Thinkers Timeline

Khadija bint Khuwaylid was a successful Arabian merchant in 6th- and 7th-century Mecca. She is honoured in Islamic tradition as the first Muslim and as the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. She was born around 555 CE in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Her family belonged to the Quraysh, the powerful tribe that controlled the city. Her father, Khuwaylid ibn Asad, was a respected merchant and tribal leader. After his death in battle, Khadija took over the family business. She built it up through her own skill until her trade caravans were among the largest in Arabia. Her caravans travelled between Mecca, Yemen in the south, and Syria in the north. People in Mecca called her al-Tahirah, meaning 'the Pure One', because of her honest dealings. She had been married twice before. Both husbands had died, and she had children from those marriages. By her late thirties she was a wealthy widow, running a major business in a male-dominated society. She refused many marriage offers from leading men of Mecca. In 595 CE, she heard about a young man named Muhammad who was known for his honesty. She hired him to lead one of her trade caravans to Syria. He returned with strong profits and a strong reputation. She then proposed marriage to him through a relative. He accepted. He was about 25; she was probably around 40, though some sources suggest 28. Their marriage lasted 25 years. She supported his religious mission until her death in 619 CE, the year Muhammad called the 'Year of Sorrow'.

Rabia of Basra was an early Sufi mystic and saint. Sufism is the mystical tradition within Islam. It emphasises the inner experience of God rather than only outward religious practice. Rabia is one of the most important early figures in this tradition. She lived in what is now southern Iraq. Her full name was Rabia al-Adawiyya al-Basri. 'Al-Basri' means 'from Basra'. She was probably born around 717 CE and died around 801 CE, living to nearly 80 years old. The exact dates are uncertain. Almost everything we know about her comes from later Sufi writers who collected and shaped stories about her over the following centuries. The traditional life story tells of great hardship. She was born the fourth daughter to a poor family in Basra. Her parents died when she was young, possibly in a famine. She was kidnapped or sold into slavery as a child. Her master treated her harshly. According to legend, he saw a light shining around her one night while she was at prayer. He freed her in awe. After her release, she lived alone in the desert for some years. Then she returned to Basra. She lived a life of severe poverty and constant prayer. She refused to marry, despite many proposals from important men. She said she belonged only to God. Disciples gathered around her. She taught a generation of Sufis. Her teaching focused on pure love of God, not love motivated by hope of paradise or fear of hell. Her grave was a place of pilgrimage for centuries. Modern scholars debate how much of the traditional story is reliable history.

Jabir ibn Hayyan (c.721-815 CE), known in medieval Europe as Geber, was a scholar of the early Islamic world whose writings on alchemy, chemistry, pharmacy, and metallurgy laid much of the practical foundation of chemical knowledge. His life is poorly documented and many details are uncertain. He is traditionally said to have been born in Tus in Khurasan, in what is now northeastern Iran, to an Arab family of the Azd tribe, and to have worked at the Abbasid court in Baghdad and Kufa under the patronage of the Barmakid family, the powerful viziers of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. When the Barmakids fell from favour in 803, Jabir reportedly retreated from public life. The scale of the writings attributed to him — several thousand treatises — is far larger than any single person could have produced, and modern scholars now believe that many works under his name were written over two or three centuries by a group of scholars associated with a particular religious and philosophical tradition, possibly the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam. Whether Jabir was a single historical person who founded the tradition, a legendary name used by later writers, or both at once, the Jabirian corpus represents one of the richest bodies of alchemical and chemical writing ever produced. It was translated into Latin from the twelfth century onwards and shaped European alchemy, through which it helped seed the eventual emergence of modern chemistry.

