The Maid of Orléans: What Really Happened in 1429
In 1429 a teenage Joan of Arc lifted the siege of Orléans in about nine days. The real history, drawn from the primary records.
Tia
9/12/20263 min read
Joan of Arc and the Nine Days That Saved Orléans
By the spring of 1429, Orléans had been under English siege since October of 1428, and the city sat on a knife's edge. Whoever held Orléans held the road to the south, so the fate of the whole Armagnac cause, and of the uncrowned dauphin Charles, seemed to rest on this one town on the Loire. The English had ringed it with a chain of small forts called bastilles, and the strongest of them, Les Tourelles, guarded the stone bridge across the river. Inside the walls, the defense was led by Jean de Dunois, remembered as the Bastard of Orléans. Then, on the 29th of April 1429, a teenage girl of about seventeen rode in with a relief convoy. Contemporary accounts describe how the townspeople crowded around her with torches, and from that night the mood inside Orléans began to change.
What followed was fast. Joan had already sent the English earlier letters demanding they leave, and the fighting opened on the 4th of May when the French stormed and took the bastille of Saint-Loup. The 5th of May was Ascension Day, a holy day with no assault, and it was then that Joan sent one final letter, tied to an arrow and shot into Les Tourelles, telling the English to go home peacefully. They refused, and the attacks resumed: the fort of the Augustins fell on the 6th, and on the 7th the French threw themselves at Les Tourelles itself. During that attack Joan was wounded, struck by an arrow between the neck and shoulder, yet by her own later testimony she returned to the field and urged the soldiers on until the fort was taken. On the 8th of May the English broke camp and withdrew. A siege that had held for roughly seven months had been lifted in about nine days once Joan arrived, and that speed is a large part of why people at the time saw something extraordinary in her.
This is the campaign that gave her the name history kept: la Pucelle d'Orléans, the Maid of Orléans. The victory reopened the path that led, that same summer, to Charles VII's coronation at Reims, and it turned a frightened town into the place most tied to her memory. Orléans has honored the 8th of May ever since, in a civic celebration that dates back to the 15th century and still fills the streets today as the Fêtes de Jeanne d'Arc. If you ever find yourself researching this quiet city in the Centre-Val de Loire, it is worth knowing that its most famous chapter is not a legend added on later. It is drawn from the trial records, the letters she dictated, and the chronicle of the siege, and the dates still line up.
To watch part 1 of the new series on Orléans, click below. And make sure to subscribe and hit the bell to watch part 2 on September 19, 2026.
Sources:
Day-by-day chronology of Joan's movements and the siege (citing historians W.S. Scott and Régine Pernoud, founder of the Centre Jeanne d'Arc): jeanne-darc.info, Chronology
Chronicle of the Siege of Orléans (MS Latin 8838, Bibliothèque nationale de France): jeanne-darc.info
Joan's dictated letters, including the May 5, 1429 letter to the English at Les Tourelles: Memory of Joan of Arc, Primary Documents
Trial of condemnation transcript (the 70 articles and Joan's answers): Famous Trials
Image Credits:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joan_of_Arc_Statue,_French_Quarter_-_panoramio.jpg
Mike Tilley, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joan_of_Arc_statue,_Place_du_Martroi,_Orl%C3%A9ans1.JPG
Adam Bishop, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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