Knox and the other galley slaves had…

Ayutthaya, having observed with growing alarm the military maneuvers of the expansionist Burmese, had sent raiding parties against Tavoy in Tenasserim while Tabinshwehti had been campaigning in Arakan.

Tabinshwehti orders the lord of Martaban to regain Tenasserim and ...

...Tabinshwehti himself leads a large force, supported by Portuguese mercenaries, westwards over the Three Pagodas Pass Route to attack Ayutthaya in 1548.

This occurs barely six months into reign of King Maha Chakapat, whose Queen Sri Suriyothai participates in the battle between Ayutthaya and Tabinshwehti's forces.

The Thai king leads his troops in the defense of the city from atop his war elephant, as is the custom at this time.

Women are not permitted to take part in battle, but Suriyothai is so concerned for her husband that she disguises herself as a man and rides into battle on her own elephant.

Seeing the king’s elephant collapsed from wounds and the king in danger of being slain during the battle, Suriyothai maneuvers her elephant to protect her husband and is killed by a scythe.

Her daughter, also dressed as a man, perishes in the fighting as well, and the Siamese monarch’s son Rameshvara and son-in-law are captured.

Facing strong fortifications and Portuguese mercenaries at Ayutthaya, Tabinshwehti decides to attack the weaker towns to the north, ...

...Kamphaeng Phet, ...

...Sukhothai, and ...

...Phitsanulok.

The Burmese invaders now run out of war materiél, and free the two noble captives in exchange for a guaranteed safe retreat.

Trenggana, the third Sultan of Demak and the brother-in-law of the kingdom’s founder, Raden Patah, conquers the Hindu resistance in Central Java, Banten, and Sunda Kelapa.

His campaigning ends in his death in battle in Panarukan in 1548, sparking a war of succession between the King's younger brother, Sekar Seda Lepen; and the King's son, Prince Prawoto.

Both the Renaissance and Reformation have reached Poland during the reign of King Sigismund, who has presided over the first golden age of Polish literature.

A patron of Renaissance art, and a major patron of Flemish weavers, Sigismund has built a courtyard and chapel in the Italian style at Wawel Castle in Kraków, bringing in the best native and foreign artists including Italian architects, sculptors, and German decorators, to refurbish the castle into a splendid Renaissance palace.

It had soon become a paragon of stately residence in Central and Eastern Europe and serves widely as a model throughout the region.

The king, although Catholic, has nevertheless granted religious freedom to Protestants and accorded royal protection to Jews, thereby making Poland the most tolerant state in Europe.

Known posthumously as Sigismund the Old, or the Great, he dies at eighty-one on April 1, 1548, succeeded by his twenty-eight-year-old son as Sigismund II, who is to continue his father's policy of religious toleration in Poland.

Illyricus opposes the concessions proposed in 1548 between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the Augsburg Interim and in the Leipzig Interim, on the ground that they endanger the integrity of Lutheranism.

The conclusion of the Truce of Adrianople in 1547 has brought Sultan Suleiman's struggle against the Habsburgs to a temporary halt.

Ottoman princess Mihrimah Sultana, the only daughter of Süleyman and wife of the Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, had awarded Turkish architect, engineer, and town planner Mimar Sinan the commission to build a mosque with medrese (college), an imaret (soup kitchen) and a sibyan mekteb (Koran school) in Üsküdar.

This Iskele Mosque (or Jetty mosque), completed in 1548, already shows several hallmarks of Sinan's mature style: a spacious, high-vaulted basement, slender minarets, single-domed baldacchino, flanked by three semi-domes ending in three exedrae and a broad double portico.

The construction of a double portico is not a first in Ottoman architecture, but it sets a trend for country mosques and mosques of viziers in particular.

After Süleyman returned from another Balkan campaign, he had received news that his heir to the throne, Shehzade Mehmet, had died at the age of twenty-two.

Not long after Sinan had started the construction of the Iskele Mosque, the sultan had in November 1543 ordered him to build a new major mosque with an adjoining complex in memory of his favorite son.

Architectural historians consider Constantinople’s Shehzade Mehmet Mosque, built between 1543 and 1548, as Sinan's first masterpiece of classical Ottoman architecture.

Border fighting between Safavid Persia and the Ottoman empire has persisted throughout the 1540s.

The Persians avoid set battles but retake Tabriz and ...