Joan of Arc Retried, and a Comet Never Cursed

Joan of Arc was condemned as a relapsed heretic and burned at Rouen in 1431 by a court operating under English control. Her mother Isabelle Romee and her brothers petitioned Rome for a review, and in 1455 Callixtus III authorized an inquiry into the trial. The proceedings took evidence from more than a hundred witnesses across France, including men who had sat on the original court, and in July 1456 the verdict of 1431 was declared null on grounds of procedural fraud and irregularity. The nullification did not declare Joan a saint, a step that waited until 1920, but it removed the sentence of heresy that had stood over her name for a quarter of a century.

The other story attached to his reign is not true. Nineteenth century writers, following a loose reading of Bartolomeo Platina's papal history, circulated the claim that in June 1456 Callixtus excommunicated the comet now known as Halley's as an agent of the Turks. What the sources actually record are prayers and processions ordered against the Ottoman advance at a moment when a comet happened to be visible, and a papal bull of that content has never been produced.

The pontificate's longest consequence was neither of these. In 1456 Callixtus made his nephew Rodrigo Borgia a cardinal and, the following year, vice chancellor of the church. Rodrigo held that office for thirty-five years and was elected pope as Alexander VI in 1492, so the family fortune that made the Borgia name a byword for Renaissance papal corruption begins with an aged Valencian pope's ordinary preference for his own relatives.