Pope Saint Pius V was Pope from 1566 to 1572 and is a saint of the Catholic Church. He is chiefly notable for his role in the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, and the standardization of the Roman liturgy within the Latin Church. P...

Mauritius, officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the coast of Africa in the southwest Indian Ocean, about 900 kilometers (560 mi) east of Madagascar. In addition to the island of Mauritius, the republic includes the i...

Nikolaus Federmann was a German adventurer and conquistador in the colonies of Venezuela and Colombia. He worked in the service of the Welser brothers. Nikolaus Federmann was born in Ulm (Baden-Württemberg) around 1505. In 1529 he was sent...

Mary of Austria, also known as Mary of Hungary, was queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia as the wife of King Louis II, and she was later Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. The daughter of Queen Joanna of Castile and King Philip I of C...

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, and has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written a...

Louis II was King of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia from 1516 to 1526. Louis owed allegiance to the Imperial Habsburgs as a member of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In 1522 Louis II was married to Mary of Habsburg, a Habsburg princess, gr...

Francis Xavier was a pioneering Roman Catholic missionary born in the Kingdom of Navarre (currently Spain) and co-founder of the Society of Jesus. He was a student of Ignatius of Loyola and one of the first seven Jesuits, dedicated at Montm...

Juliana of Stolberg was the mother of William 1 of Orange (Willem van Oranje), also known as William the Silent (Willem de Zwijger). Juliana was the daughter of Botho VIII of Stolberg-Wernigerode and Anna of Eppstein-Königstein. Her first m...

Jane Seymour was Henry VIII’s third wife. Jane married him just eleven days after Anne Boleyn was executed. Jane was born between 1507 and 1509. The marriage between Jane Seymour and Henry was on May 30th 1536. In October 1537, Jane gave b...

Guillaume Rondelet was professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier in southern France and Chancellor of the Medical Faculty from 1560. Famed as a teacher, Rondelet was also the author of a book Libri de Piscibus Marinis on the na...

The Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is a cornerstone work of High Renaissance art. The ceiling is that of the Sistine Chapel, the large papal chapel built within the Vatican between 1477 and 1480 by Pop...

Andrea Palladio was an Italian architect active in the Republic of Venice. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily by Vitruvius, is widely considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architec...

Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the third Duke of Alba was a Spanish general and governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1567 - 1573), nicknamed "the Iron Duke" by Protestants of the Low Countries because of harsh rule. Although the Duke led oppre...

In Praise of Folly (Encomiun Moriae in Latin) was written in 1509 by the Dutchman Erasmus of Rotterdam when he was guest to his English famous friend Thomas More,or Morus if you prefer, the author of the celebrated book Utopia. Given intern...

John of Leiden was an Anabaptist leader from the Dutch city of Leiden. Raised in poverty, young John became a charismatic leader who was widely revered by his followers. According to his own testimony, he went to the German city of Münster,...