People Who Should Be More Famous

Milo of Croton - Olympic athlete for a couple decades, military commander, follow of Pythagoras.

Themistocles - the man who stopped the.Persian invasion of Greece. Later ostracized and served as Persian satrap.

Epaminondas - Theban general who reformed the army, broke the power of Sparta, and changed the political map of Greece forever.

Phillip of Macedon
- we've heard of him. The general public has no idea that he's the one who conquered Greece, created the army Alexander would use, and was ready to march against Persia when he was assassinated.

Antigonus Monophthalmus - the man who almost beat all the other successors to Alexander the Great. Died in battle at age 81, which seems to have been the only battle he ever lost.

Aurelian - Roman emperor for only half-a-dozen years, defeated barbarian invasions while regaining control of the breakaway Palmyrene and Gallic Empires.

Cabeza de Vaca - explorer, faith healer, one of 4 survivors of a failed Spanish expedition who walked hundreds of miles to freedom.

Barbarossa - pirate, Ottoman admiral, pasha of Algiers.
 
Raymond IV, count of Toulouse - One of the main leaders of the First Crusade and the most powerful noble in Occitania/Southern France of his time. Inherited the county from his brother and made it the largest and richest fiefdom in France (Aquitaine might have been stronger in both size and wealth but I'm not sure about that).
During the First Crusade, he is the only crusader chief who refused to swear allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor, although he swore for him and his descendance not to harm Byzantium's interests. After Antioch was taken, he walked alongside Pilgrims to force the Crusaders to pursue their advance towards Jerusalem. After the Holy City was taken, Raymond IV lost the crown of Jerusalem to Godefroy de Bouillon.
In his last years, he assisted the Byzantines against Bohemond de Tarente, prince of Antioch and later fought to conquer the Emirate of Tripoli (which would become the furture County of Tripoli). After being wounded in the siege of Tripoli, he died in 1105.
His sons and their bloodlines would both succeed him in the counties of Toulouse and Tripoli.

John I of France - The only son born to Louis X of France and Clemence of Hungary. He only lived and ruled for five days, as he was born after his father's death. His uncle Philippe de Poitiers is supposed to have poisonned him so that he could become King Philippe V of France.
Had he lived, John I would have probably changed much of the French history and butterflied the Hundred Years' War. I never saw any timeline working on his survival, maybe because it's hard to imagine how he would have ruled as he was only a baby.

Joan II of Navarre - Daughter of Louis X of France and Marguerite de Bourgogne. She was accused of being an illegitimated daughter after the Tower of Nesles' scandal and was thus stripped of her right to inherit the French crown by her uncle Philippe de Poitiers (who became Philippe V of France). She latter married Philippe d'Evreux and recovered the Navarese crown when Philippe de Valois became Philippe VI of France.
She is the main reason Salic Law was applied in France because she was supposed to be illegitimate and, if she had married a foreign prince, France would have been in personnal union with another kingdom.

Charles II the Bad, king of Navarre - Son of Joan II of Navarre, making him the grandson of Louis X of France. He never admitted to have been stripped of his right of the French throne and tried to claim the crown against both the Kings of England and the Valois (he certainly had better rights than the both of them if there wasn't Salic Law). He also asserted his rights to the Duchy of Burgundy, but was defeated by John II of France. He never succeeded in claiming the French crown against Charles V, and died isolated because he had betrayed to many people.
He is surely less known than the other pretenders to the French throne during the Hundred Years' War.

Talleyrand
- Probably the most important French politician in the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Bourbon Restoration and in the reign of Louis-Philippe I, king of the French. He swictched sides often.

Eugene Poubelle - The man who invented the garbage can. Without him, we would probably still have a problem on what to do with our trashes :D
 
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch

Their process for extracting nitrogen from the air in the form of ammonia led to one big, and one immense, result.

The big result is that Germany was able to stay in the Great War for several years longer than it would have otherwise. Who knows what the consequences of that were?

The immense result is that the majority of people alive today are here because of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers produced using the Haber-Bosch process. The total world population right now would be only 2-3 billion people, if we were limited to natural nitrogenous fertilizers.
 
George Henry Thomas: He prevented the rout of the Union Army of Chickamagua, and destroyed Hoods army in just two days, the only Union general to eliminate his opponents force in entirety.
 
Mani - 3rd century AD Persian mystic and founder of the Manichean religion, which for 400 years directly competed with Christianity and just about everybody else, including Buddhism. Manicheism is almost certainly the most significant religion to have died out completely due to ruthless suppression by Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and even Buddhists.

Had it won out against Christianity, as it easily could have, the major Western religion would have preached asceticism in all things of the world and the flesh, and that personal spiritual growth, along with a suitable lifestyle, could free the human soul from a corrupt cosmos created by a flawed demi-god and achieve direct experience of a true God entirely outside our world.

This of course clashed horribly with the increasingly wealthy and authoritarian Christain church's rigid imposition of dogma and absolute insistence that salvation was attainable only through its officially appointed representatives. Manichean Europe would presumably not have needed a Reformation, and since to them Jerusalem was just one little part of an intrinsically evil world, there would have been no Crusades either.

Julian the Apostate - Another fellow who could have change the course of history massively, had he not died in battle in 363 AD at the age of 31 when in his determination to decisively rout the enemy he rushed into the fray without putting on his coat of mail and got a spear through his liver.

A brilliant (though slightly reckless) military commander and dedicated reformer, Julian sought to replace Christianity with Neo-Platonic Paganism as the official religion of the Roman Empire, seeing Christianity as a narrow, intolerant, hypocritical faith that only weakened Rome. However, he decreed that all religions were to be treated with equal tolerance under the law, even Christianity, so long as it had no opportunity to dominate.