Abu Bishr Amr ibn Uthman, known as Sībawayh (c. 760-796), was a Persian-born Arab grammarian whose book Al-Kitāb is the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language and one of the most important works in the history of linguistics. He was born in Hamadan or Shiraz, in what is now Iran, into a Persian family. Arabic was not his first language. He moved to Basra, in what is now Iraq, as a young man. Basra was then one of the great centres of Islamic learning, with mosques, schools, and scholarly circles that drew students from across the expanding Muslim world. Sībawayh studied with the leading Arabic grammarians of his time, including the great al-Khalīl ibn Ahmad, who had developed systematic approaches to Arabic phonology and had produced the first Arabic dictionary. Sībawayh was especially devoted to al-Khalīl and quotes him extensively in his own work. Sībawayh's nickname in Persian means little apple, and may have come from the apple-like freshness of his complexion. He lived a short life of about thirty-six years but produced a single enormous book that remains the foundation of Arabic grammatical science. The book is simply called Al-Kitāb, which means The Book — as if it were the only book that needed saying much about. This was not arrogance but recognition by the tradition that followed: for over twelve centuries Arabic grammarians have treated Al-Kitāb as the definitive starting point for their field. Sībawayh died young, possibly around 796. The details of his death are uncertain. One traditional story holds that he died shortly after losing a famous grammatical debate in Baghdad against a rival scholar. This story may not be historically reliable. What is certain is that his book survived him and became the foundation of Arabic linguistics, studied continuously from his own time until today.

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was a Persian scholar born around 780, probably in Khwarezm, a region in what is now Uzbekistan. His family name, al-Khwārizmī, means 'from Khwarezm'. He spent most of his working life in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Baghdad at that time was one of the world's great centres of learning. He worked at the House of Wisdom, a famous library and research centre set up by the Caliph al-Ma'mūn. Scholars there translated Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic and wrote original works of their own. Al-Khwārizmī was one of the most important scholars of his generation. He wrote on mathematics, astronomy, geography, and the calendar. His most famous book is usually called al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa'l-muqābala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. The word al-jabr in the title gave us the English word algebra. Another of his books explained how to calculate using the Hindu numerals from India. This book, translated into Latin centuries later, spread these numerals across Europe. We call them Arabic numerals today, but they came from India through scholars like him. He died around 850. Many of his works survive. Some exist only in later Latin translations. His influence on mathematics is hard to overstate.

Adi Shankara (traditionally 788-820, though some scholars propose earlier dates) was an Indian philosopher and theologian whose consolidation of the Advaita Vedanta school shaped Hindu thought more decisively than any other single figure in the tradition. He was born in Kaladi in what is now Kerala, in southern India, into a Nambudiri Brahmin family. Traditional biographies describe his father as dying when he was young and his mother as devout and learned. He is said to have become a renunciate at eight — a striking step taken, according to tradition, with his mother's reluctant consent. He studied under Govinda Bhagavatpada, himself a student of Gaudapada, whose commentary on the Mandukya Upanishad provided Shankara with much of his philosophical starting point. Shankara spent his short life travelling across the Indian subcontinent, debating rival philosophers, establishing monasteries, and writing prolifically. He founded four major monastic centres (mathas) at the cardinal points of India — at Sringeri in the south, Puri in the east, Dwarka in the west, and Jyotirmath in the north — each to be led by a lineage-holder called a Shankaracharya. This institutional network remains active today. His writing output was extraordinary for someone who lived only thirty-two years by traditional reckoning. His commentaries on the three foundational texts of Vedanta — the Upanishads (particularly the ten principal Upanishads), the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras — are the authoritative statements of Advaita Vedanta. He also wrote shorter philosophical works including the Upadesasahasri (A Thousand Teachings), and devotional hymns including the Bhaja Govindam, that remain widely recited. Traditional accounts place his death at Kedarnath in the Himalayas. The dating of his life has been contested — some scholars propose sixth- or seventh-century dates based on textual evidence — but the ninth century remains the conventional position.

Al-Biruni was a Central Asian polymath. The word 'polymath' means a person with deep knowledge in many fields. He worked as an astronomer, mathematician, geographer, historian, anthropologist, geologist, and physicist. He was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. He was born in 973 CE in Khwarezm, a region near the Aral Sea in what is now Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He died around 1048 CE. He came from a family of modest means. He was orphaned young. He was lucky. A prince of the local royal family took him in and arranged for his education. He studied under leading scholars of his region. By his twenties he was already corresponding with other major scholars across the Muslim world. In 1017, his life changed dramatically. The Turkic ruler Mahmud of Ghazni invaded Khwarezm. Al-Biruni was taken east, to the Ghaznavid empire's capital in what is now Afghanistan. He was effectively a captive scholar. The Ghaznavids treated him reasonably well but kept him from going home. He spent the rest of his life in their service. The move had one extraordinary side effect. Mahmud's armies regularly raided into India. Al-Biruni travelled with them. He used the opportunity to study Indian language, religion, philosophy, and science directly. He learned Sanskrit. He read Indian astronomical and mathematical texts. He talked with Hindu scholars. He wrote a book called the India, one of the most careful studies of one civilisation by a thinker from another that has ever been written. He wrote about 150 books over his career. Around 25 survive. He wrote about astronomy, the calendar, mineralogy, pharmacy, mathematics, geography, and history. He died around age 75, still working.

Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese writer and lady of the imperial court. She is the author of The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel. She was born around the year 973 in Heian-kyō, the capital of Japan (modern Kyoto). Her real name is unknown. 'Murasaki' was probably a nickname taken from a character in her novel. 'Shikibu' refers to her father's position at the Bureau of Ceremonies. She came from a lesser branch of the powerful Fujiwara family. Her father was a scholar of Chinese. He recognised her talent and taught her things normally taught only to boys, including Chinese classical literature. This education would later shape her writing in important ways. She married a much older distant cousin, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, around her mid to late twenties. They had a daughter. Her husband died of an epidemic in 1001, only two years after the marriage. Murasaki was now a young widow with a young child. She probably began writing The Tale of Genji in the years just after her husband's death. Around 1005, her writing had attracted the attention of the powerful Fujiwara no Michinaga. He brought her to court as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Shōshi, the young wife of Emperor Ichijō. Murasaki served at court for years, kept a diary, wrote poems, and continued her novel. The exact year of her death is uncertain. Most scholars accept around 1014, when she would have been about 41. Some think she may have lived later, perhaps until 1025.

Ibn Sina (980-1037 CE), known in the Western world as Avicenna, was a Persian Muslim philosopher and physician. He was born near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. He was exceptionally gifted: he is said to have memorised the Quran by age ten, and by eighteen was a practising physician whom established doctors came to consult. He lived an active and often difficult life, working as a physician and court official for various rulers across Central Asia and Persia while writing philosophy and science at an extraordinary pace. He wrote more than 200 books. His most important works are the Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical textbook across Europe and the Islamic world for five centuries, and the Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa), a massive encyclopaedia of philosophy and science. He died at 57 years old, in 1037 CE, in what is now western Iran.

Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, theologian, and teacher. He was one of the most influential and controversial intellectual figures of the 12th century. He helped lay the foundations of the Scholastic method that would dominate medieval European universities. He was born in 1079 in Le Pallet, near Nantes in western France. He died in 1142, aged about 63. He came from a minor noble family. He was the eldest son. He could have inherited the family's modest lands. He gave up the inheritance to study philosophy. He became a wandering student in northern France, going from teacher to teacher. He was clever, ambitious, and difficult. He repeatedly fell out with his teachers and set up rival schools. By his thirties he was the most famous teacher of philosophy in Paris. In the 1110s he met Heloise, the brilliant niece of a Paris cathedral canon named Fulbert. Heloise was about 20 years younger than Abelard. He arranged to lodge in Fulbert's house and tutor her. They became lovers. She became pregnant. Abelard arranged a secret marriage to protect her reputation, though Heloise initially resisted. When Fulbert discovered the relationship, he had Abelard attacked and castrated. Abelard withdrew to a monastery. Heloise became a nun. They never lived together again, though they corresponded for the rest of their lives. Abelard kept teaching and writing. He produced original works on logic, ethics, and theology. His positions were sometimes radical for his time. He was condemned for heresy twice, in 1121 and 1140. He died in a monastery while travelling to defend himself in Rome. His remains were eventually buried with Heloise's at Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where their joint tomb is still a popular site for visitors.

