1534
year
Year 1534 (MDXXXIV) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 15 – The Parliament of England passes the Act Respecting the Oath to the Succession, recognising the marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and their children as the legitimate heirs to the throne.
February 23 – A group of Anabaptists, led by Jan Matthys, seize Münster, Westphalia and declare it The New Jerusalem, begin to exile dissenters, and forcibly baptize all others.
March 10 – The Portuguese crown divides Colonial Brazil into fifteen donatory captaincies, hereditary titles similar to duchies.
March 30 – The Submission of the Clergy Act 1533 becomes law in England, requiring submission of the clergy, that is, churchmen are to submit to the king and the publication of ecclesiastical laws without royal permission is forbidden.
April–June
April 5 (Easter Sunday) – Anabaptist Jan Matthys is killed by the Landsknechte, who laid siege to Münster on the day he predicted as the Second Coming of Christ. His follower John of Leiden takes control of the city.
April 13 – Sir Thomas More, having been brought before a royal commission to swear his allegiance to the Act of Succession, testifies that he accepts Parliament's right to declare Anne Boleyn the legitimate Queen of England, but denies that the marriage is spiritually valid of the king's second marriage". Holding fast to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy, More refuses to take the oath of supremacy toward King Henry VIII. More is confined in the Tower of London. He will be executed on July 6, 1535.
“1534” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1534” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
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 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6447. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1534, 1533 and 1535.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. 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
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Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “1534” 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.