Vicent Ferrer was born to a Valencian family of Aragonese stock and entered the Dominicans in 1367. He studied at Lleida and Toulouse, was ordained priest in 1378, and rose to become Master of Theology at the University of Lleida and prior of the Dominican convent of Valencia. He was the personal confessor of the Avignon (and later Aragonese) antipope Benedict XIII (Pedro de Luna) — a connection that complicated the rest of his life.
From 1399 he abandoned academic life entirely and became a wandering itinerant preacher. For the next twenty years he travelled on foot — Spain, southern France, northern Italy, Lombardy, Savoy, Switzerland, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, and Brittany — preaching daily, often three times a day, to enormous crowds. He travelled with a 'flagellant company' of penitents in white robes who accompanied his preaching. Contemporary accounts insist he preached in his native Valencian Catalan and was understood everywhere he went — the famous 'gift of tongues' attributed to him in the canonization process.
His preaching focused on the imminent Last Judgment — he believed (and proclaimed) that the end of the world was very near, identifying himself with the angel of Apocalypse 14:6 carrying the 'eternal gospel.' Tens of thousands of conversions are attributed to him, including thousands of Jews and Moors in the Iberian Peninsula (some of these conversions in the post-1391 Spanish atmosphere were under significant social pressure — a point modern scholarship has examined critically). He worked to end the Western Schism, persuading his old friend Benedict XIII at length to step aside (Benedict refused, but Vincent's withdrawal of support from him was decisive at the Council of Constance, 1414–18). He died at Vannes in Brittany on the road home, April 5, 1419.