Miguel de Arruda: A Master Architect of…

Borommaracha IV dies abruptly in 1533 due to a smallpox epidemic, leaving the throne to his five-year-old son, Prince Ratsadathirat.

The enlarged Confederation of Shan States had extended its authority down to Prome (Pyé) in 1532 by defeating their erstwhile ally the Prome Kingdom, because Sawlon felt that King Bayin Htwe, had not provided sufficient help in their war against Ava.

Sawlon has made a fateful choice in not attacking the Toungoo Kingdom.

After the Prome war, Sawlon is assassinated by his own ministers, creating a leadership vacuum.

Although Sawlon's son Thohanbwa, king of Ava, naturally tries to assume the leadership of the Confederation, he will never be fully acknowledged as the first among equals by other saophas.

Bayin Htwe is the eldest son of Thado Minsaw of Prome, who had proclaimed the independence of his minor kingdom from Ava in 1482.

Htwe had ascended to the throne in 1526 after his father's death.

The new king had soon incurred the wrath of Sawlon, the leader of the Confederation of Shan States, because he did not send help in the Confederation's war against Ava in 1526–1527.

His father had been an ally of Sawlon, and had sent troops in their 1524–1525 assault on Ava.

In 1532, Sawlon and his Confederation armies (twelve thousand troops, eight hundred horses and thirty elephants) laid siege to Prome (Pyay).

Bayin Htwe had surrendered in late 1532, and had been sent to Dabayin in Upper Burma in exile.

Htwe's son Narapati was appointed vassal king.

Htwe's life in captivity is cut short after Sawlon is assassinated by his own ministers near Myedu, enabling his return to Prome.

He arrives back at the outskirts of Prome, five months after he lost his throne, but his son does not allow him back in the city.

He dies about a month later in the adjoining forests.

His legacy will live on through his offspring.

Two of his sons, Narapati and Minkhaung, become rulers of Prome, albeit as vassals of Ava.

Two of his daughters, Salin Mibaya and Laygyun Mibaya, will be married to Thado Dhamma Yaza II of Prome and Minkhaung II of Toungoo, who respectively will become viceroys of Prome and Toungoo.

He is the maternal grandfather of Queen Hsinbyushin Medaw of Lan Na and Queen Min Taya Medaw, a principal queen of King Nanda of the Toungoo Dynasty.

Mạc Đăng Dung, famed for his strength and cunning, had gotten got his start around 1506 as a bodyguard for the cruel and reviled Lê Emperor of Dai Viet, Lê Uy Mục.

Despite the deaths of several emperors, Mạc Đăng Dung had increased his power over time and gained many supporters.

However, he had also gained the enmity of other rivals for power.

A civil war starting around 1520 will last, with occasional breaks, for the next one hundred and fifty years.

The young Emperor, Lê Chiêu Tông, apparently fearing the growing ambition of Mạc Đăng Dung, fled to the south.

A revolt had begun, with the Trịnh and the Nguyễn families claiming to support the Emperor against the power of Mạc Đăng Dung.

Mạc Đăng Dung had responded by proclaimed the Emperor's younger brother, Prince Xuan, was now the true Emperor and installed him as Emperor under the name Lê Cung Hoàng.

The revolt had ended, temporarily, when Mạc Đăng Dung's forces captured and executed Lê Chiêu Tông along with the leaders of the revolt.

Mạc Đăng Dung in 1527 had removed the figurehead Emperor he had installed earlier and proclaimed himself as the new Emperor under the title Minh Đức.

This usurpation of the throne from the rightful Lê Emperors was not well received by the officials in the government.

Some were killed, some committed suicide, and some have fled to the south to join a new revolt by the Trịnh and the Nguyễn families against the Mạc Emperors.

A new revolt had begun, and both sides try to pull in allies, mainly the Ming dynasty but also King Phothisarat I of Lan Xang (modern-day Laos).

Mạc Đăng Dung, through submissive diplomacy and massive bribes, had persuaded the Ming not to attack in 1528, managing to obtain a temporary recognition of his rule.

He had abdicated his position as Emperor the following year in favor of his son, Mạc Đăng Doanh.

However, this had been done purely to solidify his son's claim to rule after he is gone.

