The Poetic Life of Edgar Allan Poe

Few authors have mastered channeling the dark, eerie and macabre nature of the world like the great poet and author, Edgar Allan Poe. Even in his earliest years, Poe was intimately aware of the frustrations and burdens that can plague a life cursed with misfortune. Nevertheless, he saw immense beauty in even the darkest of places, but he could also imagine chilling horrors erupting out of the sweetest and most docile of scenarios.

Artemisia I—An Impressive 5th-Century BCE Queen From Within The Persian Empire

In the past, just like today, the majority of political and military leaders were men. In most (but not all) regions of the world, the prevalence of female leaders decreases as you go back further and further into history. As a sad result, it is common for historians to become extremely enthusiastic when they find even a single woman in a position of influence within a kingdom or empire in the ancient or medieval world. Sometimes, these female rulers earned their place in history by merely achieving and maintaining power, an impressive feat in a world dominated by men. Yet, a few women during this male-dominated period of early history truly proved themselves to be more cunning, courageous and politically competent than their male counterparts. One of these great female figures from ancient history was Artemisia I, a vassal, military leader and trusted advisor of the Persian King of Kings, Xerxes I (r. 486-465 BCE).

Horace de Vere Cole—The Great Prankster of Britain

(Photographs of Horace de Vere Cole in 1910, around the time of his Dreadnaught prank, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Horace de Vere Cole, born in 1881, came from a prominent and prosperous Anglo-Irish family with powerful connections. His sister, Anne, married Neville Chamberlin, the British Prime Minister who, unfortunately, would be forever associated with the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Yet, even with a controversial figure like Neville Chamberlin as his brother-in-law, Horace de Vere Cole’s own reputation for scandal, in many ways, is the more prominent of the two. By the time of his death in 1936, Horace had cemented himself as one of the greatest pranksters of the modern age.

Saint Teresa Of Avila And Her Life Of Mysticism And Reform

(The Ecstasy of St Therese, by Francesco Fontebasso (1707–1769), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Teresa de Capeda y Ahumada, now known at St. Teresa, was born in 1515 within the region of Avila, Spain. Her parents, Don Alfonso Sanchez de Capeda, and his second wife, Dona Beatriz Davila y Ahumada, were from wealthy and powerful families with ties to the old kingdom of Castile. Despite her family’s affluent background, Teresa would go on to lead a reform movement among the Carmelite nuns, calling for a more honest vow of poverty and a harder, more religiously sincere, life of meditation and prayer.

Gottfried Leibniz, The Tragic Genius Of The Early Enlightenment

(Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke  (1660–1729), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Education and Advancement

In 1646, one of the great Western minds was born in the city of Leipzig, within the Electorate of Saxony, in the Holy Roman Empire. The boy’s name was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and his path as an intellectual and an academic was seemingly set in stone from an early age. Leibniz’s father, Friedrich, was not only a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig, but was also the chairman of the university’s philosophy faculty. As a child, Gottfried Leibniz was undoubtedly influenced by the his father’s collection of books, as well as Friedrich Leibniz’s personal knowledge accumulated from years of academia.

In 1661, Gottfried Leibniz was accepted into the University of Leipzig, where he studies philosophy and law. He obtained his degree, and applied to be a doctoral candidate at Leipzig, yet the university declined his application. Most historians and observers cite Leibniz’s youth as a reason his application was refused. Nevertheless, he quickly shed any resentment or bitterness caused by the rejection and gained a doctorate elsewhere, at the University of Altdorf.

The Talented Princess Of The Byzantine Empire And Her Impressive Book Of History

(Portrait of the Princess Anna Komnene, unknown artist or date, via Ancient Origins and Pinterest)

Anna Komnene (1083-1153 CE) was an extraordinary woman. She was an erudite scholar of multiple intellectual fields and a cunning political schemer who is believed to have attempted to climb to ultimate power in the Byzantine Empire. Yet, her greatest claim to fame resulted from her ambitious history, The Alexiad, which detailed the military and diplomatic accomplishments of her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, the emperor of the Byzantine Empire from 1081-1118 CE.

