearless and his son Philip the Good, in their trademark black velvet hats. The distinctive piled-up profile of John the Fearless’s chaperon hat appears in almost all contemporary depictions of him.
The magnificence of the increasingly independent Burgundian court is evident not only in Philip’s collar of his chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece (a golden sheepskin hanging from a chain of linked firesteels and flints, Philip’s personal emblem), but in the quality of the portrait, from the workshop of the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden.
The dauphin Charles, son of Charles VI, here depicted around 1450 as ‘the most victorious king of France, Charles VII of that name’. Victorious though he was by that point, Charles was no more prepossessing, robust or charismatic a figure than he had been in the 1420s, when he had failed to lead his army against his sworn enemy Philip the Good of Burgundy and the duke’s English allies.
The great twelfth-century castle of Chinon on the river Vienne, where Joan first appeared at the Armagnac court in February 1429.
The only surviving image of Joan made during her lifetime: a picture drawn in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement by its notary, Clément de Fauquembergue, on 10 May 1429, the day when news arrived of the liberation of Orléans. He had heard that the Armagnacs were accompanied by a maid carrying a banner, but he had never seen her, and so depicted her with long hair in female dress.
A late fifteenth-century image of Joan from an illuminated manuscript. Her armour, banner and sword reflect contemporary descriptions of the Maid once she had been equipped for war by the Armagnac regime, but her hair does not; it should be darker and shorter, cut round above her ears in the same style as the portrait of Henry V.
Letter from the Maid seeking military supplies for the siege of La Charité from the people of the town of Riom, 9 November 1429. Joan, who dictated her letters to a clerk, had by this stage begun to learn to write, and her own hesitant signature, Jehanne, appears at the end of the text. The nineteenth-century scholar Jules Quicherat noted that he saw a fingerprint and a black hair caught in the wax seal of this document.
Mid-fifteenth-century manuscript illumination of St Catherine of Alexandria, one of the saints who brought messages to Joan – or so she claimed at her trial. St Catherine cradles a book, to symbolise her success in confounding the pagan scholars who interrogated her. Beneath her feet lies the Roman emperor who ordered her execution, along with the spiked wheel upon which, miraculously, she could not be broken. She holds the sword with which she was eventually beheaded. Joan’s own sword was brought to her from the church of St Catherine at Fierbois.
John, duke of Bedford, younger brother of Henry V and regent of English France on behalf of his young nephew Henry VI, kneels before St George, the patron saint of England. St George, a warrior saint in armour, wears his emblem of the red cross – which also appears on the English flags behind him – and the blue robe of the English Order of the Garter. The book of hours in which this illumination appears was given by Bedford’s wife, Anne of Burgundy, to nine-year-old Henry VI at Christmas 1430, while he was in Rouen awaiting his French coronation, and shortly before the beginning of Joan’s trial.
An illumination of St Michael vanquishing the devil in the form of a dragon, from the Salisbury breviary, a manuscript commissioned in Paris by the duke of Bedford as regent of English France. The archangel Michael, a warrior saint to match the warlike St George, had been adopted as the patron saint of Armagnac France, along with his emblem of the white cross – and Joan would claim at her trial that St Michael had appeared and spoken to her, along with St Catherine and St Margaret. This English-commissioned St Michael, however, has been appropriated by Bedford for England: instead of the white cross of the Armagnacs, he carries a shield that much more closely resembles the red cross of St George.
Jean, Bastard of Orléans, illegitimate brother of Charles, duke of Orléans. The duke was captured at the battle of Azincourt in 1415, and remained a prisoner in England for twenty-five years. The Bastard was therefore in charge of the defence of Orléans when Joan arrived there in 1429, and fought at her side to liberate the town. He served with distinction in later campaigns against the English in Normandy and Gascony, and became count of Dunois in recognition of his service. He gave detailed testimony at the nullification trial held to clear Joan’s name in 1456.
Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, sent by the pope as an ‘angel of peace’ to broker a settlement between the Armagnacs and Burgundians after Joan’s death. He took a leading role at the Congress of Arras in 1435 where peace was made between the two sides in the teeth of English opposition. This remarkable portrait was painted in the early 1430s by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who lived in Bruges and served Philip of Burgundy.