Thinkers Timeline

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist, scientist, and inventor. He was born in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, in what is now Italy. His name means 'Leonardo from Vinci'. He was the son of a young woman named Caterina, who was probably a peasant or servant, and a wealthy notary named Ser Piero. His parents never married. Leonardo grew up in his father's family but was treated as a separate, somewhat outside figure. He showed great talent young. As a teenager he was apprenticed to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. He learned painting, sculpture, and many practical crafts. Around the age of 30, he moved to Milan to work for the Duke, Ludovico Sforza. He stayed in Milan for nearly 20 years. He painted, designed weapons, planned buildings, and filled notebooks with ideas. When French armies invaded Milan, Leonardo moved on. He worked in Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities. He served various rulers, including Cesare Borgia and the Medici. In 1516, the king of France, Francis I, invited him to come and live in France. Leonardo accepted. He spent his last three years in a small castle near the king's palace at Amboise. He died there in 1519, aged 67. He never married and had no children. He was probably gay, though the evidence is indirect. He was vegetarian, unusual for his time. He left thousands of notebook pages full of drawings and ideas, most of which were not read for centuries.

Guru Nanak (1469-1539) was the founder of Sikhism, whose teaching and poetic hymns established a distinctive religious tradition in the Punjab region of South Asia. He was born on 15 April 1469 at Rai Bhoi ki Talwandi — today Nankana Sahib, in Pakistan — to a Hindu family of the Khatri merchant caste. His father Mehta Kalu was an accountant for a local Muslim landlord; his mother Mata Tripta raised him in a household that was traditionally Hindu but exposed to the Muslim cultural world of early-sixteenth-century Punjab. He showed unusual religious sensitivity from childhood, and traditional accounts describe incidents in which he departed from expected conventions — refusing at eleven to wear the sacred thread (janeu) that marked Hindu caste identity unless it had deeper meaning, using money given for trade to feed hungry holy men rather than make a profit. He worked for several years as a clerk in a Muslim administrator's household in Sultanpur. At around thirty he had a transformative religious experience, which he later described as a direct encounter with the divine: he disappeared into a river for three days, and on emerging declared na koi Hindu, na koi Musalman (there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim). From that point he devoted his life to religious teaching. Over the following two decades he made four long journeys (udasis) — south to Sri Lanka, north to Tibet, west to Mecca and Baghdad, east through much of the Indian subcontinent — conversing with religious teachers of many traditions and composing the hymns that would form the core of Sikh scripture. In his last years he settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi River, where he established a community that combined devotional practice, manual labour, and shared meals crossing caste and religious lines. He named Bhai Lehna — renamed Guru Angad — as his successor rather than his own sons, establishing the principle of spiritual rather than hereditary succession. He died at Kartarpur on 22 September 1539. His followers preserved and expanded his hymns, which became the foundation of the Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture and ultimately the eternal Guru of the Sikh tradition.

Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian writer, diplomat, and political thinker. He was born in 1469 in Florence, then a powerful Italian city-state. His family was middle-ranking and not rich, but his father had a good library. Machiavelli was educated in Latin, history, and the classical writers of ancient Rome. In 1498, at the age of 29, he became a senior official of the Florentine Republic. For the next fourteen years he served as a diplomat and adviser. He travelled across Italy and Europe on missions, meeting popes, kings, and warlords. He watched up close how power actually worked. He saw cruelty, betrayal, and luck shaping politics far more than virtue or law. In 1512 the Republic fell. The Medici family, who had ruled Florence before, returned to power. Machiavelli lost his job. He was suspected of plotting against the Medici, arrested, and tortured. Released and sent into rural exile, he spent his days farming and his evenings writing. In 1513 he wrote The Prince, a short, sharp book of advice for rulers. He hoped it would win him a job back in Florence. It did not. He also wrote a longer work, the Discourses on Livy, a study of Roman republican history, plus comedies, histories, and military essays. He died in 1527, just before the Republic briefly returned. The Prince was published five years after his death. It became one of the most controversial and influential books in the history of political thought.

