Calendar

“This engaging volume is an account of the human grasp, measurement,
and use of time. It is comprehensive and detailed, yet enthralling in the

way
the history is told and the technical aspects explained. ”
---- HUGH DOWNS
Our present calendar predates the invention of the telescope, the mechanical
clock, and the concept of zero—and its development is one of the great
untold stories of science and history. Now, David Ewing Duncan leads us
on an extraordinary journey through man’s reckoning of time, from the
earliest calendars through our struggles with the digital “millennium bug.”
We travel from Stonehenge to Giza, from Mayan observatories to the atomic
clock in Washington; we visit a host of ancient cultures and meet a cast of
historic personages and giants of science. Here is a fresh, stimulating volume
that answers—and raises—a host of facinating questions about the nature of
human timekeeping and the majestic historical forces that have produced the
miracle of the calendar.
“Veteran science and travel writer Duncan has assembled lively history—
dating back 13,000 years to the first known timetable—of the
attempt to follow our exact place in the whirl of days, lunar cycles,
seasons, and years.’’
--- OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
“Duncan is a master at weaving together various threads and anecdotes . . .

He sketches out fascinating characters ... By using a
tiny thread to guide us through ages, cultures and religions,
CALENDAR is a fascinating exploration of the history of ideas—
and a chance to reflect on the exact nature of the little grid of boxes
that rules so much of our lives. ’’
------------------------------ SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
“Mr. Duncan enjoyably captures the interplay of religion, science
and human nature that long deferred but ultimately devised a
successful system of time.”
---- DALLAS MORNING NEWS
“In this finely researched book, David Ewing Duncan chronicles

how mankind has gradually moved towards a common calendar . . .
Mr. Duncan brilliantly evokes the more philosophical tensions
within Christianity about the nature of time.”
---- THE ECONOMIST
“Good reading for the new millennium.”

------------- USA TODAY (ON THE SHELF)
“David Ewing Duncan’s CALENDAR is a charming and

well-written ramble through history ... We encounter heroes and
villains, popes and emperors . . . He breathes life into numerous
nearly forgotten historical figures... a good read ...”
—THE TIMES OF LONDON
“Rather than simply telling the history of the calendar, Duncan has
attempted to use its evolution to tell the history of the world.”
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BOOK REVIEW

“Absorbing . . . extensively researched . . . this accomplished
interdisciplinary work will appeal to all readers tyrannized by the
date book.”
--- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Forget Stephen Hawking: The calendar is a brief history of time

that we can all understand and enjoy.”
--- THE INDEPENDENT (U.K.)
“Highly readable . .. wonderful...”

**** (4-stars, highest), “BOOK OF THE MONTH”
—FOCUS (U.K.)
“Duncan provides vivid portraits of the various figures who

played roles in this process and of their time. A fascinating
cross-section of history”
--- KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Lively and fascinating . . . with a new millennium approaching,

fresh interest in how we track the years will surely make this a
popular book.”
—BOOKLIST
“David Duncan succeeds superbly . . . CALENDAR is a

fast-moving historical tale.”
--- NEW SCIENTIST
“A fascinating book.”
--- THE IRISH TIMES
Also by David Ewing Duncan
RESIDENTS: THE PERILS AND PROMISE OF EDUCATING

YOUNG DOCTORS
HERNANDO DE SOTO: A SAVAGE QUEST IN THE AMERICAS
FROM CAPE TO CAIRO: AN AFRICAN ODYSSEY
PEDALING THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
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alenaar
Humanity 's Epic
Determine a True and

Accurate year
David Ewing Duncan
AN AVON BOOK
AVON BOOKS, INC.
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New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1998 by David Ewing Duncan

Cover Illustration by Christine Van Bree
Inside back cover author photograph © Kit Morris Photography
Interior design by Kellan Peck
Time line illustration by Myles Sprinzen
Published by arrangement with the author
ISBN: 0-380-79324-5
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All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form
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Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Duncan, David Ewing.

Calendar : humanity’s epic struggle to determine a true and
accurate year / by David Ewing Duncan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Calendar—History I. Title.
CE6.D86 1998
529'.3'09—dc21 98-10434
CIP
First Bard Trade Paperback Printing: June 1999

First Bard Hardcover Printing: July 1998
BARD TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA,
HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property.
It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the
publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
To Sander, Danielle,
and Alexander
and tkanks to Stephen en
Calendar Index
Length of the (tropical) year in 2000 A.D.: 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45
seconds
Time that the year has slowed since 1 A.D.: 10 seconds
Average decrease in the year due to a gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation:
% second per century
Lunar Month: 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.9 seconds
The earliest known date: 4236 B.C., the founding of the Egyptian calendar
Ancient Egyptian year: 3651/4 days
Early Chinese year: 354 days (lunar year) with days added at intervals to keep
the Chinese lunar calendar aligned with the seasons
Early Greek year: 354 days, with days added
Jewish year: 354 days, with days added
Early Roman year: 304 days, amended in 700 B.C. to 355 days
The year according to Julius Caesar (the Julian calendar): 3651/4 days
Date Caesar changed Roman year to Julian calendar: January 1, 46 B.C.
Amount of time the old Roman calendar was misaligned with the solar year as
designated by Caesar: 80 days
Total length of 46 B.C., known as the “Year of Confusion,” after adding 80
days: 445 days
X CALENDAR INDEX
The year as amended by Pope Gregory XIII (the Gregorian calendar): 365
days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 20 seconds
Date Pope Gregory reformed the calendar: 1582
Length of time the Julian calendar overestimates the solar year per year, as
determined by Pope Gregory: 11 minutes, 14 seconds
Number of days Pope Gregory removed to correct the calendar’s drift: 10
Dates Gregory eliminated by papal bull to realign his calendar with the solar
year: October 5-14, 1582
Dates most Catholic countries accepted the Gregorian calendar: 1582- 1584
Date Protestant Germany accepted the Gregorian calendar: partial acceptance
in 1700, full acceptance in 1775
Date Great Britain (and the American colonies) accepted the Gregorian
calendar: 1752
Length of time eliminated by the British Parliament to realign the old calendar
(Julian) with the Gregorian calendar: 11 days
Dates Parliament eliminated: September 3—13, 1752
Date Japan accepted the Gregorian calendar: 1873
Date Russia accepted the Gregorian calendar: 1917 (and again in 1940)
Date China accepted the Gregorian calendar: 1949
Date the Eastern Orthodox Church last voted to reject the Gregorian calendar
and retain the Julian calendar: 1971
Length of time the Gregorian calendar is off from the true solar year:
25.96768 seconds per year
Length of time the Gregorian calendar has become misaligned over the 414
years since Gregory’s reform in 1582: 2 hours, 59 minutes, 12 seconds
Year in which the Gregorian calendar will be one day ahead of the true solar
year: A.D. 4909
Year that Atomic Time replaced Earth Time as the world’s official time
standard: 1972
The year as measured in oscillations of atomic cesium:
290,091,200,500,000,000
The Year 2000 Will Be:
1997 according to Christ’s actual birth circa 4 B.C.

2753 according to the old Roman calendar
2749 according to the ancient Babylonian calendar
6236 according to the first Egyptian calendar
5760 according to the Jewish calendar
1420 according to the Moslem calendar
1378 according to the Persian calendar
1716 according to the Coptic calendar
2544 according to the Buddhist calendar
5119 in the current Maya great cycle
208 according to the calendar of the French Revolution the year of the
DRAGON according to the Chinese calendar
ime is the greatest innovator.
—FRANCIS BACON, 1625
ontents
Prelude: A Net Cast Over Time xvii

l. A Lone Genius Proclaims the Truth About Time I
2. Luna: Temptress of Time 10
3. Caesar Embraces the Sun 27
4. A Flaming Cross of Gold 49
5. Time Stands Still 67
6. Monks Dream While Counting on Their Fingers 95
7. Charlemagne’s Sandglass 116
8. The Strange Journey of 365.242199 137
9. From the House of Wisdom to Darkest Europe 159
10. Latinorum Penuria (The Poverty of the Latins) 174
11. The Battle Over Time 191
12. From the Black Death to Copernicus 213
xvi CONTENTS
13. Solving the Riddle of Time 233

14. Ten Days Lost Forever 261
15. Living on Atomic Time 290
Time Line: The Calendar 302
Illustrations 309
Bibliographic Notes 311
Acknowledgments 317
Index 319
silent, like an all-embracing this is forever very
ocean tidea thing to strike us
miracle; literally a
dumb. —THOMAS CARLYLE, 1840
Not long ago I met a well-known surgeon dying in a hospital in Richmond,
Virginia. He was a distressingly emaciated figure, his face a mask of skin
over his skull, his hands a pale shade of purple from weeks of intravenous
needles. Yet his voice remained deep and powerful, his eyes lively. When a
friend asked how long he was going to be in the hospital this time, the
surgeon said he didn’t know, that time was becoming irrelevant to him. “It’s
ironic,” he said, smiling weakly. “I lived by the calendar for sixty years.
Beepers, schedules— these things ruled my life. Now I have no idea what
day it is, and this doesn’t bother me. It’s as if I am floating,” he said, leaning
back on crisp hospital sheets and almost whispering the words.
Our obsession with measuring time is itself timeless. After self-
awareness, it may be our most distinctive trait as a species, since un-
doubtedly one of the first things we became self-aware about was our own
mortality—the fact that we five and die in a set period of time.
Yet even in an age of measuring femtoseconds* and star clusters 11
billion light-years away, time defies true objective measurement. It
*A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second.

xvii
xviii PRELUDE: A NET CAST OVER TIME
can seem to go slow and even stall out at certain moments only to brashly
and breathlessly rush forward at others. Time can be wasted, kept, saved,
spent, killed, lost, and longed for. To the Nuer herdsmen of southern Sudan,
time is tot and mai, wet and dry, depending on the season. For Hesiod, the
ancient Greek poet, time is harvesting cereals in the mouth when the cuckoo
sings, and a low sex drive for men during the late summer, when “goats are
at their fattest and the wine tastes best.”
Consider the geometry of how we measure time. It can be divided into
circle time and square time: clock time and calendar time. Clock time chases
itself Eke Ouroboros, the hands or flashing numbers returning to the place
where they started in a progression that has no beginning or end. It will
continue in its cycle whether or not people are around to watch the hands and
glowing numbers. In contrast, calendar time is made up of small boxes that
contain everything that happens in a day, but no more. And when that day is
over, you cannot return to that box again. Calendar time has a past, present,
and future, ultimately ending in death when the little boxes run out.
Still, in modern times we take the mechanism of the calendar for granted,
as we do breathing and the force of gravity. Passing through years, months,
weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds we seldom think about where these
things came from, or why we have chosen to divide time one way and not
another.
It has not always been so. For thousands of years the effort to measure
time and to create a workable calendar was one of the great struggles of
humanity, a conundrum for astronomers, mathematicians, priests, kings, and
anyone else who needed to count the days until the next harvest, to calculate
when taxes were due, or to figure out the exact moment a sacrifice should be
made to appease an angry god. A case can be made that science itself was
first sparked by a human compulsion to comprehend the passing of time, to
wrestle down the forward motion of life and impose on it some sense of order.
The effort to organize and control time continues unabated today. It is one
of humankind’s major collective efforts as we hedge our
PRELUDE: A NET CAST OVER TIME XIX
future and try to comprehend the past. In the stock market an investor sells a
microchip stock short or long based on a reading of the company’s history.
In river valleys we build dams and levees to prepare for 10-, 50-, and 100-
year floods. We celebrate Easter, Passover, and Ramadan on prearranged
dates just as our ancestors did centuries ago, and we expect our children will
for centuries more to come.
We are a people of the calendar. Forward- and backward-looking, we are
uncomfortable with the present in a way that our ancestors who tilled fields
and lived and died according to the great cycles of nature would never have
comprehended.
What are you doing at one o’clock tomorrow? Can you book me on the
2:06 flight to Memphis next Thursday? When will the inventory ship? Ten-
nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one-zero: blastoff!
Holding the surgeon’s wasted hands in that Richmond hospital, I thought
about my schedule for the rest of the day. Meetings, engagements, phone
calls to make, a plane to catch to fly back home. I needed to pick up a small
present for my eight-year-old, and I had to remember to put gas in my rental
car before I turned it in at the airport. In a way I envied the doctor because
he could let go and I could not. This is our blessing and our curse: to count
the days and weeks and years, to calculate the movements of the sun, moon,
and stars, and to capture them all in a grid of small squares that spread out
like a net cast over time: thousands of little squares for each lifetime. How
this net was woven over the millennia, and why, is the subject of this book.
alenar
and a laughing-stock from a mathematician’s point of view.
—ROGER BACON, 1267
Seven centuries ago a sickly English friar dispatched a strident missive to

Rome. Addressed to Pope Clement IV, it was an urgent appeal to set right
time itself. Calculating that the calendar year was some 11 minutes longer
than the actual solar year,† Roger Bacon infomed the supreme pontiff that
this amounted to an error of an entire day every 125 years, a surplus of time
that over the centuries had accumulated by Bacon’s era to nine days.1 Left
unchecked, this drift would eventually shift March to the dead of winter and
August to the spring. More horrific in this pious age was Bacon’s insistence
that Christians were celebrating Easter and every other holy day on the wrong
dates,
†When I refer to the “year” or the “solar year,” I mean the tropical year unless otherwise
indicated. The tropical year is the year according to the passing of the seasons. Usually
this is defined as the length of time between two successive vernal equinoxes. Because this
measurement fluctuates from year to year, the tropical year is usually calculated as a mean
of several years. The tropical year is slightly different from the sidereal year, which
measures the length of time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun, returning to a starting
point according to a fixed point such as a star.
+
In this same treatise Bacon elsewhere uses the figure once in every 130 years. The actual
error is closer to once every 128 years.
I
2 CALENDAR
a charge so outrageous in 1267 that Bacon risked being branded a heretic for
challenging the veracity of the Catholic Church.
Roger Bacon did not care. One of medieval Europe’s most original and
curmudgeonly thinkers, he seemed to relish his role as a rebel— first as a
master at the University of Paris in the 1240s and then as a priest after he
joined the Franciscan order sometime during the 1250s, when he was in his
forties. Insatiably curious and always willing to challenge orthodoxy, Bacon
devoted his Efe to pondering what causes a rainbow, diagramming the
anatomy of the human eye, and devising a secret formula for gunpowder.
Two centuries before Leonardo da Vinci he predicted the invention of the
telescope, eyeglasses, airplanes, high-speed engines, self-propelled ships,
and motors of enormous power. He drew these conclusions based on the
then-radical notion that science offered objective truths regardless of dogma
or what was written down in a book.
Bacon’s contemporaries were impressed by his intellect but frightened of
his ideas. His own monastic brothers at Oxford and Paris may have held him
under house arrest. Even worse, they banned him for long periods from
writing and teaching, keeping him busy with the mundane chores of the
monastery—tending the garden, reciting prayers, scrubbing the floors.
Occasionally they punished him by withholding food.
This might have been the end of Roger Bacon’s story if not for a sudden
interest in his ideas by a man named Guy Le Gros Foulques. In 1265 this
former lawyer and advisor to King Louis IX of France became aware of
Bacon and contacted him, asking the friar to send him a compendium of his
thoughts. Like Bacon, Foulques had joined the priesthood later in Efe, in
1256, the year his wife died. He then had advanced with breathtaking speed
from priest to bishop, archbishop, and cardinal, his position when he
approached Bacon. How Foulques heard about the long-cloistered friar is
unknown, nor is it clear why this important cardinal was interested in
Bacon’s ideas, nor if he agreed with them.
Whatever his reasons, Foulques’s interest was a dramatic turn of
A LONE GENIUS PROCLAIMS THE TRUTH ABOUT TIME 3
events for Roger Bacon. The long-suffering friar must have felt as if he
were finally being allowed to bring fire back to the cave. And if this were
not enough, just a few months later Guy Le Gros Foulques was elected
supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church, taking the name of Clement IV.
This led to a second notice sent to Bacon: a papal mandate delivered in
June 1266 to forward the friar’s work as soon as possible to St. Peter’s in
Rome.
Bacon was elated but embarrassed, for after years of persecution by his
own religious order, including at times a prohibition on writing, he had
nothing complete enough to send to Rome. “My superiors and my brothers,”
a frustrated Bacon wrote to the pope, “disciplining me with hunger, kept me
under close guard and would not permit anyone to come to me, fearing that
my writings would be divulged to others than . . . themselves.”
Free at last to pursue his ideas, Roger Bacon promised to prepare a
manuscript and send it as quickly as possible. For nearly two years he worked
feverishly, finally dispatching an epic treatise to Rome in 1267 called Opus
Maius (Major work). In this book and two others, hand-carried by a faithful
servant named John along the sometimes treacherous medieval highway
across Europe, Bacon expounds on topics ranging from a study of languages
and the geometry of prisms to the geography of the Holy Land.
His diatribe describing the flaws in the calendar falls in a long and
rambling chapter on mathematics, in a section where he advocates using the
objectivity of numbers and science to expose mistakes. He opens with an
announcement that he is bringing up a matter “without which great peril and
confusion cannot be avoided,” an error conceived out of “ignorance and
negligence . . . [that is] contemptible in the sight of God and of holy men . . .
The matter I have in mind,” he says, “is the correction of the calendar.”
Bacon traces flaws in the calendar back to its originator, Julius Caesar,
who launched the calendar used by Bacon—and by us today with some
modifications—on January 1, 45 B.c. “Julius Caesar, instructed
4 CALENDAR
in astronomy, completed the order of the calendar as far as he could in his

time,” writes Bacon:
But Julius did not arrive at the true length of the year, which he assumes to be
in our calendar 365 days, and one fourth of a day. . . . But it is clearly shown . . .
that the length of the solar year is not so great, nay, less. This deficiency is
estimated by scientists to be about the one hundred and thirtieth part of one day.
Hence at length in 130 years there is one day in excess. If this were taken away
the calendar would be correct as far as this fault is concerned. Therefore, since
all things that are in the calendar are based on the length of the solar year, they
of necessity must be untrustworthy, since they have a wrong basis.
Bacon also condemns a second calendric mistake that comes out of the
first. “There is another greater error,” writes Bacon, “regarding the
determination of the equinoxes and solstices. For . . . the equinoxes and
solstices are placed on fixed days. . . . But astronomers are certain that they
are not fixed, nay, they ascend in the calendar, as is proved without doubt by
tables and instruments.”
This second point was critical, Bacon notes, because the spring equinox—
astronomically the point between winter and summer at which the sun strikes
the equator—is the date used by Christians to determine Easter. According
to Church rules, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full
moon after the spring equinox. ‡ In Bacon’s day the equinox was
permanently fixed on March 21 by order of the Church, as established by an
important Christian council held at Nicaea in Turkey in A.D. 325. But since
325, as Bacon notes, the equinox had been “ascending in the calendar . . . and
likewise the solstices and the other equinox” by 1/130 of a day each year, or
just over 11 minutes. He set the true date of the equinox for the year he was
writing, 1267, on “the third day before the Ides of March,” or
‡The actual calculation of Easter is considerably more complicated than this, but this
simplification will suffice for now.
March 12—a nine-day difference. “This fact cannot only the astronomer
certify,” says Bacon, “but any layman with the eye can perceive it by the
falling of the solar ray now higher, now lower, on the wall or other object, as
anyone can note.”
He calculates that by 1361 the calendar would drop back another whole
day, throwing the entire progression of dates and sacred days further into
disarray. The friar concludes with an appeal to Clement to embrace the “truth”
offered by science, and to fix the mistake:
Therefore Your Reverence has the power to command it, and you will find men
who will apply excellent remedies in this particular, and not only in the
aforesaid defects, but in those of the whole calendar. ... If then this glorious
work should be performed in your Holiness’ time, one of the greatest, best, and
finest things ever attempted in the Church of God would be consummated.
Bacon’s own solution was to drop a day from the calendar every 125 years.
But he adds a word of warning, noting that “no one has yet given us the true
length of the year, with frill proof, in which there was no room for doubt”—
a reality that would continue to com- plicate a final solution for the calendar
problem for centuries to come.
Roger Bacon was hardly the first to realize the calendar’s drift against the
solar year. A millennium earlier the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c.
100—178) had noted that the calendar year fell short against the true year,
though his calculation differed substantially from Bacon’s. In The Almagest,
a work on astronomy widely read (if not fully understood) during the Middle
Ages, Ptolemy sets the drift at about one three-hundredth of a day, a slippage
of an entire day every 300 years. This amounts to a five-minute shortfall, or
a year of 365 days, 5 hours, and 55 minutes, rather than Caesar’s year of 365
days and 6 hours (3651/4 days). “And this number of days,” writes Ptolemy,
“can be taken by us as the nearest approximation possible from the
observations we have at present.” Considering that Ptolemy, like Bacon, had
no telescope and believed that the sun revolved
6 CALENDAR
around the earth, this calculation was a reasonably close approximation,

