Captured by Burgundian forces and sold to the English, Joan of Arc endured a politically motivated trial designed to discredit the French crown she had helped restore. Found guilty of heresy and cross-dressing, she was burned in the market square of Rouen. Twenty-five years later the Church annulled the verdict, and she was canonized a saint in 1920.
She was barely out of her teens, a peasant girl from Domrémy who claimed voices from Saint Michael and other saints directed her to save France from English domination. Her military successes, including breaking the siege of Orléans in 1429, turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War and secured the coronation of Charles VII. But Charles did little to ransom her once she was captured at Compiègne in 1430.
The trial in Rouen was a sham dressed as justice. English authorities, desperate to undo the legitimacy her victories had given the French crown, needed her condemned as a heretic and a witch. Witnesses recalled that as flames rose around her, she cried the name of Jesus repeatedly. Her ashes were thrown into the Seine so no relics could remain.
The rehabilitation trial of 1456 declared her innocent, and Pope Benedict XV canonized her in 1920. She remains one of history's most enduring symbols of national resistance and unshakeable conviction, a teenager who altered the fate of a kingdom and paid for it with her life.