Saint Joan of Arc

Joan was born around 1412 to a peasant farming family in Domrémy, a village in northeastern France. As a teenager, she reported receiving visions of Saint Michael the Archangel, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch, who she said instructed her to support the disinherited Charles VII and drive English forces out of France during the long conflict now known as the Hundred Years' War. Against extraordinary odds, she convinced Charles's court to let her lead troops, and in 1429 she played a decisive role in lifting the siege of Orléans, a turning point in the war, and in securing Charles's coronation at Reims. She was captured by Burgundian allies of the English the following year, sold to the English, and tried by a pro-English church court on charges of heresy. Convicted in a trial widely regarded as unjust, she was burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431 at only nineteen. A retrial ordered by Pope Callixtus III in 1456 formally nullified the verdict and declared her innocent. She was canonized in 1920.