though less accurate than Bacon’s year of 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes.
Between Ptolemy and Bacon scholars in Europe and Asia tinkered with
solutions, attempting to refine earlier estimates of the true year— but always
falling short (or long). These tinkerers included the great Indian astronomer
Aryabhata (476—550); the mathematician Mohammed Ibn Musa al-
Khwarizmi (c. 780-850) and others in the Islamic world; and a progression
of mostly obscure monks and scholars in the West, the best-known being the
Venerable Bede (673—735) of Britain. Using a sundial in a Northumbria
monastery, Bede suspected that the solar year was slightly off from the
calendar but did not know by how much. In part this was because Europeans
after the collapse of Rome either ignored or did not understand complex
fractions. They tended to round off anything but a simple fraction such as
one quarter or one half.
Other monks who tried, and failed, to calculate the true solar year include
Notker the Stammerer, a Swiss priest-scholar who challenged the accuracy
of certain saint’s days in a treatise written in about 896; the French
ecclesiastic Hermann the Lame, who dared to suggest in 1042 that the
Church-approved calendar might be misaligned with the heavens; and Reiner
of Paderborn, who made his attempt in the 1100s. But none of these
computists dared challenge the Church on a matter so fundamental as
measuring time.
Then came Roger Bacon, who seized the opening offered him by Clement
to plunge into this ancient puzzle. Dismissing with a wave of his quill
centuries of reticence by fearful astronomers, Bacon declared that anyone
who rejected the truth offered by science was a fool.
Clement’s reaction to Bacon’s pronouncements and appeals is unknown.
On November 29, 1268, the pope suddenly died, probably before he had a
chance to read Bacon’s just completed opus.
Nothing could have been more disastrous for the friar, who had
just accused the Church of ignorance and wrongheadedness and demanded
reforms that Vatican officials less sympathetic than Clement might have
condemned as heresy. Instead the Holy See did something far more damning:
they ignored him. Clement’s successor, Gregory X, never mentions Bacon or
his books; nor does anyone else at St. Peter’s.
But Bacon continued to speak his mind. In 1272 he penned a blistering
attack on academics and what he considered the abysmal state of learning. It
spared no one, including universities, kings and princes, lawyers, and the
papal court. He also began applying his standards for truth and objectivity to
the practice of Christianity, joining a small but vibrant movement of monks
scattered across Europe who believed that the Church had strayed from the
original dictates of Christ by acquiring too much worldly wealth and power.
Ultimately Bacon’s radical talk landed him back in serious trouble. In
1277 he was denounced again by his own religious order, which charged him
with espousing “suspected novelties.” This time they did not merely cloister
him: they sent him to prison. According to Franciscan records of his trial,
their high council “condemned and reprobated the teaching of Friar Roger
Bacon of England,” forbidding anyone from studying his work. They also
requested that Pope Nicholas III issue a decree commanding that the friar’s
“dangerous teaching might be completely suppressed.”
For the next decade and a half Roger Bacon disappeared. Then in 1292
the elderly friar, now in his late seventies and apparently out of prison,
emerged once more to pen yet another firebrand essay—his last. By then,
however, the name Roger Bacon was so obscure that this unfinished and
unpublished manuscript was noticed by no one. Nor did anyone bother to
record the exact date of his death, possibly in that same year.
But Bacon’s passion for the truth endured. Centuries later Roger Bacon
became a posthumous hero of late Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers,
who were astonished by the modernity of his ideas.
8 CALENDAR
It took another three centuries before Bacon’s demands for calendar reform
were heeded, when Pope Gregory XIII (1502—1585) finally fixed the
calendar in 1582. By then scientists had been openly clamoring for a
correction for several decades. Even Copernicus, a generation before
Gregory’s correction, penned a section about the true length of the year in
his Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543. This was the same
treatise that offered a compelling theory overturning the age-old belief that
the sun and the planets revolved around the earth.
Gregory’s reform came after he appointed a calendar commission in either
1572 or 1574, led by the Bavarian mathematician Christopher Clavius (1537-
1612), one of two quiet heroes of the Gregorian correction. The other was an
obscure Italian physician named Aloysius Lilius (1510-1576), who actually
devised the solution Gregory issued as a papal bull on February 24, 1582.
This came almost exactly 316 years—and two and a half additional lost
days—after Roger Bacon’s appeal to Clement IV.
Today almost everyone takes the precision of our calendar for granted,
unaware of the long threads spooling out from our clocks and watches
backward in time, running through virtually every major revolution in human
science, all linked to the measurement of time. The thread largely runs
through the West, since this is the source of the world’s civic calendar, but
also casts lines of varying sizes and thickness outward to China, India, Egypt,
Arabia, and Mesopotamia. Unwinding backward, it pauses at Clavius and at
Bacon; at the rush of knowledge coming from Islam and the East during the
Middle Ages; at bloody
wars fought over dates after Rome’s collapse; and at Rome at its height, when
Julius Caesar fell in love with Cleopatra, an affair that gave the West its
calendar. It moves back further still to the Egypt of the pharaohs, Babylon,
Sumer, and beyond, thousands of years before Roger Bacon penned his
treatise to the pope, when an unknown man dressed in reindeer skins and
clutching an eagle bone gazed at the sky and got an idea as radical in his day
as anything Bacon thought of in his: to use the moon to measure time.
Some 13,000 years ago, when the southern flank of the great Wurm icecap
still touched the Baltic Sea, the Dordogne Valley in central France looked
more like present-day Alaska than the leafy winegrowing hills of today.
Sprawling herds of reindeer, bison, and woolly rhino grazed on tundra and
drank the water of bracingly cold streams. From limestone heights saber-
toothed tigers scanned the herds as eagles circled slowly thousands of feet
up in the chilly air, looking for shrews, mice, and Paleolithic rodents now
extinct.
Perched on a small bluff near what is now the village of Le Placard,
another creature gazed not at the deer and roiling stream but skyward. A Cro-
Magnon version of Roger Bacon, this hairy, reindeer-skin- clad man
patiently waited for the moon to rise above the valley. He was about to
revolutionize the way he and his people would view time.
For several nights this Stone Age astronomer and time reckoner had been
watching the pale orb in the sky wax and wane. He noted that it moved
through a series of predictable phases, and that he could count the nights
between the moments when it was full, half full, and completely dark. This
was useful information for a tribe or clan that
10
LUNA: TEMPTRESS OF TIME II
wanted to use the silvery light to cook and hunt, or for calculating future
events such as the number of full moons between the first freeze of winter
and the coming of spring. For the calendar maker himself it was valuable
information he could use to impress his family, his mate, and his clan by
predicting when the moon would next be full or would disappear, events that
even today signal key religious ceremonies and celebrations.
The man at Le Placard was hardly the first to use the moon as a crude
clock. But on this particular night this Cro-Magnon did not merely gaze
upward and ponder the phases of the earth’s satellite. Turning from the sky,
he carefully carved a notch into an eagle bone the size of a butter knife,
adding it to a series of notches running vertically along the bone. The notches
were straight lines with smaller diagonals carved near the bottoms, looking
like this: The man added his marking that night to what appear to be distinct
groupings of similar symbols that change in regular patterns, possibly
corresponding to the phases of the moon. The groupings contain seven marks
apiece, which is a close approximation of the moon’s progression through
new, quarter, full, quarter, and back to new. Sometime later the man
discarded or lost this eagle bone for archaeologists to find some 13,000 years
later in a dig.
Was this one of the first calendars?
Anthropologists say it is possible, that something like the imagined scene
above may have happened on a long-ago night in Le Placard. But not all
agree. Skeptics insist that the markings on this and other bones are not
calendars but decorations or even random scratches— Stone Age doodles or
the marks left when ancient hunters sharpened their knives. Yet over the
years archaeologists keep finding the same or similar patterns appearing on
stones and bones from sites in Africa and Europe.
One bone, dating back to the Dordogne 30,000 years ago, is covered with
rounded gouges that seem to represent the moon’s course over a two-and-a-
half-month period. Another famous image, the 27,000-year-old “Earth
Mother of Laussel,” shows the carving of
12 CALENDAR
Carved Eagle Bone Possible Lunar Calendar Le Placard, c. 11,000 B.c.
what appears to be a pregnant woman holding a horn marked with thirteen

notches. Is this supposed to represent a rough approximation of a lunar year?
If so, and if the scratches and notches on the bones and stones really are
calendars, then how exactly was this information used? We may never know,
though I suspect that our calendar, made of little boxes and numbers, would
be just as puzzling to the time reckoner of Le Placard and his clan. Still, a
link exists between our calendar and theirs. Both represent conscious efforts
to organize time by measuring it and writing it down. And both use
astronomic phenomena as a timekeeper, though the Cro-Magnons who
carved these bones and stones were clearly people of the moon where
measuring time was concerned, while we are people of the sun.
LUNA: TEMPTRESS OF TIME 13
It makes sense that this Stone Age calendar maker chose Luna as his
inspiration. Alluring and lovely in its silvery dominance of the nighttime sky,
the moon seems at first glance to be a perfect clock in its dependable
regularity. Roughly every 291/2 days it passes through its phases, from new
moon to full moon and back again—a steady celestial progression that
anyone can see and keep track of. It is also relatively simple to figure out
that twelve full cycles of the moon seem to roughly correspond with the
seasons, which is how early societies invented the concept of a time span
called a year.
Nearly every ancient culture worshiped the moon. Ancient Egyptians
called their moon god Khonsu, the Sumerians Nanna. The Greek and Roman
goddess of the moon had three faces: in its dark form it was Hecate, waxing
it was Artemis (Diana), and full it was Selene (Luna). Even today people
celebrate the moon, holding feasts, dances, and solemn rituals when the
moon is new. The San of Africa, for instance, chant a prayer: “Hail, hail,
young moon!” Eskimos eat a feast of fish, reportedly put out their lamps, and
exchange women. Moslems watch for the new moon of Ramadan, Islam’s
holy month of fasting and sexual abstinence during the day and feasting at
night.
A lunar lexicon still draws on the mystery and majesty of this strange orb
hanging in the sky. We have lunatic and moonstruck, which come from
legends that sleeping in the moonlight will drive a person insane. We also
have moonshine, blue moons, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and Shakespeare’s
comparison of the crescent moon to a “silver bow new- bent in heaven.”
Even more profound is the deeply rooted connection of the moon with
measurement. Me- or men is derived from moon, as in the English meter,
menstrual, and measure.
14 CALENDAR
The moon was not the only early clock, but one of several natural cues used
by ancient peoples to measure time and to predict events such as winter,
seasonal rains, and the harvest. In Siberia the Ugric Ostiak still base their
calendar on natural cycles, incorporating them into month names such as
Spawning Month, Ducks-and-Geese-Go- Away Month, and Wind Month.
Likewise the Natchez on the lower Mississippi River had Deer Month, Little-
Corn Month, and Bear Month.
Such specific natural cues must have come out of a long and close study
of local fauna, flora, and other natural surroundings and events, information
learned and then passed down over the generations both informally from
parents to children and more formally as lists of months and easily
remembered poems and calendar stories told and retold. Eventually these
oral versions of time-reckoning cues were carved in stone and recorded on
scrolls and parchments.
For instance, the Greek poet Hesiod (fl. ca. 800 B.c.) some 2,800 years
ago took his local oral calendar used since ancient times in Pe- loponnesia
and wrote it down in a long poem called Works and Days. A practical guide
for organizing time, Works and Days is also a moral mandate to follow
ancient rules of time and duty, which is not the first or last time that a
calendar was used to codify standards of conduct. Hesiod wrote his poem at
a time when Greece was becoming a maritime power in the eastern
Mediterranean and many young men were turning away from farming and
the discipline of the land to embrace commerce, war, and politics. The first
part of the poem, “Works,” is addressed to Hesiod’s younger brother Perses,
apparently one of those young men uninterested in the traditional life. Hesiod
believed his wayward sibling needed some stern guidance from his older
brother. But the spine of the story is about time:
Keep all these warnings I give you, as the year is completed and the
days become equal with the nights again, when once more the earth,
mother of us all, bears yield in all variety.
Hesiod here refers to the most basic natural clock available—day and
night—which in their respective lengths over the course of a year offer a
crude guide to the seasons. He also alludes to cues such as the arrival of
snails in early spring:
But when House-on-Back, the snail crawls from the ground up

the plants . . . it’s no longer
time for vine-digging;
time rather to put an edge to your sickles, and rout out your helpers.
And of course Hesiod’s poem invokes that other fantastic clock in the
nighttime sky, the stars, using the position of constellations to guide his
“exceedingly foolish” brother:
Then, when Orion and Seirios are come to the middle of the sky, and
the rosy-fingered Dawn confronts Arcturus,
then, Perses, cut off all your grapes, and bring them home with you.
Show your grapes to the sun for ten days and for ten nights, cover them
with shade for five, and on the sixth day press out the gifts of bountiful
Dionysos into jars.
But the most important time guide for Hesiod is the moon. This becomes
evident in the second part of the poem, “Days,” which treats time as a
mystical force and the calendar as a cycle of lucky and unlucky days, of
omens and sacred ceremonies. “Days” is structured around the 29 or 30 days
of each Greek month and the phases running from one new moon to the next.
It lists holy days, unlucky days, days that are ill-omened for the birth of girls,
and the best days to geld bulls and sheep. “Avoid the thirteenth of the waxing
month,” writes Hesiod in a typical passage in “Days,” “for the commencing
of sowing / But it is a good day for planting plants.”
The moon also gave Hesiod and the Greeks their year, which they based
on 12 lunar months averaging close to 29 1/2 days, equal to some
16 CALENDAR
Early Greeks Greet Spring

“Look at the Swallow,” says the man on the left, “So it is, by Herakles.” “There it goes!”
“Spring is here!” From a vase, Fifth Century, B.C.
354 days. Nor were they alone. From ancient Sumer and China to the now-
vanished Anasazi in Arizona, the moon became paramount, with variations
on this same 12-month, 354-day year popping up everywhere as the Stone
Age melded into the Neolithic age and people began to discover how to build
cities, irrigate fields, set up governments, and organize armies to fight wars.
But alas, Luna was a mere temptress where time was concerned, drawing
calendar makers down a false path—the first of many in humanity’s struggle
to create an accurate calendar. For dependence on the moon caused a serious
error—much worse than the flaw that
outraged Roger Bacon several millennia later. All he had to worry about
were the 11 minutes or so that his calendar was running fast. The ancient
Greeks and others who threw their lot in with the moon found themselves
with calendars running almost 11 days fast, a misalignment that within a few
years flings a calendar into disarray against the seasons, flip-flopping the
summer and winter solstices in just 16 years. This situation is unacceptable
to anyone using such a calendar as a guide to planting and harvesting, or for
knowing the proper seasons for sailing, building houses, and worshiping
gods.
The problem comes in the time it takes for the moon to pass through its
phases as it orbits the earth, which is not a tidy number for dividing into a
year of approximately 365 1/4 days. § In fact a true lunar month is a
cumbersome 29.5306 days long as measured by modern instruments, equal
to a precise 12-month lunar year of 354.3672 days. Stack that up against the
true solar year of some 365.242199 days and one can appreciate the intense
frustrations of astronomers over the centuries trying to link up the sun and
moon.
As ancient cultures matured, frustration with the lunar drift stimulated
their scientists and priests to ponder a solution—a line of inquiry that
continues to this day as we try to fine-tune our days, weeks, and months to
fit into the true solar year. But for the ancients, lacking modern tools and
concepts, even approximating this year using the moon proved immensely
difficult. A number of solutions were tried, but all failed.
The ancient Babylonians, for one, stuck with the moon despite their highly
advanced knowledge of astronomy. But their infatuation was tempered by a
compromise with the sun in what is now called a “lunisolar” year. Sometime
around 432 B.C. Babylonian mathematicians figured out that seven years of
thirteen lunar months followed by twelve years of twelve lunar months
would equal almost exactly nineteen solar years. This later became known
as the Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton (c. fifth century
B.C.). It works by
§This is called a synodic month.

18 CALENDAR
inserting or “intercalating” extra months into the standard 12-month lunar

year. But even this 19-year system is not completely exact, running several
hours fast. It also proved unwieldy and impractical for everyday use, since
few people were willing to keep track of such a complicated system over so
long a time.
Other ancient cultures unwilling to give up the moon devised other
systems of intercalations. The Greeks added an extra 90 days every eight
years to compensate for their standard lunar calendar of 354 days, though the
months were not always added on schedule and were often inserted
haphazardly. The Jewish calendar intercalates a month every three years,
inserted just before the month of Nisan, though this system still leads to a
gradual drift that requires a second extra month to be added now and then by
Jewish elders. According to legend, Chinese mathematicians, under orders
from the Emperor Yao (c. twentyfourth century B.C.), began experimenting
with a calendar in 2357 B.C. that eventually became Metonic, adding seven
months to the lunar calendar every 19 years.
The Sumerians by the twenty-first century B.C. had developed a slightly
different system founded on a calendar year of 360 days. This came from
rounding off the lunar month to 30 days, which fit neatly into the Sumerians’
mathematic and astronomic system. This system is based on the numbers 6
and 60, which equal 360 when multiplied— the number we still use to divide
the sky and every circular plane. No one knows why the Sumerians and later
the Babylonians chose these numbers, though four thousand years later they
remain the numeric basis for everything from determining one’s position at
sea to the location in the sky of a distant galaxy vis-a-vis the earth.
The Babylonians inherited and refined the older Sumerian numerology to
divide the day up into 24 hours, which is divisible by six and also divides
evenly into 360. Again, the reason for using 24 has been obscured by time,
though it’s likely that it had something to do with the zodiac, which the
astrology-crazed Babylonians used with great fervor to guide their lives.
Possibly they divided the day and then the
night into 12 hours each to correspond to the signs of the zodiac, adding them
together to reach the 24-hour day we still follow.
In the fifth century B.C. the Greek historian Herodotus told a story that
points up the complications with these less-than-perfect luni-solar calendars.
In The Histories Herodotus tells how the Greek lawgiver Solon once
answered a question put to him by the rich and haughty Croesus of Sardis:
Who was the happiest man he had ever seen? In answering, Solon refused to
name Croesus, explaining that fate could still render him unhappy. He used
the Greek calendar to emphasize his point. “Take seventy years as the span
of a man’s life,” says Solon. “Those seventy years contain 25,200 days,
without counting intercalary months. Add a month every other year, to make
the seasons come round with proper regularity, and you will have thirty-five
additional months, which will make 1,050 additional days. Thus the total of
days for your seventy years is 26,250, and not a single one of them is like
the next in what it brings. You can see from that, Croesus, what a chancy
thing life is. You are very rich, and you rule a numerous people; but the
question you asked me I will not answer, until I know that you have died
happily.”
Egypt was the first ancient civilization to correct the error of the moon and
embrace the sun. Remarkably, they did it quite early—almost six thousand
years ago, when people living along the Nile figured out the solar year was
very close to 365 days. This led to a calendar with 12 months of 30 days each
and an additional 5 days that Egyptian mythology says were added to the
year by the god Thoth. These became the birthdays of Osiris, Isis, Horus,
Nephthys, and Set.
How these Neolithic Egyptians figured out so close an approximation to
the true year remains a mystery. Egyptian science was advanced very early,
but they were never renowned for their astronomy,
20 CALENDAR
like the Babylonians, or for a keen interest in mathematics, like the Greeks.
The most plausible explanation is the Nile. Herodotus called Egypt “the
gift of the Nile,” and anyone who has visited understands instantly the
division between the green along the river and the brown of the desert,
between life and death. The Nile was responsible for the crops, the commerce,
and the continuity of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians called it simply “the sea.”
Flooding from late June till late October, the Nile each year brought down
rich silt for crops to be grown from October to February, and harvested from
February until the end of June. These were the three seasons of life in Egypt:
flooding, growth, and harvest. The regularity of this cycle and the availa-
bility of the great river as a natural timepiece provided an easy and dramatic
alternative to the moon.
Northeast Africa was not always dependent on the Nile. Until the final
retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago the Sahara was covered not with sand
but with savanna. Then 7,000 or 8,000 years ago the savanna died as the
earth warmed and the people of the northeastern Sahara were forced into the
valley of the Nile. There they abandoned their Paleolithic life of hunting and
gathering and adapted to the cycles of the river. This provided a deep-set
regularity to the Egyptian culture, which began farming and building
settlements by about 7000 B.C. Three millennia later Egyptians established
what may be the first known date in human history, which chronographers
have calculated to be as early as 4241 B.C. A thousand years later the
kingdoms of the Nile united politically, launching a complex and
homogeneous civilization with a central authority and religion that persisted
with few breaks for three thousand years, until the death of Cleopatra, all the
while depending on the rhythms of the great river.
The Nile is a gift of Efe; but it also is an enormous clock and calendar
stretching over four thousand miles, the second-longest river in the world.
Fed by rainfall and melting snow in the Ethiopian highlands and to a lesser
extent by watersheds as far south as Uganda, the Nile floods with a
predictability that Egyptians understood long before
stone temples and pyramids began to rise on the river’s shoreline—or before
anyone thought about a formal calendar. All an early Egyptian farmer needed
to do was plant a tall reed in the mud along the river bank, cut a notch to
measure the high point of the floods, and then count the days until the next
high-water mark, which would occur almost exactly one year later. This
simple device, called a nilometer, was then the most accurate calendar in the
world, based on the seasons as regulated by the earth’s orbit and the tilt of
its axis rather than on the phases of the moon.
Egyptian astronomers supplemented the nilometer with another discovery
that made their solar year even more accurate: that Sirius, the Dog Star and
the brightest star in the sky, ascends in the dawn sky once a year in a direct
line with the rising sun. Sirius’s appearance happened to coincide with the
Nile’s annual flood; it also became the first day of the month of Thoth, the
Egyptian New Year’s Day, commemorated annually with elaborate
ceremonies that began when Sirius appeared on top of obelisks precisely
aligned with observation points on the ground below. By timing Sirius’s
appearance exactly from year to year, Egyptian astronomers eventually
realized that the solar year was one fourth of a day longer than 365 days.
Egyptians also used pyramids to measure shadows to determine the coming
of the equinoxes.
Adding a quarter of a day to the Egyptian year was a revolutionary
discovery. It brought the Egyptian year within 11 minutes and 24 seconds
(give or take a few seconds) of the true solar year at least two thousand years
before Julius Caesar embraced the 365 1/4 day calendar for Rome, and over
three millennia before Roger Bacon’s appeal to Pope Clement. Still, in a
move Bacon would have ruefully understood, the priests who controlled
Egypt’s calendar refused to alter their year to make the correction from 365
to 365 1/4 days. As orthodox and unbending as the Catholic Church in
Bacon’s era, the white-kilted Egyptian priests with their shaved heads and
painted faces considered their calendar too sacred to alter, leaving it to shift
by six hours (a quarter of a day) each year. This launched the Egyptian
calendar on
22 CALENDAR
a slow drift across the seasons in a cycle that repeated itself every 1,460 years.
Called the Sothic cycle, this flaw was not corrected until the Ptolemaic era
in Egypt. In 238 B.C.. Ptolemy III** ordered a leap-year system by adding
an extra day every four years. But even then the priests resisted the edict until
30 B.C., when Rome conquered Egypt and Augustus forced the people of
the Nile to add the extra quarter of a day to their calendar to bring it into line
with the Julian calendar. This stabilized the Egyptian calendar so that the
first of Thoth always fell on August 29.
Egyptians were not alone in their early turning to the sun. Far beyond the
great Nile valley and even the Mediterranean, on the distant edge of the
Eurasian continent, a little-understood people also figured out a close
approximation of the solar year a few centuries after the Egyptians. We know
this only because they left behind what appears to be an enormous calendar
constructed out of immense slabs of bluestone, standing upright to form
megaliths, some of them topped by lintels called henges. Standing on the
barren Salisbury plain, this structure, Stonehenge, was used for over two
thousand years by ancient Britons, who aligned the stones so that at the
precise moment of the summer solstice a ray of sun shines down the main
avenue and into its center. But what was this for? Is Stonehenge truly an
enormous calendar? Or is it an observatory, a fortress, a temple, a Bronze
Age place of assembly—or all of the above?
No one knows for sure, though the layout leaves no doubt that the people
who built it were astronomically sophisticated enough to build a device to
accurately measure the solar year. Further evidence comes from stones
erected in patterns around Stonehenge that align with the
**The royal dynasty of the Ptolemies should not be confused with the second century
Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy.
sun at both solstices and at the equinoxes, and with the moon as it runs
through its orbit around the earth. This giant calendar would have allowed
an ancient Briton to anticipate astronomic cycles and events as accurately as
the Egyptians watching Sirius—or, for that matter, a modern astronomer
using solar and star charts. Some have claimed that Stonehenge can also
foretell eclipses of the moon, which occur regularly after those months when
the full moon rises precisely down the main avenue.
The other ancient culture that invented sun time early on, the Maya, was far
more isolated than the people of Wessex. Raising great cities filled with
temples and palaces deep in the interior of Central America, the Maya also
invented a calendric system so accurate that when the Spaniards conquered
them in the sixteenth century, the Julian calendar the conquistadors brought
with them was less precise.
The Maya developed three calendar systems. The first was 365 days long,
with 18 months of 20 days, to which they added 5 more days. This was called
the haab. As for the Egyptians, these five extra days were considered special,
though the Maya believed them to be unlucky and shunned all activity as
they anxiously waited for them to pass. Apparently the Maya knew that the
year was really closer to 365 1/4 days but ignored it in this calendar, which
drifted, like the Egyptian version, about six hours a year. Concurrently with
this 365- day calendar the Maya used a 260-day cycle called a tzolkin, or
“sacred round,” which served a similar purpose as Hesiod’s “Days,” listing
omens and associations for each day to guide the Maya and other
Mesoamericans in planting, waging war, and offering sacrifices to the gods.
The 260-day cycle was developed early in the first millennium B.C. by the
Zapotecs of Mexico, for reasons that remain obscure. Common to all
sophisticated Mesoamerican peoples by the time of the Maya, who first
appear in about 1000 B.C., the tzolkin was joined
24 CALENDAR
to the 365-day calendar in a complex cycle of 52 years called the Calendar

