A place

Siena

2 stories from this place.

The Cabinet June 26, 2026 · Siena

The Twenty-Nine-Year-Old Sienese Mystic Who Travelled to Avignon to Tell the Pope to Go Back to Rome

Catherine of Siena was an unschooled Dominican tertiary from a substantial Sienese dyer's family who became one of the most influential European Catholic figures of the 14th century. Her substantial 1376 personal mission to Avignon helped persuade Pope Gregory XI to end the seventy-year Avignon papacy. She was 29.

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The Footnote June 26, 2026 · Siena, Tuscany

The Dominican Tertiary Who Walked to Avignon and Talked the Pope Into Going Back to Rome

Catherine of Siena was a 14th-century lay Dominican mystic from a Tuscan dyer family. She had no formal education and never learned to write. She wrote (through dictation) several hundred letters to political and religious leaders, walked from Siena to Avignon in 1376, and persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome.

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