Wang Yangming was a Chinese philosopher, scholar, and military general. He is one of the most important Confucian thinkers of the second millennium CE. His ideas about knowledge, action, and the human mind shaped Chinese, Japanese, and Korean thought for centuries. He was born in 1472 in what is now Zhejiang province, in eastern China. He died in 1529, aged 56. His full name was Wang Shouren. 'Yangming' is a name he later took from a place where he lived for some years. He came from a scholarly family. His father had passed the highest level of the imperial civil service examinations. Wang Yangming was clever from childhood. He passed the highest examinations himself in 1499. For most of his career he served as an official in the Ming dynasty government. He was sometimes successful, sometimes in trouble. In 1506 he protested against a corrupt eunuch official at court. He was beaten with bamboo rods and exiled to a remote post in southwestern China. The exile lasted three years. During this time, in a bamboo hut in the mountains, he had what is sometimes called his philosophical awakening. He understood, he said later, that the principles of right action were already inside the human mind. They did not need to be sought outside, in books or in the external world. After his return from exile, he continued government service. He became a respected military commander. He put down major rebellions in the Ming Empire. Despite this success, he had political enemies. He was repeatedly given difficult assignments and then attacked when they were not perfectly resolved. He died in 1529 from illness, far from home, on his way back from another military campaign. His philosophy survived him and reshaped East Asian thought.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German friar, theologian, and biblical scholar whose objections to Catholic practice became the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation — a movement that reshaped European Christianity, politics, and culture, and whose effects continue to the present day. He was born at Eisleben in Saxony on 10 November 1483, the son of Hans Luder, a copper miner who eventually became a small mine owner, and Margarethe Luder. His father intended him for a legal career and sent him to study at the University of Erfurt, where he completed a master's degree in 1505. In July 1505, caught in a thunderstorm, he was thrown from his horse and vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk if she saved him. Two weeks later, against his father's wishes, he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. He was ordained priest in 1507, completed a doctorate in theology at Wittenberg in 1512, and was appointed professor of biblical studies at the new University of Wittenberg, where he remained for the rest of his life. His extensive study of scripture — particularly Paul's letter to the Romans — combined with his own spiritual struggles produced the theological breakthrough that would become the foundation of Protestant Christianity. On 31 October 1517, he sent a letter with his Ninety-Five Theses — academic propositions for debate, originally intended to challenge the sale of indulgences — to his archbishop; whether he actually nailed them to the church door at Wittenberg is uncertain. The theses spread rapidly through new printing technology, and what began as a scholarly dispute became a European crisis. In 1521 he refused to recant before the Diet of Worms, was excommunicated, and was sheltered at Wartburg Castle by his prince Frederick the Wise, where he translated the New Testament into German. He married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in 1525; they had six children. Over the following twenty-five years he wrote extensively — biblical commentaries, sermons, treatises, hymns, and the Small and Large Catechisms. He died in 1546 at Eisleben, the town of his birth. His legacy is deeply contested. He transformed European Christianity, made the Bible broadly accessible in German, and articulated principles that would shape modern ideas about conscience and authority. He also produced shockingly anti-Jewish writings in his later years that provided material for subsequent antisemitic use, and his political theology helped legitimise the brutal suppression of the 1524-1525 Peasants' War. Engaging honestly with Luther requires holding both dimensions of his legacy together.

Huldrych Zwingli was a Swiss priest and reformer. He is one of the three central figures of the Protestant Reformation, along with Martin Luther and John Calvin. He was born in 1484 in a small Alpine village in eastern Switzerland. He died in 1531, fighting in battle at the age of 47. Zwingli came from a prosperous farming family. He was a clever child and was sent away to study. He attended universities in Vienna and Basel, where he learned the new humanist scholarship of the early sixteenth century. He became a Catholic priest in 1506. In 1519 he became the main preacher at the great church in Zürich, then a small but proud city-state. Working independently of Luther in Germany, Zwingli began calling for major reforms in the Church. He led Zürich into a sweeping break with Rome. Under his guidance, Zürich removed statues and images from its churches. It banned the old Catholic Mass. It reorganised church and city government together. Zwingli died on the battlefield at Kappel in 1531, during a war between Protestant and Catholic Swiss cantons. He was killed as a chaplain carrying weapons. His death is one of the most striking facts about him.

Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, alchemist, and reformer of medicine who lived during the early Renaissance. His real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He chose the name 'Paracelsus' himself, which probably meant 'beyond Celsus', the famous Roman medical writer. The choice gives a clear sense of his character: bold, self-promoting, and not modest about his abilities. He was born in 1493 in Einsiedeln, a pilgrimage town in what is now Switzerland. His father was a doctor and a mining-region physician. From childhood Paracelsus saw real medicine: how miners got sick, what minerals did to the human body, what worked and what did not. His mother died young. When he was about nine, his father moved the family to Villach in Austria, near more mines. He studied at several universities, took a medical doctorate in Italy, and then travelled across Europe, North Africa, and possibly the Middle East, learning from common healers, midwives, and surgeons as well as from books. In 1527 he was appointed city physician of Basel and lecturer at the university. He shocked everyone. He lectured in German rather than Latin. He publicly burned books by the ancient authorities, including Galen and Avicenna. He made enemies fast. Within a year he had been driven out. He spent the rest of his life wandering, treating patients, writing constantly, and quarrelling with the medical establishment. He died in Salzburg in 1541, aged 47, in still-unclear circumstances. His writings were mostly published after his death.

Sin Saimdang was a Korean artist, calligrapher, poet, and Confucian scholar of the mid-Joseon period. She is widely regarded as the most accomplished female artist of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) and one of the most celebrated women in Korean history. She has been the first woman depicted on a South Korean banknote (the 50,000 won note, issued from June 2009). Her real personal name was Sin In-seon. 'Saimdang' was her pen name, taken from Tairen, the mother of King Wen of Zhou in classical Chinese tradition; her name signalled her aspiration to be like that exemplary figure. Her other pen names included Saim, Inimdang, and Imsajae. She was born on 29 October 1504 (5 December by the Western calendar) in Bukpyeong-chon village, Jukheon-ri, Gangneung, Gangwon Province, at her maternal grandparents' home (Ojukheon, still preserved as a historic site). Her father was Sin Myeong-hwa, a government official and friend of the reformist scholar Jo Gwang-jo, who chose not to be politically active during the factional struggles of his time. Her mother was Lady Yi. She was the eldest of five sisters; her parents had no sons. Her maternal grandfather, recognising her early talent, taught her as he would have taught a grandson: classical Chinese, history, philosophy, and the Confucian canon. She also developed exceptional skill in calligraphy, embroidery, and painting from childhood. At nineteen she married Yi Won-su, a man from a respectable but poor family. Her father had specifically chosen Yi because he was willing to let her continue her artistic work. The marriage produced eight children, five sons and three daughters. Her third son was Yi I (1536-1584), pen name Yulgok, who would become one of the two greatest Neo-Confucian philosophers in Korean history. Saimdang continued painting and writing throughout her marriage. She died of sudden illness in Pyongan region on 17 May 1551 at age 47.

