540
year
Year 540 (DXL) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Julian calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Iustinus without colleague (or, less frequently, year 1293 Ab urbe condita). The denomination 540 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
Emperor Justinian I offers to make peace with Vitiges, but Belisarius refuses to transmit the message. The Ostrogoths then offer to support Belisarius as emperor of the West.
May – Gothic War: Belisarius conquers Mediolanum (modern-day Milan) and the Gothic capital Ravenna. Vitiges and his wife Matasuntha are taken as captives to Constantinople.
Belisarius consolidates Italy and begins mopping-up operations, capturing the Gothic fortifications. The cities Ticinum and Verona north of River Po remain in Gothic hands.
Ildibad succeeds Vitiges as king of the Ostrogoths, and installs his nephew Totila as commander of the Gothic army.
“540” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“540” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q30900. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1293.
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This entry incorporates text from “540” 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.