About
Joan of Arc was a peasant girl from Domremy who, saying she was directed by saints, persuaded Charles VII to send her with the army that relieved the siege of Orleans in 1429. She stood beside him at his coronation at Reims that July, was captured at Compiegne in 1430, and was tried for heresy and burned at Rouen in 1431. A later church inquiry annulled the verdict in 1456, and she was canonised in 1920.