1508
year
Year 1508 (MDVIII) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar.
Events
January–March
January 24 – Maximilian, King of the Romans, requests permission to march to Rome through Venetian territory, but is denied and begins his Italienzug.
February 2 – During the Glinski rebellion, Lithuanian noble Mykolas Glinskis attacks Grodno (now in Belarus) and decapitates Jan Zabrzeziński, the top ally of Grand Duke Alexander.
February 4 – Maximilian, King of the Romans, proclaims himself Holy Roman Emperor at the Italian city of Trento, after having been blocked by Venice from traveling to Rome to be crowned by Pope Julius II.
February 20 – Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, attacks the Republic of Venice and sack Ampezzo the next day.
February 28 – Louis V becomes the new prince elector of the Palatinate upon the death of his father, Philip.
March 2 – The Republic of Venice defeats Maximilian I in the Battle of Cadore.
March 5 – La Cassaria by Ludovico Ariosto, the first Italian language comedy, is premiered at Ferrara.
March 13 – The oldest annual foot race in Europe, the "Red Hose Race", is run for the first time, taking place in Scotland at Carnwath, Lanarkshire.
March 18 – Wilhelm IV becomes the new Duke of Bavaria upon the death of his father, Albrecht IV.
March 22
Working from the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli at Florence, Leonardo da Vinci begins writing his "collection without order" of his scientific discoveries.
Ferdinand II of Aragon appoints Florentine merchant Amerigo Vespucci to the post of Chief Navigator of Spain.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1508” as year. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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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 Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6170. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1508.
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This entry incorporates text from “1508” 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.