While the following people may not be the most influential, i think they deserve honorable mentions (most are in recent history)
-Che Guevara
-Thomas Jefferson/Paine
-Marx and Engels
-Francis Collins
-The "new atheists" ( hitchens, harris, dawkins, dennett)
-Margaret Thatcher
-Rev Fawell and his group of evangelical *******s
-Another scumbag but very influential is Henry Kissinger
-Noam Chomsky
-George Orwell
i think there are more but im too lazy to keep thinking of them
Mehmed II, Sultan of the Ottomans, conqueror of Constantinople. Using enormous canons that the Byzantines had rejected the plans for, Mehmed accomplished what most thought impossible: he breached the walls of the world's most strategically-important city in the world at the time. It's been argued, though not with controversy, that the resulting exodus of Greek scholars helped push the Renaissance into a new stage in Europe, and that the shock of the loss of Constantinople to an Islamic Empire helped spur Europeans, particularly Iberians, to seek an alternate route to Asian markets.
Zheng He and the Yongle Emperor: an impressive duo who radically changed the affairs of Ming China, constructed the largest naval fleet the world had ever seen (using vessels that dwarfed the puny vessels of Columbus and da Gama of 70 years later). From 1405 - 1433, Chinese fleets brought back tons of tribute and exotic goods from lands as far away as East Africa, and dominated the Indian Ocean, sowing the seeds of a Chinese seaborne empire littered with vassal states. Then, for reasons partly military, partly economic, and partly culturally idiosyncratic, the Ming court shut down the vessels, dismantled the fleet, and forbid seafaring travel, thus leaving a power vacuum the Portuguese skillfully exploited in the 1500s. Perhaps they are not influential in the traditional sense, since their enterprises were abandoned, but certainly they provide an interesting case of what might have been, and might have inadvertently opened the door for European expansion into Asia.