Round. This is the time it takes for both calendars to start again on the same
day. Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century reported that the end of
a 52-year cycle was commemorated by all advanced cultures in the region.
It was universally greeted with great despondency, the people fearing that
the sun might not return.
The third Maya calendar was the Long Count, used to calculate long
periods of time. It was based on 360-day unit called a tun and a number
system based on 20 (Mesoamericans counted with their fingers and their
toes). The Long Count cycles are as follows:
20 kins = 1 uinal = 20 days

18 uinals = 1 tun = 360 days
20 tuns = 1 katun = 7,200 days
20 katuns = 1 baktun = 144,000 days
The Mayas multiplied the baktun by 13 to get what they termed a Great
Cycle, equal to 5,130 years.
At the same end of a great cycle, the Maya, Aztecs, and other
Mesoamerican peoples believed all tilings would cease to exist and an
entirely new world would be ushered in to start the next great cycle. The
current great cycle probably began in 3114 B.C.. and will end on December
23, 2012.
Presumably the Maya discovered the true solar year using natural cues
and careful astronomic observations, though exactly how they did it remains
a puzzle. Until recently scholars believed their motivation was a literal
worship of time, though new interpretations since the breaking of the Maya
language code reveal that the Maya actually used their calendars to
legitimize the acts of kings and other key events by recording with great
accuracy the day, hour, and even minute when they occurred. This is shown
in countless hieroglyphics, steles, and paintings depicting the exact date
when specific kings and queens waged battle, ceremonially mutilated
themselves, married, and performed important sacrifices.
PAX
Maya signs for the months in the 365-day count
Maya and other Mesoamerican gods also seem to have demanded that
their priests perform ceremonies precisely on time. Nowhere was this taken
more seriously—and to such a bizarre extreme—than among the Aztecs.
Obsessed with the belief that they must keep time on its proper course, the
Aztecs offered a numbing progression of human sacrifices to appease their
sun god, Tonatiuh, to assure that he would rise each day and cross the sky.
The Aztecs believed that the sun required for “fuel” rivers of blood
26 CALENDAR
from victims who ranged from priests and criminals to the deformed, though
most were prisoners captured in warfare. If Spanish chroniclers can be
believed, the Aztecs sacrificed 20,000 to 50,000 people a year in their capital,
Tenochtitlan, with each month requiring a prescribed tally of victims: male
and female, child and adult. For instance, in the months when the rains were
supposed to come, children were drowned or walled up in caves. The more
they wept and cried, the better the omen for rain. Others were flayed to help
crops grow and burned to death during harvest time. To feed the need for
such huge numbers of victims, the Aztecs arranged a peculiar agreement with
their neighbors to fight regular ceremonial battles not for conquest, but to
allow each side to capture large quantities of sacrificial victims. Apparently
most of the victims seized in what was called the War of Flowers considered
sacrifice an honor or an unquestionable act of fate. Most were anesthetized
first with narcotic plants, though all were left conscious enough to scream
and exhibit pain, which was part of this bloodiest of time rituals.
Despite the remarkable achievements in time reckoning by Mesoam- ericans

and the people of Wessex, out of all those who early embraced the sun, it is
the Egyptians who lie in the direct path of our story. It is their affair with Sol
that brought us our calendar, making the solar year victorious over the moon
first along the Nile and then in Europe, and much later around the world. But
this triumph of the Egyptian year was hardly inevitable. Nor was it even
likely given the circumstances that led to the fusing of the ancient solar
calendar of the Nile with a brash, upstart empire ruled by a people living on
another river, the Tiber, and led by a conqueror whose adoption of a new
calendar had more to do with his love for a legendary woman than with a
passion for accurately measuring time.
i
Caesar . . . reorganized the Calendar which the College of Priests had allowed
to fall into such disorder, by inserting days or months as it suited them, that the
harvest and vintage festivals no longer corresponded with the appropriate
seasons.
—SUETONIUS, A.D. 96
As night fell, a small ship slipped under the sea chain defending
Alexandria’s harbor, raised by guards bribed to let it pass. The boat on this
balmy October evening in 48 B.C. stole quietly through the black waters,
past quays and warehouses full of grain and treasure. Skirting the fleets of
Egyptian and Roman warships, the boat carried a cargo that would not only
transform two great empires, but lead to a revolution in measuring time that
is directly responsible for calendars hanging on walls from present-day St.
Louis to Singapore.
After the boat landed unnoticed on a stone wharf, a Sicilian named
Apollodorus leapt ashore, carefully lifting onto his back a rolled-up coverlet
tied at each end. Apollodorus carried his load past Roman sentinels,
explaining by the light of torches that he bore a gift for the recently arrived
Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome. Led to the general’s apartment in
Alexandria’s royal palace, Apollodorus greeted Caesar by unfurling the
coverlet, which concealed a woman.
She can hardly have appeared dignified emerging from a bedroll. Yet as
Cleopatra rose in front of the astonished Caesar, she managed to impress
him profoundly with her majesty and sexual allure—and also with the pathos
of a woman who desperately needed help from the most powerful man in
the Western world.
27
28 CALENDAR
Cleopatra’s trouble had begun a few months earlier when her teenaged
brother and coruler, Ptolemy XIII, staged a palace coup with his advisors and
forced her to flee the city. Escaping to Syria, she had recently returned to
Egypt at the head of a small army, determined to wrest back her throne—a
cause she hoped to convince the newly arrived Caesar to embrace.
Poets and romantics tell us Caesar was smitten from the moment he saw
Cleopatra. She was twenty-two years old and a queen since her father,
Ptolemy XII, had died three years earlier, leaving her and her then ten-year-
old brother to jointly rule in the Egyptian fashion. Cunning, brilliant, and
erotic, Cleopatra spoke several languages, was highly educated in science
and literature, and was possessed of an insatiable ambition that amused and
captivated the master of the Roman world. The Roman poet Lucan (A.D. 39-
65) says the general and the queen made love that very night.
Caesar was fifty-two years old at the time. “Tall, fair, and well built,”
according to the Roman historian Suetonius, but also balding and epileptic,
he was on the verge of becoming the undisputed dictator of an empire that
had just conquered virtually the entire Mediterranean world and parts beyond.
Caesar himself had seized Gaul in a series of masterly victories ten years
earlier. Since then he had been locked in a wrenching civil war against
another brilliant general and conqueror, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus—
Pompey for short. Caesar had just arrived in Egypt in hot pursuit of Pompey,
who fled there after a crushing defeat by Caesar in the Battle of Pharsalus in
central Greece. Arriving three days after Pompey, Caesar had been
welcomed off the coast of Alexandria with a grisly gift from the boy-king
Ptolemy and his advisors: General Pompey’s embalmed head wrapped in
Egyptian linen. A soldier hired by Ptolemy’s court had stabbed the great
general in the back as he stepped off his boat. Caesar reportedly wept at the
specter of this great Roman being assassinated by foreigners. But his sorrow
was tempered with relief if not a carefully concealed elation, for the empire
was now his.
With Pompey dead, Caesar should have left for Rome to consol-
CAESAR EMBRACES THE SUN 29,
idate his victory. Instead he stayed to settle the conflict in Egypt, a country
still nominally independent but in thrall to Rome, and to be with Cleopatra.
The latest in a never-ending string of mistresses— Caesar’s troops sang of
his conquests in battle and in bed when they celebrated his triumphs—
Cleopatra impacted both his libido and his politics. “Overcome by the charm
of her society,” writes the Roman biographer Plutarch, he forced the boy-
king Ptolemy within days of Cleopatra’s dramatic entrance to reconcile with
his sister, ordering “that she should rule as his colleague in the kingdom.”
Cleopatra then promptly threw a party to celebrate—which is where Caesar
first heard about the Egyptians’ solar calendar, according to Lucan.
This seems an unlikely venue for an event that would literally reorder time
for millions of people. Indeed, Lucan tells us Cleopatra hardly had calendar
making on her mind the night of the soiree. Dressed in heavy strands of pearls,
“her white breasts . . . revealed by the fabric of Sidon,” and her hair wrapped
in wreaths of roses, she seemed far more intent on dazzling her lover with
the riches and exotica of Egypt: “birds and beasts” served on gold platters,
crystal ewers filled with Nile water for their hands, and “wine . . . poured
into great jeweled goblets.”
Still, Eros and fine food were not all that the young queen and her court
offered to this uncommonly curious Roman conqueror. “When sated,” says
Lucan, Caesar began discoursing with a scholar attached to the royal court,
an elderly wise man named Acoreus, “who lay, dressed in his linen robe,
upon the highest seat.” Caesar asked questions about the source of the Nile,
the history of Egypt—and about the country’s calendar. It was during this
conversation that Caesar heard about Egypt’s reliance on the sun for its
year—measured by the annual rise of Sirius in the eastern sky and by the
flooding of the Nile, which, the Alexandrian sage said, “does not arouse its
water before the shining of the Dog-star.”
No other ancient source that I am aware of describes this scene or
mentions the sagacious Acoreus, although something like this undoubtedly
happened to inform Caesar about the Egyptian system for
30 CALENDAR
measuring time. Later he would take this new knowledge back to Rome,
though for the moment he seemed in no rush to leave.
Caesar’s liaison with Cleopatra was also an infatuation with Egypt itself.
Already very ancient even in Caesar’s day, this was a country of fantastic
wealth and mystery—and, during the final years of the Ptolemaic dynasty,
of a decadence and sensuality very foreign to a Roman raised in the austerity
of the republic. But Alexandria was also a feast for the mind, a city that even
in its decline as a regional power remained one of history’s premier centers
of learning and sophistication. For three centuries it had attracted the greatest
minds of the far-flung Hellenistic world, who created a milieu of
intellectualism that fostered a breathtaking progression of discoveries—
including groundbreaking work on time and the calendar.
Founded by Alexander the Great when he conquered Egypt in 332 B.C.,
the city was seized after Alexander’s death by Ptolemy, one of his key
generals. Declaring himself king of Egypt in 305 B.C., Ptolemy I lavished
the Nile valley’s wealth on his new capital, creating a haven for scholars who
came from as far away as India, which was briefly connected to the
Hellenistic world after Alexander’s conquests. The city quickly expanded to
at least 150,000 people, one of the largest in the ancient world, as Ptolemy
and his dynasty filled the city with magnificent palaces, temples,
gymnasiums, museums, and amphitheaters. Sometime around 307 B.c. the
Athenian writer and statesman Demetrius of Phaleron inspired Ptolemy I to
lay the foundations for the great library of Alexandria, which eventually
housed hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls, including Aristotle’s
personal library. A generation later Ptolemy II (308-246 B.C..) built the
famed Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
towering four hundred feet and emitting a blazing fire signal that could be
seen for miles offshore.
Luminaries during CAESAR
Alexandria’s
EMBRACESgolden age included Apollonius of
THE SUN 31,
Rhodes, author of the Argonautica, about Jason’s quest for the golden fleece;
the anatomist Herophilus of Chalcedon, who performed one of the first
systematic autopsies; and Euclid and Archimedes, whose ideas form the core
of Western mathematics. But perhaps the greatest achievements in this city
on the western edge of the Nile delta, hard by the Libyan desert, were a long
line of discoveries in astronomy, some of which became the basis for the new
calendar born of Caesar’s tryst with Cleopatra.
The stargazers of Alexandria started with the patrimony left them by
earlier Greek astronomers and mathematicians. Since at least the sixth
century B.C., they had been looking up in the sky and postulating about what
they saw. The earliest of these postulated that the sun is one foot wide and is
renewed afresh each day, and that the earth either floats on water or is
supported on air. But they also realized that “moonshine” is really reflected
sunlight, that the moon is closer to the earth than to the sun, and that eclipses
are caused by the shadow of the earth and other celestial bodies.
These speculations gave way to more solid science with Pythagoras (sixth
century B.C.), who developed some of the early geometry and mathematics
used by later astronomers to analyze the respective positions of the sun,
moon, earth, and stars. Then came the Athenian astronomer Meton,
discoverer of the Metonic cycle in 432 B.C.. At roughly the same time the
astronomer Euctemon estimated the length of the seasons, though he got
them wrong. A century later Callippus of Cyzicus calculated the correct
lengths to round figures—90 days for summer, 90 for autumn, 92 for winter,
and 93 for spring. Also working in the fourth century B.C., the astronomer
Eudoxus of Cnidus devised a mathematical theory involving spheres that he
used to try to explain the motions of the planets and the moon, and what
appeared to be the motion of the sun in an earth-centered universe. Aristotle
(384-322 B.C..) also weighed in, working in the years immediately leading
up to the founding of Alexandria. His writing in astronomy expands on
Eudoxus’s theory of the planetary spheres by
32 CALENDAR
suggesting that the stars, planets, and sun literally are encased in invisible
spheres that orbit the earth in a series of concentric circles.
One of greatest of the early astronomers in Alexandria itself was
Aristarchus (fl. c. 270 B.C.), who constructed a modified sundial called a
skaphe—a spherical bowl with a needle standing up in the center like a
miniature obelisk to cast shadows against lines marked off on the bowl’s
surface. Using this device he could measure the height and direction of the
sun. This allowed him to figure out that the sun shines light against a half
moon, as seen on earth, at an angle of 87 degrees. From this he surmised that
the sun is many times the size of the earth and must be very far away.
Aristarchus also deduced that the earth circles the sun, an astronomic
theory that ran counter to the accepted orthodoxy that the sun orbited a
stationary earth. He argued that the sun seems to move across the sky because
the earth spins on its axis. But lacking a telescope and accurate star charts,
Aristarchus could not prove something considered ludicrous by an earth-
centered world, one that would remain convinced the sun was subservient to
our little planet for another eighteen centuries, until the age of Copernicus
and Galileo.
A generation after Aristarchus, the Alexandria-based mathematician,
philosopher, geographer, and astronomer Eratosthenes (276—194 B.C.)
deduced within a tenth of a degree the tilting of the earth’s axis of rotation,
which causes the seasons. He also measured the circumference of the earth
to within 250 miles of the true value. A few years later Ctesibius of
Alexandria constructed an elaborate water clock using floats, a chain winch,
cog shaft, dial, and a sundial system that linked the path of the sun
astronomically and geometrically with levels of its shadow.
In about 130 B.C. the astronomer Hipparchus (fl. 146—127 B.C.)
discovered the precession of the equinoxes, a slow shift westward of the
equinoctial points against the stars, something Isaac Newton much later
determined was caused by the very subtle gravitational tug of the moon and
sun on the earth. Hipparchus published a celestial catalogue, since lost, that
described hundreds of stars and provided calculations
about distances among them. He also confirmed the accuracy of the Egyptian
year by studying several years’ worth of solstices to come up with a
reasonably close approximation of the true solar year: 365 days, 5 hours, and
55 minutes, some six minutes too long.
But none of these stargazers were as influential as Alexandria’s last great
astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy. A Greek and a citizen of Rome who
flourished some two centuries after Caesar’s sojourn in Egypt, Ptolemy
compiled during the second century A.D. a massive encyclopedia on
astronomy and geography that became, with Euclid’s Elements on
mathematics, a widely revered if not always understood textbook in the
Middle Ages. Ptolemy’s calculations about the length of the month and year;
the motions of the sun, moon, and stars; eclipses; and the precession of the
equinoxes became the benchmarks used by every time reckoner who
followed him for over a thousand years: Bede, Roger Bacon, and the chief
architects of the calendar reform in 1582, Christopher Clavius and Aloysius
Lilius. Ptolemy’s value for the length of the solar year, which he borrowed
from Hipparchus, happened to be wrong by several minutes. Yet it is worth
noting that Ptolemy and the Alexandrians knew Caesar’s year of 365 1/4
days was in error centuries before Roger Bacon—and some 1,400 years
before Pope Gregory finally fixed it.
On the night of Cleopatra’s feast Caesar may have gotten an earful about
Egypt’s calendar, but as it turned out he almost missed his chance to use it.
That very night he narrowly avoided being killed in an attempted palace coup.
Only the intervention of Caesar’s barber, a busybody who overheard the
plotters, saved him. As it was, Caesar had barely enough time to protect
himself and to muster his troops. After fierce fighting inside the palace, the
general and his men managed to secure the royal compound, though this left
them under siege by the boy-king’s army and a mob of anti-Roman
Alexandrians. The
34 CALENDAR
Romans retained access to their small fleet, moored to the palace docks, but
were blockaded from leaving the main harbor by Egyptian warships.
Foolishly, Caesar had come to Alexandria with only two depleted legions
from the battle at Pharsalus. No more than 3,200 men and 34 ships were
pitted against an Egyptian army numbering at least 22,000 men supported by
a large Alexandrian navy. Fortifying the palace and securing the royal harbor,
Caesar dispatched messengers to fetch reinforcements from his legions in
Syria and Greece. He then launched a series of sorties to reinforce his
position, at one point setting fire to part of the Alexandrian fleet. Tragically,
these flames spread to the shore, destroying several buildings in the lavish
Brushium district west of the palace, including buildings that housed part of
the great library’s priceless collection. In another skirmish, fought over a
causeway connecting the island of Pharos to the city, Caesar’s position was
overrun, forcing him to swim for his life to a Roman skiff, pelted all the way
by Egyptians who could easily single him out in his imperial purple toga.
Caesar ultimately prevailed, however, when a large relief force of
legionnaires arrived some five months later. With these he crushed his enemy
and restored his lover to her throne.
Caesar was now free to return to Rome, but delayed again, this time to
celebrate his victory with a two-month journey with his mistress down the
Nile. Luxuriating on an immense barge filled with banquet halls and
apartments fitted out with cedar, cypress, ivory, and gold, the general and the
queen feasted, relaxed, and made love, producing in due time a son that
Caesar would later recognize as his own, calling him Caesarion. Hoping to
float all the way to Ethiopia to discover the source of the Nile, Caesar during
this trip undoubtedly continued his discourse with the sages of Egypt. These
may have included a court astronomer named Sosigenes, who wrote several
books about the stars, all of them now lost. But unlike those great stargazers
whose works have been preserved, Sosigenes at some point during Caesar’s
time in Egypt passed on something far more lasting
than suppositions about the placement of stars and the distance of the sun
and moon: a breathtakingly simple idea for reforming the Roman calendar.
In June of 47 B.C., Julius Caesar finally departed Egypt. As a parting gift he

left the pregnant Cleopatra three Roman legions to protect her, but also to
guard the interests of Rome against a woman Caesar clearly understood was
as ruthless as he in her ambitions. Desperately needed in Rome to sort out
the aftermath of the civil war, Caesar first launched two lightning-quick wars
against an upstart king in Syria and against the remnants of Pompey’s army,
which had fled to the north coast of Africa. He then returned to Rome, where
the Senate named him dictator for ten more years, commissioned a bronze
statue of him to be erected in the Forum, and ordered a celebration of forty
days for his victories in Gaul, Egypt, Syria, and Africa. This triumph became
a legendary orgy of festivals, games, and debauches that included the
slaughter of four hundred lions in the Circus, and mock battles on land and
sea in which hundreds of war captives and criminals died. For days at a time
Caesar’s soldiers marched in parades leading into the Forum, carrying more
than 20,000 pounds of captured treasure and leading in countless prisoners
weighed down by chains. These included the young princess Arsinoe, a sister
of Cleopatra who had sided with her enemies.
Caesar’s supporters reveled in their triumph, though many Romans, raised
in a republic that had for centuries despised the idea of a king, found the
celebrations grossly ostentatious and an unsettling display of arrogance and
personal power. The Roman historian Dio reports that people recoiled
against the bloodshed and the “countless sums” lavished on the shows.
People also complained about the treatment of high-born prisoners, including
Arsinoe. Demeaned in her chains, she “aroused very great pity,” to the point
that Caesar released
36 CALENDAR
her rather than face the wrath of the populace. Not even a lavish gift of gold,
grain, and oil to every free person in Rome assuaged a general anxiety about
what Caesar would do next. Already his enemies were talking darkly of a
man whose success and virtually limitless power were turning him into a
monster.
The fact that Caesar governed mostly with energy and resolve after his
infamous fete made his enemies revile him even more, since an able dictator
set back the cause of those who longed for a return of the republic far more
than if Caesar had been inept. He plunged into a dizzying series of projects
ranging from a flurry of new temples and a planned canal across the Isthmus
of Corinth to hundreds of new laws and reforms. He dissolved the corrupt
guilds in the city; limited the terms of office for senior elected officials;
forgave a quarter of the debts owed by all Romans, to stimulate the economy;
awarded prizes to large families to increase the population, depleted by the
war; and reduced the expensive subsidies of grain to the city’s paupers. He
also consolidated power by naming his own men to key offices and by co-
opting control of the Senate.
But none of the measures taken by Caesar during his first months back in
Rome was more dramatic than the one he decreed sometime in the first half
of 46 B.C.; the reordering of the Roman calendar. More than a simple
adjustment in the way days were counted, this reform was a potent symbol
not only of Julius Caesar’s newfound authority but also of an empire that
believed it had the power to reorder time—not only for its own people but
for subjects living in far-flung locales, from the English Channel to what is
now Iraq. Fortunately for the millions of people who would have to use his
calendar, Caesar’s hubris coincided with the pragmatism of a veteran general
and statesman who based his new calendar on science, not vanity or religious
dogma. In any case, Rome’s old lunar calendar was in desperate need of
reform, running in Caesar’s day several months fast against the solar year.
Like many other ancient cultures, the Romans centuries earlier/had
developed a system based on a 12-month lunar year, plus occasional days
and months intercalated by priests to keep the calendar year more or less in
line with the seasons. But over the centuries the calendar had drifted back
and forth because the priests either neglected to insert extra months or
because they intentionally manipulated the calendar for political reasons. For
instance, the highly politicized college of priests sometimes increased the
length of the year to keep consuls and senators they favored in office longer,
or decreased the year to shorten rivals’ terms. The college also misused their
calendar to increase or decrease taxes and rents, sometimes for their personal
financial advantage.
By legend, the Roman calendar—our calendar—was created by the
mythic first king of Rome, Romulus, when he founded the city in 735 B.C.—
year 1 in the Roman calendar, known as ab urbe condita (A.U.C.), “from the
founding of the city.” But unlike most moonbased calendars, Romulus for
some unknown reason concocted a year composed of only 10 months, not
12, for a year that totaled 304 days. The ancient Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.—
A.D. 17), who wrote poems about love and about the calendar, submits that
the erring warrior- king “was better versed in swords than stars,” and may
have been trying to emulate “the time that suffices for a child to come forth
from its mother’s womb”—a gestation period roughly corresponding to 304
days. Another reason may have been the Roman reverence for the number
10, says Ovid, “because that is the number of the fingers by which we are
wont to count.” Romulus repeatedly used the number 10 in organizing his
new kingdom, dividing both the 100 senators and his military units of
spearmen, infantry, and javelin throwers into groups of 10. Latin numerals
themselves—I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X—are probably symbols
meant to represent fingers counting up to 10, with the V perhaps equating to
an upraised thumb and index finger and the X to an upraised palm.
Romulus’s infatuation with ten extended to naming his months. In one of
the more unimaginative bursts of calendar making ever, this ancient king
started out attaching descriptive names to Roman
38 CALENDAR
months, then seems to have run out of ideas. The first four months he named
Martius for the god of war; Aprilis, which probably refers to raising hogs;
Maius, for a local Italian goddess; and Junius, for the queen of the Latin gods.
Then he simply fell into counting the months, naming them the fifth, sixth,
seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth: in Latin Quintilis, Sextilis, September,
October, November, and December. This mythic king’s lack of attention
explains why the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months of our modern calendar
are still numbered in Latin as the eighth, ninth, and tenth months.
Romulus and his successors were equally unimaginative in their system
of numbering days of the month. They divided up each month not into weeks,
which were introduced in Europe much later, but into day markers that fell
at the beginning of the month, on the fifth (or seventh) day, and in the middle.
These three signal days were called kalends (the origin of our word calendar),
nones, and ides. Most other days in the Roman calendar had no given name.
Instead each was numbered in a confusing system according to how many
days it fell before the kalends, nones, or ides. For instance, here is the Roman
system for the first half of March:
Modern Date Roman Date