Anna Komnene was a Byzantine princess and historian. The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire. It survived for a thousand years after the western Roman Empire fell. Anna Komnene was born in the imperial palace in Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1083. Her father was the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. She is widely considered the first known woman historian in European tradition, though women had certainly written history elsewhere before her. She was the eldest child of the emperor. Her parents had her educated to a high level, unusual for a woman of her time. She studied Greek classics, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. She read Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, and the Bible. She knew the Byzantine intellectual traditions of her time deeply. When her younger brother John was born, the line of imperial succession changed. As the eldest, Anna had expected to be empress, with her husband as a kind of co-ruler. The arrival of a male heir reduced her position. According to some sources, she later plotted to put her own husband on the throne instead of her brother. The plot failed. She and her husband were exiled within Constantinople, kept under watch but not killed. After her husband's death in 1137, she retired to a monastery. There, in her sixties, she began writing the Alexiad. The book is a long history of her father's reign as emperor, from 1081 to 1118. It runs to over 500 pages in modern translations. The book is one of the great sources for the history of the First Crusade, the Byzantine Empire, and the politics of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. She died around 1153, aged about 70.

Hildegard of Bingen was a German nun, writer, composer, and healer. She was one of the most important thinkers in medieval Europe. She was born in 1098 in a small village in what is now western Germany. Her family were minor nobles. She was the tenth child. At that time, some families gave a child to the Church. This was called a 'tithe', a kind of gift. Hildegard was sent to a small group of religious women when she was about eight. She lived with an older woman called Jutta. Jutta taught her to read and write Latin. Hildegard spent almost her whole life in religious houses. She never travelled far in the usual sense. But her ideas travelled across Europe. From childhood, Hildegard said she saw bright lights. She called these visions. She thought they came from God. For many years she did not tell anyone. She was afraid people would laugh at her. When she was about 42, she finally began to write them down. Her first book, Scivias, took ten years to finish. The Pope himself read parts of it and said it was good work. After Jutta died, Hildegard became the leader of her small group. She then founded a new house for women at Rupertsberg, near the River Rhine. Later she founded a second house at Eibingen. She wrote books on God, on medicine, on plants, and on music. She composed many songs, which are still performed today. She wrote nearly 400 letters. Kings, popes, and abbots asked her for advice. She died on 17 September 1179, aged about 81. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 2012, over 800 years after her death.

Heloise was a French abbess, philosopher, and letter-writer. She was one of the most original intellectual voices of the 12th century. She is often remembered chiefly for her tragic love affair with the philosopher Peter Abelard, but she was a serious thinker in her own right and a successful religious leader for over 30 years. She was probably born around 1100 in France. She died in 1164, aged about 64. Her family background is unclear. She seems to have come from minor French nobility. She was raised partly in the convent of Argenteuil near Paris. By her teens she was already famous for her learning. She read Latin, Greek (very rare for a woman of her time), and Hebrew. She studied Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, the Church Fathers, and the philosophy of her own day. Her uncle Fulbert, a canon at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, brought her to live with him in the city to continue her education. In her late teens she became a private student of Peter Abelard, the most famous philosopher in Paris. He was about 20 years older than her. They became lovers. She became pregnant with their son Astrolabe. Abelard arranged a secret marriage, which Heloise initially opposed because she thought it would damage Abelard's career. When her uncle Fulbert tried to publicise the marriage, Abelard sent Heloise to a convent. Fulbert thought Abelard had abandoned her and arranged Abelard's castration in revenge. After the catastrophe, Abelard pushed Heloise to take religious vows. She became a nun, then prioress, then abbess of a community Abelard had founded called the Paraclete. She ran it successfully for over 30 years. She was widely respected by religious authorities including Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny. The famous correspondence with Abelard came years later, after she happened to read his autobiography. She died at the Paraclete and was eventually buried with Abelard.

Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in Latin Europe as Averroes, was a philosopher, jurist, physician, and astronomer from Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled region of the Iberian Peninsula. He was born in Córdoba into a distinguished family of Maliki jurists: his grandfather and father had both served as chief judges of the city. He received a rigorous education in Islamic law, theology, medicine, philosophy, and the natural sciences. He served as a judge in Seville and later as chief judge of Córdoba, and also worked as court physician to the Almohad caliphs. In 1169, the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf asked him to write commentaries on the works of Aristotle that would make them more accessible, and this became his life's greatest project. He wrote short, middle, and long commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's surviving works, along with his own treatises on law, medicine, and philosophy. Late in life he fell out of favour during a period of religious reaction: his books were burned and he was exiled to a small town outside Córdoba. He was rehabilitated before his death but died in Marrakesh in 1198. His commentaries were quickly translated into Latin and Hebrew, where they shaped medieval European philosophy more deeply than they shaped the Islamic world that produced them.

