Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford was an English statesman and a major figure in the period leading up to the English Civil War. He served in Parliament and was a supporter of King Charles I. From 1632 to 1639 he instituted a harsh ru...

Nicolaes Tulp was a Dutch surgeon and mayor of Amsterdam. Tulp was well known for his upstanding moral character and as the subject of Rembrandt's famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp. The career of Dr Tulp matched the...

Gustav II Adolf, widely known in English by the Latinized name Gustavus Adolphus and variously in historical writings sometimes as simply just Gustavus, or Gustavus the Great, or Gustav Adolf the Great, (Swedish: Gustav Adolf den store, fr...

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is a tale of two teenage "star-cross'd lovers" who fall in love despite the ongoing feud between their two families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Friar Lawrence, a Franciscan monk, hopes to reconcile the fe...

Pocahontas was an Indian princess, the daughter of Powhatan, the powerful chief of the Algonquian Indians in the Tidewater region of Virginia. She was born around 1595 to one of Powhatan's many wives. They named her Matoaka, though she is b...

For most of the 17th century the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, brought wealth and prestige to the Low Countries, ushering in what would be known as the Dutch Golden Age. Business was booming, profits were soaring, and the greatly expand...

Frederick V was the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in the Holy Roman Empire from 1610 to 1623, and served as King of Bohemia from 1619 to 1620. He was forced to abdicate both roles, and the brevity of his reign in Bohemia earned him the deri...

Mikhail I Fyodorovich Romanov was the first Russian Tsar of the house of Romanov. He was the son of Feodor Nikitich Romanov (later known as Patriarch Filaret) and Xenia (later known as "the great nun" Martha). His reign marked the end of th...

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a respo...

Jan Josephszoon van Goyen was a Dutch landscape painter. Van Goyen was an extremely prolific artist; approximately twelve hundred paintings and more than one thousand drawings by him are known. Typically, a Dutch painter of the 17th cent...

Jacob van Campen was a Dutch artist and architect of the Golden Age. Van Campen's first known building was the Coymans house built in 1625 in Amsterdam. In the 1630s Van Campen and Pieter Post designed the Mauritshuis in The Hague, a palace...

Andreas Cellarius was a Dutch-German cartographer, best known for his Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660, a major star atlas, published by Johannes Janssonius in Amsterdam. He was born in Neuhausen (now a part of Worms), and was educated in H...

Constantijn Huygens was a Dutch poet and composer, Secretary to two Princes, and the father of the scientist Christiaan Huygens. He is often considered a member of what is known as the Muiderkring, a group of leading intellectuals gathered...

Pieter Jansz. Saenredam was a painter of the Dutch Golden Age, known for his distinctive paintings of whitewashed church interiors. Saenredam's paintings show medieval churches, usually Gothic, but sometimes late Romanesque, which had been...

Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri was an Italian mathematician. He is known for his work on the problems of optics and motion, work on the precursors of infinitesimal calculus, and the introduction of logarithms to Italy. Cavalieri's principl...