1497
year
The year 1497 (MCDXCVII) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 16 – At Westminster, King Henry VII opens his sixth English Parliament for a two-month session. The House of Commons elects Sir Thomas Englefield as its speaker.
February 7 – At the public square in Florence, on Shrove Tuesday, followers of the charismatic Dominican friar and evangelist Girolamo Savonarola carry out the first "bonfire of the vanities" and burn thousands of artworks, books, clothing, mirrors, music instruments, playing cards and other objects deemed by them to be a temptation to sin.
March 13 – King Henry VII of England gives royal assent to numerous acts passed as parliament adjourns, including the following:
Weights and Measures Act 1496, standardizing units of weight and of volume throughout England. Specifically, the smallest unit, the "sterling" is set at the weight of 32 corns of wheat, 20 sterlings are an ounce, 12 ounces are a pound. A gallon of wheat must weight 8 pounds Troy weight, and a 12-gallon bushel must weight 64 pounds.
Benefit of Clergy Act 1496, requiring that charges against a church official for treason must be tried in a government court of law. For other charges, clergymen may still have the benefit of being tried by an ecclesiastical court under canon law.
March 3 – The Russo-Swedish War (1495–1497) ends with a six year truce signed in Russia at Novgorod.
“1497” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1497” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6702. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1497, 1496 and 1495.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1497” 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.