March 1 Kalends Martius 1st
March 2 VI nones (5 days before nones)
March 3 V nones (4 days before nones)
March 4 IV nones (3 days before nones)
March 5 III nones (2 days before nones)
March 6 Pridie nones (day before nones)
March 7 Nones
March 8 VIII ides (7 days before ides)
March 9 VII ides (6 days before ides)
March 10 VI ides (5 days before ides)
March 11 V ides (4 days before ides)
March 12 IV ides (3 days before ides)
March 13 III ides (2 days before ides)
March 14 Pridie ides (day before ides)
March 15 Ides
Romans would refer to March 11, say, as “Five ides,” which was as clear
to any other Roman as someone today saying “March 11.” Still, given the
complexity of this system, it is amazing that it lasted some two thousand
years, operating as the official dating system in Europe well into the
Renaissance. As late as the seventeenth century, William Shakespeare could
write his famous lines in Julius Caesar, “Beware the ides of March,” and
expect his audience to know what he meant.
Romulus’s 304-day calendar was shorter-lived, being entirely unworkable
for an agricultural people who needed a reasonably accurate calendar to
guide them through the seasons. It was Romulus’s successor, King Numa,
who added two more months to the calendar around 700 B.c.—Januarius and
Februarius. This brought the year to the standard lunar year of 354 days, to
which Numa added another day because of a Roman superstition against
even numbers.
This 355-day year was a considerable improvement over Romulus’s
calendar, though it did not take long for Roman farmers to figure out that it
too was flawed and needed days and months intercalated to keep it in line
with the seasons. The Romans attempted several schemes to make the
correction, none of which worked very well. First they tried adding an extra
month every two years. But they miscalculated its length and overshot their
mark, coming up with a 366%-day-long year on average. Realizing this
calendar ran slow against the true year by a day and a quarter, the Romans
adopted a version of the Greek calendar that inserted intercalary months
every eight years. This brought their calendar roughly in line with a 365- day
year, though the Greek system was so confusing that the priests frequently
forgot to slip in the extra months at the proper interval or botched the job,
causing calendric time to slip back and forth against the solar year.
There was also politics. From the beginning the Roman calendar,
40 CALENDAR
like most others, was a powerful political tool that governed religious
holidays, festivals, market days, and a constantly changing schedule of days
when it was fas, or legal, to conduct judicial and official business in the
courts and government. (These dies fasti, or “right days,” gave the Roman
calendar its name: the fasti.) In the early days of Rome the calendar and the
all-important list of dies fas were controlled first by the Roman kings and
then in the early days of the republic by the aristocratic patrician class. For
the first several centuries after Romulus the priests and aristocrats kept the
calendar a secret they shared only among themselves, which gave them a
tremendous advantage over the merchants and “plebs”—commoners—in
conducting business and controlling the elaborate structure of religious
auguries and sacrifices that governed much of Roman life.
This monopoly on official time ended in 304 B.C., when the plebs finally
became so incensed that one of them, Cnaeus Flavius—the son of a freedman,
who was later elected to several high offices—pilfered a copy of the codes
that determined the calendar and posted it on a white tablet in the middle of
the Roman Forum for all to see. After this the priests and patricians relented
and issued the calendar as a public document—the first step in evolving the
objective, secularized calendar that Caesar introduced two and a half
centuries after Flavius’s theft.
But Flavius did not entirely win the day, for the patricians retained an
important prerogative as the class from which Rome’s priests were drawn:
control over when to insert intercalary months. It was this privilege that they
abused so shamelessly for financial and political gain. Indeed, when Caesar
returned home from Egypt and his other wars in 46 B.C., he found that the
many years of misuse had left the calendar in a shambles. Caesar himself
was in part to blame, since he had held the title of chief priest—pontifex
maximus—for several years, and had inserted an intercalated month into the
calendar only once since 52 B.C. This had left the Roman year to veer off
the solar year by almost two full months. Perhaps this was an intentional
manipulation by Caesar or his allies among the priests, or whether it was a
simple oversight by a pontifex maximus distracted by civil war. Whatever the
cause, it played havoc not only with farmers and sailors but also with a
population becoming more dependent than ever on trade, commerce, law,
and civil administration in a rapidly growing empire that desperately needed
a standard system for measuring time.
To fix the calendar, says Plutarch, “Caesar called in the best philosophers
and mathematicians of his time,” including the Alexandrian astronomer
Sosigenes, who seems to have come to Rome from Alexandria to fine-tune
the reforms he and Caesar had discussed in Egypt. The core of the reform
was identical to the system ordered by Ptolemy III in 238 B.c.—a year
equaling 3651/4 days, with the fraction being taken care of by running a cycle
of three 365-day years followed by a “leap” year of 366 days.
To bring the calendar back in alignment with the vernal equinox, which
was supposed to occur by tradition on March 25, Caesar also ordered two
extra intercalary months added to 46 B.C.—consisting of 33 and 34 days
inserted between November and December. Combined with an intercalary
month already installed in February, the entire year of 46 B.c. ended up
stretching an extraordinary 445 days. Caesar called it the “ultimus annus
confusionis,” “the last year of confusion.” Everyone else called it simply “the
Year of Confusion,” referring not just to the extended year but also to the
heady whirlwind of change inaugurated by Caesar, who in effect was
launching a vast new empire that already was profoundly reordering
countless lives.
The extra days in 46 B.C.. caused disruptions throughout the Roman
world in everything from contracts to shipping schedules. The Roman
historian Dio Cassius writes about a governor in Gaul who insisted that taxes
be assessed for Caesar’s two extra months. Cicero in Rome complained that
his old political adversary Julius was not content with ruling the earth but
also strove to rule the stars. Yet most Romans
42 CALENDAR
were relieved finally to have a stable and objective calendar—one based not
on the whims of priests and kings, but on science.
To round out his calendar reforms, Caesar moved the first of the year from
March to January, nearer to the winter solstice—an earlier calendar reform
that had not always been adhered to. He then reorganized the lengths of the
months to add in the ten days required to bring the year from 355 to 365 days,
arranging them to create a calendar of 12 alternating 30- and 31-day months,
with the exception of February, which under Caesar’s system had 29 days in
a normal year and 30 in a leap year. He left the old calendar largely intact in
terms of festivals and holidays. He also retained the old system of numbering
days according to kalends, nones, and ides, as well as the traditional names
of the months, though later the Senate changed Quintilius to Julius (July) in
his honor.
When the new day dawned on January 1, 45 B.C.—the kalends of Januarius,

709 A.u.C.—Romans awoke with a new calendar that was then among the
most accurate in the world. Even so, it remained subject to errors and
tinkering by priests and politicians. The first mistake was to come soon after
Caesar’s death in 44 B.C., when the college of pontiffs began counting leap
years every three years instead of four. This quickly threw the calendar off
again, though the error was easily fixed later by Emperor Augustus. Catching
the mistake in 8 B.C., he ordered the next three leap years to be skipped,
restoring the calendar to its proper time by the year A.D. 8. Since that year
this calendar has never missed a leap year—with the exception of those
century leap years eliminated by Pope Gregory XIII in his calendar reform
of 1582. But Augustus and his handpicked Senate did not stop with this
sensible and necessary calendar fix. They also tampered with the length of
the months, with results far less satisfactory.
This Augustan “reform” began when the Senate decided to honor
this emperor by renaming the month of Sextilis as Augustus. Part of the
resolution passed by the Senate has been preserved:
Whereas the Emperor Augustus Caesar, in the month of Sextilis, was first
admitted to the consulate, and thrice entered the city in triumph, and in the same
month the legions, from the Janiculum, placed themselves under his auspices,
and in the same month Egypt was brought under the authority of the Roman
people, and in the same month an end was put to the civil wars; and whereas for
these reasons the said month is, and has been, most fortunate to this empire, it
is hereby decreed by the senate that the said month shall be called Augustus.
This simple name change would have been fine. But either out of vanity
or because his supporters demanded it, the Senate decided that Augustus’s
new month, with only 30 days, should not have fewer days than the month
honoring Julius Caesar, with 31 days. So a day was snatched from
February, leaving it with only 28 days—29 in a leap year. To avoid having
three months in a row with 31 days, Augustus and his supporters switched
the lengths of September, October, November, and December. This
wrecked Caesar’s convenient system of alternating 30- and 31-day months,
leaving us with that annoying Old English ditty that seems to have
originated in the sixteenth century, though it must have had precedents far
more ancient:
Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November,
February has twenty-eight alone
All the rest have thirty-one.
Excepting leap year—that’s the time
When February’s days are twenty-nine.
Later Roman emperors would also try naming months after themselves.
Nero, for instance, renamed April Neronius to commemorate his escape from
an attempted assassination in that month during A.D.
44 CALENDAR
65. Other month changes that failed to stick included substituting Claudius
for May and Germanicus for June. When the Senate tried to change
September to Tiberius, this taciturn emperor vetoed the measure, coyly
asking: “What will you do when there are thirteen Caesars?” In the provinces
local leaders and subject kings frequently changed their months to flatter
powerful figures of the moment. In Cyprus the calendar once had months
named for Augustus; his nephew Agrippa; his wife, Livia; his half-sister,
Octavia; his stepsons, Nero and Drusus; and even Aeneas, the legendary
founder of Rome from whom Julius Caesar, Augustus, and the entire Julian
brood claimed to be descended.
The second error in Caesar’s calendar was less easy to repair than the mixup
over whether a leap year came every third or fourth year. This was the
conundrum noticed by the Alexandrian astronomers Hipparchus and
Ptolemy and later by Roger Bacon and others in the Middle Ages—that
Caesar’s year of 365 days and 6 hours ran slow. It’s likely that Caesar’s
Egyptian advisor Sosigenes knew this too, though if he was familiar with
Hipparchus’s calculation, no one mentions it.
But even if Caesar was aware of a flaw amounting to a few minutes, it
hardly would have upset him given the centuries that Romans had had to
endure a calendric system that was frequently many days or months in
error.†† Indeed, after the initial grousing about the change, Caesar’s calendar
became an object of pride for educated Romans. Excavations throughout the
former empire have yielded calendars carved in stone and painted onto walls,
much as we hang our calendars today.
††Romans had not yet invented the idea of a “minute.” They had a loose notion of an hour
of the day; for astronomical purposes they divided up the day into simple fractions.
Fragments of a Roman calendar, A.D. first century, the month of March. (Letters
A—H correspond to an 8-day Roman market-day cycle; K is for kalends and N
for nones; to the right are fragments of holidays and historic events occurring on
those dates.) Drawing by Herbert E. Duncan, Jr.
Caesar’s calendar also injected a new spirit into how people thought about
time. Before, it had been thought of as a cycle of recurring natural events, or
as an instrument of power. But no more. Now the calendar was available to
everyone as a practical, objective tool to
46 CALENDAR
organize shipping schedules, grow crops, worship gods, plan marriages, and
send letters to friends. Combined with the rising popularity of sophisticated
sundials and water clocks, the new Julian calendar introduced the concept of
human beings ordering their own individual lives along a linear progression
operating independent of the moon, the seasons, and the gods.
Nothing symbolized this better than a public sundial erected in 10 B.C. by
Augustus to commemorate his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and
to inaugurate his coming empire of peace. He used an obelisk transported
from Egypt (which still stands in the Piazza del Popolo in modern Rome) as
a 50-foot gnomon planted on the Campus Martius in the middle of an
enormous grid of lines showing the length of hours, days, and months, and
the signs of the zodiac. Beside it was probably etched in stone a copy of
Caesar’s calendar. “No one entering the Campus Martius could fail to see
that the Caesars united heaven and earth,” writes historian Arno Borst, “the
Orient and the Western world, and the origin and evolution of time and
history, or that they marked the beginning of a universal time.”
Not that every person in the empire suddenly abandoned their age- old
calendars using the moon, stars, and changes in the seasons. Only those who
needed to measure time in the civic world of the empire did so. This excluded
illiterate peasants, laborers, and slaves who made up the vast majority of
people living inside of Rome’s borders. Still, for the first time in European
history the coming Pax Romana would foster a middle class of traders,
bureaucrats, soldiers, lawyers, moneylenders, and craftsmen who came in
contact with the notion of measuring time using numbers and calculations.
The advent of precision timing also led the Greeks and Romans to
experience the first known frustrations about time as measured by a clock.
Lawyers, Plato said some four hundred years before Augustus erected his
gigantic sundial, were “driven by the clepsydra [waterclock] . . . never at
leisure.” Aristotle also groused about people watching the clock even during
a performance in the theater. “The length of the tragedy should not be judged
by the clepsydra,” he said,
“but by what is suitable for the plot.” Undoubtedly many Romans felt the
same way, though they must have been equally glad to have a clock when it
came to setting time Emits on a long-winded lawyer, or to possess a calendar
to prove to one’s moneylender that it had been 16 days, not 17, that one owed
interest on those 10 pieces of silver.
As Caesar was making his reforms in Rome he summoned Cleopatra from

Egypt. Soon after, the queen appeared with her infant son, Ptolemy XV
Caesar, known as Caesarion. She also brought key figures from her court,
including almost certainly the astronomer Sosigenes. Moving into Caesar’s
suburban mansion on the Janiculan Hill above the Tiber, Cleopatra’s arrival
and obvious affair with the dictator of Rome caused a scandal in Rome and
“incurred the greatest censure”—not because she was his mistress but
because she was a foreign monarch with a political agenda viewed as being
not entirely compatible with Rome’s.
Resentment grew as Caesar became increasingly aloof, forcing even
powerful political leaders such as Cicero to wait for long periods of time
merely to talk to him. In part this was because he was absorbed with reforms
and construction projects, including plans to build a library in Rome greater
than the one in Alexandria. But many interpreted his attitude as arrogance
and a desire to be treated like a king— which he was in all but name, though
he wisely refused the actual title, knowing that it would offend republican
sensibilities in a city where becoming king was still officially punishable by
death. In one famous scene involving in a small way Caesar’s new calendar,
Mark Antony, his loyal follower and lieutenant, placed a golden diadem on
Caesar’s head. When the dictator refused the crown and ordered it sent to the
temple of Jupiter, Antony ordered Caesar’s refusal to be king recorded in
Rome’s official calendar.
48 CALENDAR
The outrage of Caesar’s enemies rose from a simmer to a boil during the
early weeks of the second Julian year, in 44 B.C., as he organized a military
campaign in Parthia to begin on March 18. Just before his departure he
planned to attend the Senate. Feeling ill on March 15, he arrived late by litter
to the senatorial curia. On the way in he ran into an augur named Spurinna,
who had supposedly warned him earlier to beware the ides of March. Caesar
laughingly told the priest that the ides were here and nothing had happened.
Spurinna answered that the day was not yet over.
Caesar, who had sent away his bodyguard, then moved to take his seat
inside. Walking through the senators, he sat on his gilded throne and was
approached by a group of lawmakers. One of them, Tillius Cimber, asked
him to support a petition. When he refused, Cimber grabbed the dictator and
tore the toga from around his neck. At this signal several men attacked.
Caesar grabbed a dagger and was able to fend off his assailants at first. But
there were too many of them; 23 daggers stabbed at him, and he fell.
Bleeding to death amidst the stunned senators of Rome, this man who
thought he could rule time itself drew his toga over his head and died.
f Gold
By the decided that the

unanimous holy most on one and
festival of same the
day. —CONSTANTINE THE GREAT, A.D. 325
Three and a half centuries after Caesar died, Flavius Valerius Aurelius
Constantinus stood on a bluff above the Tiber. Kneeling down in prayer he
looked up in the sky and saw a flaming cross blazing above the sun. The
cross was inscribed with three Greek words: en toutoi nika, “in this sign
conquer.” That night Constantinus, whom we know as Constantine the Great,
dreamed he heard a voice as he slept amidst his army bivouacked north of
Rome. The voice assured him victory in a battle to be fought the next day if
he marked his standard with an X cut through with a line and curled around
the top: the cross symbol of Jesus Christ.
At dawn on October 27, A.D. 312, Constantine gave the order to paint the
cross just before his legions attacked his chief rival at Saxa Rubra, Latin for
“red rocks.” Brilliantly outmaneuvering the forces of Marcus Aurelius
Valerius Maxentius, who had ruled Italy as coemperor, Constantine pushed
his enemy’s troops into the water near the Mulvian Bridge. Earlier
Maxentius had foolishly breached this ancient stone causeway, thinking it
would prevent his foe from crossing. Instead Maxentius drowned along with
thousands of his legionnaires, leaving the road to Rome open to the 39-year-
old victor and his crossemblazoned legions.
49
50 CALENDAR
Whether or not one believes Constantine about his visions—even the

sycophantic court historian who later recorded them expressed his doubts—
his victory at the Mulvian Bridge was a crushing personal triumph and a
watershed moment for Europe precisely because he gave the credit to the
Christian god. The West would never be the same. Nor would the way people
thought about time and the calendar.
Shaking up the old order was exactly what Constantine had in mind with
his talk about flaming crosses and a powerful new god, though his embrace
of Christianity was motivated as much by politics as by faith. It was all part
of a grand strategy to forge a new imperial order— political, spiritual,
military, economic.
The empire badly needed it. Racked and bloodied by almost a century of
civil war, assassination, economic decline, and enemies pressing in on all
sides, the Roman Empire in 312 would have been unrecognizable to Julius
Caesar. Rome itself and its ancient institutions of temple and Senate had been
largely eclipsed by the all- powerful imperium, a massive bureaucracy of
civil servants, provincial governors, and army officers headed up by a single
man—the emperor. A centralized system originally designed by Augustus,
it had worked well during Rome’s golden age in the first and second cen-
turies, when powerful and relatively enlightened rulers such as Trajan,
Hadrian, and the Antonines tended to occupy the throne. By the 300s,
however, this old order was all but shattered, with emperors ruling at the
whim of the legions, and the empire weakened by a general stagnation as it
ceased to expand militarily and economically and became mired in
bankrupting wars inside and out.
One alarming sign of internal decay was the sharp decline of science and
the arts as the empire diverted resources to the military and people’s minds
became less occupied with the length of the year and poetry and more with
defending their cities. In the 260s a plague exacerbated the decline,
depopulating several provinces. That same decade the cities of the empire
began to dismantle stone monuments and amphitheaters to erect walls
against invaders. The emperor Au-
A FLAMING CR.OSS OF GOLD 51
relian, fearing an attack on Rome itself in the 270s, persuaded the Senate to
pay for a massive new wall encircling the city.
Until Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian began reasserting order in the
280s, it looked as if the empire would crack apart. In the 250s the Germanic
Marcomanni crossed the Danube frontier and raided southward into northern
Italy. To the east the Goths invaded Macedonia and later joined with
Scythian hordes to invade Asia Minor and ransack the Black Sea coast. In
260 the emperor Valerian was captured by a revitalized Persian empire,
whose armies ravaged Asia Minor until being beaten back. In 267 a fleet of
five hundred Gothic warships broke out of the Black Sea and pillaged the
Greek coast, sacking Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sparta, and Thebes before
Emperor Claudius II defeated them in a battle that would have left Italy and
Greece defenseless had he lost. All of this had left the empire unmanageable
by anyone but a truly exceptional leader.
Constantine was such a man. Reigning 31 years, when most of his
immediate predecessors had survived at best a few score months, this last of
Rome’s great emperors worked tirelessly to restructure and rejuvenate the
empire, efforts that helped to fend off collapse in the West for another
century and a half and in the East for over a thousand years.
Born in Naissa—Nis in present-day Serbia—this round-cheeked man with
flared nostrils and a square forehead could be ruthless and never hesitated to
plunge the empire into war to further his own ambitions. But he also repaired
imperial highways and established an efficient messenger network,
revamped the legal system, built magnificent basilicas, aqueducts,
monuments, and churches, and mostly kept the peace. He also sought to
transform the imperium itself, completing a shift begun by Aurelian and
Diocletian toward an orientalstyle monarchy where kings ruled not by the
grace of the Senate and the people, or even the army, but as all-powerful
despots who claimed to be chosen by the gods (or God).
Aurelian (ruled 270—275) had launched this transformation by founding
a cult of a monotheistic sun god in Rome during the 270s,
52 CALENDAR
a precursor to the imposition of Christianity. Building a resplendent new

