She is the most famous woman in medieval European history.

She halted the seemingly unstoppable English juggernaut in its tracks.

She raised a French prince to the throne.

She won international renown. She provoked both ferocious

loyalty and unyielding hatred. She forged a kingdom, yet she could not read or write.

And she died, well, she was killed whilst a teenager. She was a phenomenon and remains one

600 years later. She called herself Jean de Poussel, Joan the maid. Her father was

Jacques Duck, so we remember her as Joan of Art. At once for this podcast, I was interviewing Lord Jonathan Sumpshin.

He's a high court justice.

He's senior judges in the kingdom,

author of a massive books about the Hundred Years' War.

Brilliant man.

And he said to me that if it wasn't so well attested in the sources,

the chronicles, the court records, then the story of Joan would

be so unbelievable that he would have assumed it was made up.

This peasant girl, illiterate with no military experience, in a deeply class-conscious, hierarchical

kingdom, an institutionally sexist, misogynist society.

That girl convinces the ruling elite to give her command of an army, which she then uses to

smash an enemy that's humiliated and crushed the French on dozens of battlefields for years on end.

It is one of the most unlikely and extraordinary stories in history.

And contemporaries knew it as they lived through it.

People listened to reports in distant Constantinople, an utter disbelief.

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