Part One: Joan of Arc Was Even Cooler Than I Thought

Margaret talks with Molly Conger about two women who changed the course of history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, your
weekly podcast where I'm really excited about. This week is
gonna be so interesting. I've wanted to research this person
for so long. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I think
my job is fine. I don't have any particular I
love my job. It's so good. Okay, And my guest
today is Molly Conger.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hi, Hi, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to
hear about a cool guy.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I know, well it's not gonna be a guy. But Mollie,
as everyone knows, is just jealous because she doesn't have
her own Cool Zone Media show.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
So jealous. Yeah, it's eating me up inside.

Speaker 4 (00:39):
Oh wait, yeah, we gave you one of those, didn't
we What what?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah? No way, I scripted this bit. It would have
come off more naturally if I had scripted it.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Wait, Mollie, are you our newest weekly show host. I'm
so excited for you guys to hear about kind of
the opposite of this show, I guess is weird guys
who did really bad stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
Yeah, Molly's show is called Weird Little Guys and it's
out now and it's a weekly show on your podcast.
Feeds all of them.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
What day of the week is it?

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Thir's six?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Cool. It's good because I listen to a lot of
podcasts because I walk my dog every day and I
do a lot of like physical stuff around the land
I live on, you know, And by the end of
the weekend, I'm usually out of cool soun media podcasts
and I'm forced to listen to lesser podcasts. Oh wow, and.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
I have one more hour at the end of the week.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I know. It's a little treat just for me. So
today's Hero when I'm just gonna use Hero. I don't
like feminizing. Hero isn't a weird little guy, but is
a weird little girl slash woman, depending on where in
the story you come in. Because oh, I forgot the

(01:56):
rest of the credits. The other voice you've heard is Sophie.
I just got so excited abou who we're going to talk?
But Hi, Sophie, it's a good topic.

Speaker 4 (02:02):
I'm very excited about this. Hi, Hi Magpie, Hi Mollie. Oh,
we're just hanging's got the girls together.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
On the zoom on the zoom I know, and as
always our audio engineers, Rory. Everyone say hi to Rory.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Rory Hi Ror Hi Rory. Our theme music was written
for us by Unwoman. This week, we are going to
go back further in time than we've ever gone back
in time besides the episode where we talked about how
humans tamed dogs.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
That's yeah, well that rocks.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
That was like thirty thousand years. But we're going back
to the fourteen hundreds. We're going to a country called France.
I've heard of this country.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Ooh.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
We're going to talk about a soldier, a badass soldier
who winds up deservedly, it turns out, taking a lot
of credit for saving France from an English invasion. She
was driven by visions from God and then she was
burned at the stake.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Oh I know her.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
I know she's the most famous female soldier in history.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Unless they did it more than once.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
It's Joan of Arc.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Okay, yeah, no, we're good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, I was like, I don't think I said saint
part yet. I think and I've like looked this up
a couple times. It seems like it couldn't be true
because the Catholics like burning people, right, But I think
this is the only Catholic saint who was burned to
death by the Catholic Church, which is part of why
I took more than four hundred years, very close to
five hundred years for the Catholic Church to get around
to making her a saint.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
They don't like to admit they made a mistake.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
No, but you know, five hundred years later I could
see why maybe that wasn't the move. You know, Molly,
what have you heard about our girl?

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Joan of arc Joan? Okay, A little bit of a
strange one. A little bit of a strange one. I mean,
I guess anybody getting visions from God is a little unusual. Yeah,
but yeah, good at battle? I mean, I guess it's
easy to be good at war if God is giving
you the cheat codes, right, Yes, and no.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
We're gonna talk about which codes that God gave her
and didn't.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Yeah, but it didn't end so good for her, Although
I guess I don't know, if you're really getting visions
from God, martyrdom isn't a tragedy for you, right.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
I know, although she's technically like even still now that
they've admitted all there, she's still not a martyr, right.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Oh, because she didn't die for her because she wasn't,
so I guess martyrdom is when you die persecuted for
your faith and they're not going to admit they were
doing the persecuting.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah. Interesting, Although there's like other loopholes, like there's this
there's always a loose I can't remember his name, but
I really like him. There's this man saint from World
War Two who died in a concentration camp and he's
considered a martyr of charity. They created a whole new
category for him because being killed for being Charitis and
hating Nazis is like not technically being killed for being Catholic,

(04:51):
but it's like functionally being killed for being Catholic, because
if you're like actually good Catholic, you theoretically are willing
to die fighting at fighting Nazis and believing in charity.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah, you were doing what Jesus wanted you to do.
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
But now Joan of Arc didn't get martyrs. Everyone treats
her as a martyr.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Is she the patron Saint of France?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
I believe so, And she's definitely the patron saint of
soldiers and the city of Orleon, But yeah, I think
she's patron Saint of France. I wasn't sure I was
gonna do a Joan of Arc episode. This has been
on my list, my big list of maybes forever, right,
because I didn't know that much about Joan of Arc
coming into it. I was like, Oh, lady soldier burned

(05:32):
at the stake had visions. That's kind of all I had.
And when I first would hear most of the modern retellings,
it's sort of just kind of like, oh, no, this
is girl and she was in the right place at
the right time or whatever, and it kind of strips
her agency away. And once you dig into the story,

(05:53):
she is a badass.

Speaker 3 (05:54):
I guess you gotta be pretty tenacious to get up
in there and make people believe you.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, Like she went through the hell and back to
try and get people to believe her, And she's a
hard sell for me, right, because, like, the big thing
she did is that she's kind of the reason there's
a country called France.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Like not a point in her favor.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
I know, I don't really give a shit about France
now it would have just been conquered by the English.
Do I even less give a shit about you? But
I don't care much about the nationalism of Western imperialist countries, right.
I also don't care about royal drama. I'm not a
big fan of monarchy. The fact that she put the
true Air on the throne doesn't do it for me.

(06:35):
But the questions of gender and power and magic that
she brings up are really interesting to me, and so
that was why I was going with at the beginning
of this. And then I would just like read about
like battle after battle. There's also just something where you're like, well,
you're such a fucking badass. It's cool anyway, you know.
A couple of years ago, I did an episode about

(06:59):
a rather common medieval divorce practice before divorce was legalized,
which was called poison your husband and now you're not
married anymore.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Oh, the classic divorce.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, exactly the divorce that Christian nationalists are burreling themselves
right back towards by trying to get rid of divorce.
And the thing that I discovered while researching those episodes
that surprised me the most was that things that I
had sort of imagined were made up turned out to
be very real. About the Middle Ages, there was this

(07:30):
magical underground in medieval European cities that was made up
of like astrologers and alchemists who would set up shop
and sell everything from abortion to husband murder to fortune telling.
And you would have like Catholic priests who were selling
love potions on the side made from oil dripped over
the corpses of saints. And some of those same priests
were like doing black masses at night with women as altars.