Zhu Xi was a Chinese philosopher, teacher, and government official of the Southern Song dynasty. He was born on 18 October 1130 in Youxi, in Fujian province. His father was a minor official who lost his job shortly before Zhu Xi was born. The family was not rich, but his father valued education and taught his son the Confucian classics. Zhu Xi was a gifted student. He passed the highest civil service exam, called the jinshi, at age eighteen. Most people who passed this exam did so around age thirty-five. As a young man, he studied Buddhism and Daoism as well as Confucianism. In his late twenties he met a teacher named Li Tong, who convinced him to commit fully to Confucianism. Li Tong came from a new wave of Chinese thinkers called the Neo-Confucians. Zhu Xi absorbed their ideas and went much further, producing a grand philosophical system that would shape Chinese thought for centuries. He held government posts only for about nine years in total. He preferred teaching and writing. He rebuilt and taught at the famous White Deer Hollow Academy. He edited and wrote commentaries on classical texts. His sharp criticism of corrupt officials earned him enemies. In 1196, his opponents attacked his teachings as 'false learning' and stripped him of his posts. He died on 23 April 1200, aged 69, still in political disgrace. Several thousand people braved official disapproval to attend his funeral. Within a few decades of his death, his teachings were rehabilitated. They then became the official philosophy of China for more than 600 years.

Badi al-Zaman Abu al-Izz ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari (1136-1206) was an engineer, craftsman, inventor, and mathematician who served the Artuqid dynasty in Upper Mesopotamia, in what is now south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria. He was born in the region known as al-Jazira, from which he took his name, meaning the one from the island between the two rivers. He spent most of his working life at the court of the Artuqid rulers, first at Amid (modern Diyarbakir) and later at other centres. He served as the chief engineer of the palace, where he designed, built, and maintained machines for the court. In 1206, near the end of his life, he completed his great work, the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, commissioned by his patron the Artuqid king Nasir al-Din Mahmud. The book describes fifty machines in careful detail, with step-by-step drawings showing how each was constructed and how it worked. These included automated clocks, water-raising devices, fountains, hand-washing basins, musical automata, combination locks, and many others. He finished the book shortly before his death and it was copied and preserved for centuries in the Islamic world, with surviving manuscripts now held in libraries from Istanbul to Paris to Boston. Through these manuscripts, his engineering knowledge has reached the modern world.

Moses ben Maimon (1138-1204), a religious figure known in Hebrew as Rambam and in Arabic as Musa ibn Maymun, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher, legal scholar, and physician whose work shaped Jewish thought for centuries and influenced Christian and Islamic philosophy as well. He was born in Córdoba, in the part of al-Andalus then under Almoravid rule, where the great intellectual flowering of Jewish and Islamic civilisation was at its height. His father was a rabbinic judge. When Maimonides was about ten years old, the city fell to the Almohads, a Berber dynasty whose rulers offered non-Muslims the choice of conversion, exile, or death. The family was forced into a decade of wandering through Spain and North Africa before settling in Fustat, near Cairo, around 1166. There Maimonides rose to become the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and physician to the court of Saladin. He wrote in Arabic (using Hebrew letters) and in Hebrew. His three major works changed Jewish intellectual life permanently. The Commentary on the Mishnah (completed 1168, in Arabic) made rabbinic law accessible to wider audiences and included his famous Thirteen Principles of Faith. The Mishneh Torah (1170-1180, in Hebrew), his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law, organised the entire body of talmudic tradition into a single systematic presentation. The Guide for the Perplexed (completed around 1190, in Arabic) addressed those caught between traditional faith and Aristotelian philosophy, offering a sophisticated synthesis that remains one of the great works of medieval philosophy. He died in Fustat in 1204; tradition holds that his body was carried to Tiberias in the Galilee for burial, where his tomb is still visited. His influence on subsequent Jewish thought is difficult to overstate; the phrase from Moses to Moses there was none like Moses reflects the esteem in which later generations held him.

