Church records and later testimony from the Rehabilitation trial place Joan's birth on Epiphany, January 6, 1412, in the small village of Domrémy in northeastern France. The date carried symbolic weight for later hagiographers, linking her birth to the feast celebrating the arrival of the Magi. She would grow up to lead French forces against the English during the Hundred Years' War before her capture and execution.
No birth certificate exists for Joan of Arc, and much of what we know about her early life comes from testimony given during the 1456 Rehabilitation trial, decades after her death, when witnesses from Domrémy were asked to recall details of her childhood. Several villagers testified that she was born on the feast of the Epiphany, a detail that fit neatly into the mythology already forming around her.
Her father Jacques d'Arc was a modest farmer and local official; her mother Isabelle Romée had made a pilgrimage to Rome, hence her name. Joan grew up illiterate, tending sheep and learning needlework, in a village that sat uneasily on the border between territory loyal to the French crown and lands controlled by the Burgundians allied with England.
By thirteen she claimed to hear voices—those of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret—urging her to save France. Within seven years of this supposed birth date entering the historical record, she would break the siege of Orléans and change the course of the Hundred Years' War before being burned at the stake in Rouen at just nineteen.