(07:54):
But I don't think they were killing the women. And
just like weird sex stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
I mean, there's a reason so much which of this
medieval magic is sort of inverted Catholic, right, And it's
because it was Catholic priests doing it. They're the ones
who could read that.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Yeah, And like I think the line between medieval Catholicism
and like witchcrafton paganism is like a meaningless line. It
obviously is a strong political and legal framework built around it,
but like you're just describing the same shit and some
of the people are allowed to do it. And actually,
none of these priests are allowed to be doing these
black masses and stuff, right, They're not supposed to be

(08:29):
doing that. No, no, yeah, big, big big no no.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
No.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
A lot of I'm get in trouble for that one.
But poor middle class and aristocratic women alike would go
to these fortune tellers because women were a permanent underclass. Obviously,
rich women and the nobility and shit had far more power,
but they still, even to exert the power that they
should theoretically have, they relied on magic. And it's a

(08:54):
pattern that once I started noticing it, I see it
more and more. And so the story of Joan of
Arc isn't just the story of one woman whose visions
gave her access to military command. It's also the story
of a second woman, the King's mother in law, who
had to work behind the scenes to wield visions and
magic in order to get her cowardly son like King

(09:16):
charge person son in law.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
Little boy boy King.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Yeah, to put his back into the fight. She had
to rely on magic to do it.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
So she's Nancy Reagan and the astrologer.

Speaker 5 (09:29):
Yes, I even vaguely get that one.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
I love when Joan comes up without it making sense,
but it makes sense because Joni is everywhere.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Things don't change.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Oh, my god, is her name Joan? Her name is
Joan whoa And so so there's this, right, there's this
magical element. It also helps the story that Joan of
Arc was a total fucking badass would wade into battle
with lance and sword, taking arrows to the chest while
still fighting. I had like thought maybe like they like
brought her out as like a hey, look we have

(10:01):
a weird saint to be you know, we brought a mascot. Yeah,
I genuinely like early on, as I was doing this research,
I was like, oh, a mascot. That is like the
word that I was thinking of. No, not a mascot
unless the mascot was Also, I don't know the parts
of football full back, the quarterback, running quarter One.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Of us knows a football guy for.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
Sure, running back.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
I'm actually a little bit lying. I've ghost written two
romance novels about sports, and I had to like learn
so much about football and baseball in order to go
straight these fucking heterosexual romance novels. I know the average
height of an NFL player. It's five foot ten, shorter
than I expected.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Really, that is littler than I thought.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah, the publisher made me change it. The publisher was like,
I want our character to be like an average NFL player,
And I was like, okay, And I looked it up
and it made him five foot ten. And the publisher
was like, no, we can't have a love interest just
less than six feet tall.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
We're selling a fantasy here, Margaret. Yeah, that's so funny.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Anyway, Joan of Arc absolute badass, turned a like fucking
losing war around, drove out English invaders and forever changed
the course of history for better and worse. So Joan
of Arc, your sixteenth minute starts. Now that's my wow,
that's my sixteenth minute of fame.

Speaker 3 (11:28):
Jokes.

Speaker 4 (11:28):
It's very disorienting, thank you.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
I mean, she really was the character of the day, absolutely,
and they got bored of her and tired of our
justice fucking fast.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
God, things don't change. We've always been this way.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, it's the same people, but at different times and
with more more visions. People were more open about the visions,
I would say.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
And we didn't burn Bean down at the stake.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
No, we didn't. Although there's still time. We're going to
start this story chronologically before we've to get to being
Dad and then burn him at the stake. We're going
to start it before Joan of Arc was born. We're
gonna start it with a woman who is incredibly powerful
in her time, but like many women, has been largely
ignored by history. Her name is Yolanda of Aragon. And

(12:14):
now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, isn't Aragon
the rightful King of Gondor from Tolkien's Lord of the
Rings And the answer is close, that's Aragorn. Aragon is
a region in Spain. Probably more people knew it was
a region in Spain than thought of Aragorn, but I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
I mean maybe more people generally, but in terms of
listeners of this show, hard to say.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Fair enough no that listeners of the show would know
that Ara Gorn as an r well too are whatever. Anyway,
Aragon was not a region in Spain. The funny thing
that's like when you talk about the fourteen hundreds and
you're like, oh, Spain, Italy, France, Like, we only talk
about those countries because those are the ones that are
still around. Aragon was not in Spain. Aragon was his

(12:58):
own world spanning empire that stretched across like by being
Queen of Aragon, Yolanda of Aragon was also the Queen
of Sicily, which in this case meant the entire southern
half of Italy, which is not a concept. People aren't
Italian at this point right, and ostensibly of Jerusalem. In
case you need any more reminders that the royalty of

(13:18):
medieval Europe was transnational as fuck, and modern conceptions of
nation don't really map easily onto the past, and that
rich people are fucking weird. Because she lives in France, well,
by the end of the story, she lives in France.
She's one of the most gifted statesmen the world has
ever produced, near as I can tell. She is a
master of diplomacy in military matters, despite her self never

(13:40):
holding power. She's not a queen regnant, right, She's a
married to a guy. She was born in Barcelona on
August eleventh, thirteen eighty one. Her father was the heir
to Aragon. Her grandfather was the military guy who'd done
all that conquering under the name of Aragon. Her mother
was a friend woman, And to make this story really

(14:02):
fun and confusing, her name was also Yolanda, spelled the
same Yolanda of Aragon. The daughter was her parents only
surviving child out of eight. Oh that's rough, yeah, like
nobility won't save you from dysentery.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
That's a twelve percent batting average.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
That's not good, no, no, And it's funny because like
usually I do stories, in like the eighteenth nineteenth century,
and so everyone dies with tuberculosis. A lot of people
are gonna die of dysentery today.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
That's a rough way to go, you know, especially because
they hadn't invented toilets.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
I'm just gonna shit myself to death quietly, and then
Shakespeare write a play about me.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
I don't think it was quiet.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah, that's true. When her father won which is actually
spelled Joan the same as but it's anyway, when one
became the king of Aragon, he wanted the play I
used to become the cultural center of Europe, specifically the
center of the art of the troubadour no One at
the time as and I love this the gay science,

(15:11):
like fuck a king, but instead of tourneys with joustin knights,
he put on poetry competitions for the same like high
stakes and rewards like priceless jewels and shit.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
What a nerd.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
I know, I kind of like him, and he also
like just sucks and everything, and like the women in
his life take care of everything, but not just like
take care of him, but like run the kingdom.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
And shit like that, right, because he's busy with his
poetry contests.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, and being like not particularly good at battle and stuff.
You know, to be fair, I'm certain he's better at
battle than I am.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
I mean if we get to use okay anyway, So
Yolanda grew up obsessed with books in literature and kept
a massive library because she's also a nerd, and she
had a lot of theological tomes, which was honestly the
medieval equivalent of philosophy. And she saw the world as
a magical place full of signs, and she interwove parable
in fiction with real life, like, for example, like one