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, was a Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, reformer, and writer whose works on contemplative prayer are among the classics of Christian spiritual literature. She was born in Ávila, in central Spain, into a family of converted Jewish heritage on her father's side — a background that carried dangers in Inquisition Spain and may have shaped her guarded approach to certain topics in her writing. Her paternal grandfather had been condemned by the Inquisition for reverting to Judaism; her father had purchased a certificate of hidalgo nobility to escape the associated disabilities. Teresa grew up devout and imaginative, famously attempting as a child to run away with her brother to become martyrs in North Africa. At twenty she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila, where she spent nearly three decades living under the relaxed observance that had developed in many Spanish convents — with private cells, social visits, and considerable laxity about the original Carmelite rule. A serious illness in her early years as a nun nearly killed her and left lasting physical problems. In her middle years, around 1554, a period of intense spiritual experiences began — visions, locutions, and states she called the prayer of quiet and the prayer of union. In 1562 she founded the Convent of Saint Joseph in Ávila on a strict reformed observance of the Carmelite rule, beginning what would become the Discalced Carmelite reform. Over the following twenty years she founded sixteen more convents across Spain, negotiating with bishops, royal officials, financial backers, and opposing Carmelites. She also wrote extensively: The Book of Her Life (1565), The Way of Perfection (written for her nuns), The Interior Castle (1577, her most mature work), and detailed letters. She travelled constantly, organised effectively, and wrote with a distinctive combination of deep contemplative experience and practical wisdom. She died at Alba de Tormes in 1582, was canonised in 1622, and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 — one of the first women to receive that recognition.

Michel de Montaigne was a French nobleman and writer who invented the modern essay. He was born in 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in southwest France, near Bordeaux. His family had grown rich through the wine trade and bought their way into the minor nobility. His father had odd ideas about education. He sent the infant Michel to live with peasants for the first three years of his life, so the boy would understand ordinary people. Then he had Latin tutors speak to Michel only in Latin, so the boy grew up speaking Latin as fluently as French. The unusual education shaped him. Montaigne studied law and worked for thirteen years as a magistrate in the Bordeaux high court. He served twice as mayor of Bordeaux. He lived through the French Wars of Religion, a long, brutal series of civil conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that killed thousands and produced famous atrocities like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The wars shaped his thinking about cruelty, fanaticism, and the limits of human reason. In 1571, aged 38, he retired from public life. He moved to a tower in his château, lined the walls with about a thousand books, and began to write. He called what he wrote 'essais', from the French essayer, meaning 'to try' or 'to test'. They were attempts to think on the page, not finished arguments. He published the first edition of his Essays in 1580 and kept revising and expanding them until his death in 1592. He never quite finished. The book has been read by every educated person in the West for over four hundred years.

William Shakespeare was an English writer. He is often called the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in England. He died there in 1616. We do not know everything about his life. He came from a fairly ordinary family. His father was a glove-maker and a local official. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. They had three children. At some point Shakespeare moved to London. There he worked in the theatre. He was an actor, a writer, and part-owner of a theatre company. The company built a famous theatre called the Globe. Shakespeare wrote plays for it, and the plays were performed for large, mixed crowds. In about twenty years, Shakespeare wrote around 38 plays and over 150 short poems called sonnets. His plays include tragedies, comedies, and histories. Some of the most famous are 'Hamlet', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Macbeth', and 'King Lear'. Shakespeare was successful in his own time. He made enough money to buy a large house back in Stratford. After he died, two friends collected his plays into one book, called the First Folio, in 1623. Without that book, many of his plays might have been lost forever.

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, philosopher, and diplomat. He is often called the father of international law. He was born on 10 April 1583 in Delft, in the Netherlands. His Dutch name was Huig de Groot. The Latin form, Grotius, is the name he is now known by in most of the world. His family was educated and well-connected. His father had been mayor of Delft and a curator of Leiden University. Grotius was a child prodigy. He entered Leiden University at age eleven. He earned a doctorate in law in France at fifteen. He published his first books in his teens. He became a working lawyer and politician in his twenties. By thirty he was one of the most respected scholars in Europe. His political career ended badly. The Netherlands in his time was torn by religious and political conflict. Grotius supported one faction. When the other side won, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1619 in Loevestein Castle. After almost two years, his wife smuggled him out in a chest of books. He fled to Paris. It was in Paris, in 1625, that he published his masterpiece: De Jure Belli ac Pacis, On the Law of War and Peace. The book established the foundations of modern international law. Europe at the time was tearing itself apart in the Thirty Years War. Grotius wanted to find rules that could limit the violence and bring some order to relations between nations. He later served as Sweden's ambassador to France. He died on 28 August 1645 in Rostock, Germany, after his ship was wrecked on the Baltic coast. He was 62.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who lived through one of the most turbulent periods in British history — the English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, and the Interregnum. He spent years in exile in France and worked as a tutor to the future King Charles II. His most famous work, Leviathan (1651), is one of the foundational texts of Western political philosophy. In it he argued that without government, human life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and that people therefore have a rational self-interest in submitting to the authority of a sovereign state. He is considered one of the founders of modern political science and social contract theory.

