Gilles de Rais: Saint, Soldier, Serial Killer

At 24, he was Marshal of France. At 36, he was hanged and burned in a meadow outside Nantes.

Between those two facts lies a story that medieval France could not explain and modern historians still argue about. Gilles de Rais rode beside Joan of Arc at Orléans, helped crown a king at Reims, and then, according to the trial records of 1440, retired to his castles and murdered at least 140 children over the course of eight years.

Or he didn’t. And the whole thing was a land grab by the Duke of Brittany, orchestrated through a compliant bishop who wanted jurisdiction over a nobleman too rich and too reckless to control.

Both readings have evidence. Neither has proof.

The Richest Orphan in France

Gilles was born in late 1404, probably at Champtocé-sur-Loire in Anjou. His father, Guy II de Montmorency-Laval, belonged to one of the oldest noble families in France. His mother, Marie de Craon, brought vast estates in Anjou, Poitou, and the barony of Rais in southern Brittany. Together, the holdings made Gilles one of the wealthiest heirs in the kingdom before he could read.

His parents were dead by the time he was eleven. Marie de Craon died first; the exact date is unrecorded but it was before her husband. Guy II followed in late October of the same year, 1415. Gilles’s grandfather, Jean de Craon, seized guardianship of both Gilles and his younger brother René, overriding the different guardians named in Guy’s will. Jean de Craon was ambitious and ruthless. Historians who have studied the family records agree: he taught his grandson that wealth and rank could override any rule.

On November 30, 1420, Jean de Craon signed the marriage contract that bound Gilles to Catherine de Thouars, heiress of Tiffauges and Pouzauges; the marriage itself proceeded soon after in a chapel ceremony without the proper banns. The initial union was declared invalid by the Church on grounds of consanguinity (they were fourth-degree relatives). After a papal process in April 1422, the marriage was validated and solemnized on June 26, 1422, at Chalonnes-sur-Loire. Some sources describe the original seizure as a rapt, an abduction or forced union. Whether Catherine was physically taken or pressured into a deal her family could not refuse is unclear. She bore one daughter, Marie, and largely vanishes from the historical record.

By the time Gilles entered the Hundred Years’ War around 1427, he commanded estates across four provinces and could field and fund his own army.

Orléans and the Maid

Gilles fought for the Dauphin Charles against the English and their Burgundian allies. He first saw serious action in Anjou and Maine in 1427-1428, defending the Loire region as the English pushed south.

In May 1429, he was at Orléans. The English had besieged the city since October 1428. A relief force arrived, and among its commanders were Gilles de Rais and a teenage girl from Domrémy who said God had sent her to save France.

Gilles fought at the assault on Saint-Loup (May 4), the attack on the Augustins fortress (May 6), and the decisive storming of Les Tourelles (May 7) that broke the siege. He was present alongside Joan of Arc at all three engagements. The Journal du siège d’Orléans, a near-contemporary chronicle, places them in the same military operations.

After Orléans, he fought in the Loire campaign: Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, Beaugency, and the crushing French victory at Patay on June 18, 1429. He marched with Joan to Reims for the coronation of Charles VII on July 17, 1429, where he was given a prominent ceremonial role.

At or around the coronation, Gilles was made Marshal of France. He was 24 or 25 years old. The title recognized his military service and his enormous financial contributions. He had been paying for troops and supplies out of his own pocket.

After the failed attack on Paris on September 8, 1429, where Joan was wounded, Gilles gradually withdrew from active campaigning. Joan was captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne on May 23, 1430, sold to the English, tried at Rouen, and burned on May 30, 1431.

A persistent legend claims Gilles attempted to rescue her. No primary source supports this. No letter, no financial record, no chronicle mentions such an attempt. The story belongs to the same 19th-century tradition that made them inseparable companions.

By 1432, the Marshal of France was living on his estates. The war continued without him.

The Downward Spiral

What happened next is where the verified record and the accusation begin to overlap.

Gilles spent extravagantly. He maintained a household of over two hundred retainers. He funded a private chapel with a choir of twenty-five to thirty boys and young men, dressed them in expensive vestments, and staged elaborate liturgical performances. He commissioned a full theatrical production of the Mystère du Siège d’Orléans, one of the largest dramatic spectacles of the medieval period.

He also turned to alchemy. As his fortune drained, Gilles sought to restore it by transmuting base metals into gold. Around 1438, his personal priest Eustache Blanchet travelled to Florence and recruited an Italian cleric named Francesco Prelati, who claimed he could summon a demon called Barron. Prelati directed rituals in which Gilles stepped into circles traced on the ground with a sword, holding signed notes offering the demon “whatever you want, except my soul and the curtailment of my life.”

