The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

In the Hundred Years' War between England and France, a critical period was reached when Henry V, in 1415, won the battle of Agincourt, and five years later, by the treaty of Troyes, secured the succession to the French throne on the death of Charles VI. Both monarchs dying in 1422, Charles VII was proclaimed King of France, and Henry's son—Henry VI—succeeded to his father's throne.

France now realized that her condition was wellnigh hopeless, for the greater part of her territory was in the hands of her enemies. When the English began the siege of Orleans the extinction of French independence seemed to be inevitable. The chivalry of France had been wasted in terrible wars, and the spirits of her soldiers were daunted by repeated disaster. The English king had been proclaimed in Paris, and the "native prince was a dissolute trifler, stained with the assassination of the most powerful noble of the land."77 Anarchy and brigandage everywhere prevailed, and the condition of the peasantry was too wretched to be described.

"Such," says Lamartine, "was the state of the nation when Providence showed it a savior in a child." This child was Jeanne d'Arc, called La Pucelle ("the Maid"—more fully, "the Maid of Orleans"), whose character and services to her country made her, perhaps, the most illustrious heroine of history. She was born at Domremy, in the northeast part of France, January 6, 1412. All that is essential concerning her personality and life prior to the great achievement recorded here will be found in Creasy's own introduction to his spirited account of the victory at Orleans.

RLEANS was looked upon as the last stronghold of the French national party. If the English could once obtain possession of it, their victorious progress through the residue of the kingdom seemed free from any serious obstacle. Accordingly, the Earl of Salisbury, one of the bravest and most experienced of the English generals, who had been trained under Henry V, marched to the attack of the all-important city; and, after reducing several places of inferior consequence in the neighborhood, appeared with his army before its walls on the 12th of October, 1428.

The city of Orleans itself was on the north side of the Loire, but its suburbs extended far on the southern side, and a strong bridge connected them with the town. A fortification, which in modern military phrase would be termed a tête-du-pont, defended the bridge head on the southern side, and two towers, called the Tourelles, were built on the bridge itself, at a little distance from the tête-du-pont. Indeed, the solid masonry of the bridge terminated at the Tourelles; and the communication thence with the tête-du-pont and the southern shore was by means of a drawbridge. The Tourelles and the tête-du-pont formed together a strong-fortified post, capable of containing a garrison of considerable strength; and so long as this was in possession of the Orleannais, they could communicate freely with the southern provinces, the inhabitants of which, like the Orleannais themselves, supported the cause of their dauphin against the foreigners.

Lord Salisbury rightly judged the capture of the Tourelles to be the most material step toward the reduction of the city itself. Accordingly, he directed his principal operations against this post, and after some severe repulses he carried the Tourelles by storm on the 23d of October. The French, however, broke down the arches of the bridge that were nearest to the north bank, and thus rendered a direct assault from the Tourelles upon the city impossible. But the possession of this post enabled the English to distress the town greatly by a battery of cannon which they planted there, and which commanded some of the principal streets.

It has been observed by Hume that this is the first siege in which any important use appears to have been made of artillery. And even at Orleans both besiegers and besieged seem to have employed their cannons merely as instruments of destruction against their enemy's men, and not to have trusted to them as engines of demolition against their enemy's walls and works. The efficacy of cannon in breaching solid masonry was taught Europe by the Turks a few years afterward, at the memorable siege of Constantinople.