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...

Jogaila was Grand Duke of Lithuania (1377–1434), King of the Kingdom of Poland (1386–1399), and then sole King of Poland (1399–1434). He ruled in Lithuania from 1377. In 1386 in Kraków he was baptized as Wladyslaw, married the young Queen r...

Casimir IV of the House of Jagiellon was Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1440, and King of Poland from 1447, until his death. He was one of the most active Polish rulers, under whom Poland, by defeating the Teutonic Knights in the Thirteen Yea...

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance- and Reformation-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, likely independently of Aristarchus of S...

Jakob Böhme was a German Christian mystic and theologian. He is considered an original thinker within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal. In contemporary English, his name may be spe...

Jan III Sobieski was one of the most notable monarchs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1674 until his death. Sobieski's 22-year-reign was marked by a period of the Commonwealth's sta...

Frederick Augustus I or Augustus II the Strong was Elector of Saxony (as Frederick Augustus I) and King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (as Augustus II). Augustus's great physical strength earned him the nicknames "the Strong," "the S...

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, German physicist and instrument maker. He spent most of his life in the Netherlands, where he devoted himself to the study of physics and the manufacture of precision meteorological instruments. He is best known f...

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the latter stages of the French Revolution and its associated wars in Europe. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and a...

Aleksander Pavlovich Romanov or Tsar Alexander I (The Blessed), was Emperor of Russia from 1801-1825 and King of Poland from 1815–1825. The son of the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, afterwards Paul I, and Maria Fedorovna, daughter of the Duke o...

Nicholas I was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers (7...

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based o...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky also transliterated Przewalski, was a Russian geographer of Polish origin and explorer of Central and Eastern Asia. Although he never reached his final goal, Lhasa in Tibet, he travelled through regions unk...

Johannes Hermann Zukertort was a leading Polish chess master. He was one of the leading world players for most of the 1870s and 1880s, and lost to Wilhelm Steinitz in the World Chess Championship 1886, generally regarded as the first World...