(16:08):
time she's out hunting, right, because actually it turns out
women hunted too. Sorry. Victorian ideas of everything we think
we know about the Middle Ages is because of the
fucking Victorians. They like came up with like renfars and
like imagined a weird Victorian world of like they like
reversed all of their annoying social norms back on like
the fourteen hundreds, Which is not to say the fourteen

(16:29):
hundreds were like good or a like nice time to
be alive or a woman, but it's not what the
Victorian's claim, and so it's not like what we usually
presume anyway.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
Yeah, the fanfit was not correct.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah, exactly. She's out there hunting because she can, because
she likes hunting and wants to kill things and eat them.
But the dogs scare a rabbit out of a bush,
and the rabbit jumps up in her lap, and I think, like,
while she's on a horse, which is pretty impressive, rabbit
that's a jump. Yeah, And so she calls off the
dogs and she's like, I have a cute rabbit. This

(17:03):
is as cool. And they go and look in the
bush that the rabbit came out of, and they all
find a stone, and on the stone there appears to
be a marking. I assume it's just like wet in
a certain pattern, you know, like kind of like a
Jesus on the toast kind of thing, you know. And
they find a marking that looks so much like Mother
Mary holding baby Jesus, just as she was holding the rabbit.

(17:26):
So they built a shrine on the site.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
Fair enough.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
One story in particular was important to her, and it
was this sort of politicizing of an old fairy tale
called the Tale of the Melosine, which is about a
half fairy woman who was sent by God and I
thought about making this a four parter and now subjecting
you to that entire story, but then I didn't. There's
like a half snake lady and if you look at

(17:54):
her while she's changing, she'll leave you. And it's actually
very common thing. There's like a Russian folk tale that
I read recently and has the same Anyway, this part
is important to understand that she's into all this stuff
because later she's going to make use of signs and
portents for political and military conflict and succeed at it.
But there's no reason to doubt that even as I

(18:16):
think she's making up like prophecies and then attributing them
to someone else, she's still not necessarily doing it cynically,
Like I think she believes the stuff that she's talking about.
And that part is just interesting to me because a
lot of I think we're all bad at looking at

(18:36):
the Middle Ages of anywhere in the world because we
keep trying to look at it. It's like, yes, we're
all the same people back then, but we lived in
like a different sense of reality.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
You know, magic was more real.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Yeah, you know, people being like oh yeah, that rock
totally yep, And that's a good place for a shrine,
and then if the shne works out, then you're like, hell, yeah,
you know, we don't have any weird poor tents that
came and change the way that we think. Instead, we
have ads.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
I mean people still make pilgrimages to a lot of
those shrines. I mean they're still there. There's still very
best in people's lives.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yeah, I would totally go to them. But we do
have ads.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Oh we're going to an ad. That's what's happening now.

Speaker 5 (19:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we're going to ads now. Yeah, ed,
we're back. And if you believe in gambling, like those
ads might have told you.

Speaker 3 (19:36):
Wow, gamblers love signs too. Gamblers are always looking for
a sign.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
I know.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
And it's like understandable. I'm not trying to shit on
people who make either of these types of decisions. But yeah,
so her mom, Queen Yolande, not to be confused with
our secondary main character, Queen Ulande Land. Yeah, yeah, Yolanda junior.

Speaker 3 (19:59):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yolanda senior did more work of ruling than her husband did,
who is probably epileptic and was much more concerned with
poetry than administration. So young Yolande Yulandi Junior learned early
on how women can rule from behind the throne. And
now we won't mention her mom again. So if I
say Yulande, I only mean Junior.

Speaker 3 (20:21):
Turned into a Disney movie real quick. No Mom, the
mom is gone gone. Yeah, sorry mom, never to be
mentioned again.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah, not definitely, not around. Oh god, So young Yolande
existed politically pretty much as just get married off. So
she was married off when she was like six. She
wasn't married when she was six. When she was like six,
she was betrothed to the ten year old king of Sicily,
who was French. Because national borders have always been about
controlling the movement of poor people and not rich people.

(20:52):
They get married once they're both adults. There's so much
back and forth here that I'm not going to subject
you to. One of my least favorite things is the
doings of nobility by adults.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
You mean like twelve.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
No, actually she's nineteen, so he's like twenty four. She's
a fucking old maid. She's Yolande's senior by that time.

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Not. Actually she doesn't have kids. She's gonna end up
with kids anyway. By all accounts. She actually starts off Okay,
I said I wasn't gonna do it, back and forth.
She actually starts off being like, fuck this guy, I'm
not gonna marry him, and I'm gonna like exert some autonomy,
and that was kind of I think, just testing to
prove that she could. But in the end she loves
him and they are a love match for each other,

(21:33):
or they at least like each other a lot, and
she's now one of the richest motherfuckers in Europe. She
heads off to like whichever of her like million castles
she feels like hanging out at at a given time,
mostly in central France, because the king of Sicily doesn't
actually control Sicily because of the weird shit. Her fashion
is so decadent that priests give sermons complaining about earthly

(21:56):
vanity everywhere that she goes, and the husband is always
away trying to retake his kingdom, and so she's ruling
a decent chunk of France in his absence. Now I
run into even more of a problem. I love the
Middle Ages, helmets, swords, armor, weird theology, fairy tales, dresses,
peasant uprisings. Don't love dysentery, but it's interesting. But I

(22:20):
fucking hate nobility. I hate them politically. I also hate
them as a history writer. I don't give a shit
about so and so married so and so, and then
I had a third distant claim on the kingdom or whatever.
But we're gonna have to do some of it in
order to understand Jon of Arc and it kind of
works out because there's a guy called the Mad King.
So this gets Game of Thrones. Y.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yeah, I was gonna say Game of Thrones.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Honestly, both Tolkien and Martin, I think took a lot
from the One hundred Year War, which is what all
of this is going to take place during. One thing
you have to know is that there's this guy named
King Charles the sixth. He is the King of As
with that nice classic French name Charles, and he's not

(23:05):
living in the same reality as everyone else, which is
saying something like he he's the mad King. He's he
would almost certainly by modern sense, be schizophrenic.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
Right, Is he the one that had the horrible shaped head?
One of the Charles has had a very bad shaped head.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Oh, I don't know. They all have big noses, is
the only thing that I know about how they look.
Both him and his son are like notable for their noses.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
And it's like if your official portrait as the king,
you look kind of messed up. You know, that boy
looked terrible, you know, look awful.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, that's true. One time he went into a psychotic
state and killed five of his own men while they
were I think out hunting. He just like, ah, like
sorted killing guys, you know, And then they had to
like restrain him, and he would spend his time wandering
around saying he wasn't king, and his name was George,
and he was made of glass and if anyone touched

(23:59):
him he'd shatter.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Right, he hit the glass delusion.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, old glass man, incredible and like, you know what, overall,
thinking you're not king probably better than thinking you're king.
One of the better delusions. Yeah, he was fairly beloved.
He didn't get the nickname the mad until later when
they were talking, like after he was dead.

