st as innate genius enabled Mozart to compose symphonies as a child, innate genius enabled Joan to shape the destiny of an army and a nation. Coupled with this genius there had to be phenomenal force of will. Her genius enabled her to quickly master the rudiments of military leadership despite her absolute lack of formal training. Her force of will empowered her, a peasant girl, to browbeat royal officials into granting her an audience with the Dauphin Charles VII -- and, having won that audience, to persuade Charles to place her at the head of his army with a horse, a suit of armor, a sword, a banner, and an entourage of her own.
If intellect and willpower are qualities that can be inherited, than we can see Joan’s capacities foreshadowed in her parents. Jacques d’Arc was a farming peasant in the village of Domrémy -- but among the village peasants he was first among equals. He commanded such respect among his neighbors that he served in several official roles in the affairs of the village. It was he whom they chose to represent the village to the regional military governor -- the same regional governor Joan was to badger for an escort to Charles at the beginning of her quest.71 Jacques, with a personal initiative that was unusual in a peasant, petitioned for, and obtained, the right for his neighbors to take shelter in an abandoned nearby castle whenever brigand bands and warring forces of the Hundred Years’ War threatened the village.72 Jacques was thus a man of notable intelligence, responsibility, and enterprise among the peasantry. He died in sorrow the same year his daughter died at the stake.73
Joan’s mother, Isabelle, was a woman of superb character. She showed what she was made of after Joan’s death. An illiterate peasant woman, she spent twenty-four years traveling France, beating on the doors of the mighty, to demand a posthumous retrial for her daughter. Her pleas for justice eventually reached the Pope in Rome and she lived to see her long struggle rewarded with Joan’s exoneration. If the potential for greatness can be passed in the genes from parents to child, or if it can be developed in a child by parental example, then Joan was well-served in both her parents.74
High intelligence under stress is necessary in a military leader. The strongest unambiguous evidence of Joan’s s amazing powers of mind comes from the transcripts of her trial for heresy. From January to May 1431, over sixty of the most learned clerics in English-occupied France subjected her to an almost daily barrage of questioning. Illiterate Joan had no one to represent her or speak for her but herself. After being pushed to mental exhaustion in court each day, she was pushed to physical and emotional exhaustion each night by sadistic prison guards who mocked her and sexually molested her.75
The learned clerics sought to trap Joan with trick questions of theology so that her own answers would condemn her. The illiterate peasant answered with such consistent brilliance that she made the clerics look like fools. She forced the mastermind of these odious proceedings, Bishop Cauchon, to move the trial from public chambers to closed chambers. Amazingly, Joan’s superb answers found their way into the official record thanks to court scribes who sympathized with her.76 These pages, still intact in the archives today, are Joan’s self-portrait.
For example, Joan was asked if the saints who she claimed appeared to her hated the English. The trick in this question was that if Joan said "yes," she would be claiming that saints of the Church hated a people, who, in 1431, were still every bit as Catholic as the French. If she said "no," then she would destroy the credibility of her own mission to make war on the English. Joan adroitly answered of her saints ‘They love that which God loves and hate that which God hates."77 In another instance, she was asked if she was or was not in God’s grace. If she said that she was, the clerics were ready to hound her for the sin of presuming to know God’s mind. If she said that she was not, she condemned herself. She r