All of these individuals were involved with Portugese exploration except for Christopher Columbus, who was actually born in Italy but sailed to the New World under the patronage of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.

Captain James Cook is most famous for a series of explorations of the Southern Pacific Ocean. He was the first European to lead an expedition to mainland Australia; the first European to circumnavigate New Zealand; and the first European to land in Hawaii. He achieved this in the eighteenth century.

Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to successfully circumnavigate the globe from 1519 to 1522. Rather unfortunately for Magellan, he died near the end of the journey, so he is not actually the "first man to circumnavigate the world". However, he is remembered as such as he was the leader of the expedition.

Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He is most famous for being the first European to sail to India. He is thus credited with opening up trade between Europe and the Far East via the ocean, a trend that would propel the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, and English to global prominence.

Henry Hudson was employed by the Dutch East India Company to find the fabled Northwest Passage to Asia through the continent of North America. He sailed up the Hudson River (named after him) and found a passage into the heart of modern Canada, but could not proceed further because his crew mutinied. The Northwest Passage, was finally successfully completed in 1906 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

All of these people were responsible for spreading or encouraging the break from the Catholic Church that occurred during the Protestant Reformation. Luther sparked the Reformation with his 95 Theses; Calvin and Zwingli adapted and spread the ideas in France and Switzerland; and Henry VIII founded the Church of England and placed himself as head of Christianity in England. 

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses on the abuses and malpractice of the Catholic Church and nailed them to the door of a church in Wittenberg.

The Anabaptists were a sect of Christianity that emerged during the Protestant Reformation. They rejected the notion of infant baptism and practiced adult baptism. For this crime, they received the ire of Catholics and other Protestants alike, and their stronghold of Munster was besieged and its inhabitants massacred.

The Augsburg Confession was issued by a number of German rulers at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. It formally outlines the Lutheran faith and is the primary confession of faith in the Lutheran religion.

Erasmus is one of the most celebrated men of the Northern Renaissance. He was born in the Netherlands and lived his whole life as a staunch Catholic. He was however greatly disturbed by the abuses of the clergy within the Catholic Church. He worked tirelessly to try and reform the Church from within. He had many supporters within the humanist and renaissance movement, but was widely condemned by the more polemical supporters from both the Catholic and Protestant camps.