The rulers and diplomats who shaped nations, and the tables where they argued.
Cosimo de' Medici
The banker who made the Medici the leading family of Florence and spent his fortune on the artists and scholars of the early Renaissance.
Lorenzo de' Medici
Florence's unofficial ruler at the height of the Renaissance, a poet and patron whose diplomacy held the Italian states in balance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Florentine secretary whose writings on power, above all The Prince, made him the founding analyst of modern politics.
Cesare Borgia
The pope's son who left the church for a career as a condottiero and tried to carve a lasting state out of the Romagna.
Pope Alexander VI
The Borgia pope whose reign made the papacy a dynastic power and whose name became shorthand for political corruption.
Thomas More
The English humanist and lord chancellor who imagined a just commonwealth in Utopia and died refusing to endorse Henry VIII's break with Rome.
Desiderius Erasmus
The wandering scholar who used the new printing press to call Europe back to the sources of its faith and letters.
Charles V
The Habsburg emperor who ruled Spain, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Germany, and spent his reign defending a Catholic empire.
Francis I of France
The French king who brought the Italian Renaissance north and fought the Habsburgs for a generation.
Caterina Sforza
The noblewoman who defended her lands in the Romagna against the papacy and the Borgias, and who became a legend for her defiance.
Benjamin Franklin
The printer and experimenter who turned curiosity into useful knowledge and helped persuade France to underwrite American independence.
George Washington
The Virginia planter who commanded the Continental Army, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and defined the American presidency.
John Adams
The Massachusetts lawyer who argued the case for independence, served as the second president, and spent his last years defending the Revolution's meaning.
Abigail Adams
John Adams's partner and correspondent, who urged the new nation to remember the rights of women and became a shrewd political voice in her own right.
Thomas Jefferson
The author of the Declaration of Independence, a champion of religious liberty, and the president who doubled the country's territory.
Alexander Hamilton
The orphan from the West Indies who co-wrote the Federalist Papers and built the new nation's financial system as its first treasury secretary.
James Madison
The political theorist who shaped the Constitution, wrote the Bill of Rights, and served as the fourth president.
Thomas Paine
The English corset-maker turned pamphleteer whose plain arguments for independence and for the rights of man reached a mass audience on two continents.