Jan Pieterszoon Coen was an officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century, holding two terms as its Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies. He was long considered a national hero in the Netherlands, for provi...

Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, was a politician, and favourite of King James I of England. In 1606, most likely at the arrangement of Overbury, Carr happened to break his leg at a tilting match, at which the king was present. According...

Joost van den Vondel was a Dutch poet, writer and playwright. He is considered the most prominent Dutch poet and playwright of the 17th century. His plays are the ones from that period that are still most frequently performed, and his epic...

The Spanish Armada was a Habsburg Spanish fleet of 130 ships that sailed from Lisbon in late May 1588 under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with the purpose of escorting an army from Flanders to invade England. Medina Sidonia was...

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contra...

Johannes (Jan) Symonsz van der Beeck was a Dutch painter also known by his alias Johannes Torrentius. ("Torrentius" is a Latin equivalent of the Beeck surname, meaning "of the brook" or "of the river".) Despite his reputation as a still...

Epic poem that was published between 1590 and 1609 by Edmund Spenser. It is the central poem of the Elizabethan period and is one of the great long poems in the English language. A celebration of Protestant nationalism, it represents infide...

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham , was the favourite, claimed by some to be the lover of King James I of England and one of the most rewarded royal courtiers in all history. He was born in Brooksby, Leicestershire in August 1592, the...

Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer/astrologer, and mathematician, best known for attempting to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity and for publishing the first official observations of the Tran...

Gerard van Honthorst, also known as Gerrit van Honthorst and in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti for his nighttime candlelit subjects, was a Dutch Golden Age painter from Utrecht. Honthorst's works are numerous, and amply represented in Englis...

Shah Jahan was the fifth Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1628 to 1658. He was widely considered to be the most competent of Emperor Jahangir's four sons and after Jahangir's death in late 1627, when a war of succession ensued, Shah Jahan e...

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...