Zera Yacob was an Ethiopian philosopher of the seventeenth century. His main work is a short book called the Hatata, which means 'inquiry' or 'investigation'. According to the Hatata itself, he was born on 28 August 1599 near Aksum, an ancient city in northern Ethiopia. His father was a poor farmer. Despite this, his father sent him to school. He studied the Psalms of David and was educated in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian faith. He was a quick learner and went on to higher religious schooling for ten years. The Hatata describes a hard turning point in his life. The Ethiopian emperor Susenyos had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1622 and ordered all his subjects to follow him. Zera Yacob refused. He was denounced by enemies and feared for his life. He fled with a small bag of gold and the Book of Psalms. He found a cave near the Tekezé River and lived there as a hermit for two years. He prayed, thought, and developed his philosophy. After the death of Susenyos in 1632, his son Fasilides became emperor and restored the Orthodox faith. Zera Yacob came out of hiding. He was given shelter by a wealthy man named Habtu, whose son Walda Heywat became his student. Zera Yacob worked as a teacher and scribe. In 1668, when he was about 68, he wrote down the Hatata at Walda Heywat's request. He died in 1692 or 1693, aged about 93. The text was rediscovered in Europe in the early 1900s.

John Milton was an English poet, political writer, and government official. He wrote one of the greatest poems in the English language, Paradise Lost. He was also one of the most important defenders of free speech, religious liberty, and republican government in the 17th century. He was born in 1608 in London. He died there in 1674, aged 65. He came from a comfortable middle-class family. His father was a scrivener (a kind of legal copyist and money-lender) who loved music. Milton received an unusually thorough education. He studied at St Paul's School in London, then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he earned his master's degree in 1632. After Cambridge, he spent six years in private study at his father's country house, reading widely in classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and modern languages. He became one of the most learned poets in English history. In 1638-1639 he travelled in Italy. He met Galileo, then under house arrest. The meeting impressed him. He returned to England as the country was sliding into civil war. He chose the side of Parliament against King Charles I. He wrote pamphlets defending republican government, religious liberty, and free speech. His pamphlet Areopagitica (1644) is one of the great defences of free expression in any language. When the king was executed in 1649 and a republic established, Milton served as Latin Secretary to the new government. He wrote official letters to foreign powers and defended the regicide in major published works. He went blind in his early forties, possibly from glaucoma, while still in government service. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was in danger. He went into hiding briefly. He was eventually pardoned but lost his position. He spent his last years in poverty and obscurity, dictating his greatest poems to assistants. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious thinker. He was born in 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand in central France. His mother died when he was three. His father, a tax official and amateur scientist, raised him and taught him at home. Pascal showed extraordinary gifts very early. By the age of twelve, he was working out geometry on his own. By sixteen, he had written a serious paper on conic sections. At nineteen, to help his father with tax calculations, Pascal built a mechanical calculating machine. It was one of the first working calculators in history. He went on to make important discoveries about pressure and vacuums, helping to found modern physics. With the mathematician Pierre de Fermat, he laid the foundations of probability theory, the maths of chance. In 1654, after a near-fatal carriage accident, Pascal had a powerful religious experience. He wrote about it on a small piece of paper that he sewed into his coat and carried for the rest of his life. From then on, he turned more and more to religious writing. He joined the Jansenists, a strict Catholic group, and defended them in his Provincial Letters. He was working on a great defence of Christianity when he died in 1662, aged only 39. The unfinished notes were published after his death as the Pensées (Thoughts).

Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher. He is one of the most important thinkers of the early modern period. He was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam. His family was Portuguese Jewish. They had fled Portugal to escape violent persecution by Catholic rulers. The Netherlands at the time was unusual in Europe. It was more tolerant of Jews than most countries. But Jewish communities there stayed careful, afraid of upsetting their Christian neighbours. Young Baruch (Hebrew for 'blessed') was a brilliant student of Hebrew and Jewish religious texts. His father ran a small trading business. When the father died, Spinoza helped manage it for a short time. But by his early twenties, he was moving away from traditional Jewish belief. He read Descartes and other new European philosophers. He began to question the Bible. He asked whether miracles really happened. He doubted that God was a person who ruled the world from outside it. In 1656, when he was 23, the Jewish community of Amsterdam formally expelled him. The document is one of the harshest such orders in Jewish history. It cursed him and forbade any Jew from speaking to him or even coming within four paces of him. The exact reasons were not recorded. His dangerous religious ideas are the most likely cause. He never tried to rejoin. He made his living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. This was precise, patient work. He lived simply, in rented rooms, never marrying. He refused a university chair at Heidelberg because he feared it would limit his freedom to think. He published only two books in his lifetime, one of them anonymously. His greatest work, the Ethics, came out after his death. He died on 21 February 1677, aged 44, probably from a lung disease made worse by glass dust from his work.

John Locke was an English philosopher. He is one of the most influential political thinkers in world history. He was born on 29 August 1632 in a small village in Somerset, in the south-west of England. His father was a country lawyer who had fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War. Young John grew up during that war, watching England struggle over who should rule. He was a brilliant student. He went to Westminster School in London and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He stayed at Oxford as a teacher for many years. He studied medicine and science as well as philosophy. He worked with the famous scientist Robert Boyle. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society, Britain's most important scientific group. His medical training later saved the life of his friend and patron, Lord Ashley, by performing an operation to remove a cyst from his liver. Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) became a powerful politician. Locke worked as his secretary, adviser, and family doctor. This brought Locke deep into English politics. When Shaftesbury fell out with King Charles II in the early 1680s, Locke too was in danger. He fled to the Netherlands in 1683. He stayed there for six years, writing the books that would make him famous. In 1688, King James II was overthrown in what English people called the Glorious Revolution. William and Mary took the throne. Locke returned home safely. In 1689 and 1690, he published three of the most important books of his age: A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Each changed its field. He never married. He spent his last years at a country house in Essex, writing and corresponding with scholars across Europe. He died on 28 October 1704, aged 72.

