1502
year
Year 1502 (MDII) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 1 – Portuguese explorers, led by Gonçalo Coelho, sail into Guanabara Bay, Brazil, mistaking it for the mouth of a river, which they name Rio de Janeiro.
January 24 – Commissioners from Scotland and England meet at Richmond Palace in London to finalize an agreement on the marriage between Scotland's King James IV to the daughter of England's King Henry VII, the princess Margaret Tudor, with a dowry of 35,000 Scottish Punnds and an agreement for a "treaty of perpetual peace". The marriage will be completed by proxy on January 25, 1503.
February 12 – Isabella I issues an edict outlawing Islam in the Crown of Castile, forcing virtually all her Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity.
February 13 – The new Viceroy of the New World, Nicolás de Ovando, departs Spain with a fleet of 30 ships and orders to replace Viceroy Francisco de Bobadilla at Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, and arrives in April.
March 14 – Christopher Columbus begins preparation for his fourth and final voyage, with a goal of finding a westward passage in the New World to link the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.
March 26 – The first recorded earthquake in what is now Croatia strikes at Medvednica with a Mercalli scale intensity estimated at VIII. (2000).
April–June
April 2 – Arthur, Prince of Wales, the 15-year-old Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester, heir to the English throne as eldest son of King Henry VII, dies after a long illness less than five months after marrying Catherine of Aragon. Arthur's 10-year-old brother, Henry, Duke of York, becomes the new heir to the throne and will later succeed his father as King Henry VIII.
April 11 – Dmitry Ivanovich Vnuk, who had been the teenage co-ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow since 1498 with his grandfather Ivan III, is arrested along with his mother, Elena of Moldavia on suspicion of conspiracy.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1502” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “year” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
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 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6137. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1502, 1503, 2000 and 1498.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. 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.
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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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
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This entry incorporates text from “1502” 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.