The Action-Packed Life Of Japan’s Greatest Duelist, Miyamoto Musashi

Birth of a Legend

  (Miyamoto Musashi fighting Tsukahara Bokuden, painted by Yoshitoshi  (1839–1892), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Around 1584 CE, a boy was born into the Hirata family of samurai in the village of Miyamoto, located in the Harima Province of Japan. The boy’s father, Miyamoto Munisai (or Shinmen Munisai), was considered to be one of Japan’s greatest swordsmen, and he ran the village’s local dojo. With such a skilled parent, many would have expected that the boy would grow to be skilled with a sword. Yet, few could have predicted the unprecedented martial prowess that the newborn child would soon show the world. The boy’s name was Miyamoto Musashi, and he would later claim to have fought in over sixty duels, many of which ended in the death of his opponents.

Although Musashi is best remembered for being the undefeated “Alexander the Great” of dueling, he was also a bit of a renaissance man. Besides being a duelist, he joined the military and fought in around six battles. He also was an artist who painted, sculpted and carved. As another occupation, he became a foreman or supervisor and worked in construction. Yet, his greatest contribution to his legacy was his writing career.

When he was around twenty-two (perhaps, 1606 CE) he produced his Writings of the Sword Technique of the Enmei Ryu (Enmei Ryu Kenpo Sho), which was his first known written work on swordsmanship. In addition to this, near the end of his life, he also wrote the Thirty-five Instructions on Strategy (Hyoho Sanju Go). All his earlier writing, however, were surpassed by the book he wrote in the years preceding his death in 1645—The Book of Five Rings, or Go Rin no Sho.

Nevertheless, Musashi’s careers in literature and construction are not why most readers are here, reading this article. No, the most interesting and dramatic events in Miyamoto Musashi’s life came about because of the decades he spent wandering Japan as a traveling duelist.

Sun Tzu and the Art of War

A Violent Golden Age

(Soldiers from the Ming Dynasty Departure Herald, from the Jiajing reign period in China (1522-1566 AD), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

The centuries spanning the Spring and Autumn Period (8th-6th century BCE) and the Warring States Period (6th-3rd century BCE) saw the onset of an incredible amount of human innovation and thought. On one hand there were military advancements in China, such as the crossbow (introduced around the 5th-4th century BCE) and cavalry (made professional in China soon after the crossbow). On the other hand, texts of philosophy, religion and strategy were written that are still widely admired to this day. The number of great minds that operated during the Warring States Period is simply baffling. There was Confucius and his philosophical successors, notably Mencius and Hsün Tzu. Also prevalent were the major Daoist (or Taoist) intellectuals like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Later, there were the philosophers of authoritarianism and legalism, such as Lord Shang and Han Fei Tzu. Also present was the religious wildcard, Mo Tzu, who preached universal love and told of a personified Heaven that punished evil and rewarded good. Nevertheless, during this highly congested time period filled with so many geniuses, there lived a military strategist who would surpass all others in popularity and fame (except, perhaps, Confucius and Lao Tzu)—he was Master Sun, better known as Sun Tzu.

The Unlikely Man Who Popularized The Stories Of King Arthur—Geoffrey of Monmouth

(Painting of King Arthur by N.C. Wyeth (1882–1945), from Sir Thomas Mallory, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons

In 12th-century Britain, a peculiar churchman, historian and teacher named Geoffrey of Monmouth launched the mystical tale of King Arthur and the magician Merlin on its path to world acclaim with the debut of his book, The History of the Kings of Britain. Though the adventures of King Arthur and his chivalrous knights were eventually accepted and admired in Britain, the road to acceptance was rough. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s writing was initially widely criticized in the British scholarly world, but it found quick admirers in medieval French literature and poetry. Later, the tales of King Arthur sluggishly crept back to Britain, only becoming truly mainstream after the 16th century with the help of literary masters such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Tennyson.

