Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:

•	Document 1 Assess the Joan of Arc's capabilities as a military strategists .  What role did gunpowder play in the French efforts during this stage of the Hundred Years war?  Analyze how gunpowder would change the nature of warfare and statecraft in Western Christendom during the fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.
•	Document 2 Why did many church believe Joan of Arc practiced witchcraft?  Why were women during this period in Western Christendom believed to be weaker than men in resisting "dark forces."
•	Document 3 Excerpts for Joan of Arc's trail. How did Joan defend her actions?  What problems did this defense hold for a woman in fourteenth century Europe?

The Rise of a Charismatic Leader in a Time of Social Turmoil: Joan of Arc

The immense historical impact made by a French peasant girl, Joan of Arc, demonstrates the importance given to rare and charismatic individuals, even women leaders in predominantly male-dominated societies, during periods of social turmoil. Europe in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was beset by plagues, famines, and war. Its people, thus, were willing to look for help to the special talents of women, even in areas like warfare, where women had been largely excluded. Indeed, if not for Joan of Arc, the country we know today as France might not exist. Appearing on the scene in 1429, as the English seemed to have gained the upper hand in the Hundred Years’ War, she rallied the French against the English occupiers and turned the tide of the war. Although by no means a patriot in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, by giving religious sanction, as well as military succor, to the Valois monarch Charles VII, she made possible the consolidation of France and left Europe an inspiring, yet enigmatic, image of the female warrior-saint.

The world of Joan’s childhood was a chaotic one, in which English lords were laying claim to various French-speaking principalities. By 1420, Valois authority had been greatly eroded. Important French lords soon began to sense the wind blowing in the English direction, and English armies gradually conquered more and more French towns. In 1428, they laid siege to Orléans, a large town in north-central France; to contemporaries, it seemed a symbolic battle: as Orléans went, they thought, so the war would go—and so would God wish it to go.

This is the point at which the paths of a seventeen-yearold peasant girl and the monarch of France crossed. Beginning at about age thirteen, the shy girl had received visions of saints who instructed her to come to rescue Orléans and conduct France’s ruler to be crowned king at Reims Cathedral (he had not been crowned there, in the tradition of all French kings, because the English armies controlled Reims, Paris, and northern France). For five years, Joan resisted, but at last she agreed to obey her celestial advisers. Granted an audience with Charles VII in 1429, Joan impressed him with her piety and her passionate devotion to the Valois crown. He concluded that God really had sent her to serve France’s cause—and his own. Joan was given command of 7,000 to 8,000 men and, wearing a suit of armor and brandishing a sword, she marched to relieve Orléans. Joan directed the assault with brilliance, and inspired the French forces; her charisma came not only from a tradition of female Christian “seers,” but also from the peculiarity of her appearance (a young woman in male attire), and her appeal to French speakers who preferred their local French lords and customs to rule by English “outsiders.” On Sunday, May 8, she drove the English from Orléans, and then pressed on to Reims; here, thanks to her military victories, Charles VII was crowned, fulfilling her visions. He was now king of France—and though the war continued, the tide now turned in favor of the French.

The tide for Joan, however, began to turn for the worse. Although she continued to direct the troops with remarkable savvy, she failed to force open the gates of Paris, and jealous courtiers around Charles began to question her divine authority. She was wounded, then taken prisoner. After a year in English captivity, she was tried by the Inquisition and found guilty—at the hands of jealous and pro-English judges—of heresy, on the grounds that her visions were false and misleading. On May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake in the marketplace in the town of Rouen. Since that time, she has been seen as a heroic and charismatic martyr, and her name has very often been employed by the French in attempts to awaken French patriotism against foreign threats.

The fact that this young, illiterate woman played such an important role in the history of European warfare and state formation testifies to the fact that even in these spheres, male aristocrats, intellectuals, and clerics were not the only important actors. At the right place, at the right time, a woman could use courage, faith, and intelligence to make her visions prevail. Joan’s followers believed that female magic could restore order to their lives, even while fearing witchcraft. They accepted her cross-dressing and personalist style of political and military leadership as proof of her calling. Yet, her death at the stake is a reminder that every charismatic heroine may be, for the opposing side, a heretic.