1501
year
Year 1501 (MDI) was a common year starting on Friday in the Julian calendar. It was the first year of the 16th century.
Events
January–March
January 17 – Cesar Borgia returns triumphantly to Rome, from Romagna.
February 1 – The Duchy of Bavaria-Dachau, created in Germany in 1467 after Sigismund, Duke of Bavaria was granted his own state following his resignation from the throne of the Duchy of Bavaria-Munich, reverts to Bavaria-Munich's control upon Sigismund's death.
March 4 – Minkhaung II becomes the sole King of Burma upon the death of his son Thihathura II, with whom he was co-ruler for 15 years. Minkhaung's reign ends five weeks later when he dies on April 7.
March 25 – Portuguese navigator João da Nova discovers Ascension Island. It is definitely sighted and named on May 20, 1503 (Feast of the Ascension) by Afonso de Albuquerque.
April–June
April 7 – Shwenankyawshin Narapati begins an almost 26-year reign as King of Burma upon the death of his father, King Minkhaung II.
April 11 – The Rebellion in the Alpujarras ends in southern Spain with a treaty of surrender of the last Muslim insurgents in the Alpujarra Mountains in Andalusia on the Mediterranean Sea. The Muslims are given the choice of expulsion or conversion to Christianity.
“1501” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1501” 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 Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6131. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1501, 1467 and 1503.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. 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 “1501” 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.