Today's BirthdayToday's Birthday is a free service of TheFreeDictionary.comFrancisco de Quevedo- September 17, 2008 Quevedo was a Spanish satirist and novelist and one of the great writers of the Spanish Golden Age. A determined opponent of culteranismoa writing movement of the Baroque period characterized by the use of as many words as possible to convey little meaning or to conceal meaningQuevedo championed conceptismo, a movement that aimed to convey multiple meanings in as few words as possible. With what culteranismo writer did Quevedo have an ongoing feudhttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Francisco+de+Quevedo Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov- September 16, 2008 Kutuzov was a Russian prince and field marshal who commanded the Russian army during major engagements with Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, including the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. Kutuzov is a national hero in Russia for having turned the French back during the Patriotic War in 1812, and a number of monuments have been erected in his honor. In what epic Russian novel is he depicted as a popular leaderhttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Mikhail%20Illarionovich%20Kutuzov Marco Polo- September 15, 2008 Marco Polo was a Venetian trader and explorer who, together with his father Niccol and his uncle Maffeo, was one of the first Westerners to travel the Silk Road to China and visit with Genghis Khan's grandson, Kublai Khan. Polo helped generate extraordinary interest in the Far East among Europeans, and his book, Il Milione, was an instant hit at a time when books had to be painstakingly copied by hand. What famous explorer carried a heavily annotated copy of Polo's bookhttp://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Marco%20Polo |