Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján was a Spanish conquistador, who visited New Mexico and other parts of what are now the southwestern United States between 1540 and 1542. Coronado had hoped to conquer the mythical Seven Cities of Gold....

Diego Ortiz was a Spanish composer and musicologist, in service to the Spanish viceroy of Naples and later to Philip II of Spain. Ortiz published influential treatises on both instrumental and vocal performance. Very little is known abou...

John Knox was a Scottish clergyman and a leader of the Protestant Reformation who is considered the founder of the Presbyterian denomination in Scotland. Influenced by early church reformers such as George Wishart, he joined the movement to...

Francisco de Orellana was a Spanish explorer and conquistador. He completed the first known navigation of the length of the Amazon River, which was originally named for him. He also founded the city of Guayaquil in modern-day Ecuador. Th...

Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). He was a p...

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...

Hadrianus Junius, also known as Adriaen de Jonghe, was a Dutch physician, classical scholar, translator, lexicographer, antiquarian, historiographer, emblematist, school rector, and Latin poet. Junius was dubbed a 'second Erasmus' by some o...

James V, king of Scotland (1513–42), son and successor of James IV. His mother, Margaret Tudor, held the regency until her marriage in 1514 to Archibald Douglas, 6th earl of Angus, when she lost it to John Stuart, duke of Albany. The factio...

Catherine Parr was born around 1512. She was Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Catherine had already been married to a man called Lord Borough. She was in her teens and he was in his sixties when they married. Lord Borough soon died but C...

Gerardus Mercator, Flemish cartographer. He received a master's degree in 1532 from the University of Louvain (Belgium), where he settled. By 24 he was a skilled engraver, calligrapher, and scientific-instrument maker. He and his colleagues...

For nearly 500 years, Machiavelli's observations on Realpolitik have shocked and appalled the timid and romantic, and for many his name was equivalent to the devil's own. Yet, The Prince was the first attempt to write of the world of politi...

Andreas Vesalius was an anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anato...

Cristóbal de Mondragón y Mercado was a Spanish general during the Eighty Years' War. He was a prominent military figure of the sixteenth century, and was colonel of one of the Tercios of Flanders under the Duke of Alva, Luis de Requesens...

Anne of Cleves was Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Anne was from the small north German state of Cleves. Her brother, William, ruled Cleves but realised that his sister's marriage to the king of England would greatly enhance his status. After...

Juan Bautista de Toledo, Spanish architect educated in Italy, in the Italian High Renaissance. As many Italian renaissance architects, he had experience in both architecture and military and civil public works. Perhaps he started his caree...