Speaker 3 (24:22):
So I guess he only accidentally killed a bunch of
guys just the once. If people actually liked him.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
Everyone who wasn't Jewish, Okay, it took me a while
because everyone was like, oh everyone who was belove blah
blah blah. And then when I was like following like
the eighth rabbit hole, down the eighth rabbit hole. And
I think I was even like how antisemitic were these motherfuckers?
I can't remember exactly, but I was like I went looking.
He kicked all the Jews out of France.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
Not great.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
This is like one of like three times that's happened.
So he sucks. But I bet he didn't do it
while he thought he was George.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
George wouldn't have done that.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
I know. George is just a nice man made out
of clafe us. His wife is a beau from the
backwater of Bavaria, was an essence the queen regnant like
it was like her and the king's uncles like fighting
it out for power while King Charles was busy locked
up raving and they start arguing. Soon enough they're arguing

(25:21):
with like spears and shit, which is to say, there's
a civil war. France was already in a war, one
hundred year war, which they call that instead of the
less catchy one hundred and sixteen year, four month, three
week and four day war.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, they're not counting the breaks they took.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
They did dig a lot of breaks, which makes sense
because it's really hard to fight a war for one
hundred and sixteen years straight.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
And you have to walk to war back then, so
it just took longer.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Oh my god, you really did. Like some people got horses,
but they had to go at walking pace.

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Because most people were just walking there. I think about
them all the time we're watching Game of Thrones. It's
like like the battle maybe lasts days and days and
it's horrible and everyone has festering wounds. But like you
walked there for like six weeks.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, just robbing everyone as you go and being like,
don't worry. The state is what protects you from banditry.
Now give me all of your food and I'm going
to kill you, not.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Or just and sand Yeah, we at least you won't
need the food.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Then that's true. It's a good point, you know, saving
the country side. They're traveling around, saving the countryside from starving,
is what they're doing. So now France has a civil
war on top of a hundred year war. And this
is the annoying name of the Armagnac Burgundian Civil War,
which is only annoying to me because I don't like
pronouncing French names too many syllables.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Is Armagnac, the name of that like fake liquor that
one of the guys on the Sopranos got tricked into
investing in. Probably what am I thinking.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Of the way I remembered how to pronounce this word
is that it kind of ends in cognac or rhymes
with whatever. The House of Orleans are the Armagnacs, and
the House of Burgundy are the Burgundians. It was a
war between two of the king's other brothers, but it
was also about political and economic systems and shit. The

(27:16):
Armagnacs were pro French culturally, and they were like, yay,
we like God, agriculture and feudalism, the.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
Three pillars of society.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
But the Burgundians were pro English or English culture, and
we're like, we like pastoralism and sheep and artisans and
middle classes and cities. And it's interesting because like those
don't have to line up, you know how like modern
politics is like sometimes you'll meet people who have just
like grab bag politics, you know, like modern tankies right
where they're like, oh, we like fucking this dictator and

(27:50):
hate this other dictator, and we like support both Russia
and Palestine. You know, it's like random ass fucking politics.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
The average American has completely incoherent politics.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
That's how I feel about this too, right, because like,
pastoralism and sheep are not how you build a strong city.
Like agriculture, the sheep can't even live in the city. No,
agriculture is how you build big cities. But whatever. The
Burgundians are usually painted as the villain in this story,
and they definitely started this war by having the Duke

(28:22):
of Orleans assassinated in the streets, and then their like
defense about like did you kill that man, was yes,
we killed him. He was a tyrant at least an
honest yeah, fair enough. The Burgundians are not necessarily any better.
They had like a populist vibe to them, but as
we're all learning right now, that does not mean actual

(28:44):
class loyalty to the working class. They have like a
kind of like a fuck the nobles thing, but they
themselves are all nobility too, And.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
It's not like they're trying to abolish the monarchy.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
No, they want a different, different ruler of it. And and
they I mean, you know, on some level they're like, well,
we want Burgundy to be a separate thing from France,
And soon enough they're siding with the British, and no
one likes people who side with a foreign invasion, and
they like totally do anti populas shit too. I spent
a long time trying to be like, wait a second,
or the Burgundians the good guys here, And the answer

(29:16):
is no, there's no good.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Guys, no good guys trying to become king.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
No, just really doesn't happen. Sorry, Aragorn, you're a fantasy character.
So Yolanda, the lady whose story we're gonna follow through
all this, Her and her husband are on the Armagnac side,
and their daughter Marie is going to marry the dolphin,
Daulphin Dolphin. I'm gonna call them the dolphin because dolphin. Yeah,

(29:43):
it's the fancy French word for crown prince. And if
it sounds like dolphin to you one, it's because I
just called it dolphin because I'm bad at pronouncing French dauphin.
The defont is. It's not a coincidence. Did you know this?
Have you heard of this? The default thing?

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Wait? So it's etymologically related to dolphins.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
What us the word for dolphin? Because some guy with
a dolphin on his coat of arms a long ass
time before had made a deal with a French king
in exchange for having the word for crown prince become dolphin.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Oh so the arrangement was explicitly about the word. Yeah,
that's a man with vision. That's a man with vision.
I know he like sold either his title or his manner.
I had a hard time figuring it out because I
didn't want to get too lost in the sidetrack, you know.
And in exchange for hundreds of years, the royal heir
was named the Dolphin, okay, which is like respect Middle

(30:37):
Ages for being fucking weird.

Speaker 1 (30:39):
You know.

Speaker 3 (30:39):
He's not asking for jewels or lands. He's like, no,
I want everyone to have to say this dumb thing
that makes them think of me.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
I think he got paid too, but like he like,
I think he was like giving up titles in land
or something. I think he kind of like got eminent domained,
you know. But someone listening knows this really well, and
I'm not it. I'm not that person. So Marie marries Charles,
the sixth third son, Charles, who is not actually the

(31:07):
Dolphin yet. I'm just gonna say dolphin. But don't worry,
a lot of people are going to die in France
especially nobles, and so he'll get a chance, much like
he has a chance to take advantage of these sweet,
sweet deals if they buy a time machine and go
back in time and advertise to the dufall.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Alrightp Charles, you would have loved chumba casino?

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Absolutely, who doesn't?

