Marco Antonio Bragadin

He was a Venetian commander in charge of the defenses of Famagusta on Cyprus. Despite having medieval walls and a force that was vastly outnumber by Turks, Bragadin managed to hold out for 9 months waiting for Venice to save him, his men, and the townsfolk of Famagusta. The city was the only thing preventing the Ottomans from completely conquering the island. Venice tried desperately to raise the forces needed to drive the Ottomans off of Cyprus. They allied with the Papal States, but it was still not enough. The only country that could help them was Spain who dragged their feet the entire nine months preparing people, ships, and eventually traveling to Cyprus. If they hadn't, the relief forces would have made it on time to relieve Bragadin.

Instead, he surrendered to the Turks asking only that the townspeople and his men be allowed to go free. They agreed, but immediately cut off Bragadin's nose and ears and pressed him into forced labor for all the trouble, grief, and death he had given the Turks. After those two weeks they tied him to a column and began skinning him starting at his feet. He died when they reached his waist. The Turks finished the job, stuffed the skin, and then paraded it around their empire to show their people what happens when you defy the Ottomans. Bragadin's skin was later purloined from the Constantinople's arsenal in 1580 by the young Venetian seaman, Girolamo Polidori, who was there on business. He brought it back to Venice, where it was received as a returning hero. The skin was preserved first in the church of San Gregorio, then interred with full honors in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, where it still is.

Preventing the Ottomans from taking Cyprus could have completely changed the outcome of the later half of the 16th century and into the 17th century as the Ottomans would not have had such secure control over the Eastern Mediterranean.

Henk Sneevliet.

He was a railworkers union activist in The Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth century. He was a member of the Sociaal Democratische Arbeiderspartij (SDAP, Social Democrats). In 1911, following the SDAP's refusal to support an international strike of sailors, he resigned from the SDAP and joined the SDP (Sociaal Democratische Partij, a party that split off from the SDAP and later became the main Communist party in The Netherlands). Because of his SDP involvement he could no longer find work on the Dutch railroads, so he migrated to the Dutch East Indies.

In the Dutch East Indies he becomes involved with the Indonesian struggle for independence and founds the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) and becomes their representative in the Commintern. Because of his past as an activist and his experience bringing communism to Asia Sneevliet would be Lenin's representative in China. He helped found the Communist Party of China, pushed Mao Zedong for a leadership position within it and advocated cooperation with the Kuomintang.

He would return from his mission of bringing communism to China in 1924. He disavowed the Soviet Union following Stalin's succession and became a Trotskyist. He fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans and joined the resistance against German Occupation in World War II. He was arrested and executed in 1942.

Without Sneevliet we probably wouldn't have had Mao as the leader of communist China and we almost definitely wouldn't have cooperation between the communists and the Kuomintang. Without Sneevliet it seems very likely we wouldn't have China as a communist state.

Not underappreciated in the sense that lots of people know about him and don't appreciate him, but underappreciated at the time and not commonly known about today.

Hugh Thompson Jr.. I tear up every time I read about that man, what he did, and how he was treated for it. With no regard for his own life or any personal consequences, he ordered his crew to protect Vietnamese civilians from US forces, firing on them if necessary (it wasn't, in the end). And for his actions, he was vilified, received death threats and had mutilated animal corpses left on his porch.

Edit: I normally don't post here as I'm not qualified; if this comment is outside the rulebook for this thread just let me know.

Porphyry, a 3rd century neo-Platonist scholar and critic of Christianity. His works were banned by Constantine because they were so convincing and he attracted rebuttals from some thirty Christian apologists, such as Methodius, Eusebius, Apollinaris, Augustine, Jerome. Theodosius II ordered every copy burned in A.D. 435 and again in 448, showing how his legacy was feared by the establishment.

