François Rabelais, the French writer, doctor, and…

The ruler of Sandoway in southern Arakan had pledged loyalty to Tabinshwehti in exchange for the throne of Arakan.

The fortifications at Mrauk U, the capital of Arakan, had been built with the assistance of the Portuguese, rendering ineffective the customary strategies of frontal assault or siege.

Arakan, with the intercession of monks, finally persuades Tabinshwehti to abandon the siege and return to Pegu.

Malmö's ornate city hall, or Radhuset, is constructed in 1546 in the late Gothic style. (Modified several times since then, the current appearance dates from 1864-69.)

Drug preparations have been acknowledged since Babylonian times, but the first official pharmacopoeia is the Dispensatorium of Valerius Cordus, published in 1546 and made legally binding for the practitioners in the imperial German city of Nürnberg.

Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer), while town physician of Joachimsthal (now Jachymov, Czech Republic), becomes intensely interested in all aspects of the mining and metallurgy industry by which the town thrives, and begins an extensive study of the subject.

The author of a number of works on medicine, geology, mineralogy, politics, and economics, Agricola publishes De natura fossilium (“On the Nature of Fossils”), a treatise on the origin of mountains, minerals, and underground water, in 1546.

Luther had been asked late in 1545 to arbitrate a dispute in Eisleben; he has traveled here despite the icy winter weather.

The dispute is settled on February 17, 1546, but the strain on Luther has been very great and he dies the next day.

Barbarossa (Redbeard) is the byname of Khayr ad-Din, original name Khidr, Barbary pirate and later admiral of the Ottoman fleet.

By Barbarossa's initiative, Algeria and Tunisia have become part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Holy Roman emperor Charles V led a crusade that captured Tunis and Goletta in 1535, but Barbarossa had defeated Charles V's fleet at the Battle of Preveza (1538), thereby securing the eastern Mediterranean for the Turks (until their defeat at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571).

Barbarossa remains one of the great figures of the court at Constantinople until his death in 1546; his pirate successors will continue to ravage Mediterranean coastal towns and villages for the next three centuries.

Sadasiva has from the first been kept under guard; Rama Raya, together with his brothers Tirumala and Venkatadri, rules the Vijayanagara kingdom.

Rama Raya is able to control, although not to subdue entirely, rebellious nobles in the east and the extreme south.

He also concludes a treaty in 1546 with the Portuguese, whose settlements have been expanding and who have caused no small amount of damage to indigenous settlements over the past few years.

Girolamo Fracastoro discusses the nature and the spread of infectious diseases, describing the transmission of disease by "seminaria," or living germs (and thus foretelling in many ways the true germ theory of disease).

In his work De contagione et contagiosis morbis ("On Contagion and Contagious Diseases"), published in 1546, Fracastoro, whose theory will remain influential for nearly three centuries, states that each epidemic disease is caused by a different type of rapidly multiplying minute body and that these bodies are transferred from the infector to the infected in three ways: by direct contact; by carriers such as soiled clothing and linen; and through the air.

Ammannati designs the Benavides Tomb in the Church of the Eremitani, or Church of the Hermits, in 1546.

The name for syphilis is derived from Fracastoro's 1530 epic poem in three books, Syphilis sive morbus gallicus ("Syphilis or The French Disease"), about a shepherd named Syphilis.

The poem suggests using mercury and "guaiaco" as a cure.