Claudius was Roman emperor from 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he was the son of Drusus and Antonia Minor. He was born at Lugdunum in Gaul, the first Roman Emperor to be born outside Italy. Because he was afflicted with a...

Casimir I the Restorer was a Duke of Poland of the Piast dynasty and the de jure monarch of the entire country from 1034 until his death. He was the only son of Mieszko II Lambert by his wife Richeza, daughter of Count Palatine Ezzo of L...

Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, was King of France from 1180 to 1223, a member of the House of Capet. Philip's predecessors had been known as kings of the Franks, but from 1190 onward, Philip became the first French monarch to style hi...

Saint Dominic (Spanish: Domingo), also known as Dominic of Osma, often called Dominic de Guzmán and Domingo de Guzmán Garcés was the founder of the Friars Preachers, popularly called the Dominicans or Order of Preachers, a Catholic religiou...

James I, King of Scots (reign: 1406 – 37), was the son of Robert III and Annabella Drummond. He was probably born in late July 1394 in Dunfermline as youngest of three sons. By the time he was eight years of age both of his elder brothers w...

Philip the Good KG (French: Philippe le Bon), also Philip III, Duke of Burgundy was Duke of Burgundy from 1419 until his death. He was a member of a cadet line of the Valois dynasty (the then Royal family of France). During his reign Burgun...

Albert the Magnanimous KG was King of Hungary from 1437 until his death. He was also King of Bohemia, elected (but never crowned) King of Germany as Albert II, duke of Luxembourg and, as Albert V, archduke of Austria from 1404. Albert w...

Francesco I Sforza was an Italian condottiero, the founder of the Sforza dynasty in Milan, Italy. He was the brother of Alessandro, with whom he often fought. Francesco Sforza is mentioned several times in Niccolò Machiavelli's book The Pri...

Ludovico Sforza was Duke of Milan from 1489 until his death. A member of the Sforza family, he was the fourth son of Francesco Sforza. He was famed as a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and other artists, and presided over the final and most pro...

Jan van Scorel was an influential Dutch painter credited with the introduction of High Italian Renaissance art to the Netherlands. It is not known whether he began his studies under Jan Gossaert in Utrecht or with Jacob Cornelisz in Amsterd...

Christian III was king of Denmark and Norway from 1534–59. Early in his reign, he allied with Gustavus I of Sweden to defeat the German city of Lübeck in 1536. That victory broke the power of the Hanseatic League and made the Danish fleet s...

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing. Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany. Recomm...

Joseph Justus Scaliger was considered to be the foremost scholar in sixteenth-century Europe, referred to as "the light of the world", "the sea of sciences" and similar epithets, and it is to him that we owe a "modern" definition of chronol...

Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to modern calculus. In particular, he is recognised for his discovery of an original method o...

Father of Peter the Great. Alexey Mikhailovich Romanov was a Tsar of Russia during some of the most eventful decades of the mid-17th century. The son of Tsar Mikhail I and Eudoxia Streshneva, he was sixteen years old at the time of his fath...