Ibn Khaldun

Born in 1332, Ibn Khaldun moved through the courts and upheavals of North Africa and Andalusia as diplomat and scholar before retreating in 1375 to write the Muqaddimah in six months - a work that treated history as a science with observable laws governing the birth, growth, and collapse of states. The framework influenced Ottoman thinkers from the 17th century onward, including Kâtip Çelebi and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who applied his cycles to their own empire's trajectory. He met Tamerlane in 1401, a late encounter between the theorist of power and one of its most violent practitioners. Modern readers have found in his work uncanny anticipations of Machiavelli on statecraft, Hegel on historical process, and Adam Smith on labor and value. He died in Cairo in 1406, his method dormant in the Islamic world for centuries and unknown to Europe until long after the disciplines he prefigured had formed.