King James II of England and VII of Scotland was the last Catholic monarch to rule over England, Scotland, and Ireland. His reign, from 1685 to 1688, culminated with the Glorious Revolution, in which Protestants deposed him in favor of Mary...

Samuel Pepys was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is most famous for the diary that he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. Pepys had no maritime experience, but he rose to be the Chief Secretary...

Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban and later Marquis de Vauban, commonly referred to as Vauban, was a Marshal of France and the foremost military engineer of his age, famed for his skill in both designing fortifications and breaking t...

Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha was an Ottoman military leader and grand vizier who was a central character in the empire's last attempts at expansion into both Central Europe and Eastern Europe. In 1683, he launched a campaign northward...

Nicolaes Maes, also known as Nicolaes Maas was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre and portraits. In about 1648 he went to Amsterdam, where he entered Rembrandt's studio. Before his return to Dordrecht in 1653 Maes painted a few Rembrandtes...

Francis Willughby was an English ornithologist and ichthyologist. He was a student, friend and colleague of the naturalist John Ray at Cambridge University, and shared some of his expeditions and interests. Ray saw Willughby's Ornithologia...

Frans van Mieris, the elder, was a Dutch Golden Age genre and portrait painter. The leading member of a Leiden family of painters, his sons Jan (1660–1690) and Willem (1662–1747) and his grandson Frans van Mieris the Younger (1689–1763) wer...

Robert Hooke, natural philosopher, inventor, architect, chemist, mathematician, physicist, engineer. Robert Hooke is one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. The inventor of, amongst other things, the iris diaphragm in ca...

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose history, influence and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Established in 1636 by the Massachusetts...

Gerrit Battem was a superior Dutch landscape painter. Houbraken mentions drawings by Battem in the house of his patron Jonas van Witsen of Amsterdam, who bought them for 1300 guilders along with colored drawings by Adriaen van Ostade in...

Edward Colston was an English slave trader, merchant, philanthropist, and Member of Parliament. He supported and endowed schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches in Bristol, London and elsewhere. His name is commemorated in several Brist...

Tulip mania was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is ge...

Swammerdam was a seventeenth century Dutch microscopist and naturalist who is most famous for his microscopic observations and descriptions of insect development that were published posthumously as The Bible of Nature, but is more often ref...

Dieterich Buxtehude was a German-Danish organist and a highly regarded composer of the Baroque period. His organ works comprise a central part of the standard organ repertoire and are frequently performed at recitals and church services. He...

Jan van der Heyden was a Dutch Baroque-era painter, draughtsman, printmaker, a mennonite and inventor who significantly contributed to contemporary firefighting. He improved the fire hose in 1672, with his brother Nicolaes, who was a hydrau...