1500
year
Year 1500 (MD) was a leap year starting on Wednesday in the Julian calendar. It was the last year of the 15th century. The year 1500 was not a leap year in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
The year 1500 was seen as being especially important by many Christians in Europe, who thought it would bring the beginning of the end of the world. Their belief was based on the phrase "half-time after the time", when the apocalypse was due to occur, which appears in the Book of Revelation and was seen as referring to 1500. This time was also just after the Old World's discovery of the Americas in 1492, and therefore was influenced greatly by the New World.
Historically, the year 1500 is also often identified, somewhat arbitrarily, as marking the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the early modern period.
The end of this year marked the halfway point of the 2nd millennium, as there were 500 years before it and 500 years after it.
Events
January–March
January 5 – Duke Ludovico Sforza recaptures Milan, but is soon driven out again by the French.
January 26 – Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón reaches the northern coast of Brazil.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1500” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as year. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6126. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1500 and 1492.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1500”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1500 primary sources, 1500 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1500”?
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This entry incorporates text from “1500” 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.