Aphra Behn was an English writer. She is the first woman known to have earned her living by writing in English. Almost every fact about her early life is uncertain. She was born around 1640, probably in Kent in the south of England. Her family was not rich. Her father may have been a barber called Johnson. As a young woman, she travelled to Surinam, a small English colony in South America (it later became Dutch). There she seems to have met people whose stories she used later in her writing. By 1664 she was back in England. She married a man called Behn, possibly a German or Dutch merchant. He died or left her within a few years. She then used the name Mrs Behn for the rest of her life. In the 1660s, King Charles II sent her to Antwerp in the Netherlands as a spy. Her job was to get information about English enemies. She sent messages back to London using the code name 'Astrea'. The king did not pay her enough. She ended up in debt. She may have spent time in a debtors' prison in London. From about 1670 she began writing plays. They were witty, often funny, and sometimes about sex. She wrote about 19 plays in total. Her most famous play is The Rover (1677). She also wrote poems, novels, and translations. Her novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the first novels in English. It tells the story of an African prince sold into slavery. She died on 16 April 1689, aged about 48 or 49. She is buried at Westminster Abbey, a rare honour for a writer. Virginia Woolf later said that every woman who writes owes something to Aphra Behn.

Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician, physicist, and natural philosopher. He was born prematurely in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, and his father died before he was born. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, but when the university closed because of an outbreak of plague in 1665, he returned to his family farm and spent roughly eighteen months there during which he made several of the most important discoveries in the history of science. He developed the mathematical foundations of calculus, began developing his theory of gravity, and conducted his first experiments on light and colour. He returned to Cambridge and eventually became a professor there. His great work, the Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, set out his three laws of motion and his theory of universal gravitation. It was recognised immediately as one of the greatest intellectual achievements in history. He also served as Master of the Royal Mint, reforming the English currency, and as President of the Royal Society. He was famously difficult in his personal relationships and spent enormous amounts of time on alchemy and biblical interpretation, interests that are less often mentioned than his physics.

Matsuo Bashō was a Japanese poet of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest master of haiku and one of the foundational figures in all of Japanese literature. He transformed haiku from a witty social pastime into a refined literary art form capable of profound spiritual and aesthetic depth. He was born Matsuo Kinsaku in 1644 near Ueno in Iga Province (modern western Mie Prefecture). His father was a low-ranking samurai serving a local lord. Bashō later took the name Matsuo Chūemon Munefusa. As a young man he entered the service of Tōdō Yoshitada, son of the local lord. Yoshitada shared his passion for poetry, and the two studied haikai together. Yoshitada died suddenly in 1666 when Bashō was about twenty-two. The grief-stricken Bashō left his samurai position and eventually made his way to Edo (modern Tokyo), the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. There he immersed himself in literary circles and by the 1670s had become a respected poet and teacher. In 1680 he withdrew from urban Edo to a small hut by a banana tree (bashō in Japanese), from which he took the poetic name by which he is now known. He took up the study of Zen Buddhism under the priest Butchō and adopted an increasingly ascetic life. From 1684 he began a series of long walking journeys across Japan, recorded in travel diaries that combined prose and haiku: Nozarashi Kikō (Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton, 1684), Kashima Kikō (1687), Oi no Kobumi (Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1688), Sarashina Kikō (1688), and his masterpiece Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North, completed 1694). The last documented a 2,400-kilometre journey through northern Honshu in 1689 with his disciple Kawai Sora. He returned to Edo in 1691, set out again in 1694 for Kyushu, fell ill on the way, and died in Osaka on 28 November 1694. He was 50.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun of colonial New Spain, widely regarded as the finest writer of the Spanish Baroque in the Americas. She was born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman of Spanish descent. She taught herself to read at the age of three, devoured the books in her grandfather's library, and begged her mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend university — which was closed to women. At sixteen she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, where she astonished scholars with her learning. Rather than marry, she entered a convent in 1669, first the Carmelites and then the Hieronymites, where she could continue her studies and writing. Her cell became one of the great intellectual centres of the Americas, filled with books, musical and scientific instruments, and a stream of visitors. She wrote love poetry, religious verse, philosophical essays, plays, and comic dramas in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and the Afro-Mexican creole of her time. In the early 1690s, church authorities pressured her to abandon secular studies. She signed a statement of submission in her own blood, sold her library of some four thousand books, and died in 1695 while nursing her sisters through an epidemic.

