| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Charlemagne | King of France, also crowned Emperor of the Roman People in 800 |
| William the Conqueror | Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066 |
| Eleanor of Aquitaine | Powerful French duchess; divorced the king of France to marry Henry II of England and ruled all of England and about half of France with him |
| Pope Urban II | Leader of the Roman Catholic Church who asked European Christians to take up arms against Muslims, starting the Crusades |
| Saladin | Muslim sultan who overthrew the Seljuk Turks and drove the Christians out of Jerusalem, leading to the Third Crusade |
| Richard the Lion-Hearted | King of England who led forces against the army of Saladin during the Third Cursade |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | English author of the Canterbury Tales |
| Castiglione | Italian aristocrat who wrote The Courtier, which became a handbook for how to succeed in society |
| Niccolo Machaivelli | Florentine political philosopher and statesman who wrote The Prince, which advised rulers to separate morals from politics |
| Lorenzo de Medici | ruler of Florence who was an important patron of arts and learning |
| Leonardo da Vinci | Renaissance man who became famous as a painter, architect inventor and engineer; painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper |
| Raphael | famous painter of both classical and religious subjects and accomplished architect |
| Michelangelo Buonarotti | sculptor and painter of the Sistine Chapel, the statue David and the design of the dome of St. Peter's Cathedral |
| Johannes Gutenberg | German man credited with the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s |
| Desiderius Erasmus | priest and Christian humanist philosopher who wrote about the need for a simple Christian life without the rituals and politics of the church |
| Sir Thomas More | English humanist who wrote Utopia, a book that told about a perfect but nonexistent society based on reason |
| William Shakespeare | English playwright and poet; author of such famous works as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliette, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream |
| Christine de Pisan | Italian-born woman who wrotethe first important work focusing on the role women played in society |
| Albrecht Dürer | German artist who visited italy in the late 1400s, learning techniques of realism and perspective, influencing later German Renaissance artists |
| Jan van Eyck | Flemish painter who focused on landscapes and everyday life |
| Martin Luther | critic of the Roman Catholic Church whose theses sparked discussion about its practces and beliefs and to the founding of Lutheranism |
| John Calvin | important Protestant reformer whose writings became the basis of Calvinism |
| Henry VIII | English king who broke with the Catholic Church in order to divorce his first wife |
| Elizabeth I | Daughter of Henry VIII and queen who firmly established England |
| Ignatius of Loyola | Founder of the Jesuits whose search for spiritual peace led him to give up his belongings and practice self-denial |
| Francis of Sales | French missionary who returned the French district of Savoy to the Catholic church and founded a religious teaching order for women |
| Teresa of Avila | Spanish nun who reformed the Carmelite order |
| Jethro Tull | gentleman farmer who invented the seed drill for planting grain |
| Richard Arkwright | inventor of the spinning frame, which spun stronger, thinner thread |
| James Watt | Vritish inventor who made steam engines faster and more efficient |
| Robert Fulton | developed and operated the steamship Clermont on the Hudson River |
| Thomas Edison | Developer of the first usable and practical light bulb; invented phonograph |
| Henry Ford | developed mass-production factory methods; produced affordable model T cars |
| Wilbur and Orville Wright | brothers who were the first people to succeed in flying a powered airplane in sustained flight |
| Samuel Morse | inventor of the telegraph and the code used to send telegraph messages |
| Alexander Graham Bell | inventor of the telephone |
| Martin Luther King Jr. | Leader of a civil rights campaign that exposed racial injustice and won reforms |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Soviet leader who came to power in 1985 and made changes in the nation's economy and government |
| Boris Yeltsin | leader of the republic of Russia who favored more radical change than Gorbachev did |
| Saddam Hussein | dictatior of Iraq who invaded neighboring Kuwait in August of 1990 |
| Osama bin Laden | al Qaeda leader who aims to uniteMuslims and destroy the United States |
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