Speaker 3 (31:39):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (31:41):
All right, you've got a hundred year war and you've
got a civil war. Why not have an invasion by
a Shakespeare character.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
I mean, you're already doing two wars. I think rule
of threes makes it funnier to have a third one.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, And to be fair, this is more back. It's
almost like the restarting the hundred years War is like
kind of on a break, you know. And then Henry
the Fifth is like, and this is smart of Henry
the Fifth. He's like, oh, they're in a civil war, Well,
that seems like a really good time to go fuck
them all up. And I've played enough risk. I know
that this is true.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
I mean, maybe he was just trying to help them
resolve their differences by realizing that they had a common enemy.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
That's true. That's true. If if he was in charge,
no one would be fighting with each other. That is
like the way that people defend the idea of the
modern state. They're like, well, you know, one guy's in charge,
so now we have peace. So he invades, and both
sides immediately are like, who can suck up to him
the fastest and most effectively and get the English on

(32:42):
their side. So once again there's no good guys in
this story. Both sides offer him royal marriages and shit,
and he doesn't take either because he looks at this
as a clear sign of weakness and is like, oh,
I could fucking take you both. You're both fucking just
rolling over before I even get there.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Of all you have is daughters, Like.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, fortunately a daughter of a non normal daughter of
France is going to kick his fucking ass. In August
fourteen fifteen, he and twelve thousand of his closest friends
land in France. They take the city of Harflee, which
you know, about half the things I looked up how
to pronounce, and then sometimes I forgot so Harflee and

(33:20):
he takes the city at great cost, dysentery fucks them
up worse than the enemy, and then you got one
of the most fun battles in all medieval history. Have
you ever heard of the Great historic Battle of Agincore.

Speaker 3 (33:36):
My high school history teacher says that I should say, yes.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Okay, great, then you already know it, so we'll just
skip over it.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
No no, no, no for the listener, for the listener.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally totally. I actually I knew about
this battle, but I wouldn't have remembered his name. Like
names come in and out of my head within like
next week, I won't remember the name of this battle.
This is a slaughter. Henry the Fifth has nine hundred
knights and five thousand long bowmen, and the French didn't

(34:06):
really fuck around with longbows. It's like an English cultural thing, right,
the French are hunting with crossbows.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
When this was kind of the time period where they're
still sort of working out which one is better, right,
Like these are sort of newer technologies.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Yeah, and then, like my understanding, like the English longbow
is like a fucking thing. It is like you are
training your whole life to have the arms and chests
and shoulders to pull this thing back. It is an
incredibly powerful weapon that is incredibly specialized, and you need
like a culture built around it in order to make
use of it in battle. At least according to the

(34:42):
far too many hours of YouTube I've watched put on
by probably terrible people. I have seen so many videos
of can the English longbow penetrate a French breastplate?

Speaker 3 (34:53):
Well, at least we have the answers to these questions.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
We don't. This is the best part. It's because whoever
makes these videos is either siding with the longbow or
the armor, and you can tell ahead of time. It's
so annoying.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
We need a double blind study.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
I know, I know, but we certainly know what wins
five thousand longbowmen versus like kind of the entire French nobility.
The French did not fuck around with longbows. They hunted
a crossbows. They had the numbers. They had at least
fourteen thousand, easily twenty five thousand people coming up on
like six thousand, right, six to ten thousand French soldiers died,

(35:32):
most of them knights aka the nobility. It's possible way
more than that number of French people died because they
literally didn't count the non noble dead.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
I mean, at that point, how do you count any
of them? Like, how are you cleaning this up?

Speaker 2 (35:47):
I mean, these are the most in charge people in
the country. So like they're the only people that there's
like records about right now. They're all gone. The English
lost one hundred and twelve people, six hundred total people
if you include like man at arms and you know,
trash like that. And it's because the English just stood

(36:07):
there and shot arrows at nights stuck in a field
of mud.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
That's rough. I mean, I guess if you have the
longer range, if you're you know, ranged weaponry against ranged weaponry,
and yours go further.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Yeah, it's ranged weaponry versus knights on horseback.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
They didn't have a chance.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
No, they absolutely did not. And I wish it was
this easy to wipe out. If all the billionaires and
sons of billionaires formed an elite squad of soldiers, I
wouldn't be sad, That's all I'm gonna say, especially if
I get longbows and they only get swords. I don't know.
This is the like, don't fuck with longbow's battle. This
is like what's a nor okay, so like a webu

(36:50):
is Japan and norwbu's Norway. What's the like generic Western
Europe Middle Ages boo ingle boo. Well, I don't like
the sound of that, no one should.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
Are there people who are sort of just that have
that sort of waboo fascination with Anglo Saxons.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
Yeah, I've seen a lot of their videos and it's
a terrible shame because I really like medieval weapons. But anyway,
this battle, it just fucks everything up.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
We just don't send our rich boys to war like
we used to, I know.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
And it's actually just like the one defense you can
make of feudalism is it was like the peasantry isn't
going to war at this point, like by and large,
I mean, they're getting murdered in the war by both
sides who are just bandits arning around killing them and
taking all their stuff.

Speaker 3 (37:40):
But they didn't have to walk there.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
I know, they could just stay and die at home.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
Our lords used to actually get out there and try it.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Yeah, yeah, totally. Meanwhile, the heir to the throne of
France dies of dysentery, the next heir dies of an
ear infection, and so young Charles, he's like fourteen years old,
is suddenly the daufont.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
So he was third, he was third, and now he's first. Yep.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
And he does not live with his parents. He lives
with his bride to be's family, because he's a total
mama's boy, but not to his mom, but to Yolande,
who actually pays attention to him his mom by all accounts,
although she's like the villain and the story, so everyone
says she sucks, but it sounds like she sucks, right.
Where's Yolanda who's actually paid attention to him and been

(38:29):
nice and has been raising him ever since he was
betrothed to her daughter Marie, So he's living over with
mom in law. Charles the Seventh's actual mom at this
point is a boom has gone traitor. Henry the fifth
is back, and the Burgundian faction has switched sides to
supporting the English invasion, and the Queen non regnant has

(38:51):
switched sides to supporting the Burgundians, so she's now supporting
the English invasion. And since her husband is usually locked
up somewhere believing he was the king, the Defont is
now kind of the ruler of France, but so is
the wife, and so are all these other factions, and like,
no one really knows who's in charge.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
They didn't have a twenty fifth Amendment, they didn't have
a plan for this.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
No no. They were like, hey, step down, and he
was like, I can totally do it. Let me just
debate the Henry the fifth. It's gonna be totally fine.
And then he was like, I'm made of glass, give
me some ice cream. But since Dad was still technically king,
whenever he like wasn't locked up, he would do things
be like aha, I'm not crazy, Let's go off and

(39:35):
do this incredibly bad idea military excursion that has no
strategic value and get everyone killed. So it like wasn't
good for France. Henry the fifth has reinvaded and just
fucking things up, just wrecking the place. Yolanda is trying
desperately to end the civil war, like is just trying
to get Hey, aren't we all not English? Can we