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was a Kongolese Christian prophetess and political leader. She founded the Antonian movement, which imagined Christianity in Kongolese terms. She was born around 1684 near the mountain of Kibangu, in the Kingdom of Kongo (in what is now northern Angola and the western Democratic Republic of the Congo). Her family was of Kongolese nobility, though not wealthy. She was baptised Beatriz, following the Catholic faith of the Kongolese kings, but her Kikongo name was Kimpa Vita. The Kingdom of Kongo in her time was in deep crisis. A civil war that had begun in 1665 was still going on. The ancient capital, São Salvador, lay abandoned. Rival families fought for the throne. The wars produced thousands of captives, many of whom were sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Kongo had been officially Christian since 1491, but the Italian Capuchin missionaries often dismissed local religious practices as witchcraft. As a young woman, Kimpa Vita was trained as a nganga marinda, a Kongolese religious medium who consulted the spirit world for community healing. In August 1704, when she was about 20, she fell seriously ill. She said she died and came back to life. Now, she said, she was possessed by Saint Anthony, the popular Italian Catholic saint. Through her, Saint Anthony preached. She led a remarkable movement that reoccupied São Salvador in 1705. She won thousands of followers, including peasants and some nobles. In 1706, she was captured by King Pedro IV with help from the Capuchin missionaries. A church tribunal condemned her. She was burned at the stake on 2 July 1706, aged about 22. Her infant son, born just weeks before her capture, was spared.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a German composer and organist usually regarded as the supreme master of Baroque music and one of the greatest composers in any tradition. He was born in Eisenach into a large and distinguished family of working musicians — the name Bach had become almost a synonym for musician in parts of central Germany. He was orphaned at ten and raised by an older brother who trained him in the organ and in composition. From fifteen he worked continuously as a professional musician: as a choirboy, as a church organist in small towns, as a court musician at Weimar and then Cothen, and from 1723 until his death as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where he was responsible for the music at several city churches, the Thomasschule, and important civic occasions. He wrote music almost constantly. His output includes more than two hundred sacred cantatas, the St Matthew and St John Passions, the B minor Mass, the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, dozens of organ works, and hundreds of other pieces. He married twice and had twenty children, several of whom became important composers in the following generation. He went blind in his last year and died after an unsuccessful eye operation. His music was not widely celebrated after his death and had slipped into relative obscurity by 1800; its revival in the nineteenth century, launched by Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion, began a long process by which Bach came to be regarded as a central figure of world music.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a French lawyer and political thinker. He was born in 1689 at the family castle of La Brède, near Bordeaux in southwest France. His family belonged to the lesser nobility. He studied law and worked as a judge in the Bordeaux high court for twelve years. The work was tedious, but it gave him a deep first-hand knowledge of how laws and courts actually function. In 1721 he became famous, almost by surprise, with the Persian Letters. The book is a comic novel about two Persian travellers in France who write letters home about French customs. Through their puzzled outsider eyes, Montesquieu mocked French society, religion, and politics. The book was a bestseller across Europe. Soon Montesquieu sold his judge's office, joined the French Academy, and turned to full-time writing. For the next twenty years he travelled, read, and worked on his great book. He spent over a year in England, watching parliament and the courts. He read history and travel writing from many parts of the world. The result was The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. It was a vast comparative study of government across many cultures and times. The book was banned by the Catholic Church but read everywhere. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. His ideas, especially about separating the powers of government, would shape the United States Constitution forty years later, and constitutional thought ever since.

Voltaire was a French writer, philosopher, and campaigner who became the most famous voice of the European Enlightenment. His real name was François-Marie Arouet. He was born in Paris in 1694 to a middle-class family. As a young man, he wrote sharp poems and plays that mocked powerful people. Twice he was put in the Bastille prison for his words. He took the pen name 'Voltaire' around 1718. In his twenties he spent two years in exile in England. He admired the freer politics, the religious tolerance, and the science of Newton. Back in France, he spent his life writing across many forms: tragedies, histories, poems, novels, scientific essays, philosophical books, and thousands of letters. He wrote so much that his collected works fill more than 70 large volumes. He was always in trouble with the French government and the Catholic Church. To stay safe, he moved often. He spent years at the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, then in Switzerland, then in his own large estate at Ferney near the Swiss border. From Ferney, in his sixties and seventies, he became Europe's most famous writer. He defended people wrongly accused by the courts. He campaigned against torture, religious persecution, and superstition. He died in Paris in 1778, at the age of 83, treated like a hero by huge crowds. Eleven years later, his ideas helped fuel the French Revolution.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher and writer. He is one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He was born on 28 June 1712 in Geneva, which was then an independent city-state, not part of France or Switzerland. His mother died nine days after his birth. His father was a watchmaker who taught him to read and love books. When Rousseau was ten, his father got into a fight and had to flee Geneva. Young Jean-Jacques was left with relatives. At fifteen, he left Geneva and wandered across Europe. He worked as a servant, a private tutor, and a music copyist. He taught himself by reading. He met a wealthy older woman named Madame de Warens, who took him in for several years. His early life was unstable. He had little formal education. He would later turn this outsider experience into a source of philosophical insight. He moved to Paris in 1742. He made his name in 1750 when he won an essay competition on whether progress in arts and sciences had improved human morals. His answer, surprisingly, was no. The essay made him famous. For the next twenty years, he wrote a series of books that changed European thought. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) argued that civilisation had corrupted humanity. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century. The Social Contract (1762) proposed a new theory of political legitimacy. Emile, or On Education (1762) proposed a revolutionary theory of how to raise children. Rousseau had six children with his partner, Thérèse Levasseur, and placed all of them in a foundling hospital. He did this against her wishes. The facts are hard to reconcile with his writing on education and family. He spent his final years moving from country to country, often in conflict with authorities who banned his books. He died on 2 July 1778 in Ermenonville, France, aged 66.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and studied at the University of Glasgow and then at Oxford. He became a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, where he taught ethics, politics, and economics. He is best known for two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which is about how human beings understand right and wrong through imagining how others feel, and The Wealth of Nations (1776), which examined how economies work and what makes countries rich or poor. He lived during a time of enormous economic change: the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain and the rapid growth of international trade. He was trying to understand these changes and work out what principles should guide economic life. He has often been called the father of modern economics, though his ideas are more complex than they are often presented to be.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, a city in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). His family was Lutheran and not wealthy. His father was a saddle-maker. His mother, who died when he was 13, was a strong early influence and encouraged his studies. He studied at the University of Königsberg from the age of 16. He worked for several years as a private tutor for noble families before returning to the university as a lecturer in 1755. He became a full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. He stayed in Königsberg his whole life. He is said never to have travelled more than about 150 kilometres from his birthplace. His daily routine was famously strict: neighbours were said to set their watches by his afternoon walks. For most of his career he was a respected but not famous teacher. Then, starting in his late fifties, he wrote a series of huge books that changed philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790) set out a new system. He wrote important shorter works on ethics, religion, politics, and history. He continued writing until his death on 12 February 1804, aged 79. His work is hugely influential, but parts of it are also troubling. He wrote racist statements about non-European peoples. These texts sat alongside his claims about universal human dignity. Modern scholarship has taken this tension seriously, and honest study of Kant now includes this difficulty.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist whose systematic use of the balance to measure the weights of substances before and after chemical reactions helped transform chemistry from a largely qualitative study into a quantitative science. He was born in Paris to a wealthy bourgeois family, studied law in accordance with his family's wishes, and then turned to science. He was elected to the Academy of Sciences at twenty-five. To fund his expensive experimental work he became a member of the Ferme generale, the private tax-collecting consortium that gathered certain taxes for the French crown — a position that gave him income and later cost him his life. In 1771 he married Marie-Anne Paulze, fourteen years his junior, who became his essential scientific collaborator, translating English papers into French, drawing apparatus, and keeping laboratory records. Through the 1770s and 1780s Lavoisier carried out meticulous experiments on combustion, calcination, and respiration, eventually showing that combustion was reaction with a component of air he called oxygene. He proposed a new chemical nomenclature and published Traite elementaire de chimie in 1789, widely regarded as the first modern chemistry textbook. In the French Revolution, his membership of the tax farm became a mortal liability. He was arrested, tried, and guillotined in 1794 at fifty, along with twenty-seven other former tax collectors. The mathematician Lagrange remarked the next day: it took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not be enough to produce another like it.