If Julian had lived considerably longer and reigned for more than 8 years, allowing his reforms to become permanent, the future Eastern Empire would presumably have had no problem getting along with the Muslims. Thus, again, no Crusades, and a much faster assimilation of Arabic knowledge and ideas, thus speeding up the growth of science - would we currently have 23rd century technology?

Léon Theremin - Best known as the inventor of the weirdest ever musical instrument, this guy should almost certainly be as well-known as a hyper-intelligent inventor of loads of weird stuff as Tesla. Unfortunately he spent a large part of his very long life (1896-1993) working for Stalin whether he wanted to or not (mostly he didn't).

Back in the 1920s he was a few months too late to create the very first television, but his version, arrived at independently, was much more advanced than John Logie Baird's. Stalin immediately made it top secret because he wanted to use it for video surveillance along Russia's enormous border, though being a delicate and very expensive prototype, it was completely useless for this application.

During WWII, Theremin attempted to persuade Stalin that his talents would be best employed designing advanced long-range rocket weapons. Stalin insisted on his instead designing a super-bomber from specifications drawn up by non-scientist party officials who wanted something massively bigger than anything the Germans had just for the sake of it. He protested in vain that this monster broke the laws of aerodynamics. When it strangely failed to fly, he ended up spending a few uncomfortable years in Siberia.

However, he did design two incredibly sophisticated bugging devices, one of which was in the office of the US Ambassador in Moscow for 7 years before it was found by mistake (and then it took the CIA another 5 years to figure out how it worked).

He also invented the first drum machine, the first disco - a machine which not only produced different notes in response to the movements of a dancer, but had a psychedelic light-show synchronized to the music - and claimed in the 1930s that in the future everyone in the world would be able communicate through a fantastic network of interlinked electronic typewriters.

He also suggested some pretty far-out things, such as force-field motorway bridges, harnessing the Earth's magnetic field to turn the whole planet into a spaceship, and raising Lenin from the dead, a plan he only abandoned because the embalming process had included the removal of his brain.

If Stalin had let him develop Russian V2-type weapons, they probably wouldn't have affected the war very much, but would the Space Race have been more interesting? Or alternatively, had he stayed in America having a high old time instead of returning to Russia shortly before WWII (for patriotic reasons, to avoid paying tax, or because Stalin had him kidnapped - accounts vary), would we have had rave culture in the 1940s and a crude internet in the 1950s?

By the way, it has been seriously (?) suggested that Theremin was a "Man Who Fell To Earth"-type space alien. You can probably see why.
 
Yesterday I was thinking about important but overlooked battles in history that get obscured by "more" famous battles. Here are two generals that should be more famous:

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, considered the greatest British commander in history by many historians and generals that came after him including the Duke of Wellington. The de facto head of the coalition against Louis XIV in the War of Spanish Succession, Marlborough achieved the first great English victory on the continent at Blenheim in 1704 since Henry V at Agincourt nearly 300 earlier. Though he never got the "knockout" blow, his efforts helped turn England/Britain from a periphery power in Europe and the world stage into a major power.

James Wolfe, British General, whose victory and death on the Plains of Abraham began the history of the United States. Wolfe's successful capture of Quebec resulted in removing the threat of French attack on the American colonists and through a series of events caused the birth of the United States.
 

Talleyrand
- Probably the most important French politician in the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Bourbon Restoration and in the reign of Louis-Philippe I, king of the French. He swictched sides often.

What about Joseph Fouche while you are mentioning Talleyrand? He's generally not that well known, and should be, at least as a conspirator and intiguer par excellence. He went from being a Regicide, to Thermidorean, to the Directoire's Minister of Secret Police, to being Napoleon's Minister of Secret Police/Interior Minister (and got to say whatever he liked about and to Napoleon while basically running the interior and some exterior business as well), was made Duc d'Oranto, then given charge of Rome, then was talking to both the future Charles X and Napoleon at the same time, was trying for a republic when it became clear Napoleon was going to be exiled, was made Minister of Secret Police under Louis XVIII, unnerved the Ultra-Royalists so much they made a law outlawing regicides in France and so exiled him to Naples (where he still had Oranto) and then he died of old age.
 
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Ibn Khaldun: great political scientist and economist, way ahead of his time. Cited by many great historians and scholars.


Philipp Melanchton: "As much as Luther, he is the primary founder of Lutheranism"
 
Charles "the Hammer" Martel- stopped Muslim conquest of Europe at Tours.

Cinncinatus- placed as dictator to save a surrounded army. Did so and relinquished power in 16 days rather than keeping the whole term.

Hamilcar Barca- father of Hannibal who might have been able to hold Sicily had Carthage's Navy won. Later he conquered most of Spain.

Clovis- ruler of the Franks who conquered modern France. Converted his entire tribe to Catholocism.

Aetius- Roman general who achieved the last great victory of Western Rome by defeating Attila.

Pope Leo I- Man who convinced/bribed Attila not to sack Rome after Aetius's fall from Grace.
 
Andrew Carnegie - Scottish orphan who came to America and became one of the great captains of industry of the 19th century. Great philanthropist as well. .

:confused:With Carnegie Libraries all over the country, and him used as the stereotypical philanthropist, and/or robber baron turned philanthropist?

What more do you want?
 
What about, Subodei, he was the real mastermind behind the Invasion of Europe, the starter of the Blitzkreig, a brillinant strategist who never lost a single battle... and crushed russia, Hungary, and Poland laying waste to EUrope....
 
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