1481
year
Year 1481 (MCDLXXXI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 6 – Ahmed Khan bin Küchük, Khan of the Great Horde, is killed by the Khan of Sibir, Ibak Khan in battle and is succeeded by his son, Sheikh Ahmed.
February 6 – The first execution during the Spanish Inquisition is carried out in Seville in an auto-da-fé as six people convicted of heresy are burned alive. As a result of this and other murders, thousands of conversos— mostly Jewish people who had converted to Christianity— flee their homes.
March 15 – The first of a series of earthquakes to affect the island of Rhodes occurs, leading up to the deadly earthquake in May.
April–June
April 2 – King James III of Scotland gives royal assent to the six Defence of the Realm Acts and to the Benefices Act 1481, passed by his parliament in anticipation of a war with England.
April 5 – Mahmud Gawan, the chief minister (peshwa) of India's Bahmani Kingdom (now in the state of Karnataka) is executed in Bidar on orders of the Sultan Muhammad Shah III Lashkari, after being falsely convicted of treason. The preparer of the forged document that led to Gawan's overthrow, Malik Hasan Bahri, becomes the new peshwa.
April 8 – Pope Sixtus IV issues the papal bull Cogimur jubente altissimo, calling for Roman Catholics to participate in a crusade against the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Turkish-occupied southern Italian area in and around Otranto, with the liberation of Valona (now in Albania) to follow.
May 3
The 1481 Rhodes earthquake, the largest of a series, strikes the island of Rhodes, causing an estimated 30,000 casualties.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6631. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1481.
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This entry incorporates text from “1481” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.