Welcome to the Night Chronicles.

July 17, 1429, Reims. The cathedral smells of wax, the vaults hum with voices, and the archbishop, who hasn't seen his own city for seven years, anoints himself. The man crowned on this day only yesterday had only a title and half a country. Beside him, holding a banner, stands a girl not yet eighteen.

In ten months, this girl will be held in a Burgundian castle as a prisoner of war. A price will be set for her, there will be haggling, and then payment. The money will be found by the side that fought her.

And in the papers of the king she led to the crown, there is no counteroffer.

In this episode, you will learn:

∙ Why Reims cost Charles VII more than any military victory—and what exactly Joan managed to accomplish in the eleven weeks between Orleans and her coronation.

∙ What happened at the gates of Compiègne on the evening of May 23, 1430—and why the commandant's accusation of treason has remained unproven for six centuries.

∙ A document from July 14, 1430: six thousand francs, a life pension for one archer—and a custom previously applied to captured kings and princes.

∙ A letter that no longer exists. What the royal chancellor wrote to the citizens of Reims immediately after Joan's capture—and who he mentioned in that same letter.

∙ One line from a letter from the University of Paris that breaks the usual formula of "the king did nothing."

∙ An English document from January 3, 1431, stipulating in advance what to do if the ecclesiastical court did not condemn her.

∙ An archival act from the spring of 1431. A deal struck in the name of Charles VII around a completely different, famous prisoner—in the very weeks when Joan was being interrogated in a Rouen cell.

The fire is visible from afar, so everyone knows about it. Receipts, demands, and payment orders are completely invisible, and it is they that preserve what happened between the coronation and the Old Market of Rouen.

There is no "do not rescue" order in the archives, and we are not inventing it. There are other things: documents about whom the crown paid for during these years, whom it ransomed, whom it compensated for captivity—and a complete absence of such a document about the girl who won Reims for her. And twenty-five years later, her mother will come to plead on her behalf.

If you are interested not in a retelling of the hagiography, but in what actually happened between July 1429 and July 1456, you have an hour to do so.

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