Shan forces lead a counterattack on Prome in 1544, but Tabinshwehti's forces are able to repel the assault.

Pinto returns to the coast of China after being released at Ningbo, and makes contact with Portuguese merchants who are highly interested in a trade mission to Japan.

The Portuguese trading expedition is shipwrecked, however, on the coast of the Ryukyu Islands, where they are arrested for piracy but are released because of the compassion of the women of the island.

Denmark’s king Christian III, waging a dynastic struggle with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who supports the claims of the daughters of deposed Christian II, bars the Habsburg Netherlands' shipping from the Baltic Sea, and Charles concludes a peace with him in 1544.

The questioning of certain church practices by German priest and scholar Martin Luther, a former Augustinian monk, in the form of the ninety five theses, had launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517, and by the mid 1540s a large part of northern Europe has left the Roman Catholic church for new Evangelical communities.

Concluding that their malevolent Jewish obstinacy makes them reluctant to convert, and not any deficiencies in his doctrine of practice, Luther attacks the Jews, urging that their synagogues and homes be destroyed and that they be driven from the country.

“Verily, a hopeless, wicked, venomous and devilish thing is the existence of these Jews...our pest, torment and misfortune.”

German Protestant reformer and theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus, after studying at the universities of Basel and Tubingen, goes to Wittenberg, where Philipp Melanchthon and Luther influence him.

Appointed professor of Hebrew in 1544 when he is twenty-four, he becomes a strict Lutheran dogmatist.

The University of Königsberg becomes the intellectual center of Lutheranism in the Polish kingdom.

António de Campo, one of the captains of the famously successful Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, had in 1502 discovered Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay), an inlet of the Indian Ocean on the coast of the extreme southeastern part of present-day Mozambique.

Lourenço Marques, after exploring the upper reaches of the estuaries leading into the bay, establishes an eponymous settlement in 1544, situated on a large natural harbor and peopled with the Portuguese trader's native wife and mixed-race children.

Today the capital and largest city of Mozambique, its economy centered around the harbor, Maputo, the former Lourenço Marques, has an official population of approximately 1,244,227 (2006), but the actual population is estimated to be much higher because of slums and other unofficial settlements.

Süleyman’s beys continue his campaign against the Habsburgs in  1544, seizing parts of Styria, Carinthia, and Croatia.

Jean Calvin greatly admires Clément Marot’s Psalms, but because Marot, like most of his friends, has been at least as much of a freethinker as a Protestant, this is fatal to his reputation in Calvin’s austere city.

Forced to flee again, Marot makes his way into Piedmont, where he will die in Turin in September of this year at the age of about forty-eight.

Most of Provence remains strongly Catholic, with only one enclave of Protestants, the principality of Orange, Vaucluse, an enclave ruled by Prince William of the House of Orange-Nassau of the Netherlands, which is created in 1544.