(39:55):
just fucking get along please and kick out the English?
But neither side will agree on terms. When the Burgundians
finally take Paris, the people of Paris are overjoyed and
riotous and do a lot of wealth redistribution. They're chanting
things like death, death, the town is ours, kill them all,
kill them all.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
Maybe it sounds fancier in French.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Yeah, sounds great. I don't know, I mean terrible. It
is terrible. We should redistribute the wealth.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
I mean, it doesn't rhyme.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
That's true, that's true. I like this chante because it
brings to mind one of my old favorite sayings. Every
now and then, the poor supposed to rise up and
kill all the rich people. It's the only good part
about being poor.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
I mean, it's like how forest fires are necessary for
certain seeds to.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
Germinate, right exactly, the tree of liberty, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
I hate to derailize as we're getting to the sacking
of Paris, but every time this quote comes up, I
have to say, the only time I've ever heard someone
say that, like in real life, in person, with sincerity,
about the tree of liberty, water with the blood of tyrants, this, that,
and the other. During the insurrection, there were no porter potties,
uh January sixth right that there was no opportunity to

(41:05):
use the restroom in a safe and clean way. But
there is a large bush on the Capitol lawn that
the bush, I think, hides like an electrical box, like
a big box where the electricity lives, you know, And
so the bush hides that. So that looks very fancy.
But on January sixth, it was a bathroom, and I
saw a man pissing in this bush. He was so

(41:27):
big that you could get inside of it. He's in
the bush and he's pissing, and he is getting a
little bit of pea on his shoes as he looks
around to make sure everyone hears him say this as
he's pissing, and he's saying, you know, the tree of
liberty is water with the blood of tyrants, like as
he's pissing on his own shoes.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Hell. Yeah, Also it means his urine is the blood
of tyrants. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
I don't think he quite got it.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, I loved because as soon as that insurrection happened,
and you know, right away the right wing was like
it was Antifa and like immediately or like no, there
would have been medics, there would have been like press contacts,
there would have been fucking poor to potties. We know
how to throw a riot, Like.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
There would not have been middle aged people rubbing raw
onions on their eyes.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
There's a homeopathic remedy for to your guests.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
Anyway, so we're sacking Paris, we're sacking parents.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
So they're sacking Paris and the Burgundians are no better.
It's out with the old boss, in with the new boss,
and the defam is whisked away from mob violence in
the middle of the night, and Paris has fallen. Sixteen
hundred Armagnacs are killed by the Burgundians in Paris during
the cleansing of Paris, which is a sketchy word for
a bad thing. The mad King he's still in Paris

(42:45):
because none of this affects him. He's like, oh, welcome back,
honey to his wife. Who comes, you know? Or he's
maybe like, I don't know. My name is George. Who
are you? What's going on? Right?

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Like George is not in danger here, He's just George.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah, why would anyone mess with George? Old George? What
a nice guy? What's you're Jewish? Which case he hates you?
You have to get out of the country. And after
the cleansing of Paris and Paris has fallen to the
English and the Burgundians, Yolando of Aragon is functionally in
charge of the Armagnac side of the war and of
protecting the Dufont. The Burgundians, including the Dufont's actual mom.

(43:20):
They're like, hey, give us our kid, the Dufont.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Oh, now you want your third son back now that
you realize he's valuable.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Basically, that's what Yolanda writes back, basically says no, and
we have the letter right because one of the cool
things is that, like a lot of times when I
talk about shit from like even one hundred years ago,
it's like, I don't know, this is what we think happened.
There's a lot of records of a lot of this
because they were writing a lot of this down. Yolanda
writes back and is like, no, you'll drive him mad

(43:49):
like his father or turn him English like you. So
if you want him, come and get him. Sick burn Yolanda,
I know. And it's funny because she's very like, come
and get him. But she is overall a peacemaker. She's
like pretty quickly follows us up with like you want
to talk terms, like what's going on? You know, like
how can we end this war? She's like genuinely a
really good statesman, Like she's good at this.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
But I think, like mom to mom, she was like
you didn't want this boy?

Speaker 2 (44:15):
Yeah, totally. The Burgundians cemented their alliance with England by
marrying someone to Henry the Fifth, declaring Henry the fifth,
the true heir of the mad king, which actually just
continues to prove that they don't give a shit about
young Charles the defont right. They're like, fine, you're out.
We have a new heir, Henry the Fifth is now
the heir.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
That's not how that works.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Not according to the hours I've spent playing Crusader Kings two,
the most annoying strategy game in the world, because you
can't send armies unless you marry your daughter off to someone.

Speaker 3 (44:46):
First, wait, whose daughter did they send him?

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Oh god, I had it written in the script and
them was like, I don't care someone's he marries someone.
And England and Burgundy now control the northern half of France,
and the Default controls the southern half, which is the
poorer half and not the capital I think, aka, not
the half you want to control of France. So the

(45:10):
Default he's like young, but he's like an adult now
and he's mad, so he tricks and kills the Duke
of Burgundy. He's like, hey, let's meet on a bridge
where no one can ambush each other and just talk
it out. Okay, we'll figure it out. Because the Duke
is like his uncle or some shit or a cousin
or whatever the fuck you.

Speaker 3 (45:25):
Know, they're all cousins for sure.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, and so he's like, ah, don't worry, no one
can ambu and then ambushes him and then kills the
Duke of Burgundy. And this does not make anything better.
So now both dukes of the original leaders of both
sides of the Civil War are dead, and it does
not end the war. However, this assassination means that what's

(45:48):
happening in real life matches the plot of that fairy
tale about the half snake lady I was telling you
about forty minutes ago. Okay, the fairy tale that Yolanda
liked had a displaced air who killed his own cousin
and then was wandering the forests of southern France.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
So now she thinks a prophecy is coming.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
If only a magical woman with visions from God would
come and rescue the Deafont, just like in the story.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
Oh so she's primed and ready.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
Yes, Also she believes this as far as I can tell,
there's no reason to believe she doesn't. But she's also
making it happen.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
But that's how magic works, right.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
I genuinely believe, So yes, yeah, so if only he
were to meet Joan of Arc to tie up some
political loose ends before we introduce our actual hero. Henry
the Fifth shits himself to death with dysentery in fourteen
twenty two. Rip Yeah, And a few months later, Mad
Charles the sixth dies after getting a cold while he's
out hunting. Or maybe he ate poisonous mushrooms. By mistake,

(46:58):
if you read like most things, I wasn't gonna go
read a book about the guy because he's not the
main character or the secondary character of the story, right,
But I read a lot about him anyway. I read
a lot of articles and shit, and most of the
articles are like and then he died, And I'm like,
when a king dies, you fucking say how. It's because
we don't know.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
I was like, even if they said how, it's like
they were just guessing, Like was it like Zachary Tyler.
They're like, oh, he died from eating a bowlful of cherries,
and it's like, no, he probably for sure did not.
That's probably not what happened. Wait, who's that one of
the presidents?

