The Sistine Chapel and David are two of the most famous works of the famous Renaissance artist and sculptor Michelangelo.

Italy's relatively large urban society and emerging middle class allowed for a large number of individuals to be free to pursue artistic or scientific pursuits. This was in contrast to most of the rest of Europe and the world, where the vast majority of people had no free time for pursuits unrelated to simply surviving. This allowed the Renaissance to flourish first in Italy.

The Decameron was written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. It is considered one of the most important works of early Humanism and the Italian Renaissance. It is centered around a series of tales about the Black Death. The Black Death was a devastating plague that hit Europe in the fourteenth century and led to widespread death and suffering. By some estimates as many as a third of all Europeans perished as a direct result of the Black Death. It would take almost two hundred years for population levels to recover.

The Medici rose to prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Florence. The Medici were a banking family, and in the fifteenth century, the Medici Bank was the largest in Europe. The Medici are significant because they were frequent and enthusiastic patrons of the early Renaissance in Italy. They funded artistic works and spectacular architectural wonders.

The School of Athens is one of the most famous Renaissance paintings, and it is still considered a masterpiece today. It was painted by the Renaissance artist, Raphael, in the early sixteenth century. The fresco can be found in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.

Lorenzo the Magnificent was a ruler of Florence in the fifteenth century. At the time, Florence was an economic center of Europe and one of the most prominent cities of the Italian Renaissance. Lorenzo the Magnificent is most commonly remembered as a generous and enthusiastic patron of the arts. He sponsored the works of Michelangelo, among many others.

The Peace of Alais was a treaty signed in 1629 between the French monarchy and the leaders of the Huguenots, French Protestants. The peace provided religious toleration for the Huguenots but required them to disarm so that they would no longer be a threat to the crown. The peace did not last, however, as later in the seventeenth century, Louis XIV revoked the arrangement and began official state persecution of Protestants in France.

Louis XIV, often known as the Sun King, is perhaps the most significant ruler (excluding, possibly, Napoleon) in French history. He ruled for an unprecedented period of time in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and did a great deal to strengthen the French monarchy and country. His reforms, directed by his Chief Minister Cardinal Mazarin, established national standards for currency, taxes, and language and also helped codify French national identity.

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was written in the fourteenth century in England. It is famous for helping popularize the use of the vernacular (local) language in writing and helped encouraged the spread of humanism during the English Renaissance. 

Following the death of the last Tudor ruler, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1603, the English crown was left without any direct heir. So the Scottish monarch James I, Elizabeth’s cousin, ascended to the throne. In doing so, he began the process of uniting the Scottish and English kingdoms into the Kingdom of Great Britain. Although James I could not himself unify the two kingdoms (he ruled over them both independently), they would be unified a century later during the reign of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch.