1539
year
Year 1539 (MDXXXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 4 – Giannandrea Giustiniani Longo is elected to a two year term as Doge of the Republic of Genoa in Italy, succeeding Giovanni Battista Doria.
January 12 – Treaty of Toledo: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (aka Charles I of Spain) and Francis I of France agree to make no further alliances with England. The treaty comes after Henry VIII of England's split with Rome and Pope Paul III.
January – Toungoo–Hanthawaddy War – Battle of Naungyo, Burma: The Toungoos decisively defeat the Hanthawaddys.
February 9 – The first horse race is held at Chester Racecourse, the oldest still in use in England.
March 1 – King Henry VIII of England summons Parliament to meet, with the session to start on April 28.
March 2 – Askia Isma'il, ruler of the Songhai Empire in West Africa, dies after a reign of slightly less than two years and is succeeded by Askia Ishaq I.
March 30 – Canterbury Cathedral surrenders, and reverts to its previous status of 'a college of secular canons.
April–June
April 17 – At Dresden in Germany, Heinrich IV of the House of Wettin, nicknamed "Heinrich der Fromme" (Henry the Pious) becomes the new Duke of Saxony within the Holy Roman Empire upon the death of his older brother, Georg der Bärtige ("George the Bearded").
April 19 – The Treaty of Frankfurt is signed at Frankfurt-am-Main by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor on behalf of the Empire's Roman Catholic states, and the Lutheran theologian Philip Melanchthon, representative of the Schmalkaldic League of Protestant German states. Effective May 1, the parties agree that no violent actions will be taken by either side against the other during a 15 month truce period.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1539” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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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 Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6479. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1539.
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This entry incorporates text from “1539” 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.