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NewBrightness t1_jbzmy9z wrote

Could Gilles de Rais’s killings have been influenced by the death of joan of arc?

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jezreelite t1_jc08it5 wrote

Probably not: a biographical essay of Gilles in The Hundred Years War Part III: Further Considerations mentions that his parents died in a gruesome hunting accident that he may have witnessed and that at 16, he kidnapped and forcibly married his cousin, Catherine de Thouars, with the connivance of his maternal grandfather and guardian, Jean de Craon. Jean and Gilles later attempted to kidnap and then threatened Catherine's mother, Beatrice de Montjean, who had decided to remarry, as they feared that her new marriage would cause the loss of some Thouars lands. Years later (possibly at the behest of Georges de La Trémoille), they successfully kidnapped Charles VII's mother-in-law, Yolanda of Aragon.

Later, in 1427 (two years before the appearance of Jeanne), Gilles already liked to watch the executions of pro-English French nobles who had been taken prisoner.

>Interestingly, the defeated English were usually allowed to escape with their lives; by contrast, if an anglophile Frenchman fell into Gilles’s hands was invariably executed as a traitor. One historian describes Gilles’ treatment of such men: He would have them all hung from tall poles that were driven into the ground … Gilles would then stay to watch them fitfully kick, their necks in the noose, until the last spasms of their agony.

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AngryBlitzcrankMain t1_jbzs5bn wrote

Its hard to say if they happened at all, let alone what they might have been potentionally influenced by.

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