508
year
Year 508 (DVIII) was a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar. In the Roman Empire, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Venantius and Celer (or, less frequently, year 1261 Ab urbe condita). The denomination 508 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 Anastasius I formally recognizes Clovis I of the Salian Franks as ruler of Gaul. He sends a Byzantine fleet of 100 warships to raid the coasts of Italy.
Britannia
Battle of Netley: King Cerdic of Wessex moves with an Anglo-Saxon army inland, and defeats the British king, Nudd-Lludd (according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle).
Winter – All the rivers in England are frozen for more than two months.
Europe
King Clovis I fails in an effort to take the walled city of Carcassonne (Southern Gaul). He establishes Paris (Lutetia) as his capital and gets baptized, making Roman Catholicism the official religion of the Kingdom of the Franks.
King Theodoric the Great sends an Ostrogoth army, led by his sword-bearer Theudis, drives the Franks out of Provence, and recovers Septimania (Languedoc) from the Visigoths.
“508” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“508” 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 Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q31027. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1261.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. 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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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “508”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 508 primary sources, 508 archive and year research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “508” 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.