Toussaint Louverture was the main leader of the Haitian Revolution. This was the only successful slave revolt in modern history. It turned a French slave colony into the first free Black republic in the world. He was born around 1743 on a sugar plantation called Bréda, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Today we call this country Haiti. His exact birth date is not known. His parents were enslaved people, probably brought from West Africa. Toussaint was born into slavery. But his life was unusual. His owner allowed him to learn to read and write. He studied French, some Latin, and medical herbs. By his fifties, he had been freed and owned a small coffee farm. He even owned a few enslaved people himself, which was common for free Black men at the time. This complicated background shaped his later choices. In 1791, a massive uprising began on the colony's northern plain. Enslaved people burned plantations and killed their owners. Toussaint joined the revolt but was not yet its leader. Over the next decade, through brilliant military campaigns, he rose to command. He defeated Spanish armies, British armies, and several French armies. He wrote a constitution for the colony in 1801 and made himself governor for life. In 1802, Napoleon sent a huge army to restore slavery. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting under a flag of truce and captured. He was shipped to France and locked in a freezing cell in the Jura mountains. He died there on 7 April 1803, cold and starving. But the revolution he had led did not die. The next year, his former generals defeated the French and declared Haitian independence on 1 January 1804.

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and legal reformer. He was the founder of modern utilitarianism. He was born on 15 February 1748 in London, into a wealthy lawyer's family. He was a child prodigy. He started learning Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at twelve. He qualified as a lawyer but never practised law. He thought the English legal system was a mess of confused rules that harmed the people it was meant to serve. He spent the rest of his life trying to reform it. He inherited enough money to live without working. For nearly 60 years, he wrote almost every day. He produced thousands of pages on law, government, punishment, economics, and ethics. Much of his work was not published during his lifetime. He would start a book, follow his thoughts into new topics, and leave the book unfinished. His friends and disciples, including James Mill and later James's son John Stuart Mill, edited and published large parts of his work. Bentham's main book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, appeared in 1789. It set out his core principle: the measure of a good action or a good law is whether it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. This principle, called the 'principle of utility', became the foundation of utilitarianism. His influence on law and politics in Britain was enormous. He helped design prisons, wrote model constitutions for foreign governments, and shaped the reform movements of the early 19th century. He had unusual ideas. He designed a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, that has since become a famous image of surveillance. He argued against laws punishing homosexual acts, centuries before this became widely accepted. He left instructions for his body to be preserved after death and displayed in a wooden cabinet. His preserved body, called the 'auto-icon', is still on display at University College London, which he helped inspire. He died on 6 June 1832 in London, aged 84.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer. He is one of the most celebrated composers in European classical music. He was born in 1756 in Salzburg, then a small city in the Holy Roman Empire. He died in 1791 in Vienna, aged only 35. Mozart was a child prodigy. He showed an astonishing musical gift very young. By the age of five he was composing simple pieces. His father, Leopold Mozart, was also a musician. Leopold took young Wolfgang and his older sister Maria Anna, also gifted, on long tours across Europe. They performed for kings, queens, and audiences in many cities. As an adult, Mozart settled in Vienna, the musical capital of his time. He worked as a freelance musician. He gave concerts, taught pupils, and wrote music on commission. This was a difficult way to live. Mozart often had money worries, even though his music was admired. In a short career he wrote an enormous amount: over 600 works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and church music. He died young, possibly of a fever or kidney illness. The exact cause is not known. He was buried in a common grave, in the standard way of his time. He was not poor or forgotten when he died, despite later myths.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and early advocate for women's rights. She grew up in poverty and educated herself by reading widely and working as a teacher and governess. In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the first serious arguments that women deserved the same education and political rights as men. She died at the age of 38, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would later write Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft's ideas were ignored or mocked for much of the century after her death, but she is now recognised as one of the founders of modern feminism.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a Japanese painter and printmaker of the Edo period, widely regarded as the greatest artist of the ukiyo-e tradition and one of the most influential artists in world history. He was born in the commoner district of Edo (modern Tokyo) to an artisan family. Apprenticed at fifteen to a woodblock cutter, he entered the studio of the print designer Katsukawa Shunsho at eighteen and spent his twenties learning the trade. He changed his artistic name over thirty times across his long career, each change marking a stylistic shift or a new artistic ambition. The name Hokusai, meaning north studio, dates from his middle years. He produced an enormous body of work: book illustrations, sketches, paintings, and the printed series for which he is most famous. In his early seventies he began the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the Great Wave off Kanagawa and Red Fuji — two of the most widely recognised images in the world. He also produced the Hokusai Manga, fifteen volumes of drawings covering every conceivable subject, from birds and fish to grimacing faces and imaginary creatures. He lived in poverty for much of his life, moved house more than ninety times, and continued working into his late eighties. He died at eighty-eight, lamenting that he had not been given another ten years of life to become a true artist.