Pope Felix III dies on January 3, 492; Gelasius succeeds him.

Gelasius' election on March 1, 492, is a gesture for continuity: the new pope, having inherited Felix's struggles with Eastern Roman Emperor Anastasius I and the patriarch of Constantinople, exacerbates them by insisting on the removal of the name of the late Acacius, patriarch of Constantinople, from the diptychs, in spite of every ecumenical gesture by the current, otherwise quite orthodox patriarch Euphemius.

Theodoric the Great conquers Rimini and brings his Ostrogoth fleet to blockade the harbors six miles from the capital of Ravenna.

Important provisions, food and supplies, are cut off and the inhabitants are starved to death.

Emperor Xiaowen begins adopting a sinicization policy as well as various reforms.

He marries Feng Qing, who becomes empress of the Northern Wei Dynasty.

The Book of Song, a historical text of the Liu Song Dynasty of the Southern Dynasties of China, covers history from 420 to 479, and is one of the Twenty-four Histories, a traditional collection of historical records.

It is written in 492–493 by Shen Yue from the Southern Qi dynasty.

The work contains one hundred volumes at the time that it is written, but some volumes will already be missing by the time of the Song Dynasty.

Later editors will reconstruct those volumes by taking material from the History of the Southern Dynasties, plus a few works such as the Historiette of Gao by Gao Jun, though many of those volumes will no longer be in their original condition.

The Lombards, migrating south from the upper Elbe, settle the abandoned Rugian territory in 493.

The movement of the Slavs from their original homeland north of the Carpathians to other parts of East Central Europe is apparently linked in large part to the invasion between the fifth and sixth centuries of nomadic peoples from the east.

The Huns, Alans, and Kutrigur Bulgars in turn subject certain Slavic tribes and often take them along on raids against the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Kutrigur Bulgars probably originated as a Turkic tribe of Central Asia and arrived in the European steppe west of the Volga River with the Huns about 370; retreating with the Huns, they resettled about 460 in an arc of country north and east of the Sea of Azov.

Hired by the East Romans in 480 to fight against the Ostrogoths, the Bulgars subsequently have attracted by the wealth of the empire.

From 493, the Bulgars continually attack the western Danubian provinces of the Empire.

Meanwhile, small Slavic groups have in the fifth century begun settling outlying regions in the region of what is today Bulgaria.

The Slavs, characteristically sedentary farming and livestock-raising tribes, speak an Indo-European language and organize themselves into clans ruled by a council of family chiefs, holding in common all land and significant wealth.

The Roman general Diogenianus besieges Claudiopolis, an ancient city of Cappadocia, but his army is blocked in the mountain passes by the Isaurians.

John the Hunchback (John Gibbo) comes to his aid and wins an overwhelming victory against the rebels in 493 and drives the rebels back to Isauria, where, despite numerical inferiority, they continue to battle imperial forces.

The Ostrogoths conquer Dalmatia and other neighboring provinces by the end of 493.

Chilperic II had begun his reign in 473 after the partition of Burgundy with his brothers Godegisel, Gundobad and Godomar; he ruled from Valence and his brothers ruled respectively from Geneva, Vienne, and Lyon.

They are all sons of Gundioc.

Sometime in the early 470s, Chilperic had been forced to submit to the authority of the Roman Empire by the magister militum Ecdicius Avitus.

In 475, he had probably sheltered the exiled Ecdicius after the Visigoths had obtained possession of the Auvergne.

After his brother Gundobad had removed his other brother Godomar (Gundomar) in 486, he turned on Chilperic.

In 493, Gundobad assassinates Chilperic and drowns his wife, then exiled their two daughters, Chroma, who became a nun, and Clotilda, who flees to her uncle, Godegisel, in Geneva.

When the Frankish king, Clovis I, requests the latter's hand in marriage, Gundobad is unable to decline.

Clovis and Godegisel soon ally against Gundobad in what will prove to be a long, drawn out civil war.

The Burgundians had seized the opportunity to invade northwestern Italy while Odoacer and Theodoric the Great were locked in battle over control of Pavia in the early months of 490, devastating Liguria and carrying away an unknown number of victims into captivity, if not slavery.

Once Theodoric had killed Odoacer and was securely in control of Italy, he sent bishop Epiphanius of Pavia on a mission to ransom as many of these captives as possible.

Accompanied by Bishop Victor of Turin, they crossed the Alps in March.

Shanzer and Wood believe Epiphanius was possibly also entrusted with a mission in connection with the marriage of Gundobad's son Sigismund to Theodoric's daughter Ostrogotho.

In his account of this visit, Magnus Felix Ennodius, who accompanied Epiphanius on this journey, describes Godegisel as germanus regis the "king's brother" and not king—again contradicting Gregory of Tour's later account.

Ennodius notes that "more than six thousand souls" were so ransomed; from Lyon alone, four hundred men were thus freed.