1540
year
Year 1540 (MDXL) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 6 – King Henry VIII marries Anne of Cleves, his fourth Queen consort; the marriage lasts six months.
February 14 – Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, enters Ghent without resistance, and executes rebels, ending the Revolt of Ghent (1539–1540).
March 23 – Waltham Abbey is the last to be closed as part of Henry VIII of England's dissolution of the monasteries.
April–June
April 3– Estêvão da Gama becomes the new Governor of Portuguese India.
April 7– The English cathedral priories of Canterbury and Rochester are transformed into secular cathedral chapters on Easter Sunday, concluding the Dissolution of the monasteries.
April 12– Printing of the first translation of the New Testament into the Icelandic language is completed after King Christian III of Denmark finishes having Oddur Gottskálksson's text compared to the original Latin.
May 17 – Battle of Kannauj: Sher Shah Suri defeats and deposes Mughal Emperor Humayan, establishing the Sur Empire.
June 10 – Thomas Cromwell, Chief Minister for King Henry VIII, is arrested at meeting of the Privy Council of England at Westminster and charged with treason. Cromwell is removed from his positions as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal, Lord Great Chamberlain and Governor of the Isle of Wight, and will be executed on July 28.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1540” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
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.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6482. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1540 and 1539.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. 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 “1540” 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.