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He was the last of the great system-builders in Western philosophy. He was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in southern Germany. His father was a civil servant. His mother taught him Latin before he started school but died when he was eleven. He had one sister, Christiane, who became very close to him. Hegel studied philosophy and theology at the University of Tübingen. There he became friends with two other young men who would become famous: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three were excited by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 when Hegel was nineteen. For years Hegel struggled to find an academic post. He worked as a private tutor in Switzerland, then in Frankfurt. In 1801 he became an unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena. There he wrote his first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He famously finished the manuscript on the same day Napoleon's army arrived in the city in October 1806. The book was published in 1807. Hegel's career then bounced around. He worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg, then as a high school principal in Nuremberg. He married Marie von Tucher in 1811. In 1816 he became a professor at Heidelberg, then at Berlin from 1818. By the 1820s he was the most famous philosopher in Germany. His lectures filled large halls. He died of illness, possibly cholera, on 14 November 1831 in Berlin, aged 61.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He was born in 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany. He is one of the most important composers in the history of Western music. He was baptised on 17 December, so he was probably born a day or two earlier. He came from a musical family. His grandfather was a respected court musician. His father, Johann, was also a musician but a difficult man and a heavy drinker. Johann saw young Ludwig's talent and pushed him hard, sometimes cruelly, hoping to create a child star like Mozart. Beethoven gave his first public performance at the age of seven. In 1792, aged 21, he moved to Vienna, the music capital of Europe. He studied briefly with Joseph Haydn. He soon became famous in Vienna, first as a pianist and then as a composer. Wealthy noble families paid him to write music. He never took a full court post. He preferred to work as a freelance composer, which was unusual for his time. In his late twenties, he began to lose his hearing. By his forties he was almost completely deaf. He kept composing, often using a notebook to communicate with visitors. His later works, including the Ninth Symphony, were written when he could no longer hear them properly performed. He never married, though he loved several women, often unhappily. He died in Vienna in 1827, aged 56. Around 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Simón Bolívar was a military leader and political thinker who led much of South America to independence from Spain. In Latin America he is known as 'El Libertador', the Liberator. He was born on 24 July 1783 in Caracas, in what is now Venezuela. His family was part of the wealthy Creole class: people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by uncles and a close teacher, Simón Rodríguez, who shaped his ideas deeply. As a young man, Bolívar travelled in Europe. He saw Napoleon crowned emperor in Paris in 1804. He watched the French Revolution's promises turn into Napoleon's empire. He also read widely: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment thinkers. These experiences shaped his sense of what politics could and could not achieve. Bolívar returned to South America determined to free it from Spanish rule. Between 1810 and 1825, he led long military campaigns across huge distances. He crossed the Andes mountains with his army in conditions that killed many of his soldiers. He won key battles at Boyacá (1819), Carabobo (1821), and Ayacucho (1824, commanded by his general Sucre). By the end of these wars, Spain had lost its mainland American colonies. Six modern countries were born from this struggle: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia (named after him), and Panama. Bolívar hoped to unite these new nations into one great republic. He called it Gran Colombia. But the project failed. Regional rivalries, personal ambitions, and the size of the territory tore it apart. Bolívar died of tuberculosis on 17 December 1830, aged 47, on his way into exile. He died disappointed, saying famously that he had 'ploughed the sea'.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist whose Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen years old, is widely regarded as the founding work of science fiction and one of the most influential novels in the English language. She was born in London to William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died days after giving birth to her, and Mary grew up in a household filled with books and visitors from the radical circles of her father. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the summer of 1816, during a cold and rainy holiday at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of their company write a ghost story. Over the following months Mary wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818. Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died in infancy or childhood, her husband drowned in 1822, and she was left at twenty-four to raise her surviving son alone and to support herself by writing. She produced further novels, including The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic narrative written after Percy's death, as well as travel writing, short stories, biographical essays, and careful editions of her husband's poetry. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was an English fossil collector and self-taught palaeontologist whose discoveries on the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset transformed scientific understanding of the deep past. She was born into a poor Dissenting Protestant family that made part of its living by selling curiosities — fossils and shells — to summer visitors on the south coast of England. Her father Richard taught her and her brother Joseph how to find fossils in the crumbling cliffs of the Blue Lias. He died when she was eleven, leaving the family in debt. Mary took up fossil hunting as a trade to support her mother and brother. At about twelve, she and Joseph uncovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton known to science, a marine reptile that had been unknown before. Over the following decades Mary made many further extraordinary finds on her own: the first complete plesiosaur, the first British pterosaur outside the usual fossil record, important ichthyosaurs, and fossil fish with preserved ink sacs. She learned enough anatomy, geology, and classical languages to read the scientific papers written about her finds — and to correct them. The gentlemen geologists who bought her specimens and published descriptions of them sometimes credited her by name and sometimes did not. She died of breast cancer at forty-seven, still poor despite the scientific importance of what she had found.