Pieter Bruegel (also Brueghel) the Elder was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter and printmaker from Brabant, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel". From...

Mathurin d’Aux de Lescout, called Mathurin Romegas, was a scion of the aristocratic Gascony family of d'Aux and a member of the Knights of Saint John. He was one of the Order's greatest naval commanders and ended his life disgraced as a Riv...

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian composer of Renaissance music. He was the most famous sixteenth-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. Palestrina had a vast influence on the development of Roman C...

Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer (1526–1588) was a wood merchant of Haarlem, Netherlands She was the daughter of Simon Hasselaer and Grietje Koen. When the city was besieged by the Spanish, she led a company of women in defence of the city, b...

Carolus Clusius, or Charles de l'Écluse, was a Flemish doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th century scientific horticulturists. In 1573 he was appointed prefect of the imperial medical garden in Vienna by...

Maximilian II was king of Bohemia from 1562, king of Hungary from 1563, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from 1564 and king of the Romans until his death. He was a member of the House of Habsburg. Born in Vienna, he was a son of his predece...

Philip II, king of Spain and Portugal, was born at Valladolid, the only son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. Philip II, the self-proclaimed leader of Counter-Reformation, assumed the throne in 1556 with a great...

Abraham Ortelius (Abraham Ortels) was a cartographer and geographer, generally recognised as the creator of the first modern atlas. He was born in Antwerp in what is now Belgium. A member of the influential Ortelius family of Augsburg, he t...

John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and...

Paolo Boi was an Italian chess player. He is considered to have been one of the greatest chess players of the 16th century. He was born in Syracuse, Sicily (now Italy) and died in Naples. Historian H. J. R. Murray says he was poisoned by...

The Siege of Vienna of 1529, as distinct from the Battle of Vienna in 1683, represented the farthest Westward advance into Central Europe of the Ottoman Empire, and of all the clashes between the armies of Christianity and Islam might be si...

Rodrigo (Ruy) López de Segura was a Spanish priest and later bishop in Segura whose 1561 book Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del Axedrez was one of the first definitive books about modern chess in Europe, preceded only by Pe...

Ivan IV Vasilyevich, commonly known as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and Tsar of All the Russias from 1547 until his death. His long reign saw the conquest of the Khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siber...

Yermak Timofeyevich, born between 1532 and 1542 - 1584) was a Cossack who led the Russian conquest of Siberia in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Russia’s fur interests fueled their desire to expand east into Siberia. The tsar’s ultimate...

Admiral Sir John Hawkins was an English shipbuilder, naval administrator and commander, merchant, navigator, and slave trader. As treasurer (1577) and controller (1589) of the Royal Navy, he rebuilt older ships and helped design the faster...