temple to the sun in Rome, Aurelian announced that the sun god had made
him emperor, not the Senate; a transformation cut short by his assassination
shortly thereafter. Diocletian (ruled 284-305) furthered this eastern tilt by
also embracing the cult of the sun and by dividing the empire into eastern
and western halves, with the main center of power under his control in the
East. He gave up the traditional purple toga of the emperor for sumptuous
silk robes and jewel- encrusted belts and shoes; and, for the first time since
the early days of the Latin kings, a Roman head of state donned a crown.
Constantine would complete this easternification by choosing Byzantium as
the site for his new capital, Constantinople. Strategically located near the
empire’s richest provinces, it was within striking distance of both the western
and eastern frontiers.
Constantine would also adopt one of the East’s chief religions, reversing
350 years of largely secular rule—symbolized by Caesar’s calendar—in a
move that would soon fuse the political and military might of a still-potent
empire with what would become an even more potent state religion.
At first it was not entirely clear which religion. During these troubled
times Romans embraced several popular sects, most of them from the East—
everything from a pseudoreligious brand of Neo-Platonism to Christianity
and the worship of the sun. Keenly aware of this diversity, the always
expedient Constantine seemed willing to embrace virtually any religion that
might serve his political needs, despite his story— told much later—about
the Christian god and the flaming cross of gold at the Mulvian Bridge. In
fact, at the time he credited his victory over Maxentius to more than one god.
To please the pagans of Rome, he erected the Arch of Constantine, which
dedicates his triumph to Rome’s old deities—and remains one of the best-
preserved and most imposing triumphal arches in presentday Rome.
Constantine also flirted with the popular cult of the sun god Mithras at the
time of the battle since the Mithraists also held sacred a symbol similar to a
cross. Certainly such a twin billing would
have pleased the large numbers of both Mithraists and Christians in his army.
Only over the course of several years did Christianity gradually win out,
perhaps because the Christians offered a more effective power base, or
because Constantine found the tenets and organizational structure of the
Christian Church easier to co-opt and merge into the existing imperial
structure. Another, simpler reason may have involved Constantine’s mother,
the British-born Helena (248-328), a former barmaid and a longtime
Christian who was mistress (and possibly a first wife) to Constantine’s father.
A formidable woman who seldom left her son’s side, Helena lobbied hard
for the Christian god, receiving generous sums from her son to build dozens
of churches from Judea to Gaul, including the still-standing Church of the
Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Constantine himself hedged on a full personal commitment to his own state
religion until 337, when he was finally baptized on his deathbed.
Whatever Constantine’s true personal beliefs, his fusion of church and
state ended what was in essence an experiment begun by Caesar and
Augustus to decouple religion from the government—and religion from time.
Its impact would utterly transform Europe over the next several centuries,
affecting all aspects of life, including the way people kept track of calendar
days.
Inevitably Constantine’s new order, like Caesar’s three and a half centuries
earlier, got around to putting its stamp on the calendar, in this case by
creating a new, religiously inspired system of measuring time. He did this by
leaving intact Caesar’s basic calendar of 365 1/4 days and 12 months, while
making three major changes within this structure: the introduction of Sunday
as a holy day in a new seven-day week; the official recognition of Christian
holidays such as Christmas with fixed dates; and the grafting onto the
calendar of the Easter celebra-
54 CALENDAR
tion, which is not a fixed date, being tied to the Jewish lunar calendar in use
when Christ was crucified. The existence of these two types of holy days,
fixed and floating, is where Christians get the terms “immovable feast” and
“movable feast.”
The emperor’s first move to reorder the calendar came in an edict issued
in 321, nine years after the Battle of the Mulvian Bridge, when he established
Sunday as the first day in a seven-day week—a unit of time unknown in the
original Roman calendar of kalends, nones, and ides. ‡‡ According to
Constantine’s dictate, all citizens other than farmers were ordered to abstain
from work on dies Solis—the Sun’s day. He also ordered the courts closed
for litigation and the commanders of the army to restrict military exercises
so that soldiers could worship the god of their choice.
Constantine’s selection of Sunday was not without controversy. It
blatantly rejected the long-held observance of Saturday as the Sabbath by
Jews and by Roman pagans, who in the late empire had set aside Saturday—
Saturn’s day—as a day to rest and worship.
Saturday at one time was the choice of many Christians as well, since most
early believers were Jews who felt obligated to keep their traditional holy
day on this seventh day in the Jewish week. But because Jesus was crucified
on the sixth day of the Jewish week and, according to the Bible, rose from
the dead on the first day of the next week—a Sunday—some early Christian
leaders decided to shift their Sabbath to Sunday, and to mark this day each
week by a special service featuring the Eucharist.
But old ways died hard. As late as the turn of the second century, Christian
prelates were still complaining about certain Christians who continued to
favor a Saturday Sabbath, which one bishop condemned in a letter as a
“superstition,” describing “the show they make of the [Jewish] fast days and
new moons” as being “ridiculous and undeserving of consideration.”
By the time Constantine issued his edict Christians had largely set-
‡‡The Romans did have an informal cycle of market days held every eight days.
tied the issue of Saturday versus Sunday, with Sunday the victor. The
emperor, however, did not strike a purely Christian line with his new law.
By placing the Sabbath on the day devoted to the sun in the seven-day cycle
of pagan planet-gods, the emperor also curried the favor of the Mithraists
and other sun worshipers. Constantine’s official designation of this day in
the Roman legal code as dies Solis cannot have pleased his new hierarchy of
Christian bishops, priests, and laymen, even if some tried to justify the
emperor’s decision by insisting that Christ, like the sun, was the light of the
world.
As for Constantine’s new seven-day week, it had already been gaining in use
and popularity among Romans because of its astrological significance—
seven referring to the number of planets (including the sun and the moon)
then thought to be in the sky, each of which “controlled” a day of the week.
Indeed, the seven-day system was already ancient by Constantine’s day. It
seems to have originated circa 700 B.C.. in Babylon, when astrologers
assigned their planet-gods to the days of the week—names the Romans
replaced with their own planet-gods. For instance, the day of Nabu, the
Babylonian god of the scribes, became in Latin the day of Mercurius, the
Roman god of communication—and today survives as mercredi in French,
miercoles in Spanish, and so forth across the spectrum of Romance
languages (see chart on page 56).
In English, however, the day of Nabu is known as Wednesday because of
a curious twist of history: the fact that the seven-day week did not penetrate
to Britain until the era of the Anglo-Saxon conquests in the fifth century. At
that time the invaders wanted to take on certain Roman trappings but clung
to their own pagan religion and gods. So Nabu in Babylon became Mercurius
in Rome and Woden—the German (and Viking) god of poetry—in Britain.
Centuries later this Mesopotamian-Roman-German-British astrological
connection has
56 CALENDAR
spread to dozens of countries around the world, as people from Hong Kong
to Harare pay homage to otherwise forgotten gods every time they mention
the word Wednesday.
Planet Ancient Planet-gods Modern-day Names

Babyloni an Roman Anglo-Saxon English French Spanish
Sun c Shamash Sol Sun Sunday dimanche domingo
Moon Sin Luna Moon Monday lundi lunes
Mars Nergal Mars Tiw Tuesday mardi martes

Mercury Nabu Mercurius Woden Wednesday mercredi miercoles
Jupiter Marduk Jupiter Thor Thursday jeudi jueves
Venus Ishtar Venus Freya Friday vendredi viernes
Saturn Ninurta Saturnus Saturn Saturday samedi sabato
Astrology was so influential in the ancient world that 7 became a kind of

mystical number. This was evident not only in the seven-day week but also
in the so-called seven ages of man. The astronomer Ptolemy, among others,
believed that these ages were tied to the seven planets and their orbits in the
earth-centered universe. According to his cosmology, infancy is ruled by the
moon, childhood by Mercury, adolescence by Venus, youth by the sun,
manhood by Mars, middle age by Jupiter, and old age by Saturn. The planets
and the number seven were also associated with good and evil omens
affecting winds, rain, fair sailing, good crops, bets at the chariot races,
warfare and birthdays, for instance in this nursery rhyme:
Monday’s child is fair office, Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving, Saturday’s child works hard for its
living, And the child that’s born on the Sabbath day Is bonny and blithe,
and good and gay.
A FLAMING CROSS OF GOLD 57
Recently chronobiologists have discovered that the seven-day cycle, like

the sleep cycle of days and nights, may also have biological precedents. They
say that certain biorhythms in the human body work on seven-day cycles,
including variations in heartbeat, blood pressure, and response to infection.
The potential for rejection of a transplanted organ seems to peak at seven-
day intervals. Other organisms, including bacteria, share these basic
biorhythms. Possibly this faint tick of biology may be one reason that
Mesopotamians, Romans, and numerous other cultures, from the Incas of
Peru to the Bantu of central and southern Africa, have shaped their activities
around a week of 5 to 10 days.
Astrology was responsible for yet another curiosity in our weekly calendar:
the order of the days. We take the order of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
and so forth for granted, but in fact it does not correspond to the ancient
understanding of the solar system, which put Saturn farthest from the earth,
followed in descending order by Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and
the moon. The discrepancy between this order and the arrangement of our
week comes from another invention from Mesopotamia: the division of the
day into 24 equal units of time. The reason for this scheme has been lost. As
I mentioned
earlier, it may have had something to do with dividing the day into two 12-
hour periods to correspond with the 12 signs of the zodiac. Another reason
may have been the fact that 24 works into the basic Mesopotamian numeric
system based on 6. Twenty-four is divisible by 6; likewise, the 360 degrees
of the Babylonian circle is divisible by 24.
The order of the day names themselves comes from ancient Me-
sopotamian astrologers’ attaching a planet-god to preside over each hour of
the day, arranged according to their correct cosmological order. For instance,
Saturn controlled the first hour of Saturn’s day
58 CALENDAR
(Saturday), followed in its second hour by Jupiter, then by Mars, the Sun,
Venus, Mercury, and the moon. In the eighth hour the cycle started again
with Saturn, and the progression repeated until the twenty-fourth hour of the
day, which happened to fall to Mars. Because the next hour in the cycle—
the first hour of the new day— belonged to the sun god, the day after
Saturday was called Sunday.
The ancients used a simple device for keeping track of the proper names
of the hours and days in relation to the planet gods. They used a seven-sided
figure, with each vertex marked with a planet’s name in the proper order.
Archaeologists found one of these wheels drawn as graffiti on a wall when
they excavated Pompeii. It looks something like this:
Even after Constantine’s edict about Sunday, it took another generation

or two for the seven-day week to catch on throughout the empire. The 24-
hour system took longer, having to wait until the invention of the mechanical
clock in the Middle Ages by monks anxious to observe with precision their
canonical hours. Before this, people marked the passage of time during the
night by using the stars and during the day either by eyeballing the sun or by
listening to public announcements of the time. For instance, the Roman
military had callers watching the position of the sun to announce the
changing of the guard at the third hour of the morning (tertia hora), at the
sixth of midday (sexta hora), and at the ninth of the afternoon (nona hora).
In another example, Saxons in Britain divided their days according to the
ocean’s tides—“morningtide,” “noontide,” and “eveningtide.”
Saxons also gave us the English word day, which comes not from the Latin
dies but the word in Saxon for “to burn,” during the hot days of summer.
Hour is from Latin and Greek words meaning “season.” Originally it referred
to the fact that the length of the daylight period varies according to the season.
The second important calendar change introduced by Constantine was when

to celebrate Easter, a matter not as easily resolved as the question of Sunday.
The holiest day for Christians, Easter’s worship is complicated by the fact
that Christ’s resurrection occurred during the Jewish Passover, which is
dated according to the phases of the moon in the Jewish calendar. This means
that the date for Passover— and Easter—drifts against the solar calendar,
changing year to year. For early Christians this was a conundrum because
they lacked the detailed astronomical know-how required to synchronize
precisely the moon’s phases with the solar year.
This hardly stopped Christian time reckoners from trying. Indeed, even as
science and knowledge from the ancient era began to fall away in these latter
days, the question of when to celebrate Easter remained one of the few areas
where scientific inquiry would survive during the great darkness to come.
But this was still in the future. For Constantine the issue was not so much
how to determine the date for Easter, but how to get the various factions of
Christianity to agree to celebrate the Resurrection on the same day, even if
technically this date was not exact. Politically this was crucial to establishing
one state religion, with one set of rules.
60 CALENDAR
The Easter question came to a head in what is today a quiet Turkish village
famous as a lakeside respite for Turks weary of chaotic Istanbul, some 80
miles away. Known as Iznik, this village 1,700 years ago was a prosperous
Hellenistic city called Nicaea, Greek for “victory.” This name appealed to
Constantine, who styled himself “Constantinus Victorus.” One historian
writes, “The beautiful town lay on an eminence in the midst of a well-
wooded flower-embellished country, with the clear bright waters of the
Ascanian Lake at its foot.” Says another, “The bright green of the chestnut
woods in early summer stood out in the foreground; in the distance the snow-
capped Olympus towered over its mountain ranges.” It was here in 325 that
Constantine convened the first major Christian council, which made the first
concerted effort to solve the Easter problem and to come up with a unified
date for its celebration.
The choice of Nicaea was no accident. Situated strategically in the East,
near the new heart of Constantine’s revamped empire, the city was easily
reached by the three hundred or so bishops who attended, and their
delegations. Nearly all of these came from the East, in part because
Christianity had permeated few areas in the West. Sylvester I, the aging
bishop of Rome—at this time all major bishops were called by the honorific
papa, or “pope”—did not come because he was too ill, but he sent
representatives.
Constantine was so anxious to convene this meeting that he paid the
bishops’ expenses, placing at their disposal the empire’s system of public
conveyances and posts along its highways. At Nicaea he paid for food and
lodging. The sessions were held at a large basilica converted into a church
and in the audience chamber of an imperial palace, possibly situated on the
shore of today’s Lake Iznik.
The council opened in the late spring, probably on May 20, without
Constantine. He came a month later. The early sessions were held in the
city’s main church, with the doors open to the lay public. Even pagan
theologians participated in some of the debates. Gathering in small groups
under colonnades and in gardens, dressed in togas and robes, they argued the
relationship between God and Christ and the
A FLAMING CROSS OF GOLD 61
meaning of passages in holy texts, breaking for sumptuous meals of wine,

meats, fruits, and vegetables laid out by imperial servants.
For many of the bishops and priests it must have been a heady moment, if
slightly surreal. Just a few years earlier many of them had been practicing
their religion in secret. Some had been viciously persecuted. Paul, a bishop
from Neo-Caesarea, had lost the use of his hands after being tortured with
hot irons. Two Egyptian bishops each had had an eye gouged out. One of
these, Paphnutius, also had been hamstrung. Constantine later singled him
out at Nicaea and kissed his mutilated face. The historian Eusebius, an
eyewitness at the council, writes about the lavish feast held on July 25 to
celebrate Constantine’s twentieth year as emperor, and the lingering fear felt
by the bishops as they passed guards in the banquet halls and saw “the glint
of amis” that so recently had been turned against them.
But this turnaround from fear to feasting was nothing compared to
Constantine’s sudden transformation of a church that for three hundred years
had lacked a central authority. Scattered and at times hounded by the
authorities, Christianity had operated less as a single cohesive religion than
as a collection of sects and denominations following the same basic tenets
but differing on points major and minor—such as when to celebrate Easter.
Unity had always been a goal, though most congregations had remained
more or less independent of one another, with doctrine and details of worship
left to the local elders and members to decide. In cities large enough to assign
a bishop, these prelates had exercised some authority, but as one historian
noted in talking about Alexandria’s freewheeling churches, with their many
controversies and bickering between sects and church leaders, “it was not an
exceptional thing to have a doctrine of one’s own.”
Constantine’s mandate at Nicaea was to put a lid on this free-for- all by
establishing a set of uniform rules governed by a centralized structure headed
by himself as emperor. To accomplish this, Constantine called on the bishops
to resolve differences ranging from petty disputes to fundamental
controversies, the most important one at the time being the question of
whether or not God the Father came before
62 CALENDAR
Christ the Son, or if they both had always existed. A popular Alexandrian
theologian and preacher named Arius had been espousing the former,
teachings recently condemned by his chief rival and detractor, the bishop of
Alexandria. Both Arius and the bishop had been invited to make their case
at the council.
Constantine arrived at Nicaea on about June 19, 325, and was immediately
handed a thick packet of papers detailing controversies large and small
among the attendees. He carried the packet with him into the audience hall
of his palace, where he officially opened the council wearing a robe of gold
and draped with jewels like a Persian king. Sitting on a golden throne in front
of the prelates, he listened to welcoming speeches before rising to answer
the mostly Greekspeaking bishops in Latin. Through a translator he
welcomed them but quickly got to the point about the purpose of this council,
holding up the packet of papers like a scolding father. He told them, “I your
fellow servant am deeply pained whenever the Church of God is in
dissension, a worse evil than the evil of war.” Ordering the bishops to set
aside their arguments, he took the packet and dropped it into the flames of a
brazier. As it burned he told his audience that they must use this council to
establish a uniform doctrine they all would follow—an imperative that
became the guiding force behind the Catholic (“universal”) church for
centuries to come and would profoundly affect all aspects of life, including
attitudes toward measuring time.
Details of the Easter debates at Nicaea are not recorded, although the
controversies leading up to the council are well known. For almost three
centuries this issue had frustrated the followers of Christ, who were anxious
to celebrate properly the signal event in their religion.
The problem arose because no one who witnessed Christ’s death and
resurrection had thought to jot down a date. Even worse, the
Gospels that recount Christ’s biography offer contradictory information in

vague references about the timing of these events. All agree that Christ rose
on the first day of the Jewish week—a Sunday. But which Sunday? Three
Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—suggest the Sunday after the Passover
feast in the Jewish month of Nisan. The Gospel of John, however, indicates
another date in Nisan, a dichotomy exacerbated by the drift of the Jewish
lunar calendar in the years following Jesus’s crucifixion.
This vagueness arose because the earliest Christians cared little or nothing
about dates, for the understandable reason that Jesus’s disciples and first
followers fervently believed in their savior’s imminent return. For them time
was irrelevant, a point underscored by the apostle Paul, who did not date his
letters that appear in the New Testament. He explains why in an epistle
written to the church in Galatia, in which he reprimands those Christians who
pay attention to “days and months and times and years,” accusing them of
being more interested in astrology and earthly matters than in God. In
another letter Paul exhorts the Christians of Colossae, in central Asia Minor,
not to judge others by what they eat or drink, “or in respect of a holiday, or
of the new moon or of the Sabbath, which are a shadow of things to come.”
When Jesus failed to return immediately, Christians realized they needed
some sort of system for dating. By the second century they started writing
schedules of when to worship, and crude calendars of saint’s days and other
Christian holidays. They also began to argue about dates, such as whether to
worship on Saturday or Sunday, and how to draw up a chronology of events
in Jesus’s life. This became increasingly important to a religion that is based
on real events as recorded in the Bible, which says that Christ lived in actual
time: he was born, raised by Mary and Joseph, was baptized, became a
teacher, was tried and executed, and rose from his tomb three days later.
These central events are the underpinnings of the Gospels and of Christianity
itself, which makes this a religion of history and the calendar— a potent and
critical reality for early adherents even as they grappled
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with another core tenet of their religion: the doctrine of eternal life and a God
who exists outside of time.
This dichotomy between the Christ that exists beyond time and the
historic Christ became an early source of tension in Christianity. It later
became one of the great theological conundrums of the Middle Ages, when
the timeless Christ of dogma and mysticism reigned supreme. Even so, the
notion of empiricism and measuring time never entirely died out, in part
because of the Church’s need to understand enough about the temporal world
to designate a proper date for Easter.
By the time of Nicaea, Christians had more or less agreed upon dates for
celebrating Christ’s birth and other key events. These included days set aside
to mark the martyrdom of saints—dates meant to record in real time
important episodes in the Christian calendar, and to provide an alternative to
pagan holidays. The first known martyr’s day to be commemorated seems to
have occurred in the midsecond century, when the bishop of Smyrna was
burned at the stake “on the second day in the beginning of the month of
Xanthicus, §§ the day before the seventh kalends of March, on a great
Sabbath, at the eighth hour. He was arrested by Herod, when Philip of
Thralles was High Priest, and Statius Quadratus Proconsul, during the
unending reign of our Lord Jesus Christ.” According to an eyewitness, the
bishop’s bones were taken away and interred in a place “where the Lord will
permit us ... to assemble and celebrate his martyrdom— his ‘birthday’—both
in order to commemorate the heroes who have gone before, and to train and
prepare the heroes yet to come.”
As for Easter, most Christians agreed by 325 that it should be preceded
by a fast, and that the sacred day itself should have some relationship with
the full moon that falls during the Jewish month of Nisan. Beyond this,
individual churches and sects split on the issue of holding Easter always on
a Sunday or according to the approximate date in Nisan that Christ rose from
the dead, which changed according to the drift of the Jewish lunar calendar.
By the third century a rising
§§A month in a local Greek calendar.