In reality, Mạc Đăng Dung continues to rule with the title of Senior Emperor.

His son is not the equal of his father and as a result of several defeats, he has lost control of the provinces south of the Red River as the revolt has gathered strength.

The Nguyễn-Trịnh army in 1533 conquers the Winter Palace and proclaims Lê Trang Tông the rightful ruler of Vietnam.

The figurehead Lê emperor is officially crowned at the newly recaptured southern capital.

King Photisarath, one of the great kings of Lan Xang, had taken Nang Yot Kham Tip from Lanna as his queen as well as lesser queens from Ayutthaya, and Longvek.

Photisarath is a devout Buddhist, and has declared it as the state religion of Lan Xang.

In 1523 he had requested a copy of the Tripiṭaka from King Kaeo in Lanna, and in 1527 he had abolished spirit worship throughout the kingdom.

In 1532 the period of peace ended for Lan Xang when Muang Phuan rebelled; it will take Photisarath two years to fully suppress the rebellion.

In 1533 he moves his court to Vientiane, the commercial capital of Lan Xang, which is located on the floodplains of the Mekong below the capital at Luang Prabang.

Vientiane is the principal city of Lan Xang, and lies at the confluence of trade routes, but this access also makes it the focal point for invasion from which it is difficult to defend.

However, the move does allow Photisarath to better administer the kingdom and to respond to the outlying provinces that border the Đại Việt, Ayutthaya and the increasingly powerful Burmese polity.

Vasily III, Grand Duke of Moscow, dies on December 2,1533.

His three-year-old son succeeds him as Ivan IV.

His mother, Yelena Glinskaya, a member of a leading boyar, or noble, family, establishes a regency that quickly degenerates into intrigue, denunciation, and wild violence as rival boyars dispute Glinsky dominance.

Denmark's rigsraad (state council), dominated by the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nobility, decides to govern temporarily without a king following the death of King Frederick in 1533, rather than to accept a Lutheran partisan from the ranks of the burghers, who have the support of the Refprmist peasantry.

Danish rebels, allied with the aggressive Hanseatic mercantile city of Lübeck, seek to restore Christian II, the deposed and imprisoned Danish king, and to bring Danish Copenhagen and Swedish Malmö into the Hanseatic League.

Leading Jutland nobles and bishops support Frederick’ eldest son and designated successor, thirty-year-old Christian, the Lutheran-educated Duke of Holstein, in his military campaign against Count Christopher of Oldenburg, commander of the Lübeck and Danish forces that favor the restoration of Christian II.

Regiomontanus’s important work on trigonometry, De triangulis planis et sphaericis libri quinque, completed in 1464, is first published in 1533.

Much of the material on spherical trigonometry in Regiomontanus' On Triangles had been taken directly and without credit from the twelfth-century work of Jabir ibn Aflah otherwise known as Geber, as noted in the sixteenth century by Gerolamo Cardano.

The shah of Safavid Persia, Tahmasp I, has become active in the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire.

Suleyman, preoccupied with affairs in the East and convinced that Austria is not to be overcome at one stroke, grants a truce to archduke Ferdinand in 1533.

Ibrahim Pasa, vested with full powers, represents the sultan in negotiations with the Holy Roman emperor Charles V over the Hungarian question; these negotiations establish most of Hungary as tributary to the Ottomans and confirm the extraordinary powers of the grand vizier.

Ferdinand is to be considered as the King of Germany, and Charles V as the King of Spain, and they are equal to the Grand Vizier of Ottoman Empire.

Moreover, they are banned to count anyone as 'Emperor' except the Ottoman Emperor.

By the peace of 1533, signed in Constantinople, Ferdinand abandons his claims to central Hungary and recognizes Zápolya's rule there as Ottoman vassal, while Süleyman agrees to accept Ferdinand as ruler of northern Hungary in return for the payment of an annual tribute of thirty thousand guldens.

Austria, to tighten its grip on Croatia and solidify its defenses, restricts the powers of the Sabor, establishes a military border across Croatia, and recruits Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, and other Slavs to serve as peasant border guards.

(This practice is the basis for the ethnic patchwork that survives today in Croatia, …