Joan of Arc and the End of the War (1429-1453)

The war's decisive turn began with a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Domrémy. In 1429 Joan of Arc gained an audience with the disinherited Dauphin Charles and convinced him of her mission to relieve the besieged city of Orléans and see him crowned at Reims. She entered Orléans on 29 April 1429 and, under her leadership, French forces broke the English siege on 8 May; a string of further victories in the Loire valley followed, culminating in the crushing French win at Patay on 18 June, and on 17 July 1429 she led the Dauphin to be crowned Charles VII at Reims, restoring the symbolic legitimacy the Treaty of Troyes had stripped from him. Captured by Burgundian forces at Compiègne in May 1430 and sold to the English, Joan was tried for heresy by a politically controlled ecclesiastical court at Rouen under Bishop Pierre Cauchon and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431; a later nullification trial, authorized by the pope, annulled her conviction in 1456, and she was canonized in 1920.