anti-Semitism among non-Jewish adherents added to the confusion, as

Christians became biased against using dates that depended on when Jewish
priests determined the start of Nisan to be. So a third choice emerged: linking
Christ’s resurrection to the solar year and to Caesar’s calendar by using the
spring equinox as a fixed astronomic date to determine Easter. With this
anchor date decided, a formula could be devised to correlate the equinox with
the phases of the moon and the weekly cycle of Sundays.
None of the surviving canons issued by the council mentions the Easter
problem directly, though the rules that emerged from Nicaea are well known
among Christians: that Easter will fall on the first Sunday after the first full
moon after the equinox, but shall never fall at the beginning of the Jewish
Passover. The sentiment of the assembled bishops was recorded by
Constantine himself in a letter addressed to bishops and other church leaders
who did not attend the council. “By the unanimous judgment of all,” wrote
the emperor, “it has been decided that the most holy festival of Easter should
be everywhere celebrated on one and the same day.” In the same letter
Constantine notes that the council opposed the practice of following the
Jewish calendar to determine Easter. “We ought not,” he says in a letter
charged with anti-Semitism, “to have anything in common with the Jews, for
the Savior has shown another way.”
But the council’s solution was hardly perfect. First off, it codified a
holiday that changes dates every year, a confusing notion for the average
Christian or recently converted pagan used to annual holidays falling on the
same date every year. A second problem was that Nicaea’s Easter solution
required what was then impossible: an accurate determination in advance of
a date that assumed a precise knowledge of the movements of the sun, earth,
and moon. Ancient scientists could calculate only an approximate date, a
reality that would haunt time reckoners for centuries as they tried, and failed,
to determine true dates for Easter. In the absence of good science most
churches fixed on an arbitrary date for the vernal equinox on March 21.
Another blemish in the Nicaea solution was the failure of the coun-
66 CALENDAR
cil’s bishops and time reckoners to correct the central flaw in Caesar’s
calendar: the annual error of 11 minutes. This meant that an Easter tethered
to a fixed spring equinox would drift backward with the rest of the calendar,
falling behind the true orbit of the earth by one full day every 128 or so years.
By 325 the Julian calendar was already three days behind where it stood
when Caesar introduced his reforms in 45 B.C., when the vernal equinox fell
on March 25. By Bacon’s day the true equinox had dropped back to March
14, though the church continued to follow the practice after Nicaea of rigidly
determining Easter according to a March 21 equinox, arbitrarily set at the
time of the council.
On the other big issue at Nicaea—the nature of Christ—the council
debated heatedly throughout that long-ago summer, finally issuing on July
25 the Nicene Creed, which declared Arianism a heresy and affirmed that
Christ and God came from one substance and had both always existed. But
far more important than the nature of Christ or the date for Easter was
Nicaea’s codification of Constantine’s fusion of church and state, an
expedient political move by this shrewd emperor that was to link inexorably
the Church to secular power, wealth, and absolutism for many centuries to
come—first as an adjunct to imperial Rome and later as an independent
entity that derived its allembracing influence from its own imperial-style
hierarchy and assumption of power over Christian domains.
Constantine closed the council by admonishing the still-fractious bishops
to keep their unity at all costs and to use their newfound power with care.
“Be like wise physicians,” he said, “who treat different cases with
discrimination, and are all things to all.” Undoubtedly no one assembled on
that hot Mediterranean day, feasting on Constantine’s meats and fruits and
sipping his wine, had any idea how prophetic the emperor’s final words
would be—that this recently outlawed religion would truly become “all
things to all” in every realm, including time, replacing Rome itself as the
most powerful single entity ruling the lives and souls of millions of people
and countless generations yet to come.
tan s Still
Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts

still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and
future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held
steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short
moment, they would glimpse the splendor
of eternity, which is forever still.
—AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO, C. A.D. 400
Less than a century after Constantine celebrated the success of his council at
Nicaea, a Roman foot soldier stood sentry on a snow- swept river bank at
Mainz in what is now Germany. Shivering in his armor and military wraps,
this anonymous infantryman watched the ice-choked Rhine and the opposite
bank, where hundreds of cooking fires burned, tended by a vast and growing
horde of German barbari. This lone soldier might have been a Roman, or
more probably a Romanized German recruited by the faltering empire to
help defend its northern border. Whatever his nationality, as he stamped his
feet to stay warm on this frigid December day in 406 he almost certainly was
not thinking that Rome itself hung in the balance. Even when he looked up
and saw to his horror that the masses across the river were moving toward
him over the ice, he could hardly have imagined that this was the beginning
of the end of the ancient world in the West, and for Europeans an end to time
itself as they had known it.
The sentry sounded the alarm and his legion scrambled to meet the
barbarians, a coalition of tattooed, scraggly, fur-clad Germans from the
tribes known as the Alans, the Sueves, and the Vandals. But the
67
68 CALENDAR
Roman garrison was fatally depleted. Most of the men had been pulled off
the Rhine frontier to join a desperate counterattack against yet another army
of barbari, the Ostrogoths, then invading the Balkans. Removing the Rhine
legions was a calculated move by the Roman military, who were betting that
the Germans there would not attack during the winter. But no one had
counted on the fact that the Rhine might freeze solid, a rare occurrence. Nor
could the emperor and his generals have known that the Germans were
themselves fleeing the savage invasion of their country by the Huns.
Lacking the resources to stop them, Rome watched helplessly as the
Mainz hordes and other waves of invaders poured across borders that had
held firm for four hundred years to ravage defenseless cities. Britain was lost
in 410 when its Roman garrison departed to defend Gaul, never to return.
Soon after, Gaul itself began to break apart; Spain too slipped slowly away
in the West, along with parts of the Balkans in the East. A marauding band
of Visigoths reached the gates of Rome itself in 410, crashing through its
walls to sack a city that for centuries had been one of the greatest powers in
the earth’s history.
Inevitably the gathering chaos affected people’s perceptions of time and
the calendar as the predictable patterns of Roman life began to crumble.
Caesar’s calender would remain the official calendar in the West long after
the empire fell, though more and more people found an organized list of days,
months, and years irrelevant. They had more immediate concerns, such as
finding enough to eat and avoiding the ravages of the barbari.
But chaos was not the only outcome of the empire’s collapse. Nor did
every Roman institution falter. One, in fact, grew stronger amidst the
disorder and decay: the Catholic Church. Originally designed by Constantine
as a vehicle to enhance the political might of Rome, the church ended up
superseding it, retaining its power and influence in the ecclesiastic realm,
particularly as the barbari dropped their pagan gods and embraced a Church
that demanded—and got—an allegiance much stronger than the imperium
itself had ever known. This was because the church claimed jurisdiction not
over lands and armies but
TIME STANDS STILL 69
over souls, an authority that would extend during the coming centuries into
virtually all aspects of a Christian’s life.
This amounted to a new societal order in Europe, including a new concept
of time—something Christian theologians call sacred time. Neither cyclical
nor linear, it is rather a kind of antitime that Christians equate with God, who
is perfect, eternal, and timeless.
The idea of sacred time was hardly new. In one form or another it had
existed since religions developed concepts of eternity and the afterlife, core
beliefs for ancient Egyptians, Jews, and many other cultures. Sacred time had
been a part of Christianity from its earliest days, though much as they do
today, Roman-Christians had tended to keep God’s time in their religious
lives, while continuing to operate in their daily lives on real time—on the
passage of hours, days, months, and years. But as Rome’s political power
ebbed and the Church rose from its ashes, the sacred soon overwhelmed the
profane.
The man who best articulated this new order was Augustine of Hippo
(354—430), a bishop and theologian who wrote two of the most influential
Christian books outside of the Bible: The Confessions of St. Augustine and
The City of God. In both works Augustine takes some pains to explain
“sacred time” and why he believed it was more “real” than secular time,
which is fleeting.
Augustine’s long life straddled the years when Rome slid from a still-
formidable empire under Constantine’s immediate successors into the
widening abyss of final decline. He was 52 years old in 406, when the Mainz
hordes broke through the frontier, and lived to see the dismemberment of
Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. Indeed, the backdrop of the empire’s slow
collapse obviously influenced Augustine’s philosophical outlook, which
favored a secure, perfect “city of God” over the faltering “city of man.”
Born just 17 years after Constantine’s death, Augustine grew up in the
small provincial city of Tagaste, 40 miles from the coast of what is today
Algeria. In a meteoric early career as a philosopher and teacher, he moved
from his little town to Carthage, then to Rome, and finally in his early thirties
to the imperial court at Milan, at that
70 CALENDAR
time the de facto capital of the western empire. This was during the reign of
Theodosius I (d. 395), the last powerful emperor to reign over the entire
empire. In his palace the young Augustine became the court teacher of
rhetoric, a coveted position that might have led to high political office, power,
and wealth.
But Augustine was a troubled young man. Living a life he describes in his
Confessions as one of near debauchery and moral vacuousness, he tried and
rejected several of the religions popular at the time. Then in 386, at the age
of 31, he was alone in a Milan garden when he says he heard the voice of a
child when no child was there. The voice commanded him to open a nearby
Bible, which told him to give himself over to Christ. He did, resigning his
post in the imperial household and eventually returning to North Africa to
become a bishop of the small port city of Hippo—today’s Annaba in modern
Algeria, on the sea near the border with Tunisia.
Known as the last great intellectual of the classical era, Augustine set out
to create a philosophical structure that linked his new religion to one of the
giants of the ancient world, Plato, equating this long- dead Athenian’s ideas
about a prime mover/creator with the Christian God, and Plato’s notion of a
perfect universe, existing beyond our flawed world, with the Christian
concept of heaven. Augustine borrowed from Plato’s conception of time as
being by definition in motion. This makes it an imperfect attribute of an
imperfect world, since the realm of the prime mover is a place of perfection
that by its nature is timeless and immutable. It has no beginning or ending,
nor any movement forward or backward, and therefore has no time to mea-
sure. Recast in Christian terms, this ideal is what Augustine meant by sacred
time.
“The world was made not in time,” Augustine says in The City of God,
“but together with time.” This means that God the creator may have set in
motion the idea of time as perceived by humans, but he himself exists outside
of it, a concept that Augustine argues is ultimately a matter of faith. “Follow
the One,” he says, “forgetting what is behind, not wasted and scattered on
things which are to come and
things which will pass away . . . and contemplate Thy delight which is neither
coming nor passing.”
A discussion of Augustine’s ontology may seem a bit abstract for a book
about little squares marching along on a calendar, except that it represented
a powerful current then forming in Europe and in the Church, which for
centuries would cast a suspect eye on anyone who tried to delve too deeply
into matters of time. Augustine understood the need for a simple calendar
that kept track of holidays, legal days, and birthdays. Nor did he oppose a
philosophical discussion about the nature of time. What he opposed was an
overemphasis on trying to quantify the past, particularly on issues such as
the creation—something he considered a waste of time for those seeking the
perfection of God. He was even more critical of those who tried to predict
the future, which in his mind was sole province of God. These included
astronomers and mathematicians who used planets and other cues from
nature to predict the future beyond the next harvest or the seasonal coming
of winter and spring. “In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I am
sending you the Holy Spirit so that he can teach you about the course of the
sun and the moon,” Augustine wrote in a 404 letter. “He wanted to make
Christians, not mathematicians.”
Augustine, however, was hardly the last word on how to treat the past and
future, and time itself. Indeed, his mysticism and reliance on faith would
continue to bump up against those who wanted to categorize and measure
the past—especially the Christian past—and those who wanted to plan or to
predict the future in a systematic and scientific manner. It was the tension
between these two ideals, the sacred and the profane, that would dominate
the next millennium in Europe, though one side clearly was the victor—even
as Rome’s political and cultural collapse combined with Augustine’s
philosophy of antitime to all but extinguish any scientific interest in the
calendar, or in making it more accurate.
And yet, as we shall see, the light of scientific curiosity was never
quenched entirely. Even in the darkest days after the fall of Rome a
72 CALENDAR
progression of isolated monks and thinkers remained inquisitive, inasmuch

as they were able, about nature and science—including ways to better
measure what Augustine said was unmeasurable: time.
Augustine himself conceded that time reckoning could be tolerated in one

area where the sacred and the profane could not be disentangled: calculating
and predicting the date for Easter. This could be determined only by someone
knowledgeable in astronomy and mathematics—and so the calculation of the
date of Easter became the slender thread that science would hang by over the
coming centuries. This was ironic, given that Christians who condemned
science as a blasphemous intrusion into God’s domain were forced to rely on
science to date the most mystical event in their pantheon of miracles and
otherworldly epiphanies: the resurrection of Christ.
The history of science in the Middle Ages would have been very different
if the bishops at Nicaea had decided simply to name a fixed date for Easter
in the solar calendar. But they did not. Instead, in the wake of Nicaea,
Christians developed what became a complex equation to determine the
proper day, forcing time reckoners to return to something Caesar had
dispensed with centuries earlier: a dependence on the moon. Almost by
accident they found themselves confronting the ancient conundrum of trying
to correlate the phases of the moon with the orbit of the earth—the same
problem that had plagued calendar makers from China and Babylon to
preimperial Rome as they tried to fuse a 354-day lunar year with a roughly
365 1/4-day solar year.
Even today this lunar-solar linkup is a challenging astronomical problem,
one that must compensate for a complicated range of gravitational tugs and
pulls from the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies; the slow degradation of
the orbits of the earth and moon over time; the slightly elliptical orbits of the
earth and moon; and the spin of the earth on its axis—all factors that
Christian time reckoners in the era
of Nicaea had no inkling about when they devised their basic formula for
Easter. Below is a 14-step algorithm devised by modern-day Cath- olic
astronomers, who factor in some of the variables to come up with an almost
precise Easter date—almost, because there are always minute fluctuations in
the movements of the earth, moon, planets, and stars that make an absolutely
exact measurement impossible to predict.
= year %19
ab
= year/100
cd = year %100
e = b/4
= b%4
= (6
= (b +-f+
8)1)
/ 25
/3
= (19*a+b-g+ 15)%30
hi = c/4
k = c%4
1 = (32 + 2 * e + 2 * i - h - k)%7
= (a+ 11*h + 22 * 1)/451
m
Easter month = (h + 1 — 7 * m + 114)/31 [3 = March, 4
= April]
P = (h + l-7*m + 114)%31
Easter date = p + 1 (date in Easter month)
/ = division neglecting the remainder

% = division keeping only the remainder
= multiply
As far as anyone knows, the bishops at Nicaea did not officially assign
anyone or any place to make the official Easter determination, though the
task naturally fell to Alexandrian astronomers. Even before the great council
the bishops of Alexandria had dispatched letters to other churches
announcing the date when they would celebrate the Easter feast. Few details
are available about these early calculations,
74 CALENDAR
though the Alexandrians before and after Nicaea apparently used the old 19-
year cycle of lunar months—the Metonic cycle—to link the moon to the solar
year.
The Alexandrians also seem to have been the ones who fixed the date for
the spring equinox on March 21, a change from Caesar’s day, when the
equinox was set on March 25. This shift may have been an attempt to
compensate for the drift in Caesar’s calendar against the true solar year,
though the true drift between Caesar’s reform in 45 B.C.. and the Council of
Nicaea in A.D. 325 was closer to three days than to four.
At least two astronomers are known to have created time charts predicting
future dates for Easter. Both were also bishops of Alexandria—Theophilus
(bishop 385-412), whose tables covered a 100-year span between 380 and
480, and his nephew Cyrillus, who succeeded his uncle and devised a 95-
year table covering the Easters between 437 and 531. Both charts were
reasonably accurate, though they suffered from a small flaw in the Metonic
cycle—the fact that 235 synodic lunar months do not fit exactly into 19 Julian
years, falling one day long. Over the course of 95 years (five 19-year cycles)
this excess of a single day amounts to a five-day mistake in matching up the
phases of the moon with the Julian calendar—a problem early time reckoners
attempted to deal with by intercalating a day into each 19-year cycle.
A more serious problem for Easter reckoners after Nicaea was political
rather than scientific. Not every city went along with the Alexandrians’
methods for dating Easter, despite the council’s dictate that the Easter
question should be addressed uniformly for all Christians.
The most pronounced difference was between the churches of the East,
which followed Alexandria’s lead, and the churches of the West, which
looked to Rome—a split that went far beyond issues of Easter and the
calendar as the Roman world slowly divided itself along a fault line of east
and west, Greek and Latin, Hellenistic and Roman. The Easter differences
between Rome and Alexandria were small but important, particularly
because they foreshadowed the eventual split
between the Greek and Latin churches, which to this day celebrate Easter on
different dates.
The first east-west Easter squabble concerned dating the equinox. The
Egyptians continued to use March 21. Rome, however, used Caesar’s
original date: March 25. The other problem involved methods for matching
up the solar year and the phases of the moon. Romans used a system
developed in the mid-third century based on an 84-year cycle of lunar months
divided into years, which was accurate within a day and a half. This differed
from the Alexandrians’ 19-year cycle, which was both more precise and
easier to keep properly adjusted.
In most years the result of these subtle differences meant nothing, since
both methods came up with the same day for Easter. A few years, however,
were wildly off. For example, in 387 Augustine noted angrily in a letter that
the Alexandrians were celebrating Easter on April 25 and the Romans on
April 18. Worse still, he fumed that the Arian churches of Gaul—still
thriving despite Nicaea’s condemnation of their founder’s doctrine—had
come up with a third date. Using yet another formula, they celebrated Easter
that year on March 21.
Dissension over details in the Easter calculation was one reason why
Augustine at times became impatient with mathematicians and others who
seemed obsessed with numbers and with measuring time. The bishop of
Hippo had little patience with such worldly minutiae as he went about
completing the process set in motion by Constantine and the bishops at
Nicaea to subjugate time to God, and by extension to the Church. Christians
had long been thinking this way, but not until Augustine did anyone lay it all
out and elevate the issue of God’s time from the simple language and logic
of the apostles to the high scholarly realm of philosophy in the ancient
tradition, an intellectual legitima- tization that the church had lacked before.
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As the hordes of barbari swarmed across Gaul and Iberia in the years after
the Mainz invasion of 406, tribes fanned out to plunder in every direction.
One band of Vandals marched all the way from their homeland in modern
Hungary to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in 429, when they began terrorizing
the provinces of Mauretania and Numidia, finally reaching Augustine’s city
of Hippo in 430.
The aging bishop, then 75 years old, joined in the collective effort to
organize the city’s defenses and to care for the thousands of refugees from
other Roman towns pressed inside the city walls. By midsummer Hippo was
completely surrounded by the barbari, who set up a fourteen-month siege.
Inside the walls the people grew hungry as the Vandals hemmed them in
from land and sea. They then became sick with an illness that spread quickly
through the crowds living in makeshift, unsanitary conditions. Stricken with
fever, Augustine himself was sent to bed sometime in August. He died a short
time later, several months before the invaders conquered the city, which
Rome was forced to cede to the Vandals along with Carthage eight years
later in a desperate gambit to appease these barbari before they captured
other key African provinces supplying grain to Italy.
The Vandals, reveling in their plunder as they moved into the shattered
cities of Roman Africa, formed a poignant backdrop to Augustine’s death.
For as he died the ancient world of Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine was
also dying, as was time as it had been understood in ancient times.
But time did not entirely stop—not yet, anyway—despite the empire’s final
demise in 476 with the assassination of its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus,
46 years after Augustine’s death. For even as Rome’s invaders fought over
their spoils, a brief and improbable window opened up in Italy late in the
fifth century: a moment of peace and political stability that allowed three
remarkable scholars living in
Rome to flourish in what was truly the last gasp of the ancient world. Each
in his own way affected time, the calendar, and how people would perceive
them in the dark ages fast approaching. Two of them were sons of ancient
patrician families in Rome, young intellectuals who experienced meteoric
careers as scholars and political appointees. The other was a Scythian monk
and theologian about whom little is known.
By the time these three young men were living in Rome, at roughly the
turn of the sixth century, the city had again changed hands. Just a few years
earlier the German general Odoacer, who deposed Romulus Au- gustulus,
was himself ousted and killed by the Ostrogoths in 493. Meanwhile Gaul had
cracked into shifting territories fought over by German warlords leading
bands of Burgundians, Franks, Alemanni, Alemanes, Goths, and Suessiones.
In Britain bands of Picts, Angles, and Saxons fought each other as a few
surviving enclaves of Romano-Britons grimly hung on, pushed west into
modern-day Wales. To the south the Visigoths seized all but the far west of
Iberia; in North Africa the Berbers and Vandals controlled the entire coast
and the waters of the western Mediterranean with a fleet built by the Vandal
king Gaiseric in Carthage. In the East the old empire persevered, but barely,
getting some breathing space early in the sixth century when invading
Persians, who had nearly crushed them, had to break off their conquest to
beat back the Huns ravaging their own northern and eastern frontiers.
Rome itself was a shattered city, sacked repeatedly over the previous
century. By now the great buildings, homes, and monuments were mostly
stripped of precious metals. Basilicas, massive baths, and the labyrinth of
palaces on Palatine Hill were still in use but decaying as a depleted civil
service struggled to maintain what they could. Statues lay smashed on empty
streets, and entire neighborhoods fell into ruin as most people abandoned the
city. Markets lacked the grain and produce supplied for centuries from
colonies now lost. Romans facing one blow after another had begun a
centuries-long process of peeling off the marble facades and dismantling the
stone from one building after another to use in new construction or to build
defenses. Only
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those basilicas and temples taken over by the Church remained more or less
untouched, though most prelates bore little regard for the art and architecture
of pagans. One can still see divots on columns outside temples converted to
churches, gouged by Christians who wrapped chains around them and tried
to pull down these old “pagan” structures, but could not because they were
built too well.
Disastrous decline seemed inevitable in Italy, as it did elsewhere in the
former empire, until the arrival of an unexpected savior in the guise of King
Theodoric, whose powerful Ostrogothic army had swept in from the east to
take over Italy and parts of what is now France, Austria, and the Balkans. An
unusually enlightened leader and clever military strategist, Theodoric ruled
Italy for 33 years, providing stability for the first time in a century with a
combination of a powerful army and restoration of the old imperial civil
structure. A great admirer of Roman culture, Theodoric, ruling from Ravenna,
capital of the last few emperors in the West, set about repairing and rejuve-
nating what he could of Italy’s battered cities. In Rome he rebuilt palaces,
shored up roads, and reopened aqueducts destroyed by the barbari. It was
during this brief and all too furtive flash of Roman renaissance that our three
young men were able to pursue political careers and intellectual pursuits,
including work on time and the calendar, almost as if the old empire had not
died.
The most famous of the three is Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, born
in Rome in 480 to an ancient noble family. His ancestors included numerous
consuls and senators, two emperors, and a pope. Orphaned young, he was
raised by another ancient noble family headed by Quintus Symmachus,
consul in 485 and later prefect of Rome under Theodoric. By 510 the 30-
year-old Boethius was accomplished enough as an intellectual and politician
for Theodoric to tap him for consul and for several delicate diplomatic
missions—in-
eluding the delivery of a water clock and sundial, long symbols of learning
and of Roman culture, to the king of the Burgundians. Soon after, Theodoric
appointed him to the high office of magister officiorum, a kind of royal chief
of staff in charge of the civil service and palace officials. In 522 Boethius
was honored again by the king’s appointment of his two sons to the
consulship, approved by both Theodoric and the emperor in Constantinople,
who retained a titular authority over such offices.
But Boethius’s true love was learning. This was his summum vitae
solamen, his chief solace in life. Somehow finding the time, he plunged into
scholarly pursuits, translating into Latin, Gibbon tells us, “the geometry of
Euclid . . . the mechanics of Archimedes, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the
theology of Plato and the logic of Aristotle.” These translations are the only
reason many of these works were preserved into the Middle Ages. Boethius
also penned tracts on theology and a treatise on mathematics—a
compendium of the knowledge of numbers that became a textbook for
scholars in the Middle Ages, used by time reckoners among others, who were
indebted to Boethius’s careful recitation of mathematical concepts such as
whole numbers, geometric equations, and proportions.
But by far Boethius’s most important—and haunting—work was his thin
Consolation of Philosophy, written while he was imprisoned in a fortress
tower in Pavia by Theodoric and tortured daily during the winter of 524—
525. Why the king arrested his brilliant magister officiorum is not clear,
though historians surmise the king suspected Boethius of conspiring with the
emperor in Constantinople, possibly over religious matters. Because
Theodoric and the Goths were Arian, tensions inevitably ran high at times,
particularly after the prelates of Constantinople and Rome settled a series of
long-standing disputes shortly before Boethius was arrested. This
rapprochement between the defunct western and still viable eastern wings of
the old empire undoubtedly made Theodoric uneasy as the Byzantines stirred
to life militarily under their new emperor, Justinian (483-565)—who in fact
would invade Italy and crush the Ostrogoths a few years later.
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Whatever the reason, Boethius’s cruel imprisonment provides a tragic but

poetic coda on the ancient world, including a farewell to the ancient view of
time as something to be studied and contemplated instead of shunned or left
to a few expert monks assigned the task of determining Easter. One can feel
the anguish of this man, whose own imprisonment becomes a metaphor for
the end of learning even as time slows down and the world, in his view,
darkens:
So sinks the mind in deep despair