Speaker 2 (47:30):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Okay, Like he was having too many cherries and cold
milk and it gave him a bad tumming and he died,
was it? Tyler? But it's like that's probably not why.
I don't think that's a way that people died. Yeah,
so yeah, I mean they can say he died from whatever,
but they don't know. They're making that up.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
Yeah, maybe he was made out of glass and someone
touched him.

Speaker 3 (47:50):
I don't know, he shattered.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Yeah, one chat and one shattered.

Speaker 4 (47:54):
Zachary Taylor. Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president. Yeah, okay, cherries
himself through cherries.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
Yeah. I mean if I thought I was made of glass,
I would not get on a horse. No, you're kidding.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Meat. Well, maybe he turned to glass. Maybe he wasn't
in glass mode and then he like turned into glass mode.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
It says he died five days after eating cherries and
milk of like cholera and gi issues. I'm gonna say
it wasn't the cherries.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
Just super lactose intolerant.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
It was probably the fact that he just lived on
a swamp and they didn't have like sewage.

Speaker 4 (48:28):
Yeah, I'm gonna say because he was the twelfth president
of the United States and men just used to die.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
I mean, there's this whole thing that's fatal called being
born before antibiotics.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
You know, that's what I'm saying. People just used to die. Yeah,
people used to just have a lot of diarrhea.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Yeah. I can't wait. I mean, I'll be dead, but
I can't wait till a couple hundred years from now.
People say the same thing about like, oh man, the
twenty first century, I remember when people just die of cancer,
just like, yeah, some of their cells would do something
weird and then they'd all die. Like Jesus Christ, how
did anything get done? Well, that's one of my only
like hope for the future things, because I because whatever. Anyway,

(49:09):
So the throne of France goes to the infant Henry
the sixth, at least the like Paris side of it, right,
and the Daupont is now ostensibly the king of France,
but he has no power, he has no crown, and
he becomes Charles the seventh. And I'm gonna keep calling
them deaufall mostly in the script, I think, because this fun,

(49:30):
I know. And besides, like numbers are all the same
thing to me, Like six and seven are the same number.
So Charles the sixth and Charles the seventh are the
same person until you name them like the Glass King
and the child Dolphin. Now I'm like, oh, I know
who I'm talking about.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
Now I get it. Now I'm with you.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, this is part why I sucked at history in
high school.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
I mean, it's not our fault. They kept naming the
guys the same stuff.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
I know. I know, at least this time they actually
were like, he was born Charles, Charles the seventh was
born Charles, you know right.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
It wasn't like a regnal name, because like, it's hard
enough that I got to learn one name for a guy.
Now he's got three. I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
I know.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
It's like when your friends are like, hey, message me
on Instagram and I'm like, I can't remember you change
your Instagram handle once a week or your signal handle,
like it's an emoji. I'm not remembering emoji instead of
your name. That's not happening.

Speaker 3 (50:23):
No, I'm having whole conversations with people that I'm too
afraid to admit I don't know who you are.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
I know, or like you see your old friends and
then you're like hello their Instagram handle and they're like,
do you know my actual name? And I'm like I
used to, but there's only a room in my head
for one name for you.

Speaker 3 (50:40):
That's oupsec Margaret. If the police ask you, you can't
even tell them. I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
I'm just laying the groundwork now for the fact that
I have a terrible memory. I'm gonna be like interviewed
by that and I'll be like, you want to hear
about something from the fourteenth century, And they'll be like, no,
where were you three weeks ago? And I'm like, I
want to hear about something from the nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
I got a story for you about a dolphin king anyway,
Joan of Arc. Yeah, so we've got our baby dolphin king. Yeah,
and we're waiting for the prophecy to come to pass.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
Yep, We're waiting for the maid. Joan of Arc was
born in fourteen twelve, which means that she was three
years old when half of France's nobilities got stuck full
of arrows in the mud. She was a commoner. There's
no record of her birth. She was called Jeannette, she
told inquisitors later about her name. In my town they
called me Jeanette, and since I came to France, I
have been called Joan. As for my surname I know

(51:33):
of none.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
She's not from France.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
So this is the interesting thing, Right, I got really
annoyed because all of her quotes are constantly like and
then I went to France from where So she was
born in this town called dom Remi, which is on
the border between France, or rather English controlled France, like
Burgundy kind of, and then the Holy Roman Empire, which
is like also kind of doing a Burgundy thing. Right,

(51:57):
all of the control is really up in the air.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
So is this just more indicative of the fact that
like people didn't have that sort of national identity, like
they didn't really think of themselves as the people of France.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah, even though her town kind of did. But I
get the impression they saw themselves as like outliers. Like
it's like, I don't know, being on an island and
then going to the mainland kind of thing. Like dom
Remi was French but across the river sometimes considered it
the same town, but not is Burgundian. And at this

(52:29):
point in the Civil War, one half of the town
that she's from fucking hates the other half, or the
town across the river or whatever, and they're like they're
not armies but they're like leading raids back and forth
across the.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
It's a Springfield Shelbyville situation.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Yes, exactly. I do get that reference because I was
born and I was gonna say born in the nineties,
but that's not true at all. But I grew up
in the nineties and her region, I believe, was entirely
encircled by Burgundians. And so this is why I think
Joan referred to its going to France, is that they're
an island of France away from France kind of, but

(53:06):
it's definitely in France.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
Now.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
Jeannette was one of five kids. She had no formal education.
She never learned to read or write. She was smart
as fuck, she was charismatic as fuck, and she had
away with words, and she would not like me cussing
about her. And she was obnoxiously pious. Instead of plowing
the fields, she would head over the next town over
to go to the bigger church because they had a
nicer cathedral. Boys in the village regularly made fun of

(53:32):
her for her piety. Rude. I know. Meanwhile, the war
is going really really badly for the Daufall.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
Oh right, they're still doing the war.

Speaker 2 (53:44):
They are still doing the war. That's like, yeah, one
of his major allies has now swapped sides and he
lost fifteen thousand soldiers in one battle.

Speaker 3 (53:54):
You can't really do that very many times.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
No, he thinks he's done at that point. A run
out of guys, Yeah, he kind of does run out
of guys at that point. He's like a shell of
a you know, he's a young king, right, and the
first thing he does is get his entire army wiped
the fuck out in one go.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
That's so hard to replace. That's like a lot of
horses and nice outfits and stuff.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
I know, I know, right, And actually when basically most
of the replenishing of the armies that's going to happen
mostly has to do with people. Then, like swapping sides
back to his side. That's going to happen every now
and then, mostly because of Yolanda. So, Yolanda had been
away doing political shit that I whatever, and then she
came back and she started turning things not around, but
like stemming the tide, ending the string of failures. She

(54:41):
raised an army to defend her own castle and did
so defended her castle that they were trying to claim.
And then she did diplomacy to bring important people back
to the side of France, but still not looking good.
The Deaufant is doubting his own cause maybe God isn't
on his side after all. He's losing badly and quickly.