Eihei Dogen (1200-1253) was a Japanese Buddhist monk whose writings founded the Soto school of Zen Buddhism and produced one of the most original bodies of religious philosophical work in East Asian history. He was born in Kyoto into a high-ranking aristocratic family and reportedly lost both parents in early childhood — his father when he was two or three, his mother at seven or eight. These early losses are traditionally said to have awakened in him a deep awareness of impermanence that would shape his later teaching. At thirteen he entered the Tendai Buddhist monastic order on Mount Hiei, the great centre of Japanese Buddhist learning. He studied there for several years but grew dissatisfied with what he saw as the corruption and decline of Japanese Buddhism. Around 1223 he travelled to China, where he spent four years in Chan (Zen) monasteries seeking a genuine teacher. At Mount Tiantong he met Rujing, a rigorous Chan master in the Caodong (Soto) lineage, and under his teaching Dogen experienced the awakening he had been seeking. He returned to Japan in 1227 with Rujing's confirmation of his enlightenment and spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and establishing Soto Zen as a distinct tradition in Japan. He lived first at Kenninji in Kyoto, then founded Koshoji temple, and finally moved in 1243 to the remote mountains of Echizen Province, where he established Eiheiji — the monastery that remains the head temple of the Soto school. His magnum opus, the Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), is a collection of ninety-five fascicles written over about twenty-two years, treating almost every aspect of Buddhist thought and practice with extraordinary philosophical depth and linguistic inventiveness. He wrote in Japanese rather than Chinese, a decision that made his work accessible to Japanese readers but also required him to invent much of the philosophical vocabulary he needed. He died at Kyoto in 1253 at age fifty-three. His influence on Japanese religion, aesthetics, and thought has been substantial; his international reception, particularly in the twentieth century, has made him one of the most studied Buddhist thinkers outside Asia.

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273), known throughout the Islamic world as Mawlana (our master) and in the West by the short name Rumi, was a Persian Sufi poet, theologian, and teacher whose work remains among the most widely read religious poetry in world literature. He was born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan), then part of the Khwarezmian Empire, into a family of religious scholars. His father Baha al-Din Walad was a respected teacher and preacher. The family fled westward before the Mongol invasions, travelling through Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus, and finally settling in Konya in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (in present-day Turkey) — the origin of the name by which he became known. Rumi received thorough training in Islamic law, theology, and the Persian poetic and philosophical tradition. By his thirties he was a respected scholar and teacher with his own students and a conventional scholarly career. In 1244 he met a wandering dervish named Shams al-Din of Tabriz. The encounter transformed him. For nearly three years the two were inseparable, engaged in intense spiritual conversation. When Shams disappeared — either killed by Rumi's jealous disciples or simply leaving — Rumi responded not with a return to conventional scholarship but with an outpouring of poetry. The Diwan-i Shams-i Tabrizi, a collection of over forty thousand verses of lyrical poetry dedicated to his lost friend, and the Masnavi-i Ma'navi, a six-book epic of some twenty-five thousand couplets often called the Persian Qur'an, are the main works of his later life. He also wrote prose works and letters. The Sufi order later founded by his followers — the Mevlevi, famous for the whirling dance that became a form of prayer — spread across the Ottoman world. He died in Konya in 1273 and was buried there; his tomb at the Green Mausoleum remains one of the most visited religious sites in the Islamic world. UNESCO declared 2007, his eight-hundredth birth anniversary, an international year of Rumi.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and theologian whose synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy became the most influential intellectual achievement of medieval Catholic thought and remains a central reference in Catholic philosophy and theology today. He was born around 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Sicily (in present-day Italy), to the noble family of the Counts of Aquino. His parents sent him at age five to the nearby Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, intending him for a monastic career that would eventually make him abbot. In 1239 political conflicts disrupted this plan and he was sent to the University of Naples, where he encountered the works of Aristotle and the new Dominican Order. In 1244 he joined the Dominicans — a decision his family opposed so strongly that they kidnapped him and held him under house arrest for over a year. He persisted, reached Paris in 1245, and became a student of the great Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. He followed Albertus to Cologne, then returned to Paris, where he became a master of theology in 1256. Over the next eighteen years he wrote at an extraordinary rate — the Summa contra Gentiles (1259-1265), the Summa Theologiae (begun 1265, unfinished), extensive commentaries on Aristotle, commentaries on several books of the Bible, disputed questions, and many other works. He held teaching posts at Paris and at the Dominican study house in Rome and spent his final years in Naples. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass, he had some experience that he described only as straw compared to what he had seen, and he stopped writing. He died a few months later, in March 1274, while travelling to attend the Council of Lyon. He was canonised in 1323. His works have been studied continuously in Catholic institutions for over seven centuries and have influenced philosophy and theology well beyond Catholicism.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was an Italian poet, writer, and political thinker. He was born in Florence, one of the most important cities in medieval Italy, into a family of modest nobility. He fell deeply in love as a young man with a woman named Beatrice, who died young and became the central figure of his poetic imagination. He was active in Florentine politics and held several public offices. In 1301, when a rival political faction took power in Florence, Dante was accused of political offences, sentenced to death if he returned, and exiled from his city forever. He never went back. He spent the rest of his life wandering from city to city in northern Italy, writing, and composing the work for which he is remembered above all others: the Commedia, known in English as the Divine Comedy. This long narrative poem, written in Italian rather than the Latin used by educated writers of the time, describes a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It was immediately recognised as a masterpiece and has remained one of the most admired works in world literature for seven hundred years.

Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan traveller, scholar, and writer. He travelled more widely than almost anyone else in the medieval world. Over about 30 years, he visited most of the Muslim world and far beyond, covering an estimated 120,000 kilometres. His travel book is one of the great works of medieval literature. He was born in 1304 in Tangier, on the northern coast of Morocco. His full name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta. He came from a family of Muslim judges who followed the Maliki school of Islamic law. He was educated as a religious scholar. In 1325, aged 21, he left home to make the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. He travelled across North Africa to Egypt, then up through Palestine and Syria, and on to Mecca. He completed the pilgrimage. Then he kept going. Curiosity and ambition kept him moving for the next 24 years. He travelled across Iraq, Persia, East Africa, Anatolia, Central Asia, India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bengal, and possibly China. He served as a judge in several places, including in the Indian sultanate of Delhi, where he worked for the powerful Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq. In 1349 he returned home to Morocco. After more shorter trips to Spain and across the Sahara to Mali, he settled down. The Sultan of Morocco asked him to dictate the story of his travels to a court scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The book was finished around 1355. Ibn Battuta lived another 13 or 14 years and died around 1369. His grave is in Tangier.

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a North African Muslim scholar, historian, and thinker. He was born in Tunis, in what is now Tunisia, to a family of scholars and officials. He lived through a turbulent period: the Black Death killed most of his family when he was seventeen, and he spent much of his life moving between the competing kingdoms of North Africa and Spain, working as a diplomat, judge, and official. In his early forties, he spent about four years in a small castle in what is now Algeria, largely cut off from political life. During this time he wrote the introduction to his great historical work, known as the Muqaddimah. This introduction is now recognised as one of the greatest works of social science ever written. He later moved to Egypt, where he worked as a judge and continued to write until his death in Cairo in 1406. He is considered one of the founders of sociology, historiography (the study of how history is written), and economics, though he lived five centuries before these disciplines were formally established in Europe.

Julian of Norwich was an English Christian mystic and theologian. She is thought to be the first woman to have written a book in English that has survived. She was born around 1342, probably in or near Norwich, England. Norwich at that time was one of the largest cities in England, a centre of trade and learning. Almost nothing is known about her early life. We do not even know her real name. The name Julian comes from the church of St Julian's in Norwich, where she later lived. In May 1373, when she was thirty years old, she became seriously ill. She thought she was going to die. While she lay close to death, she received a series of sixteen visions, which she called 'showings'. They came to her over the course of a day and night. She recovered from her illness and wrote down what she had seen. This first version is now called the Short Text. She then spent about twenty years thinking about what the visions meant. She became an anchoress. An anchoress was a woman who lived in a small cell attached to a church, dedicated to prayer and spiritual counsel. Her cell had a window onto the church so she could receive communion, and another window onto the street so she could speak with visitors. After two decades of reflection, she wrote a much longer version of her book, the Long Text. It is now called Revelations of Divine Love. She is known to have been alive as late as 1416, when she would have been about 74. She probably died not long after. She was famous enough in her lifetime that the pilgrim and writer Margery Kempe visited her for spiritual advice.

