Wen Zhengming, born in present-day Suzhou, claims to be a descendant of the Song Dynasty prime minister and patriot Wen Tianxiang.

Wen’s family was originally from Hengyang, Hunan, where his family had established itself shortly after the tenth century.

Not until the time of Wen's great-grandfather, Wen Hui, a military officer, did the family move to the Suzhou area.

Wen often chooses painting subjects of great simplicity, like a single tree or rock.

His work often brings about a feeling of strength through isolation, which often reflect his discontent with official life.

Many of his works also celebrate the contexts of elite social life for which they are created.

He collaborates in the design of the Humble Administrator's Garden, generally considered one of China's four greatest gardens.

Nils Dacke, already fugitive for having killed a sheriff in 1536, leads the mainly Catholic peasants of the province of Småland in southern Sweden in June 1542 in rebellion against the anti-Catholicism and harsh tax collection policies of Sweden’s King Gustavus Vasa.

Vasa had himself had come to power at the head of a peasant army in 1523, establishing Sweden's independence from Denmark and making Protestantism the national religion.

Småland, which found itself on the border between Sweden and Denmark after the dissolution of the Kalmar Union in 1523, has been hard hit by Vasa's ban on cross border trade.

The powerful Swedish noble Svante Sture rebuffs the rebels’ offer of support in gaining the Swedish throne, refusing involvement in the civil war.

The rebels assassinate a number of sheriffs and tax collectors.

Gustav, underestimating the military prowess of the peasants, sends small expeditions of his German mercenaries to quell the revolt.

The landsknechts are however unsuited for battle in the rugged forests and suffer heavy losses.

Dacke has devised defensive tactics which allow the peasants to use their steel crossbows with devastating effect; his successes help spread the revolt over all the southern provinces of Sweden.

The situation is so serious that the king is forced to sue for peace and on November 8th a one-year ceasefire is signed.

During the ceasefire Dacke is the de facto ruler of southern Sweden and receives (and declines) offers of foreign support.

He reinstates the Catholic Church and reopens the cross border trade in the areas under his control.

Gustavus simultaneously reinforces his troops in Småland.

Bratislava becomes the capital of Habsburg Hungary after the Turkish capture of Buda, at which time the city is also known by its German name, Pressburg.

Bratislava is today the political, cultural, and economic center of Slovakia, and the country's largest city.

Vijayanagara, the capital city of the Vijayanagara empire and a bulwark of Hindu civilization in South India, has flourished between the fourteenth century and sixteenth centuries.

The reign of Vijayanagara’s Emperor Achyuta ends in 1542 with about the same external boundaries of the kingdom as in 1529, but the internal struggle with the regent Rama Raya plus the activities of other nobles and chieftains have weakened the hold of the center over some of the provinces.

The process of decentralization had set in again, but now the strongman who will pull the kingdom together is already on the scene.

Rama Raya brings himself to the undisputed pinnacle of power when he defeats his rival in the succession struggle following Achyuta's death and crowns his own candidate, Achyuta's nephew Sadasiva.

South India’s Muslim kingdoms, often collectively termed the Deccan sultanates, had become established in the northern Deccan after the fall of the Bahmani sultanate in 1527.

Ahmadnagar is the strongest and best organized of the Bahmani successor states during the sixteenth century, followed by Bijapur and then Golconda.

All three are much larger and more important than Berar and Bidar, and all three either began with or had soon come to accept the Shi'ite form of Islam (the religion of the Persian newcomers) as the official faith of their rulers.

The three major states form shifting patterns of alliances, which sometimes (both before and after 1565) also include Vijayanagar, while the two smaller Muslim states range themselves on one side or the other in order to protect their independence.

The goal of military campaigns normally is to humble the adversary without doing irreparable harm, for all three major Muslim states fear the supremacy of any one state, and a tripartite division of territory seems more likely to insure the continued independence of all.

Taddesse Tamrat, an Ethiopian historian writes, "The Muslim occupation of the Christian highlands under Ahmad Gragn lasted for little more than ten years, between 1531 and 1543. But the amount of destruction brought about in these years can only be estimated in terms of centuries."

The theologian Pietro Martire Vermigli (sometimes simply Peter Martyr), originally Piero Marian Vermigli, had taken the name Peter Martyr, after St. Peter Martyr, when he had been ordained into the Augustinian order.

Born in Florence and educated in the Augustinian cloister at Fiesole, he had been transferred in 1519 to the convent of St. John of Verdara near Padua, where he had graduated D.D. about 1527 and made the acquaintance of the future Reginald Cardinal Pole.

He had been employed from that year onward as a public preacher at Brescia, Pisa, Venice and Rome; and in his intervals of leisure he had mastered Greek and Hebrew.

He had been elected abbot of the Augustinian monastery at Spoleto in 1530, and in 1533 prior of the convent of St. Peter ad Aram at Naples.

About this time, primarily through the influence of Spanish religious writer Juan de Valdes, he had read Martin Bucer's commentaries on the Gospels and the Psalms and also Huldrych Zwingli's De vera et falsa religione; and his Biblical studies began to affect his views.

He had then been accused of erroneous doctrine, and the Spanish viceroy of Naples had prohibited his preaching.

The prohibition had been removed on appeal to Rome, but in 1541 Martyr had been transferred to Lucca, where he had again fallen under suspicion.

Summoned to appear before a chapter of his order at Genoa, …

...he flees in 1542 to Pisa and thence ...

...to another Italian reformer, Bernardino Ochino, at Florence.

He and Ochino eventually escape to England.

The Spanish crown, pressed by such committed reformers as Bartolomé de Las Casas, attempts to control and then abolish the “encomienda” system through the so-called New Laws of the Indies of 1542, by which the system of forced labor is to be phased out.

The laws, designed to temper the abuses perpetrated against the native Americans, are initially resisted with bitter opposition.