On 7 September 1726, François-André Danican Philidor was born in Dreux, France.
Three hundred years later, his name remains familiar to chess players around the world.
Most will probably meet it through the Philidor Defence. Others will encounter the Philidor position while learning rook endings. Fewer will know that the man behind those names was regarded as the leading chess player of his age, wrote one of the most influential early books on chess strategy and had a substantial second career as a composer.
There is also a slight problem with starting his story with the Philidor Defence.
He did not invent it.
More than an opening
The position reached after 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 bears Philidor's name because he advocated and analysed the system. The idea itself is considerably older. Ruy López had already recommended ...d6 in the sixteenth century.
That makes the opening a useful introduction to Philidor, but not necessarily for the reason its name suggests.
His real contribution was not discovering a particular second move for Black. It was helping change the way chess was understood.
Pawns change the game
In 1749, at just 22 years old, Philidor published L'Analyze des Echecs in London.
At a time when much chess revolved around rapid development and attacks against the king, Philidor put far greater emphasis on pawns, pawn structure and long-term planning.
His famous argument that pawns were the soul of the game was not simply a claim that pawns were valuable. He believed the arrangement and movement of the pawns shaped what the rest of the pieces should be doing.
That sounds fairly ordinary to a modern player.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, it was not.
Philidor sometimes pushed those ideas too far and later generations corrected parts of his theory. But the broader principle survived. Pawns create weaknesses, control space, restrict pieces, open lines and determine where play is likely to take place.
Three centuries after his birth, those are still fundamental parts of learning positional chess.
The strongest player of his age
There was no official World Chess Championship during Philidor's lifetime, so calling him a World Champion would impose a later title on an earlier era.
What can be said is impressive enough.
Philidor was widely regarded as the strongest player in Europe and remained the dominant figure of his chess world for an extraordinary length of time. He regularly gave opponents odds and was never defeated in a match played on level terms.
His surviving games do not give us a clean way to compare his playing strength with later masters. Only a relatively small number survive, many from late in his life and many played at odds.
His historical importance is therefore better measured by his influence than by trying to manufacture a modern rating for him.
One Philidor name that really is his
There is another piece of chess terminology that carries Philidor's name with much stronger justification.
Anyone who studies rook endings eventually meets the Philidor position.
It is one of the fundamental defensive techniques in rook and pawn against rook. Philidor analysed the method, and it appeared in the substantially revised 1777 edition of his chess book.
Alongside the winning Lucena position, it remains part of basic rook-endgame theory today.
A strategic idea first published in the eighteenth century is still being taught to players trying to save half a point in the twenty-first.
That is a rather more convincing legacy than having an opening named after you.
Chess was only half the story
Philidor's life becomes more unusual when chess is temporarily removed from it.
He was also a professional composer.
He came from a long family line of French royal musicians, trained in the royal chapel at Versailles and went on to become an important figure in the development of French opéra comique.
Works including Blaise le savetier, Le Sorcier, Tom Jones and Ernelinde belonged to a musical career with historical significance in its own right.
There is even a bust of Philidor on the Palais Garnier in Paris.
It is there because of his music, not because somebody at the Paris Opera was particularly impressed by 2...d6.
Three hundred years later
Philidor died in London in 1795.
His chess world would be almost unrecognisable to us. There were no ratings, no engines, no online databases and no formal World Championship.
Yet some of the ideas carrying his influence remain completely familiar.
Study the pawn structure.
Think about the position rather than only the attack.
Learn the rook ending.
And perhaps remember that the man whose name appears beside an opening in a database was considerably more interesting than the opening itself.
Three hundred years after his birth, that is a reasonable reason to remember François-André Danican Philidor.