After weeks of theological and moral examination by clergy at Poitiers, Joan of Arc received clearance to proceed to Orléans and to the dauphin's court, lending her improbable mission crucial ecclesiastical legitimacy. The verdict transformed a teenage peasant into a sanctioned instrument of French royal restoration during the darkest years of the Hundred Years' War.
By January 1429, France's fortunes looked grim: the English and their Burgundian allies controlled much of the north, Orléans lay under siege, and the dauphin Charles had not been crowned. Into this crisis walked a seventeen-year-old from Domrémy who insisted she had heard voices commanding her to save France.
Rather than dismiss her outright, Charles's advisors sent Joan to Poitiers, where a panel of theologians and matrons questioned her for weeks about her visions, her virginity, and her intentions. Their conclusion, delivered around this time, found nothing heretical in her claims and much that seemed providentially useful.
The clearance mattered enormously: it gave political cover to a desperate court willing to gamble on a peasant girl's visions, and it set in motion the campaign that would relieve Orléans within months and see Charles crowned at Reims by July. Joan's story would end at the stake in 1431, but the Poitiers verdict was the hinge on which her entire legend turned.