Christine de Pizan was a medieval Italian-French writer. She is widely considered the first woman in Europe to make her living as a professional author. She was born in 1364 in Venice. Her father, Tommaso da Pizzano, was a doctor and astrologer. When she was four, the family moved to Paris because her father had been invited to serve as court astrologer to King Charles V of France. Christine grew up in the French royal court. Her father supported her education, which was unusual for a girl at the time. She read Latin, history, philosophy, and poetry. She had access to the king's library, one of the best in Europe. At fifteen she married Étienne du Castel, a court notary. By all accounts the marriage was happy. They had three children. In 1389, her husband died of the plague. Christine was 25. Her father had also died the year before. She suddenly had to support her three children, her widowed mother, and a niece. She had no inheritance and no easy way to earn money. Most widows in her position would have remarried or entered a convent. Christine chose neither. She decided to write for a living. She found patrons among the French royal dukes. She wrote poems, biographies, advice books, political works, and history. By her death around 1430, she had produced over forty works. Her best-known book, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), is one of the earliest defences of women in European literature. She is buried in the convent of Poissy, where she spent her final years writing in support of Joan of Arc.

King Sejong the Great (Sejong Daewang) was the fourth king of Korea's Joseon dynasty and one of the most consequential rulers in Korean history. He is the only Korean ruler other than Gwanggaeto the Great of Goguryeo to be honoured with the title 'the Great'. His birth name was Yi Do. He was born on 15 May 1397 in Hanseong (modern Seoul), the third son of King Taejong, the third Joseon ruler. His childhood name was Won Chong. He was not the expected heir. His older brother Yangnyeong was named Crown Prince in 1404. By 1418, Yangnyeong's preference for hunting and leisure over study had led to his removal from succession. The second brother Hyoryeong took religious vows and removed himself. Yi Do, who had distinguished himself by serious study from childhood, was made Crown Prince and ascended the throne later that year at age 22, when his father Taejong abdicated in his favour. Taejong continued to influence court affairs until his death in 1422. Sejong reigned for 32 years, from 1418 to 1450. His reign is widely called the Golden Age of Joseon. He governed by Confucian principles, in which a sovereign was expected to be a scholar of broad learning and to recognise and use men of talent. In 1420 he founded the Jiphyeonjeon (Hall of Worthies), a royal research institute where scholars worked on linguistic, scientific, agricultural, medical, and astronomical projects. Under his reign Korea developed rain gauges, water clocks, sundials, advanced movable-type printing, an independent astronomical calendar based on the Seoul meridian, and many improvements to military technology. His most famous achievement was the creation of the Korean alphabet, Hangul, announced in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. He died on 8 April (or 18 May, by some calendar conversions) 1450 at age 53, by then blinded by complications of diabetes. He was buried at the Yeong Mausoleum and was succeeded by his eldest son Munjong, who reigned only briefly.

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.

Mirabai was a sixteenth-century Indian poet and saint. She is one of the most loved figures in the bhakti movement, a Hindu devotional tradition that swept across India for many centuries. She was born around 1498 in Kudki, a village in present-day Rajasthan in north-west India. Her family, the Rathore Rajputs, were a royal warrior clan. Her mother died when she was young. According to tradition, Mirabai was given a small image of the god Krishna by a holy man during her childhood. She held on to it, and her devotion to Krishna grew. She came to see him as her divine husband. In 1516, when she was about 18, she was married to Bhoj Raj, the crown prince of the neighbouring Mewar kingdom. He was wounded in battle and died in 1521. Mirabai refused to commit sati, the practice of a widow burning herself on her husband's funeral pyre, which was expected of Rajput princesses. This refusal began a long conflict with her in-laws. Legends say her in-laws made several attempts to kill her: poison disguised as nectar, a snake in a basket of flowers, a bed of nails. Each time, she survived. Whether these stories are literal history or symbols of her spiritual protection, they show that she lived under real threat. She eventually left palace life. She wandered to Vrindavan, Krishna's mythical home, and to Dwarka in Gujarat. She sang her songs in temples and public places. She is believed to have died around 1547. Hundreds of devotional songs are attributed to her, though most were probably composed later in her tradition.