Joan of Arc's story is almost impossible to believe. Keep in mind that France was facing an ultimate defeat at the hands of the English as The Hundred Years' War drew to a close. Joan grew up in northern France, in one of only a few villages still faithful to the French king (it should come as no surprise, since we are talking about France here, that large numbers of the population of northern France were collaborating with the enemy at this time). Here was Joan of Arc, a teenaged female peasant, illiterate and ignorant of military strategy, leaving home at the age of 17 in response to angelic voices she had first heard four years earlier, traveling across two hundred miles of enemy territory to reach the Dauphin, and within two years saving her nation from complete military defeat and restoring the crown price of France to the throne. This was the early 15th century, mind you - women, especially young girls, would never dream of cutting their hair, dressing in man's clothing and armor, and riding off to war with an army of men, and no one really cared what a peasant thought in the first place. Somehow, though, Joan of Arc convinced the future king to give her an army, and she led her troops in battle dressed in the full armor of a king's soldier. She claimed her authority came from God Himself, that He communicated with her in mysterious voices and instructed her to do all these impossible things - and she delivered what she promised. Can you imagine what the English troops based in the fortress of Orleans thought when they received an ultimatum from this seventeen-year-old girl to withdraw their forces? Many of them did not live to regret their dismissal of her demands.

Having fulfilled her promises to save the nation and restore the French monarchy, Joan's young life quickly took a series of dramatically tragic turns. Certain elements of the king's court stirred up trouble for her out of jealousy, she herself became more demanding and forceful, and eventually her military campaigns began to meet with disaster rather than glorious victory over the odds. Many began to surmise that she had fallen out of favor with the Deity - or if luck and determination rather than heavenly assistance had led to her early successes. Attempts to retake Paris by force, a move the king was always reluctant to follow, were failures, and on the third such mission Joan of Arc was captured. The video gives the impression she was captured by the English, but actually she was captured by Burgundian collaborators and then sold to their English allies. She languished in prison for more than a year, defended herself nobly and admirably at her "trial," and faced the most awful of deaths with courage and unnatural calm. She did, after a solid year of imprisonment and torture, sign a confession to the effect that her voices never came from God and that she was, in essence, a heretic, but she soon recanted these claims. There is no written record of what took place during the three days between her "confession" and her disavowal of that confession and swift execution. Almost surely, as the video suggests, she was raped during that time, a horrible enough event in its own right, but sickeningly appalling for someone who had dedicated her mind and body to the work of God and drew sustenance from her cherished virginity.