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Wednesday, May 30, 1431
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Judge Pierre Cauchon delivered the 19-year-old maiden to the executioner, who led her to the center of the Old Marketplace. As many as 800 armed soldiers guarded her. The guards pushed back the crowd that had surged into town to watch the burning of this witch, their political and military enemy. Joan was tied to the stake above tight bunches of kindling, and the executioner ignited the blaze. Death by burning is slow and gruesome, but Joan faced her ordeal with courage and faith in God. Her cries of faith and pleas for heavenly assistance rose clear and strong above the crackling flames and the noise of the crowd. As Joan died, the mood of the crowd changed. Some English observers wept with pity. One Englishman said that, at the moment Joan gave up her spirit, a white dove emerged from her body and took flight. Even the executioner said that he deserved damnation because he had burned a holy woman. Joan's captors feared her heroic reputation. They refused to give her a Christian burial and ordered her ashes thrown into the River Seine. In-Depth Coverage
Condemned to Burn. When Joan's captors told her about the sentence on the morning it was to be carried out, Joan screamed and tore her hair. "Alas! that they are treating me so horribly and cruelly that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, should be today consumed and reduced to ashes!" Citing the threats of sexual assault and the other abuses she had suffered in prison, she confronted her sentencer, Judge Pierre Cauchon. "Bishop, I die because of you. If you had put me in the prison of a church court and handed me over to the hands of competent and agreeable ecclesiastical caretakers, this would not have happened to me. That is why I complain of you before God." Tied to the Stake. According to her chaplain, Joan was allowed little time to prepare. "While Joan was making her devotions and pious lamentations," he recalled, "I was strongly pressed by the English, and indeed, by one of their captains, to leave her in their hands so as to make her die more quickly. They said to me, whose job was to comfort her on the scaffold: 'Priest, are you going to let us get done in time for dinner?' And impatiently, without any form or indication of judgment, they sent her to the fire, saying to the master of the work: 'Do your job.' " Faith in God. One witness said, "Joan asked for a cross to hold, and hearing that, an Englishman made her a little one in wood from the end of a stick, which he handed to her, and she took it devoutly and kissed it. She put that cross in her bosom, between her flesh and her garments." The Condemned's Final Cries. As Joan burned, her chaplain recalled, she continued to "praise God and the saints while lamenting devoutly; the last word she cried in a high voice as she died was 'Jesus!' " A Mystery in the Ashes. The English wanted to ensure that none of Joan's remains could be collected to serve as holy relics for her sympathizers. Even so, rumors soon spread that though her body had burned to ashes, her heart remained intact. The executioner reported that he applied oil, sulfur, and carbon to Joan's heart and entrails, but no fuel induced them to burn, "at which he was astonished as if by a confirmed miracle."
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