The trial records document ten to twelve such rituals. The demon never appeared, and the gold never materialized.

Meanwhile, his family intervened. In July 1435, Gilles’s brother René and other relatives petitioned Charles VII, who issued an interdict forbidding Gilles from selling any more of his properties. The Duke of Brittany enforced the same prohibition within his jurisdiction. The richest nobleman in France was running out of money and running out of people willing to let him spend what remained.

The Accusation

In May 1440, Gilles made a catastrophic mistake. He seized a cleric named Jean Le Ferron at the castle of Saint-Étienne-de-Mer-Morte, threatening him with a guisarme, a long-handled polearm, and repossessed property he had previously sold. The seizure of a cleric violated ecclesiastical immunity. It gave Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, jurisdiction.

Malestroit moved fast. In July, he launched a pastoral investigation, gathering testimony from families near Gilles’s residences about missing children. On July 29, he released his findings, and the Duke of Brittany cooperated. Gilles was arrested in September 1440.

Two parallel trials opened at the Tour Neuve in Nantes:

The ecclesiastical trial, conducted by Bishop Malestroit and the Vicar of the Inquisition Jean Blouyn, charged Gilles with murder of children, sodomy, heresy through demon invocation, and violation of ecclesiastical immunity. The indictment of 49 articles, read on October 13, alleged 140 child victims.

The secular trial, conducted under Duke Jean V’s authority by Pierre de l’Hôpital, President of Brittany, charged him with murder and the kidnapping of Le Ferron. The secular records are incomplete; some were destroyed in a later fire.

Nineteen witnesses testified in the ecclesiastical trial. The key witnesses were Gilles’s own servants:

Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrillaut, called Poitou, described years of procuring children, the methods of killing, and the disposal of bodies. Their accounts corroborated each other and matched details in Gilles’s own confession. They were convicted and executed.

Francesco Prelati testified about the demon-summoning rituals, admitting he had performed necromantic ceremonies. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, not death. He later escaped and found refuge at the court of René of Anjou, where he committed new crimes (extortion and the imprisonment of Geoffroy Le Ferron). He was condemned by the Parlement of Paris for these offenses and burned at the stake in early 1446.

Perrine Martin, called La Meffraye, gave a prison confession describing how she lured children to Gilles’s residences. She is reported to have died in prison before reaching trial.

Two key accomplices, Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville, had fled before the arrest and were never caught.

The Confession

On October 21, 1440, Gilles de Rais confessed.

The trial record states the confession was voluntary. He had initially refused to recognize the court’s authority, calling the judges “simoniacs and ribauds.” He was threatened with excommunication. The prosecutor reminded him that torture had been authorized “to shed light and more thoroughly scrutinize the truth.”

The next day, without torture being physically applied (according to the record), Gilles broke down. He confessed in detail, weeping, and asked the audience to pray for him. He described the murders, admitted to sodomy, said he derived “sensual delight” from the killings, and stated he could not determine the exact number of victims. He blamed his crimes on the laxity of his upbringing.

He repeated the confession before the secular court.

Whether this confession was genuine remains the central question of the case. The threat of excommunication meant eternal damnation in the medieval worldview. The authorization of torture, even unapplied, constituted psychological coercion. The Templars had also “confessed voluntarily” under identical conditions a century earlier.

On the other hand, the confession’s emotional specificity went beyond the formulaic language of coerced admissions. Gilles described acts, locations, and sequences that his accomplices independently corroborated. Coerced confessions tend to be vague. This one was not.

The Meadow at Nantes

On October 26, 1440, Gilles de Rais was led to the Île de Biesse, a meadow beyond the Loire overlooking Nantes. At eleven o’clock, the fires were lit and he was hanged.

At his own request, his body was cut down before the flames consumed it. Four noblewomen claimed it for burial at the Church of Notre-Dame des Carmes in Nantes.

Henriet Griart and Étienne Corrillaut were executed beside him, by the same method. Their bodies were left in the fire.

The Marshal of France was 36 years old. He had gone from Joan of Arc’s battlefield to this meadow in eleven years.

Was He Framed?

The revisionist case is not frivolous. It rests on documented facts:

No physical evidence was presented at trial. No bodies. No bones. No murder weapons. No graves. The conviction rested entirely on testimony and confession.