Saint Augustine (c. 354-430)

A Wayward Son Who Became One Of Christianity’s Most Influential Figures

  (Saint Augustine, painted by Antonio Rodríguez (1636 - 1691), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Augustine was born in 354 CE to a Roman family living in Algiers. His mother was a Christian, and it is thought that his father converted to the religion on his deathbed. Suffice it to say, Augustine was exposed to Christianity from a young age. As a child, Augustine was made a catechumen—a person learning about Christianity before baptism—but he decided not to go through with it, and sought spiritual enlightenment elsewhere.

Homer: The Obscure Legend And His Epic Tales

  (Statue of Homer, photographed by Rufus46, via Creative Commons (licensed CC 3.0), cropped and edited)

All around the world, and in almost every country, countless educated people have heard of, or read, the famous works by the ancient Greek poet, Homer. His two masterpieces, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are widely considered to be the first two works of ‘Western’ literature. In addition to that, Homer (along with his possible contemporary, Hesiod) was one of the first Greeks to drag the gods of Olympus down from their obscure mountain and make the deities relatable and personified with emotions in ways that the average person could understand. The poet’s works would go on to be preserved, edited and translated into numerous languages, serving as a core component of literary education—and it is still taught in schools, today. Yet, except those general truths, much about Homer remains a mystery. Who was he? When did he live? Was Homer one man or many? To these questions, historians can only shrug their shoulders and hypothesize.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400 CE), The Masterful 14th Century English Poet

(Sketch of Geoffrey Chaucer from The Illustrated Magazine of Art. 1-1 (ca. 1853), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in 1342 to a family with some ties to government bureaucracy (court and minting), but Chaucer’s father mainly made a living by producing wine. When Geoffrey Chaucer was around fifteen years of age, he managed to gain a position as page to the Countess of Ulster. In that position he acted as a servant and a messenger for his noble employer. Two years later, in 1359, Chaucer was sent to fight in the long-running Hundred Years War between England and France. French soldiers, however, captured the seventeen-year-old youth. Thankfully for Chaucer, he was not imprisoned for very long. The Countess of Ulster’s father-in-law, King Edward III of England, must have seen something he liked in young Geoffrey Chaucer, for he paid the boy’s ransom and negotiated his release in 1360.

Virgil (70-19 BCE)

(Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia, by Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762–1834), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

The poet Publius Vergilius Maro, better known as Virgil, was born in the rural village of Andes, near the modern day region of Mantua, Italy. He grew up during a tremendous time of tumultuous change. In the 1^st Century BCE, the power of the Roman Senate was challenged by many powerful authoritarian figures. The dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, had only been dead for nine years when Virgil was born, and Julius Caesar was leading Roman legions into modern Switzerland, France, Belgium and England during Virgil’s teenage years.

Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)

The Life Of A Deceptively Deep Man And His Books Of History And Norse Mythology

(Print of Snorri Sturluson, c. 1899, by Christian Krohg (1852–1925), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons)

Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179-1241) was one of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages. His fame comes primarily from two great feats of academia, the Heimskringla (History of the Kings of Norway) and The Prose Edda. The Heimskringla was an ambitious text that traced the history of Norway from mythical times up to the reign of King Magnus Erlingsson (r. 1162-1184). More authoritative than the average Icelandic saga, but more eloquent that the typical historical text of his time, the Heimskringla stands as one of the most unique works of the Middle Ages. Whereas the Heimskringla is a huge book, The Prose Edda is a very short and concise work. Yet, once the pages of The Prose Edda are opened and the words are read, the reader immediately understands why this short book became just as renowned as the Heimskringla. The Prose Edda, although small, is the most elaborate collection of Norse mythology known to exist from the Middle Ages. Snorri Sturluson, himself, is equally as deceptive as his handbook of mythology. While his name and works may, at first glance, conjure an image of a robed scholar penning down the legends and tales of his country, he was actually a much more interesting person than that—Snorri Sturluson was a rich, powerful and conniving Icelandic warlord who met a violent death.