The German Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt (German: Deutscher Bauernkrieg) was a widespread popular revolt in the German-speaking areas of Central Europe, 1524–1525. It failed because of the intense opposition of the aristocracy, wh...

Selim II Sarkhosh, also known as "Selim the Sot (Mest)" or "Selim the Drunkard", was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1566 until his death. He was born in Constantinople a son of Suleiman the Magnificent and his fourth and favourite wi...

Luís Vaz de Camões is considered Portugal's and the Portuguese language's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Shakespeare, Vondel, Homer, Virgil and Dante. He wrote a considerable amount of lyrical poetry and dr...

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...