Catherine was born to a cloth dyer in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the twenty-third of twenty-six children, most of whom didn’t survive infancy. It was a tough time and place to be born: the Black Death, which was to kill a third of Europe, was spreading; much of what we now know as Italy was a mosaic of warring factions; and the Catholic church, which had brought some measure of stability to Europe, was in disarray with the Pope exiled at Avignon in France.