550
year
Year 550 (DL) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 550 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 Justinian I appoints Bessas commander (magister militum) of Armenia, and entrusts him with the war in Lazica (Georgia).
Siege of Petra (550–551)
January 16 – Gothic War: The Ostrogoths under king Totila recapture Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.
Summer – Totila plunders Sicily, after he subdues Corsica and Sardinia. He sends a Gothic fleet to raid the coasts of Greece.
Justinian I sends two Nestorian monks on a mission to Central Asia, to spread Christianity in the East (approximate date).
Europe
The Vendel era begins; the name is given to a region in Uppland (an important area of the sagas' account of a Swedish kingdom).
Persia
The Sassanid Empire, under the reign of King Khosrow I, controls the trade of silk destined for Europe and the Byzantine Empire.
Asia
The Eastern Wei Dynasty ends, and Wen Xuan Di becomes emperor of Northern Qi.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “550” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
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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 Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q32150. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “550” 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.