(55:03):
Even when he gather up a bunch of troops, he
wouldn't go on the offensive with them because he's like,
I don't know, I should stay where it's safe. I
give up kind of.

Speaker 3 (55:12):
He's got the yips, the what the yips?

Speaker 2 (55:15):
What's the yips?

Speaker 3 (55:16):
It's like a sports psychology term, right where you get
so in your own head that you can't do the
thing that you're good at. Yes, he doesn't want to
take a risk. He's good at nothing, but yes, well yeah,
you know, yeah, he's going to be named Dolphin, which
is also a very sports kind of thing to be. So,
Yolanda of Aragorn, of Aragon, that's the second time.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Oh there's gonna be more, I'm sure, Yolanda of Gondor, Yeah, totally.
She's like, how the fuck am I going to save
the free people of Middle Earth from the forces of Mortar. No,
they're all it's it's a horizontal battle that's entirely lateral.
Both sides are shitty or whatever, but we're you know,
you pick a side and then this story is shown whatever.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
Well, only one side is ordained by God.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
I heard, Oh that's true. Yeah, whichever side kills the
other one the most effectively. That's what Jesus always talked about,
Kill thy enemy. So Yolanda Aragorn is like, how the
fuck do I say, France? I want to turn shit around.
I need to give people, especially the Daufont hope. And
there was this famous woman seer, Marie of Avignon, who

(56:23):
was said to be able to predict the future. She
had written this book of predictions and people trusted her.
So a rumor started up that there was a new
prophecy from Marie, and this started spreading. This rumor coincidentally
started spreading from the areas where Yolanda was countess.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Is it a coincidence?

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Like, we genuinely don't know if Yolanda spread this prophecy.
But I read this really amazing book called The Maid
and the Queen by Nancy Gladstone. It presents this kind
of hypothesis that I find very convincing that sort of
fits a lot of the holes in the Joan of
Arc story by Yolanda in it. You know, Nancy has
this great quote historians, this great quote, but like, why

(57:04):
didn't anyone notice that Yolanda was doing it? Because she
is a woman. The best camouflage in history is to
not have a dick, like, you.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Know, nobody's looking for you, to be crafty.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Yeah, or like even connecting the dots, you know, you're
like even because people know that Yolanda was like a
powerful woman and stuff, right, but she was kind of
lost to history because she wasn't you have to be
like Joan of Arc level to be remembered as a
woman at this time, you know.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
I mean, I guess she's the only one we remember.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
Yeah, And so this prophecy spreads, and probably Yolanda started
this prophecy, but we don't know about a virgin woman
who would come from the borderlands to pick up arms
and free France from its enemies. And to quote this
historian Nancy Goldstone, in nearly every hamlet, town or village

(57:54):
in fifteenth century France there lived someone who claimed to
have visions, or who could interpret dream or who was
otherwise believed to have been somehow touched by God. These
were the likely targets of the prophecy, and it acted
upon them like a recruitment slogan, so that.

Speaker 3 (58:11):
They've just got like seers showing up being like, oh,
I heard about your I heard about your prophecy. I'm
here because it's it's me.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
And one of the things that's never in any of
the stories I've read about Joan of Arc except that
one book, and even then it was like only a sentence.
Twenty people showed up.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
I would like to know their stories, I know.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
And Jeannette without surname known to us now as Joan
of Arc, she had been having visions and we'll talk
about those visions and how she became a badass night
and killed a whole bunch of motherfuckers on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (58:46):
Oh my god, you're gonna make people wait two days
to find out.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
I know, even you, well now you have to wait
about five minutes. But yep, everyone's got to wait.

Speaker 4 (58:55):
God, ask for a spoiler.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Okay, what spoiler you want? Was she like I am
no man, no, no, but like she has more of
that energy than yeah, like I really people would really
kind of sold me on the like she was a
mascot thing, yeah, you know, or like sort of inconsequential

(59:21):
or got lucky once. She's fucking badass, and like France
exists because of this lady. I mean, you know, maybe
there'd be the world map would look different, not necessarily better,
not necessarily worse. Whatever. France is another fucking colonial power.
But who fucking knows the visions themselves? You can know

(59:43):
by waiting till Wednesday. But first people can hear about
Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
Yes, I am a podcaster now, much like Joan of
arc I have fulfilled the prophecy so true, so true.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Gross.

Speaker 3 (59:57):
Sorry, God, God's gonna smite me. He's gonna get me. No,
I have a new show on Cool Zoe Media. It's
called Weird Little Guys, and it's it's about guys who
did not do cool stuff at all, guys who did
stuff that sucked. It's a show about.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Monsters, fucking Burgundians.

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
Yeah, I'm not going that far in the past.

Speaker 2 (01:00:16):
It's okay because although.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
I don't know, maybe by the thirty orth or fortieth episode,
we'll be talking about fourteenth century fascists. Hell yeah, they
hadn't invented it yet, but we'll find one.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
I mean, that's how I like half my show is like,
especially in the near future, will be like, look, anarchism
didn't exist yet, but let me tell you about some
fourteenth century heretics were based Joan of arc.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
Isn't but like, but they have the vibe. They had
the vibe.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Yeah, yeah, we'll be talking about some people with some
good vibes. Yeah. I suspect that you will reach the
point where you go past your original expectations of scope.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Yeah, the scope creeps, I suppose, right, But for now, Yes,
you should go and subscribe to Weird Little Guys on
whatever podcast app makes you feel good.

Speaker 2 (01:00:59):
Hell yeah, I'm really excited about it, like genuinely. Also,
if people want to hear they're like, I don't know,
I have to make sure to hear Molly on other
shows first. Then there's an awful lot of it could
happen here that you can listen to with Molly on it.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
Yeah, I still host on it can happen here occasionally,
So yeah, you can acclimate yourself to my mallifluous voice.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
Yeah, just a word, I totally know. Why do I
not know that word? You think that this is the
kind of thing I would know I know about? Like
these and thousand. Shit.

Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
Yeah, it's like, oh, I don't know, I could. I
couldn't actually give you the actual word. Yeah no, but
it's like, you know, it's just sort of melodic and soothing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
Okay, okay, yeah, So if you got anything you want
to plug, no, we did it that well. I want
to say, if you like women with swords and spears,
I have a book coming out hell yeah, by a
woman with more axes and spears. She's kind of into
spears specifically, and it's called The Sapling Cage and it

(01:01:59):
is a fantasy book about a transwitch who fights with
a spear sometimes. And you can pre order it now
and get it in September. And if you preorder it
now from Firestorm co Op, which is a queer owned
bookstore in Nashville, North Carolina, but they sell it online,
you will get a signed copy because last week I
signed thousands of stickers book plates. Fancy order for stickers,

(01:02:22):
and you could have one of them yourself, and we'll
see you on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Foolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

Speaker 3 (01:02:43):
You get your podcasts.