Rogier van der Weyden or Roger de la Pasture was an Early Flemish painter. His surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces and commissioned single and diptych portraits. Although his life was generally uneventful, he...

Originating in Bruges, the Gruuthuse Manuscript is a very diverse collection of Middle Dutch rhyming literature which was compiled in about 1400. There are many reasons why it can be described as special. Perhaps the most important of these...

Fra Mauro was an Italian cartographer who lived in the Republic of Venice. He created the most detailed and accurate map of the world up until that time, the Fra Mauro map. Mauro was a monk of the Camaldolese Monastery of St. Michael, lo...

Johannes Gutenberg was a German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher who introduced modern book printing. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most importan...

The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (sometimes also, particularly regionally, Age of Contact or Contact Period), is an informal and loosely defined term for the early modern period approximately from the beginning of the 15th ce...

Jacqueline of Wittelsbach (Dutch: Jacoba van Beieren; French: Jacqueline de Bavière; was Duchess of Bavaria-Straubing, Countess of Hainaut and Holland from 1417 to 1432. She was the only daughter of William VI, Count of Hainaut and Holland...

Nicholas of Kues, also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Cusa, was a cardinal of the Catholic Church from Germany (Holy Roman Empire), a philosopher, jurist, mathematician, and an astronomer. He is widely considered one of the...

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...

Charles VII, called the Victorious or the Well-Served, was King of France from 1422 to his death, though he was initially opposed by Henry VI of England, whose Regent, the Duke of Bedford, ruled much of France including the capital, Paris....

Murad II Kodja was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1421 to 1451 (except for a period from 1444 to 1446 when his son Mehmed II reigned). Murad II's reign was marked by the long war he fought against the Christian feudal lords of the Ba...

Constantine XI Dragaš Palaiologos, was the last reigning Byzantine Emperor, reigning as a member of the Palaiologos dynasty from 1449 to his death in battle at the fall of Constantinople. Following his death, he became a legendary figure in...

Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer and general Renaissance humanist polymath. Although he is often characterized as an "architect" exclusively, as James Beck ha...

John Hunyadi was a leading Hungarian military and political figure in Central and Southeastern Europe during the 15th century. According to most contemporary sources, he was son of a noble family of Romanian ancestry. He mastered his milita...

Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist, rhetorician, and educator. He is best known for his textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. The Donation of Constantine suggests that Constantine I "donated" the...

The Yongle Encyclopedia, literally The Great Canon or Vast Documents of the Yongle Era, was a Chinese compilation commissioned by the Chinese Ming Dynasty emperor Yongle in 1403 and completed by 1408. Until Wikipedia, it was the world's lar...