Leipzig

The Saxon trading and printing city where Leibniz was born to a professor of moral philosophy and taught himself Latin in his father's library.

Leipzig ran on fairs, books and its university. Leibniz's father died when he was six and left a library the boy was eventually allowed into, where he taught himself enough Latin to read the historians by twelve. He entered the university at fourteen and was refused a doctorate in law at twenty on the grounds that he was too young, so he took one elsewhere the same year and never held an academic post again.