 astride a great war-horse, brandishing her banner and shouting "Follow me!" to an army of soldiers who adored her. She was a military leader. But what kind of military leader was she? Was she nothing more than a charismatic, but naive, inspirational mascot who was cynically used by the real military leaders to rally their demoralized troops? Or was she a true commander who made decisions and gave orders? Respectfully setting aside voices from God for the moment, how did an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl with no military training lead an army that had known nothing but humiliation and defeat to sudden, repeated, and decisive victories?
Before attempting to answer how Joan did what she did as a military leader, it is first necessary to reach a conclusion as to what she did. Modern scholars disagree on the "what" before they even get to the "how." Edouard Perroy, in his book The Hundred Years War, implies that Joan was nothing but an inspirational figurehead, a sort of all-army "cheerleader."3 Frances Gies, in her Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality, specifically cites Perroy in order to take issue with him. She maintains that Joan was a true war captain who listened and spoke in war councils, who advocated courses of action, and who made decisions and gave orders.4
Any attempt to find where the truth lies between the poles of Perroy and Gies must of course return to the firsthand sources. In the case of Joan of Arc, scholars are richly blessed by the great volume and detail of the accounts of Joan by those who knew her personally -- accounts that have been kept scrupulously intact to this day. Most of what we know about Joan comes from the transcripts of her two trials. In 1431, Joan, at that time a prisoner of war of her English enemies, was subjected to a Church trial for heresy. The trial was a political sham, conducted by turncoat French clerics who were partisans of the English and who were dependent on English support to maintain their privileged positions. To no one’s surprise, they found Joan guilty and condemned her to her death at the stake, The complete original transcript of her trial, including her own account of her life, still exists, in good condition, at French archives in our own time. In 1455, twenty-four years after Joan’s death, the Church reopened her case by giving her a posthumous retrial. In various inquiries preceding and during the retrial, 115 witnesses who had known Joan answered questions about her.5 The court recorded their testimonies in hundreds of pages of writing that we have in our possession, fully intact, today. The witnesses included people from all backgrounds including peasants who were childhood friends of Joan, lords and ladies who had known her at the royal court, and, most importantly for the present purpose, soldiers who had gone into battle at Joan’s side. The retrial, besides nullifying Joan’s conviction for heresy and opening the way for her eventual canonization, provided scholars of subsequent generations with more firsthand source material about Joan than exists for almost any other historical figure who lived prior to her time. Perhaps less reliable than the transcripts of the retrial, but still valuable, are the various chronicles that were penned during or shortly after Joan’s lifetime and which are still in existence in various archives.
The military men who dealt intimately with Joan on a daily basis during her campaigns and whose reminiscences were recorded in the documents of the retrial were several. The two highest-ranking of them were Jean, Count of Dunois, (the illegitimate half-brother of the Duke of Orléans, hence titled "Bastard of Orléans") and Jean, Duke of Alençon, a kinsman of the Dauphin and eventual (thanks to Joan) King of France, Charles VII. In the vague and imprecise military organization of late medieval France, Dunois and d’Alençon may be understood as Joan’s co-commanders of the army at war. Other witnesses were members of Joan’s personal entourage. Jean d’Aulon was her squire while young Louis de Coutes was her page. Jean Pasqu