Avicenna
Avicenna was born in Afshana, a village near Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), the capital of the Samanids, a Persian dynasty in Central Asia and Greater Khorasan. His mother, named Sitāra, was from Bukhara; his father, Abdullāh, was a respected Ismaili scholar from Balkh, an important town of the Samanid Empire, in what is today Balkh Province, Afghanistan. His father worked in the government of Samanid in the village Kharmasain, a Sunni regional power. After five years, his younger brother, Mahmoud, was born. Avicenna first began to learn the Quran and literature in such a way that when he was ten years old he had essentially learned all of them.
Benedicta Ebbesdotter of Hvide
Our knowledge of Benedicta comes from a genealogy of the Hvide family compiled in the Sorø Abbey in the 14th century. From the terse data of this source, the following life-story has been deduced. Benedicta was born in Knadrup in Northern Zealand in Denmark between 1165 and 1170 as the child of the noble Ebbe Sunesson Hvide. The Swedish infant prince Sverker Karlsson was brought to Denmark in 1167 after the killing of his father, and was apparently raised by his powerful maternal relatives. Most probably he met his future bride, a kinswoman of his mother, there, and married her when reaching manly years. This may have happened in the mid-1180s.