Who Lived When, a Timeline of Famous People Since 1200

Who lived when? Seeing history side by side

History is usually taught one person or one country at a time, which hides how much lives overlapped. Put famous lifespans on a single timeline and surprising pairings appear: Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, and Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year. The Big Map of Who Lived When, the poster above, does exactly this for more than 200 people from the 12th century to today, drawing each life as a bar so you can see who was alive at the same time.

The idea is old. In 1765 Joseph Priestley published A Chart of Biography, which covered 1200 BC to AD 1800 and drew about two thousand lives as lines, so readers could see at a glance who were contemporaries [1].

Surprising historical overlaps

Some of the overlaps the poster highlights (dates as on the poster unless noted):

• Shakespeare, Marlowe and Galileo were all born in 1564. Shakespeare and Galileo were working at the same time as Miguel de Cervantes (1547 to 1616), who died in the same year as Shakespeare.
• Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the second and third US presidents, both died on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.
• Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin were both born in 1889. Chaplin later parodied Hitler on film.
• Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were both born in 1929. Had Anne Frank survived, she would have been the same age as King.
• Mark Twain and Helen Keller were friends, linking a writer born in 1835 with a campaigner who lived until 1968.
• Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were friends; Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot were friends; Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat were friends.
• Ernest Hemingway met Fidel Castro in 1960, and Salvador Dalí worked with Walt Disney in 1946.
• Genghis Khan (1162 to 1227) was the grandfather of Kublai Khan (1215 to 1294).

The medieval world, 1150 to 1450

The poster opens with Richard the Lionheart (1157 to 1199), Genghis Khan and King John, who signed Magna Carta in 1215. The mathematician Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi and the poet Rumi were all alive in the early 1200s. A century later came Dante, Giotto and Marco Polo, while Mansa Musa ruled the Mali Empire. The Black Death swept across Europe from 1346 to 1353, during the lives of Geoffrey Chaucer, Petrarch and the historian Ibn Khaldun. The Ming Dynasty began in 1368.

Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, 1400 to 1600

Johannes Gutenberg (1406 to 1468) brought movable-type printing to Europe in the same century as Joan of Arc and Vlad the Impaler. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519), Michelangelo and Raphael overlapped with Christopher Columbus, who reached the Bahamas in 1492, and with Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan. Copernicus, Machiavelli and Martin Luther all lived at the same time, as did Henry VIII (1491 to 1547) and the conquistador Hernán Cortés. Elizabeth I and her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots close the century, alongside Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh.

Science, revolution and the Enlightenment, 1600 to 1800

Isaac Newton (1643 to 1727) shared his lifetime with Rembrandt, John Locke, Christopher Wren and Louis XIV, and with pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy such as Captain Kidd and Blackbeard. Bach and Handel were both born in 1685. The Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith and Kant overlapped with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Mozart (1756 to 1791) died two years before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793, and Napoleon and Beethoven were both born in 1769 and 1770.

The 19th century

Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe were both born in 1809. Queen Victoria (1819 to 1901) reigned through the lives of Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Karl Marx, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In the American West, Sitting Bull and Geronimo were contemporaries of Mark Twain and P.T. Barnum. By the end of the century Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Vincent van Gogh, Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud were all working at the same time.

The 20th century and today

Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955), Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Winston Churchill overlapped with Gandhi and Marie Curie. The Lost Generation of writers, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, came of age around the First World War. The poster ends with people still alive when it was made, from Bob Dylan and Steven Spielberg to Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Malala (born 1997). It shows Pelé and Queen Elizabeth II dying in 2022, so it was made in or after late 2022.

Corrections to the poster

• Ivan the Terrible is printed with the dates 1754 to 1793, the same as Louis XVI. Ivan IV of Russia actually lived from 1530 to 1584 [2].
• Goethe is printed as dying in 1842. He died in 1832 [3].
• Several names are misspelled: “Guru Sanak” should be Guru Nanak (1469 to 1539) [4], “Marie Antionette” should be Marie Antoinette (1755 to 1793) [5], and “Aligheri”, “Telsa”, “Tolkein” and “Gaugin” should be Alighieri, Tesla, Tolkien and Gauguin.

Questions about who lived when

What are some surprising historical overlaps?

Shakespeare and Galileo were both born in 1564; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on 4 July 1826; and Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were both born in 1929.

Which historical figures lived at the same time?

Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Columbus, Copernicus and Machiavelli were all alive around 1500. Isaac Newton overlapped with Rembrandt, Louis XIV and Christopher Wren, and Charles Darwin and Edgar Allan Poe were both born in 1809.

What is a chart of who lived when called?

It is usually called a timeline or biographical chart. Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography is one of the earliest [1].

Who made the Big Map of Who Lived When?

The poster carries no creator credit, and we have not been able to identify its maker. If you made it, please contact us so we can credit you.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, A Chart of Biography.
2. Wikipedia, Ivan the Terrible.
3. Wikipedia, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
4. Wikipedia, Guru Nanak.
5. Wikipedia, Marie Antoinette.

Last reviewed 2 November 2026