Roque Alcubierre, a Spanish military engineer who led the first excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum. During the excavations he fell afoul of Johann Wincklemann, one of the most important figures in the history of archaeology and one of the creators of pottery classification. Wincklemann wrote a series of blistering polemics against Alcubierre that were almost, but not completely, all lies, and the poor engineer's reputation hasn't recovered. The Pompeii museum still claims he pried the bronze letters off of inscriptions, which is certainly not true.

In reality he was professional and meticulous given the time period.

Let's talk for a moment about the illustrious William Dunbar:

Born 1459/1460, Dunbar was one of the greatest poets of late Medieval Scotland. He was arguably the last great Scottish Chaucerian, and produced a huge variety of works. He wrote EVERYTHING, including long allegory (The Golden Targe and The Thissle and the Rois,), elegy (Lament for the Makers) to devotional and public poems (Too many to name), and hilarious satire (My person favorite is his insult duel with a fellow poet in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy).

Here's a highlight from that last:

The erd sould trymbill, the firmament sould schaik,
And all the air in vennaum suddane stink,
And all the divillis of Hell for redour quaik,
To heir quhat I suld wryt with pen and ynk;
For and I flyt, sum sege for schame sould sink,
The se sould birn, the mone sould thoill ecclippis,
Rochis sould ryfe, the warld sould hald no grippis,
Sa loud of cair the commoun bell sould clynk.

Having previously compared the overconfidence of Kennedy to the pride the caused Lucifer to fall, Dunbar now describes a mock apocalypse that would result from the force of his own flyting. Translated, it's something like

"The earth would tremble, the firmament would shake
The air would of venom stink
The devils of hell would from fear quake
To hear what I would write with pen and ink
For if I flyte, some man for shame would sink,
The sea would burn, the moon would be eclipsed,
Rocks would crumble, the world would fall to bits,
So loud the warning bell would clink"

He's historically gotten a bit of a bad rap from literary critics, for a couple of reasons: Firstly he draws very deeply on Chaucer, so some people are inclined to see him as rather derivative. Second, some people dislike his high style, because he tends toward what he himself refers to as "ennamilit" poetry: highly decorated, sometimes to the point of being overdone, and loaded with fancy Latin loan words.

Personally, I don't mind a bit of purple writing, and he has huge stylistic breath. No one could argue that the passage I cited is too fancy and overhigh, and I should note that poem goes on for more than FIVE HUNDRED LINES (Though half is Kennedy's). Lament for the Makers another favorite of mine, has a totally different tone, with the limited description and Latin refrain of Timor Mortis Conturbat me (Roughly: the fear of death disturbs me) gives it the sense of a spare funeral procession, marching rhythmically to the grave.

We know very little about his life outside of his poetry, as is typical for Medieval Scottish Poets. He received a Masters degree from the University of St. Andrews, and served in the king's court in some capacity, probably as a scribe of some kind, but also possibly as a chaplain, as well as serving as a court poet. (Many of his poems are clearly for public consumption, like the flyting.) He was clearly quite well regarded, because by 1510 he was receiving a large salary of 80 Scottish Pounds a Year. His exact time and manner of death is unknown, it's certain that he died by 1530 because he is mentioned in a list of great poets who have died, but we have no mention of him between 1513 and that list, so it's impossible to say what became of him.

His poetry, though, in my opinion, is exceptional, and his satire is some of the outright funniest stuff I've read from the middle ages. And let me tell you, some of his more vulgar passages will at least raise an eyebrow even from the most jaded modern reader. The Flyting is downright vicious, and definitely complicates the assumption that we're more comfortable with vulgarity and explicitness now than in the Middle Ages. Imagine reading something like that in front of the Queen of Great Britain today. It would be a scandal!

Sources: Fox, Denton. “FOX: ‘The Scottish Chaucerians’ (1966).” Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature. Ed. Derek Brewer. University: University of Alabama Press, 1966. 164–200. Print.

Dunbar, William, and John W. Conlee. William Dunbar: The Complete Works. Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2004. Library of Congress ISBN. Web. Middle English Texts.