Bishop Malestroit had ongoing jurisdictional disputes with Gilles. The Le Ferron incident gave him the opening he needed.

Duke Jean V stood to gain. After the conviction, several of Gilles’s former properties ended up in ducal hands or with ducal allies. Under Breton law, the Duke could not simply purchase vassals’ properties, but forfeiture after conviction bypassed this restriction.

The witnesses were servants testifying under threat of ecclesiastical sanction. Excommunication was not an abstract penalty. It meant exclusion from the sacraments, denial of Christian burial, and, in the medieval understanding, damnation.

Salomon Reinach, a respected archaeologist, argued the case between 1902 and 1912, comparing the trial to other ecclesiastical frame-ups: the Templars, Joan of Arc herself. Historian Jacques Heers of Paris-Sorbonne published a detailed study in 1994. Heers examined the trial critically but concluded Gilles was guilty; his objections targeted novelists and pseudo-historians who instrumentalized the case, not the verdict itself. In 1992, writer Gilbert Prouteau organized a symbolic retrial in a conference hall at the Luxembourg Palace, presided over by Judge Henri Juramy. The “court” acquitted Gilles.

The 1992 retrial had no legal authority. No medieval trial survives modern evidentiary standards. That applies to every conviction from the period. The acquittal proved that 15th-century courts were not 20th-century courts, which no one disputed.

The Catholic Church has never rehabilitated Gilles de Rais. The persistent claim that it has is false.

The Evidence on the Table

Modern medieval scholarship has largely settled on a position that satisfies neither side.

Matei Cazacu’s 2005 archival study accepts Gilles’s guilt while acknowledging the political exploitation of the case. Laurence de Looze and other recent scholars note that the trial documents, while problematic by modern standards, are unusually detailed for the period and contain internally consistent testimony. The “pure frame-up” theory remains a minority position in academia.

The strongest reading of the evidence: real crimes, politically motivated prosecution. Children did disappear near Gilles’s properties. Families did complain. Servants did describe specific acts that corroborated each other. But the number of 140 victims is almost certainly exaggerated. The timing of the prosecution served the interests of men who wanted Gilles’s land. And the procedural safeguards that might have separated truth from political convenience did not exist in 1440.

Gilles de Rais was either one of history’s first documented serial killers or one of its most elaborate judicial victims. The trial records survive in Latin in the departmental archives of Loire-Atlantique. The bodies were never found. The castles still stand. The question remains open.

The Testament of Solomon presents a king who commands demons and uses their power for construction, not destruction. Gilles tried the opposite: he sought demons for gold and, according to his accusers, fed them children. Whether that story is history or fabrication depends on which evidence you trust.

The evidence is on the table. You decide.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Trial transcripts of Gilles de Rais, ecclesiastical and civil proceedings, Nantes, September-October 1440 (Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique)
• Bossard, Eugène. Gilles de Rais, Maréchal de France, dit Barbe-Bleue (1404-1440), d’après les documents inédits. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1885 (revised 1886)
• Bataille, Georges. Le Procès de Gilles de Rais. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965 (English: The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson, Amok Press, 1991)
• Cazacu, Matei. Gilles de Rais. Paris: Tallandier, 2005
• Heers, Jacques. Gilles de Rais: Vérités et légendes. Paris: Perrin, 1994 (revisionist case for innocence)
• Reliquet, Philippe. Le Moyen Âge: Gilles de Rais, maréchal, monstre et martyr. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982
• Hyatte, Reginald, trans. Laughter for the Devil: The Trials of Gilles de Rais. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984
• Benedetti, Jean. Gilles de Rais: The Authentic Bluebeard. London: Peter Davies, 1971
• Wolf, Leonard. Bluebeard: The Life and Crimes of Gilles de Rais. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980
• Vincent, Catherine. Gilles de Rais ou la confusion des âmes. Paris: Payot, 2011
• Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Là-bas. Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1891
• Michelet, Jules. Histoire de France, vol. 5: Charles VII et Louis XI. Paris: Hachette, 1841
• Pernoud, Régine and Marie-Véronique Clin. Joan of Arc: Her Story. Trans. Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998
• Vale, Malcolm G. A. Charles VII. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974
• Contamine, Philippe. La Guerre de Cent Ans. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968
• Prelati, François (testimony). Confessions recorded in the trial proceedings of October 1440, transcribed in Bossard 1885 appendices
• Acta Sanctorum entries and Breton hagiographic traditions concerning the cult of Gilles de Rais at Nantes
• Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Crown, 1959