The Florentine Medici family rose to power on the tremendous wealth created through the family bank that, during the fifteenth century, was the largest bank in Europe. On that basis, they created a political dynasty that ruled Florence and Tuscany from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, yielding four popes and many marriages into powerful families across Europe.

An Italian revolutionary exiled to London for instigating insurrection. Founder of the journal Pensiero ed azione ("Thought and Action") and author of numerous essays and several pamphlets as well as Dei Doveri dell'uomo (1860).

A prominent Frankish monk, poet, and scholar whose work was so influential as to grant him the title of Praeceptor Germaniae ("Teacher of Germany").

Irish Protestant clergyman, Gothic romance novelist, and dramatist, best known for his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a novel considered among the last of the classic English Gothic romances.

A prolific Jacobean dramatist, frequent collaborator with John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, and others. Scholars tend to agree that Massinger wrote at least 15 plays independently and was a part of 23 collaborations. Many also believe that there may be upwards of a dozen of his works which have been lost. Among his many dramas, some of the more important include The Fatal Dowry (c. 1617-1619), Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619), The Custom of the Country (c. 1619), The Maid of Honour (c. 1621-1622), The Duke of Milan (c.

Italian painter, novelist, and statesman who campaigned for the consolidation of the fragmented Italian states into a centralized union. He was author of two historical novels, Ettore Fieramosca (1833) and Niccolò dei Lapi (1841).

Italian philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. Among other works, he published Congiura del conte Fieschi in 1629 and Arte istorica in 1636.

Forced to flee to England after being deposed from rule over a fractious Scotland, the great niece of Henry VIII of England and mother of James I of England was beheaded as a threat to the throne of her distant cousin, Elizabeth I.

Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning alongside husband William III. Mary legitimated her husband's rule as the daughter of King James II. Mary sided with her husband in the overthrow of her catholic father's rule, as she wished for more protestant policies.

Known as Mary Tudor or "Bloody Mary," Mary I was the first queen to rule England in her own right. Mary I was termed "Bloody Mary" for her persecution of Protestants in a failed attempt to restore Roman Catholocism to England following her father, Henry VIII's, initiation of the English Reformation.