Ruyn France, February the 21st, 1431.

At 8 o'clock on a frozen Wednesday morning, a 19-year-old peasant girl in leg irons

shuffled into the chapel royal of Rouen Castle to stand trial for her life.

The ankle cuffs were connected by only a few links of chain so she could not walk. She could only hobble, a few inches at a time, across the

stone floor of the English fortress, past 42 robed clerics and theologians who had assembled

to destroy her. Her name was Jehan. History would call her Joan of Arc,

and the men who put her in that chapel knew, before the first question was asked,

exactly how this trial would end. The road to Rouen began in a garden in Domremy, a small village

in northeastern France. Jean was 13 years old, the daughter of a farmer

named Jacques Dark, when she first heard the voice. It came on a summer afternoon from her right

side, surrounded by a great light. The voice belonged, she said, to the archangel Michael.

Then came St. Catherine, then St. Margaret. They spoke in French. They spoke often,

especially when the church bells rang at Complain, and what they told her was extraordinary.

Go to the Dauphin, raise the siege of Orleans, crown the true king of France. This was 1425.

France had been bleeding for nearly a century in its war with England.

The English and their Burgundian allies controlled Paris and most of northern France.

The Dauphin, Charles, the uncrowned heir to the French throne, had been disinherited by treaty and dismissed as illegitimate.

Orleans, the last major stronghold on the Loire River, was under English siege.

If it fell, the road to southern France lay open, and whatever remained of French resistance would collapse.

Into this walked a teenage girl who could neither read nor write, who had never held a sword,

who told anyone who would listen

that God had sent her to save France. In February of 1429, she talked her way into the court at

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