And sight grows dim; when the storms of life
Blow surging up the weight of care,
It banishes its inward light
And turns in trust to the dark without.
This was the man who once was free
To climb the sky with zeal devout
To contemplate the crimson sun,
The frozen fairness of the moon—
Astronomer once used in joy
To comprehend and to commune
With planets on their wandering ways.
This man, this man sought out the source
Of storms that roar and rouse the seas;
The spirit that rotates the world,
The cause that translocates the sun
From shining East to watery West;
He sought the reason why spring hours
Are mild with flowers manifest,
And who enriched with swelling grapes
Ripe autumn at the full of year.
Now see that mind that searched and made
All Nature’s hidden secrets clear
Lie prostrate prisoner of the night.
His neck bends low in shackles thrust,
And he is forced beneath the weight To contemplate—the lowly dust.
In the Consolation Boethius finds comfort in his intellect, in striving for

truth through philosophy, and through God. Indeed, his spirit, which was so
clearly at odds with the anti-intellectualism then spreading over Europe,
would also console those solitary monks and thinkers left tending the dim
flicker of light that constituted learning through the long, dusky centuries to
come.
It fell to the second of the three men in this odd Gothic-Roman world
to carry on Boethius’s ideals as darkness truly fell. Flavius Magnus Aurelius
Cassiodorus was born about 490 to another of Rome’s influential patrician
families. The son of a praetorian prefect of Rome under Theodoric,
Cassiodorus became his father’s aide in his late teens or early twenties, while
plunging into the same sort of intellectual pursuits as his friend Boethius.
And like his friend, Cassiodorus was noticed at a young age by the German
king, who moved him rapidly through the ranks of the imperial civil service.
In 523 Theodoric appointed him to be Boethius’s replacement in the top job
of magister officiorum in Ravenna even as his friend was being tortured in
prison and penning his soulful Consolation. It seems that Cassiodorus cither
did nothing to help, or could do nothing. Official correspondence preserved
from this period, written mostly by Cassiodorus, does not mention
Boethius’s plight.
Apparently Cassiodorus was less threatening to Theodoric than Boethius
was. He not only survived the immediate peril of the king’s wrath, but also
lived well beyond Theodoric’s reign. He died decades later, long after the
Goths themselves were driven out of Italy by Justinian, the Byzantine
emperor who tried—and failed—to revive the empire in the West. While the
Goths reigned in Italy, Cassiodorus
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served as a high official for Theodoric and his successors, including a

daughter named Amalasuentha, who ruled eight years as regent for her infant
son. For 15 years he also stood behind many of the efforts to revive and repair
the crumbling cities of the Roman heartland, penning edicts in the king’s
name—including orders to restore and preserve monuments, an increasingly
hopeless task after Theodoric’s death. “Do not let these images perish,” he
pleaded in one edict, referring to the deterioration of certain bronze elephants
on the Via Sacra in Rome, “since it is Rome’s glory to collect in herself the
artisan’s skills whatever bountiful nature has given birth to in all the world.”
He also published numerous works, including a history of the Goths and a
twelve-volume set of his official correspondence as magister officiorum—
highly literate epistles that discuss a number of scientific topics, including
expositions on the months of the year.
Soon after the capture of Ravenna by Justinian in 540—which briefly
reconnected parts of the old western empire with the eastern part—
Cassiodorus traveled to Constantinople, plunging into the intellectual life of
the Byzantine capital. He stayed for a decade and a half at what was then a
crossroad of old-world culture and learning and Christianity, returning home
to Italy in 554. What he found there was chilling—a homeland shattered after
the final convulsive wars between the Goths and Byzantines. Huge swaths
of the countryside lay wasted. The city of Rome itself was virtually in ruins.
In the end Justinian had won against the Goths, but the price had been the
near destruction of Italy. Moreover, the Byzantines were stretched so thin
that they soon would lose much of their bitterly won territory to the
Lombards, yet another tribe of German barbari pressing against the northern
frontier of Italy.
This was a critical moment for Cassiodorus and many other Roman
scholars and nobles now faced with the undeniable end of the old world.
They could think of only one thing to do: withdraw from the broken walls
and ravaged streets of Rome and other cities to their estates in the country,
which over the years of turmoil Rome’s powerful families had fortified with
stout walls and defenses in what be-
came early prototypes for medieval castles. But when Cassiodorus joined the
exodus to the countryside he took with him his thirst for knowledge, turning
his family estate near the toe of Italy’s boot into a combination school and
religious retreat—a scholar’s monastery, a place of learning that mixed
rhetoric, mathematics, time reckoning, and other elements of a classical
curriculum with religious study. In this way Cassiodorus turned his back on
the outside world he had served for so long, withdrawing intellectually and
spiritually as well as physically to become a spiritualist and a conversus—
one who “converts” from a life of evil to one of living according to Christian
principles.
This approach was considerably different from the majority of mon-
asteries and communities of monks then forming in Italy and across Europe,
most of whom specifically avoided any knowledge not directly applicable to
their faith, or they took a stance that all useful knowledge had already been
written down, so there was no use searching for more. Cassiodorus embraced
both ancient and Christian thought, insisting that the monastery should be a
place to worship and to preserve a spirit of learning—which included a
somewhat desperate attempt by Cassiodorus to save ancient manuscripts as
city libraries and schools were ransacked and abandoned.
Already in his sixties when he became a full-time monk, Cassio- dorus
devoted the remaining years of his long life to building up his monastery. He
assembled a collection of ancient texts that some say numbered in the low
thousands, and he wrote about a wide range of subjects—including a defense
of old-world science that echoes Boethius’s devotion to philosophy. In doing
so he helped preserve the rudiments of time reckoning during the dark
centuries to come, leading up to Roger Bacon’s strident restatement eight
centuries later of Cassiodorus’s belief in the truth of science as an expression
of God’s creation. Around 550 Cassiodorus wrote a defense of mathematics
and how it is critical to astronomy and time reckoning:
It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of this discipline
[mathematics]. If we learn the hours by it, if we calculate the courses of the
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moon, if we take note of the time lapsed in the recurring year, we will be taught by
numbers and preserved from confusion. Remove the computus from the world, and
everything is given over to blind ignorance. It is impossible to distinguish from other
living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.
Cassiodorus was hardly a secularist, however. In extensive writings about

arithmetic, astronomy, and the science of time reckoning— which he called
computus—he makes a critical distinction between time measurement and
time reckoning. The first, he said, is merely a matter of making observations
of celestial bodies and jotting down numbers, and using mechanical devices
such as clocks that require technical skill but not intellectual achievement to
manufacture. Time reckoning, on the other hand, is purely intellectual, says
Cassiodorus. It recognizes God’s miracles of numbers and their usefulness
in making calculations of time, which are critical to a believer for planning
when and how he will worship God, with the ultimate calculation being the
true date of Easter.
This did not mean that Cassiodorus disapproved of astronomy or of clocks.
Years earlier a more secular Cassiodorus had written his friend Boethius that
the horologium—a combination sundial and water clock—was the highest
achievement of civilization, held in awe by barbarians. He still believed this
late in life when he told his monks:
We do not want to leave you in ignorance of hour-measurements; they were, as you

know, invented for the great benefit of humanity. For this reason 1 had two clocks
made for you, a sundial fed by sunlight, and a waterclock giving the number of hours
constantly, by day and night.
But Cassiodorus did not teach his pupils how to construct these mechanisms,
believing that monks should contemplate theory and calculations and not
spend their time like village mechanics tinkering with devices. In this spirit
the elderly Cassiodorus and his followers used their science of computus to
create daily, weekly, and monthly calen-
dars of sacred days and monastic duties and feasts. They also wrote the first
textbook explaining how to compute Easter, beginning with the year 562—
a set of instructions widely used in the Middle Ages, though not exactly as
Cassiodorus intended. Indeed, for a man setting out to preserve knowledge
and to inspire intellectual thought, his textbook allowed generations of
monks simply to follow a cookiecutter recipe for determining dates, rather
than learn the processes behind the calculations. Likewise, Cassiodorus’s
water clocks quickly fell into disrepair after the master died, since no one
knew how to fix them.
But it was a sign of these tumultuous times, when monks seemed to be setting
up monasteries on every rocky hill in Italy, that what one monastic teacher
was condemning, another was condoning. So even as Cassiodorus’s clocks
stopped in southern Italy another leading monastic figure not connected to
our three young men in Rome, Abbot Benedict of Nursia in Umbria, was
energetically teaching his monks to make clocks and to use them to tell time
down to the hour— something no one had done before in such a systematic
or official way.
Benedict was a typical monastic in his belief that devotees should
concentrate on the hereafter, and that man’s time on earth was ephemeral.
But he also shared the ascetics’ obsession with following rules to reinforce
his faith, which led him to embrace clocks as instruments that could serve
man in his service to God. In about 540, the year Ravenna fell to Justinian
and Cassiodorus moved to Constantinople, Benedict wrote a guide to what
he considered proper worship, known as The Benedictine Rule. This
included a table of hours setting out a strict list of duties, prayers, mealtimes,
and ceremonies linked to a careful measuring of each hour of the day.
Before the Rules a monastery’s abbot typically arranged tasks and
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schedules for his tightly knit community. But Benedict, working in the spirit
of creating uniform rules for the universal (Catholic) church, refused to leave
this to the whim of individual abbots. Wanting to be sure that a monk in
Naples was saying the same Psalm at the same hour as one in Provence, he
ordered that time be kept accurately and objectively by using the best clocks
then available: the sundial and water clock, and later a “candle clock” made
to burn in measured hourly increments.
Benedict’s Rules started with the Christian calendar as it then existed,
with its saint’s days, holy days associated with Christ’s life, celebrations, and
feasts. He then assigned tasks and duties to virtually every day of the year,
using as his inspiration the Roman anny’s system of loosely dividing the day
into hours, with daily watches rotating on the third, sixth, and ninth hours
(morning, noon, and afternoon). Benedict ordered these three key points
announced each day in the monastery. He also delineated canonical hours
that did not have to be announced: dawn (matutina), sunrise (prima hora),
sunset (vespera), and the coming of complete darkness at night
(completorium). He listed certain Psalms to be read each day and at the
beginning of the seven named hours so that everyone would know the correct
hour and when it began. He fixed precise hours for waking, eating, working,
and resting, and staggered them according to the seasons. For instance:
During the winter, that is from 1 November (a Kalendis Novembribus) till

Easter, the time of rising will be the eighth hour of the night, according to the
usual reckoning. From Easter till 1 October (Kalendas Octubres) the brethren
should set out in the morning and work at whatever is necessary from the first
hour till about the fourth. From the fourth hour until the Sext they should be
engaged in reading. After the sixth hour, and when they have had their meal,
they may rest on their beds in complete silence. . . . The None prayers should be
said rather early, at about the middle of the eighth hour, and then they should
work again at their tasks until Vespers.
Benedict’s system meant that Christian monks for centuries would live
under Rome’s civil calendar and the Roman army’s day, imposed far more
strictly than by the old empire’s magistrates and generals. But the idea here
was not temporal power or political order but a test of willpower and belief,
and a means by which monks could fill their days with manual work that
would keep their minds sharply focused on spiritual matters. “Idleness is an
enemy of the soul,” wrote Benedict.
The abbot of Nursia’s rules eventually spread to monasteries across
Europe, becoming a symbol of faith for devotees in a medieval era that
otherwise ignored time. As something that set apart monks from the rest of
society, the Benedictine system also engendered in laymen a sense that
following a strict schedule of duties according to the clock was an important
part of religious devotion. Eventually, the Benedictine’s sense of time crept
into everyday life and language. The word siesta, for instance, comes from
the abbot setting aside an hour of rest after the midday meal at the sixth hour.
Devout Catholics still pray at matins in the early morning and at vespers in
the evening. Some historians believe that modern capitalism, with its use of
time as an economic unit—for wages, contracts, and interest rates—grew in
part out of the Benedictine fixation on measuring time.
When Cassiodorus was still a young man he met, and perhaps was taught by
the third of our troika in Rome, an abbot named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 500—
560)—“Little Dennis.” Described as a Scythian— one of a barbarian people
who a century earlier had been driven south by the Huns from their ancient
home in the Caucasus—little is known about Dionysius other than his work
on the calendar and on one of the first collections of official Catholic rules
known as canons. He knew Boethius and Cassiodorus, but was probably
older. Late in life Cassiodorus remembered him fondly as a brilliant scholar
with a great
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fluency in translating Greek and Latin. Also an accomplished mathematician

and astronomer, in 525—the year Boethius was executed— Pope John I (d.
526) asked him to calculate the Easter date for the next year. At the time this
was part of an effort by the Roman church to wean itself from its sister church
in the East, who long had treated the science of determining Easter like some
arcane pharaonic secret, a mystery understood only by those steeped in the
tradition of Aristarchus and Claudius Ptolemy. With a wave of his Latin quill
Dionysius changed all of this, ending the long hegemony of Alexandria by
co-opting their formulas and methods, freeing Rome at last from the time
lords of this ancient city of stargazers.
Of course, Dionysius was careful to couch his work in terms that would
be acceptable to the spiritualists of his day, insisting in explanations about
his work that the holy day of Easter should be calculated “not so much from
worldly knowledge, as from an inspiration through the Holy Spirit.” He then
promptly turned to astronomy and mathematics to make his calculations,
adopting what in those days was the most accurate method available, the 19-
year lunar cycle. Essentially he updated the table computed by the
Alexandrian bishop Cyril, extending it for another 95 years, from 532 to 627.
We needn’t plunge too deeply into the numeric complexities of these long-
forgotten tables, although a brief dip will help explain what a man such as
Dionysius knew and had to work with as he struggled to make sense of his
Christian-Roman calendar. For example, in the chart below are four years in
Dionysius’s first 19-year cycle:***
Year (A.D.) 532 533 534 535
Indiction (I) 10 11 12 13
Moon’s Phase (II) 0 11 22 3
***He is using the old Roman system of kalends, ides, and nones, which would linger
throughout the Middle Ages.
Year (A.D.) 532 533 534 535

Day of the Week of
March 24 (III)
4 5 6 7
Year in 19-Year
Lunar Cycle (IV) 17 18 19 1
First Day of
Passover (V)
Nones April 8 Kalends April Ides April 4 Nones April
Easter Sunday (VI) 3 Ides April 6 Kalends April 16 Kalends May 6 Ides April
(April 11) (March 26) (April 16) (April 8)
Below are explanations of each of the lines headed up by a Roman numeral:
I: This number has nothing to do with calculating Easter. It refers to a

system of dating Roman documents in 15-year cycles called indictions, a
style of dating so widely used for financial and legal documents (often in
conjunction with the date of a consul or emperor’s reign) that Dionysius
included it as a helpful guide to the year for those using his table.
II: To calculate the true Easter, astronomers started by noting the “age”—
or phase—of the moon during a given year on a set date in the solar calendar.
This was arbitrarily set by Dionysius at March 22, the day after the official
spring equinox as determined at the time of the Council of Nicaea. For
instance, in 532 the moon’s age was 0 days old on March 22—a new moon.
This age-number is called an epact. Because the lunar year runs 11 days fast
against the solar year, the age of the moon on any given date in the Julian
calendar will always be 11 days “older” the next year. Thus in 533 the epact
of the moon was not 0, but 11.
A year later, in 534, the epact moved another 11 days back, for a total of
22 days of movement since 532. But because the moon runs in a 29 1/2 day
cycle (rounded up to 30 days by Dionysius), the next
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year, 535, has an epact of 3, determined by taking 22 + 11 = 33 - the 30-day

month = 3. And on it goes with eleven added to each year, running on a 30-
day cycle.
The epact is important because in the 19-year lunar cycle this number will
always be the same for each year in the cycle. (See number of the year in the
19-year progression.) This formula made it simple for anyone with even a
rudimentary knowledge of numbers to calculate Easter, though later time
reckoners would realize that the moon does not fit precisely into this cycle,
since the lunar month is actually less than 30 days. Whether or not to use
epacts became a hotly debated topic during the deliberations in the sixteenth
century that led to the Gregorian reforms in 1582.
III: This is the day of week that fell on March 24, which was used to
determine on which date the Sunday after the equinox would fall.
IV: The year in the 19-year lunar cycle.
V: This is the beginning of Passover, corresponding to Nisan 14 in the

Jewish calendar—a date that Christian time reckoners were ordered to avoid
by the bishops at Nicaea, who dictated that Easter could never be held on the
day Passover begins. If the calculations for Easter indicate a date on Nisan
14, the celebration was moved to the following Sunday.
VI: The correct date each year for Easter Sunday, based on the formula in
use at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325. This has Easter falling on the
first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Dionysius, like other Easter time reckoners past and present, provides
numerous equations that prove the interconnectedness of these
dates mathematically.††† These are practical for the serious ecclesiastic task
at hand but also seem in their elegance to be the product of a mind that
enjoyed the precision and exactitude of equations for their own sake, despite
his devout talk about “the Christian concept of time.”
Dionysius’s contribution to our calendar went far beyond the pedestrian task
of calculating another 95 years of Easters. When he published his tables he
included a reform that was little noticed in his own day but now affects
virtually everyone in the world: the system of dating known as anno Domini
(A.D.), “the year of our Lord”—which many people now call the common
era (C.E.).
In a letter to a bishop named Petronius, Dionysius complained that earlier
Easter tables used a calendar widely followed at the time, which started its
year one in A.D. 284, the year that Emperor Diocletian ascended to the throne.
Under this system, the year Dionysius wrote his letter—which we call A.D.
531—was designated the year 247 anno Diocletiani, the year of Diocletian.
But Diocletian was a notorious persecutor of Christians, noted Dionysius,
who tells Petronius that he “preferred to count and denote the years from the
incarnation of our Lord, in order to make the foundation of our hope better
known and the cause of the redemption of man more conspicuous.”
Dionysius calculated that Christ was born exactly 531 years earher—which
became his base year of A.D. 1. (Dionysius did not designate a year 0
†††One flaw in Dionysius’s system was the impossibility of matching up the seven-day
week, in which Sunday fell, mathematically with a 95-year period of 19-year cycles.
Obviously seven does not divide into 95, which meant this table was still not entirely
accurate as a predictive tool. A mathematician in Aquitaine named Victorius figured out a
solution to this problem c. 457 by figuring out that Easter dates repeat themselves every
532 years, 532 being a number divisible by 19 and by 7. Apparently Dionysius was
unaware of Victorius’s discovery.
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because the concept of zero had not yet been invented). Where the abbot got
this date for Christ’s birth is unknown. Nor is it clear if his scheme was an
original idea or one already informally used. Whatever the source, Dionysius
was the first ever to use the system we all now take for granted when he
wrote on his Easter tables anni Domini nostri Jesu Christi (the years of our
Lord Jesus Christ) 532—627.
Unfortunately, Dionysius almost certainly got his dates wrong. The true
moment of Christ’s birth is unknown and a matter of immense controversy
even today, given the vague and contradictory information available on
Christ’s early life. The Gospel of Matthew claims he was born in the time of
Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C.. This means the birth must have occurred
before this date. Other Gospels and historical sources suggest dates ranging
from 6 or 7 B.C.. to A.D. 7, though most historians lean toward 4 or 5 B.C.
This means the year 1996 or 1997 was probably the true year 2000 in the
anno Domini calendar, if one does the arithmetic without a year 0.
Anyway, it took time for Dionysius’s use of anno Domini to catch on.
Some Christians resisted it because they preferred the anni Diocle- tiani, also
called the “Era of the Martyrs,” a period held in veneration despite its
association with an anti-Christian emperor. (Coptic Christians in Egypt still
use anni Diocletiani; for them, the year A.D. 2000 will correspond to the
year 1716 in the “Era of the Martyrs.”) It was Dionysius’s friend Cassiodorus
who first used the A.D. system in a published work when he and his monks
wrote their textbook in 562 on how to determine Easter and other dates, the
Computus paschalis. Other Italians gradually accepted the A.D. system over
the next several decades, followed very slowly by other regions of
Christendom.
Early Catholic missionaries introduced the system in Britain, where
newly converted Saxons issued edicts dated with anno Domini in the seventh
century. It first appeared in Gaul during the eighth century but did not come
into wide use in Europe until the tenth century. In some outlying provinces,
including parts of Spain, the A.D. system was not adopted until the 1300s.
Christians did not use the inverse of anno Domini, B.C.. (for “before Christ”)
until 1627, when the French as-
tronomer Denis Petau apparently became the first ever to add B.C.. to dates
while teaching at the College de Clermont in Paris.
Soon after the elderly Cassiodorus published his textbook on computus in

562 the eastern emperor Justinian died, leaving his ambition to reestablish
the western empire unrealized. His efforts ultimately proved disastrous to the
West, as he and his immediate successors found themselves overextended
and unable to fend off fresh assaults by Lombards, Bavarians, Saxons, and
other Germanic tribes. Even worse, these previously obscure invaders were
far less Romanized than the Germans Justinian had destroyed, barbari who
had long associated with Rome on the border of the old empire. With
homelands deep in the hinterlands of Europe, the newcomers were far more
rapacious and thorough in their ravaging and in establishing tribal-style
governments. The Byzantines retained a toehold in Ravenna and in other
parts of Italy for several more decades, and remained a presence for centuries
to come. But in the wake of Justinian’s juggernaut, most of the West
collapsed again into near anarchy, with the only remnant of central authority
residing in the Church.
Boethius’s execution in 524 had signaled the instability of an age that had
little interest in intellectual pursuits. But the death of Cassi- odorus sometime
in the 580s—presumably safe behind his monastic walls—symbolized the
final gasp of an ordered world where time had mattered and calendars framed
how most people lived, worked, and worshiped. With the West now a
political and intellectual wasteland, people had little need for formal civil
calendars, with most reverting back to a preliterate age when fanners, sailors,
and merchants measured time as the Greeks did in Hesiod’s days—in broad
cycles where events were triggered by the bloom of a flower or the flight
north or south of flocks of birds. For much of Rome’s illiterate population
this had always been the way time was measured. But now, as Boethius
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lamented in his Consolation, the entire culture seemed to be sliding into an

abyss:
For who gives in and turns his eye

Back to the darkness from the sky, Loses while he looks below
All that up with him may go.
Time had finally come to a full stop. Or at least it seemed this way, though
remarkably a few monks and scholars over the coming centuries would keep
the mechanism of calendar time moving, if barely. Indeed, the story of the
calendar now shifts to one of the greatest of these medieval lights, a man who
lived not in Rome or some other ancient center of culture, but on a shadowy
island on the edge of what was to these Europeans the known world.
Mon Urea m W ki1eCounting
on Their Fingers
It is said that the confusion in those days was such that Easter was
sometimes kept twice in one year.
—BEDE, A.D. 731
Under an ancient gnarled oak tree in southwest England the first archbishop
of Canterbury held a meeting sometime in the late 590s— about a decade
after Cassiodorus died in Italy—to settle a local dispute over Easter.
The archbishop, a Greek named Augustine,‡‡‡ was trying to convince a
delegation of Celts from the western side of the island to abandon their
system of calculating the Easter date, which deviated from St. Peter’s.
Isolated since the last imperial legion abandoned the island in 410, these
Celts had been Christianized late in the Roman era only to find themselves
cut loose soon after from both the empire and the Church in Rome. Since
then waves of invasion by Saxons and Angles had driven these ancient
Britons into what is now Wales, where they had joined with other Christian
Celts from Ireland to form an independent church, with its own ideas about
dating the Resurrection.
Augustine, dispatched to Britain by the pope to evangelize the Saxons and
to Romanize the Celts, insisted that God was on his side. To
‡‡‡This is not Augustine of Hippo.

