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...

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...

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...

John Wilkins was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as one of the founders of the Royal Society. He was Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death. Wilkins is one of the few persons to have headed a college at...

Jan Six was an important cultural figure in the Dutch Golden Age. The son of a well-to-do merchant family Six, Jan studied liberal arts and law in Leiden in 1634. He became the son-in-law of the mayor of Amsterdam, Nicolaes Tulp, in 1655, w...

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière, was a French theatre writer, director, stage manager, actor, and all-around man of theatre, one of the masters of comic satire. The son of an interior decorator, Jean Baptiste Poquelin los...

Charles Perrault was a French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known of his tales include Le Petit C...

Mehmed IV was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1648 to 1687. Taking the throne at age seven, his reign was significant as he changed the nature of the Sultan's position forever by giving up most of his executive power to his Grand Vizi...

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific...

Ahmed III was Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and a son of Sultan Mehmed IV (1648–87). His mother was Mâh-Pâre Ummatullah (Emetullah) Râbi'a Gül-Nûs; Valide Sultan, originally named Evmania Voria, who was an ethnic Greek. He was born at Hajiog...

James Edward Oglethorpe was an English general, a philanthropist, and a founder of the state of Georgia. It was through his initiatives in England in 1732 that the British government authorized the establishment of its first new colony in N...

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman...

Elizaveta Petrovna, also known as Yelisavet and Elizabeth, was the Empress of Russia (1741–1762) who took the country into the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). On the eve of her death in 1762, the...

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer of the Neapolitan school. Although he died at the age of 26, he is credited with masterpieces in two fields of music: La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress, c.1733), an intermezzo, or short com...

Jean François de Saint-Lambert was a French poet and military officer, but he is most remembered for his involvement in two love affairs. Over the winter of 1747-48, Voltaire and his entourage took up residence in Lunéville. Saint-Lambe...