We all know about Joan of Arc’s visions, cross- dressing and in the end being torched by the church. My question is was she a great tactician or just lucky? Divine guidance doesn’t count.
I think this one will get many factual answers and many opinions. So, moved from General Questions to IMHO, where you can still get factual answers.
samclem, moderator
Good point - didn’t think of that - thanks.
For ending up getting burned alive? How lucky is that?
She had some real military blokes backing her up, advising her.
In real influence, she was about as important as a banner, guerdon, Eagle, or other standard. She inspired the troops. Her actual tactical input was next to nil, as you might expect for someone with no training or experience.
Any ninny can stand in front of the troops and holler inspirational slogans. She was that ninny.
From what I’ve read, it seems that she wasn’t so much a great tactician or lucky. It was that she was a great charismatic leader.
One of the reasons she ended up in charge of an army was that everything conventional that had been tried before then had failed miserably. The French army suffered from low morale, which translated into poor performance on the field. If your army doesn’t believe in its cause, they aren’t going to fight very well.
Joan was able to rally the men under her command, and that alone made a huge difference on the battlefield. Now instead of reluctantly going into battle, certain that they were going to lose as they had so many times before, now the men were confident and bold, and fought much better as a result. And the more they won, the more their confidence grew. Similarly, as Joan’s reputation grew, the English began to have doubts about their ability to defeat her, and those doubts translated into less confidence on the battlefield and tactics that suffered as a result.
Joan didn’t usually directly command the men into battle, so how much control she had over tactics and such is debated. Noblemen actually controlled the battle, but many of these noblemen also said later that they often took her advice as they thought it to be divinely inspired. It’s not clear how many actual battle plans were divinely inspired and how much the nobles injected their own version of common sense and experience into Joan’s inspiration to turn it into a functional battle plan.
I guess given the choices the answer would by “lucky”, but that doesn’t really encompass it either. The fact of the matter is there is some dispute about how much she influenced the planning and execution of actual military strategy. Certainly she tried to, but she seems to have been mostly about aggression, aggression and more aggression. Which works some of the time, but not all of the time. The more cynical view is that she was merely an inspirational figurehead and cheerleader. Which actually was no small thing in the Middle Ages, especially as she was often “cheering” from the front line. The most credulous view is that she was central to the direction of the Loire Campaign.
Given that a 17-year old peasant girl was unlikely to have been a natural-born master tactician, I tend to lean towards the cynical side. That she was intensely charismatic is not in doubt and I think she performed an important role in that particular campaign. But I doubt her tactical acumen was at the heart of it.
I agree that Joan’s main selling point was her personal charisma and leadership skills both on and off the field ; but she wasn’t totally inept at the military stuff either.
At her trial, the commanders she served with on the war council observed that she had a particular knack for and understanding of siege weaponry and artillery for example ; typically intuiting the best spots to site them when sieging despite having exactly zero education in this matter (and bear in mind that poliorcetics is a complex science which typically involves knowing not just dumb ballistics and an in-depth understanding of the mechanical characteristics of your rock-lobbers, but also logistics and structural engineering. You typically can’t just pull this stuff out of your arse).
Their testimonies seemed to range from bemused, impressed and jealous about it from what I can recall.
She jumped from a tower, fell 70 feet, and survived. That seems pretty lucky. Unless it was a failed suicide attempt, to avoid the fire. Then, maybe not so lucky.
Ha! It was all part of her master tactical plan!
Ah. Bipolar I manic psychosis with a touch of the Asperger’s.
She was inspired by GAWD. But it was just twelfth level chess stuff, in order to make her the subject of the coolest movie ever made. THAT was the endgame.