95
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prove it he reportedly performed a miracle under that old oak tree— restoring
sight to a blind man.
The Celts were impressed but unconvinced. “Whereupon Augustine ... is
said to have answered with a threat that was also a prophecy,” writes the
British monk Bede (672—735), recounting the story a century later, “telling
the Britons that their intransigence would one day cause their destruction.”
Sure enough, wrote Bede, a few years later a brutal Saxon king named
Aethelfrith (d. 616) “raised a great army and made a great slaughter of the
faithless Britons.” The dead included 1,200 unarmed monks massacred near
their monastery at Bangor, south of modern Liverpool. That King Aethelfrith
was a butcher intent on expanding his tiny kingdom at the expense of Celts;
and that he was a pagan who cared nothing about Easter, hardly mattered to
Bede and other Christians siding with Rome in this murky, little-known
comer of Europe. For them the massacre was the fulfillment of Augustine’s
prophecy against these “faithless Britons, who had rejected the offer of
eternal salvation, would incur the punishment of temporal destruction.”
And what was the difference between the two churches’ dates for Easter?
A single day.
You see, the Celts placed the date of Christ’s crucifixion on a Thursday
instead of a Friday. This meant their Easter had to fall (according to the
Jewish calendar) between Nisan 14 and 20, while Rome said the date must
fall between Nisan 15 and 21 —a difference so minor that it is hard to
imagine anyone quibbling to the point of bloodshed. Especially given the fact
that Bede himself, one of the most brilliant time reckoners in the Middle
Ages, knew something that almost no one else did in this murky era: that
Rome’s official dating of Easter was itself in error, because the Julian
calendar it was based on was flawed.
MONKS DREAM WHILE COUNTING ON THEIR FINGERS 97
Bede was almost sixty years old in 731 when he published his account of the
prophecy and slaughter in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
A monk, teacher, and choirmaster at the Saxon-era monasteries of
Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, he lived far away from the centers
of culture and learning (such as they were) in his age— which makes his
accomplishments all the more astonishing. For without ever leaving the
neighborhood of his twin monasteries, Bede wrote some sixty books on
subjects ranging from commentaries on the Bible to works on geography,
history, mathematics, and the calendar. He penned detailed letters describing
the concept of the leap year, his calculations about the supposed motion of
the sun around the earth, and his measurements of equinoxes. He even came
up with the name calculator to describe a time reckoner, and later catholicus
calculator—‘ ‘Catholic calculator.
“I was born on the lands of this monastery,” Bede wrote in his History. “I
have spent all the remainder of my life in this monastery and devoted myself
entirely to the study of Scriptures. And while I have observed the regular
discipline and sung the choir offices daily in church, my chief delight has
always been in study, teaching, and writing.” Handed over to the abbot of the
monastery by his apparently upper-class family at age 7, he was educated by
the monks, became a church deacon at age 19, and was ordained a priest at
age 30—all at Wearmouth and Jarrow.
Built in the latter part of the seventh century, Wearmouth was founded
shortly after Bede’s birth in 672 on the coast of England near where the River
Wear pours into the North Sea—a country of rolling hills, Emestone and
sandstone outcrops, low mountains, and ruined Roman walls and towns. The
monks built a companion monastery nine or ten years later at Jarrow, a few
miles away on the mudflats at the confluence of the Don and Tyne rivers.
Both began as Saxon structures of timber and straw until one of the project’s
sponsors, a monk of noble birth named Benedict Biscop (c. 628—690),
decided the buildings should look Eke the stone churches he had seen during
his travels in Gaul. With Hadrian’s ruined wall and an old Roman
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fort nearby, stone was readily available for pilfering, though Benedict Biscop
had to bring over skilled labor from Gaul because Britain lacked master
builders and stone masons. He also brought across the channel glassmakers
who glazed the windows and made glass receptacles.
Benedict filled his buildings with a rich assortment of imported altar
vessels, paintings and carvings—and with a library. Taking five trips to
Rome Benedict brought back “a great mass of. . . books,” including
calendars—among them almost certainly Dionysius Exiguus’s charts and
calculations, and the latest martyrologies (lists of saint’s days and other holy
dates). The exact contents of Benedict’s library is unknown, though it seems
to have included a copy of a Bible used and illustrated by Cassiodorus,
known as the Codex Grandior; as well as theological works, a smattering of
Greek philosophy and mathematics, and Cassiodorus’s encyclopedias of
ancient knowledge.
It was an impressive library for its day, though at best it contained some
four to five hundred works. §§§ This compares to perhaps two to three
thousand volumes Cassiodorus had access to a century and a half earlier in
his library, which itself was profoundly diminished from the vast collections
of antiquity, including Alexandria’s library and its four hundred thousand
manuscripts. Imagine what this meant to the inquiries of the second-century
astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who had a mountain of information at his
disposal, compared to Bede. Working six hundred years later in his cold
monastic cell at Jarrow, Bede had to make do with just a few treasured vellum
scrolls tucked into wooden boxes to keep them from rotting in the dampness
common to Northumbria.
Likewise, Bede and his countrymen were only vaguely aware of events
beyond the frigid, turbulent waters of the Mare Germanicum, now known as
the North Sea. It probably took several years, for instance, for Northumbrians
to find out that the mother church in Rome had finally broken off its titular
allegiance to Constantinople,
§§§Bedc cites about 175 sources in his writings.

which had claimed authority over the former imperial provinces of the West
as the inheritor to Rome—a claim that had become increasingly unrealistic
after the failed attempt of Justinian to reconquer the West. In part this break
came about because of another seismic event happening far from the British
Isles—the sudden appearance of Islam in the mid-seventh century, which
eventually forced the Byzantines to recall their legions from central Italy.
Following Mohammed’s teaching and his founding of the first mosque at
Medina in 622—year 1 in the Moslem calendar—the armies of Islam had
swept like a fire- stonn to seize Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt by
651; North Africa by 702; and Spain and parts of Asia Minor by 711, when
Bede was about 38 years old. By then the stunned Byzantines had lost nearly
their entire empire, and were fortunate to have held on to their heartland in
western Asia Minor, coastal Greece, and Sicily.
Meanwhile the politics in the West remained confused, with shifting
tribes battling, conquering, and being conquered. Lombards reigned for the
moment in northern Italy. East of the Danube lived pagan Slavs, who had
gradually enveloped much of the former provinces of Rome in northern
Greece and in the Balkans. Closer to Britain, the Franks had dominated what
is now France and Germany for over a century; in 732, a year after Bede
published his History, the Merovingian kings of France decisively beat back
the Moslem invaders of Spain as they attempted to roll into southern France.
In faraway Britain this was at best a distant rumble, though it’s likely that
Bede himself felt far more isolated intellectually than geographically. Indeed,
he lived in a time when even monks in monasteries were turning away from
all but a crude understanding of basic scholarship, either because they lacked
manuscripts and teachers or because they had no use for knowledge they
considered ungodly and profane. Most aspired to follow Cassiodorus’s
admonition to learn, though few succeeded beyond a clumsy understanding
of basic concepts. In France one senior cleric complained that many monks
and churchmen were completely illiterate. At Jarrow Bede himself had to
translate the
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Lord’s Prayer from Latin to the local vernacular so that his brothers could
understand the Latin words they spoke when they prayed.
Scholarship in many places was reduced to learning a few key subjects
by rote and devoting one’s life to copying ancient manuscripts, which most
monks held in awe as artifacts of a glorious past, but few understood. A
number of monks lost their eyesight scratching out copies in the
semidarkness of their stone cells, since candles were not allowed for fear fire
would consume the ancient parchments. “He who does not turn up the earth
with the plough,” a sixth-century monk admonished his brothers, “ought to
write parchments with his fingers.” Many monks did not stop with mere
writing, but also adorned their manuscripts with stunningly beautiful
ornaments, calligraphy, and illustrations: glittering gold-leafed letters and
painted flowers and vines; masterly images of winged angels, fiery demons,
tortured saints, and Christ enthroned in heaven. Some of the most dazzling
illuminations appear on medieval calendars, which typically list month-by-
month dates and saint’s days and are lavishly illustrated with scenes of
peasants gathering hay in June, nobles hunting and drinking wine in August,
and peasants huddling beside hearth fires as snow blankets the out-of-doors
in February.
If few of these monks thought deeply about the knowledge in these lovely
books, fewer still came up with their own interpretations about time
reckoning or anything else in the scientific reahn. This makes a genuine
scholar such as Bede all the rarer. In fact, the only other truly notable time
reckoner in these dark days of the early Middle Ages was Isidore of Seville
(560-636), a Roman ecclesiastic and scholar living in another distant outpost
of the former empire: Visigoth Spain. The Archbishop of Seville, Isidore is
known for eradicating Arianism among the Visigoths and stifling other so-
called heresies in Spain— and for compiling a great encyclopedia along the
lines of Cassio- dorus’s, a summa of universal knowledge as it existed in this
sunny, hot corner of Europe. Preserving numerous fragments of classical
works that otherwise would have been lost, he described the fundamentals of
general astronomy and mathematics, including a section on
time reckoning and the Easter cycle that would be used by Bede and other
time reckoners over the next few centuries.
Yet even Isidore’s work follows the tendency of this era to substitute
copying and the reiteration of past thinking for true scholarship. Little in his
encyclopedia is original, and some of it is poorly written. Isidore even apes
Cassiodorus’s admonition to learn and understand astronomy and
mathematics, offering little analysis or insight of his own. “Remove
computus from the world,” Isidore wrote, essentially plagiarizing an almost
identical statement made by Cassiodorus, “and everything is given over to
blind ignorance. ... If you remove the number from objects, then everything
collapses.”
This encouraged many a medieval monk to embrace the science of
computus, though at the same time Isidore, like Cassiodorus, instructed his
brothers to think of timekeeping devices as mere tools, like a key or a chain—
an admonition that reinforced the medieval tendency to rely on already
established equations and rules that required little imagination or creativity,
a process that perpetuated the prevailing simplification of Augustine of
Hippo’s view that understanding time beyond a simple calendar and dating
Easter was better left to God.
During this period most of Europe still followed Julius Caesar’s basic
calendar, though pagans beyond the Christian realms continued to use their
own ancient calendars. To the north the Saxons (those who had not emigrated
to Britain) and other old German tribes used a combination lunar-solar
calendar that started with the twelve lunar months and then added a month
every so often to match it up with the solar year. This calendar began on
December 25, shortly after the winter solstice. Month names included the
third month, Solmonath, the month of offering cakes; Blodmonath, the
month of sacrifice; and Eosturmonath, named after the goddess of spring and
twilight, Eostre. Another modern word derived from the Saxon calendar
comes from
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Guili, the name of the Saxons’ first and last months of the year. The Old
English for Guili is geol; in modern English it is yule. Guili occurred during
winter, hence “yule log” and “yule season.”
The Slavs who dominated eastern Europe during Bede’s day apparently
used a purely lunar calendar. Islam, symbolized by the crescent moon, also
ignored the sun and still does in its religious calendar, which drifts across the
solar year at a pace of eleven days a year. Farther east, the Chinese under the
T’angs—one of the richest and most stable dynasties in Chinese history, then
at the height of its power and influence—continued to use a calendar similar
to those developed in ancient Babylon and Greece a thousand years earlier.
Based on a lunar year, this calendar added extra months seven times during
a 19-year cycle. They assigned numbers to identify each month, but used
their zodiac symbols to name years in a 12-year cycle of animals familiar to
anyone who has eaten in a Chinese-American restaurant with a printed
placemat listing the year of the rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep,
monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. The Gregorian year 2000, for instance, is the
year of the dragon. The year of Bede’s death in 735 was the year of the pig.
From the perspective of a T’ang astronomer in 735 it would have been

laughable to imagine that Bede’s calendar would one day become the world’s.
Still, even as invaders on all sides conquered territories once Christian, the
seeds were being sown to expand the hold of Christianity—and by default
the Julian calendar. Christianity had always been a proselytizing religion,
taking literally the words of Christ when he said, “Follow me.” Like Islam,
it offered a potent and coherent set of religious ideals and duties that proved
highly attractive to religiously minded people. Also like Islam, it had fused
its doctrines and faith with the apparatus of political power—first under the
aegis of Rome and more recently under the sponsorship of barbarian kings
converted to Christianity. This made the spread of Christianity less an

individual decision than a strategic ideology of kings, nobles, and through
them entire peoples.
By the time Bede was a young man, the Church’s conversion of barbari
and the conquests of Islam had precipitated a titanic shift in Christianity’s
geography, transforming it from a religion primarily of the Mediterranean
and Near East to a European religion. The most critical moment had come
sometimes between 496 and 506 when King Clovis of the Franks agreed to
be baptized by a Catholic bishop at Reims. A shrewd politician, Clovis
embraced Rome to gain the support of Gallo-Roman Catholics in his
successful war against the Arian Goths in what is now central and northern
France. Clovis’s victories set in motion a kingdom that would eventually split
into France and Germany, nations that for centuries remained closely con-
nected with the Church in Rome. The Catholics made further inroads with
other Germanic tribes, though Christians in Bede’s day were hardly of one
mind. The Goths, Burgundians, and Alemanni remained Arian, which was
only one of several sects that deviated in ways large and small from official
Roman doctrine. Arians, for instance, continued to worship Easter according
to their own formulation of dates, as did a remnant of the Celts whose
brothers had been massacred by Aethelfrith a century earlier.
Most of the Christian expansion into Germanic countries remains murky.
Details are recorded, if at all, by scattered letters from bishops and popes in
Rome and by local chroniclers of Franks and others whose grammar and
grasp of literary style was poor and their facts jumbled or suspect. England
is an exception because of Bede. But his History is important beyond the
stories it tells because Bede chose to use Dionysius Exiguus’s scheme of
anno Domini to date the events in his chronology—the first time this was
done in such a prominent and widely read history. He also agreed with
Dionysius’s dating of Christ’s birth, affirming the Scythian monk’s
designation of the year 1 that we still use today. Before Bede, historians had
dated events using the reigns of kings and emperors. Or, like the ancient
Greek historian
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Herodotus, they had simply strung together stories roughly in chronological

order with no precision in exactly when they took place.
Bede’s history starts with brief sketches describing the island and original
inhabitants of Britain, its conquest, rule, and abandonment by Rome, its
invasion by Saxons and Angles in their long boats, and the two centuries of
chaos that followed as the Germans fought among themselves and against
the old Romano-British population. Bede then settles into the meat of his
story when Rome in the time of Archbishop Augustine looked once more
toward Britain—as a country to conquer not militarily but spiritually.
Anyway, it seemed to be the next logical step for expanding the Christian
reach once Gaul was firmly in the Catholic sphere. Yet Bede insists that the
pope who dispatched Augustine to Britain in 596, Pope Gregory I (540—
604), was inspired less by strategy than by compassion. Bede tells the story
in his History:
We are told that one day some merchants who had recently arrived in Rome
displayed their many wares in the market-place. Among the crowd who thronged
to buy was Gregory, who saw among the merchandise some boys exposed for
sale. These had fair complexions, fine-cut features, and beautiful hair. Looking
at them with interest, he inquired from what country and what part of the world
they came. “They come from the island of Britain,” he was told, “where all the
people have this appearance.” He asked whether they were Christians, or
whether they were still ignorant heathens. “They are pagans,” he was informed.
“Alas!” said Gregory with a heartfelt sigh: “how sad that such bright-faced folk
are still in the grasp of the author of darkness.”
Gregory asked the name of the slave boys’ race and was told they were
Angles. “That is appropriate,” he said, “for they have angelic faces, and it is
right that they should become joint-heirs with the angels in heaven.”****
****This loses something in translation. In Latin Gregory said: “Non Anglii, sed
angeli,’’ literally: “Not Angles but angels.”
Whether moved by the boy slaves or by politics, Pope Gregory in 596 had
dispatched Augustine, a Greek monk and Gregory’s former monastic
roommate, from St. Peter’s to evangelize the distant Britons. It says a great
deal about the state of Europe’s highways—and the immense distance to
Britain in the mind-set of these Romans—that when Augustine and an
entourage of forty monks “progressed a short distance on their journey, they
became afraid, and began to consider returning home. For they were appalled
at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce, and pagan nation, of whose very
language they were ignorant.” The monks became so fearful that they voted
to send Augustine back to Rome “so that he might humbly request the holy
Gregory to recall them from so dangerous, arduous, and uncertain a journey.”
Gregory understood their reluctance but ordered them to continue. This reply
came in a letter from Gregory that demonstrates the dating system then in
use—one that had not yet incorporated Dionysius Exiguus’s new anno
Domini concept. After exhorting the monks to continue on to Britain, and
asking that “God keep you safe, my dearest sons,” Gregory recorded the day
he wrote his letter:
Dated the twenty-third of July, in the fourteenth year of the reign of the most
pious Emperor Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the thirteenth year after his
Consulship: the fourteenth indiction.
The emperor referred to is Maurice of Constantinople, whom the Romans at

this time still nominally regarded as the titular ruler of the West; the
“indiction” is the year in the fifteen-year cycle that had been used since
Diocletian’s time to date Rome’s financial and legal dealings.
During the days of the empire the journey north from Italy through
southern France, and onward to Britain took several days through a settled
country over good roads. In 596 the journey took weeks to pass through
territories thick with thieves, marauders, and stretches of land once peaceful
and under till, but now abandoned. Traveling by ship across the channel,
Augustine arrived at Ebbsfleet on the island
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of Thanet, where the Germanic king of Kent, Aethelberht, met him in the
open air. Aethelberht was married to a Christian princess from the Frankish
royal house but remained a pagan himself. He chose an open field, Bede says,
because “he held an ancient superstition that, if they were practisers of
magical arts, they might have opportunity to deceive and master him” should
he meet them in a more enclosed space. Arriving in full regalia and carrying
a cross of silver and a picture of Christ, Augustine and priests made a
favorable impression on the king. He even provided them an old basilica in
his capital at Canterbury that long ago had been a Christian church under the
Romano- Britons—a move that Bede says paved the way for Aethelberht to
convert by 601, when Augustine was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury.
With the conversion of the Saxons came the reintroduction of Caesar’s

calendar in Britain, with certain Anglo-Saxon modifications. For instance,
the substitution of Germanic planet-gods for those of Rome to designate the
days of the week, and the use of the goddess Eostre to name Easter—which
then and now is officially called the Feast of the Passion by Catholics. This
followed an already long tradition in the Church of absorbing certain pagan
customs into local ceremonies and beliefs. This policy was spelled out by
Pope Gregory in another letter, where he tells Augustine not to wreck the
Saxons’ pagan temples:
The idols are to be destroyed, but the temples themselves are to be aspersed
with holy water, altars set up in them, and relics deposited there. ... In this way,
we hope that the people, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may
abandon their error and, flocking more readily to their accustomed resorts, may
come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of
sacrificing many oxen to demons, let some other solemnity be
substituted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy
martyrs whose relics are enshrined there. . . . For it is certainly impossible to
eradicate all errors from obstinate minds in one stroke. . . .
Dated the seventeenth of June, in the nineteenth year of the reign of our most
pious Lord and Emperor Maurice Tiberius Augustus, and the eighteenth after his
Consulship: the fourth indiction.
Gregory does not specifically mention days of the week or the Saxon naming
of Easter as part of his campaign. But it is not too much of a stretch to assume
that Tiw’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, and Freya’s day—and Easter—
came to be used in early Christian England as part of an effort to win over
the “obstinate minds” of Saxons and Angles.
When Augustine arrived in Britain in 597 he was, at best, only vaguely aware
that Christians already lived on the island—the Celts he would soon meet
under the old oak tree. Indeed, these Celts and Romano- Britons may have
lost ground against the Germans, but they had been gaining ground for their
Celtic church as they proselytized across Ireland, Scotland, and northern
England, winning souls among the Celtic pagans—who adopted the Celtic
system of dating Easter—even as Augustine showed up in the south and
began evangelizing for the Roman church.
Both sects built large monasteries and competed for converts, with
Northumbria becoming a major spiritual battleground during the time of
King Oswiu (612—670), who embraced the Celtic faith. Then he married the
Princess Eanfled of Kent, a Catholic, who brought with her from Canterbury
her own bishop and priests. This introduced two dating schemes for Easter
to the royal court—which in most years did not matter, since the Celtic and
Catholic calculations were not far off from each other. But every so often—
such as in 664—the dates differed. “It is said that the confusion in those days,”
writes Bede, “was
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such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year, so that when the King
had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were
still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday.” For Christians this was horrific: the
royal couple, representing law and truth for their subjects, celebrating the
holiest day in the kingdom on separate dates. For people of this period the
discrepancy went far beyond a religious squabble. It undermined the order
of the state—such as it existed in this still murky time—and of a universe
that was supposed to provide absolute answers from an infallible God.
At least this was the theory. In reality, the king and queen’s rival Easters
were tolerated for several years—until Oswiu’s son, trained by the Catholics,
convinced his father that something should be done if the country was to have
the sort of unified church rulers sought in those days. So in 664 defenders of
both traditions gathered for a conference to decide the issue at the monastery
of Streanaeshalch—the “Bay of the Beacon”—at Whitby, on the coast some
40 miles north of York. Bede tells us it was a cordial, if sometimes passionate,
exchange, an outback version of Nicaea in 325, where rival sects gathered to
feast and freely debate before a sovereign who at the end would make a
decision affecting the future of the holy days.
An Irish bishop named Colman argued the case for the Celts, invoking the
authority of the apostle John to defend his church’s dates. On the Roman side
an abbot named Wilfred cited the authority of Nicaea and other councils,
adding that “a few men in a corner of a remote island should not be preferred
before the universal Church of Christ throughout the world.” Would these
scruffy islanders, Wilfred asked, remain backward and outside the
mainstream of European culture, or would they join the same mighty Church
championed by the Franks and other kingdoms?
King Oswiu was no fool. He believed in the Irish teaching he had grown
up with, but he also understood that it made little sense to remain obstinate
against Rome and the rest of Catholic Europe. So in the end he decided to
abolish the Celtic system and to adopt the Roman, saying he was especially
swayed by Wilfred’s argument that
the pope, as the successor to St. Peter, had the authority to decide Church
dogma. Wilfred quoted Christ as saying: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock
I will build my Church.” More to the point for the literalists of the early
Middle Ages, Wilfred quoted Christ as saying he gave to Peter “the keys of
the kingdom of heaven.” Oswiu responded by asking the Celtic bishop if
Christ actually said these words. Bishop Colman admitted he did, and that
the Celts had no such authority given to the founders of their church. Bede,
a Catholic himself, tells us what the king said next:
“Then, I tell you, Peter is the guardian of the gates of heaven, and 1 shall not
contradict him. I shall obey his commands in everything to the best of my
knowledge and ability; otherwise, when I come to the gates of heaven, there may
be no one to open them, because he who holds the keys has turned away.”
When the king said this, all present, both high and low, signified their agreement
and, abandoning their imperfect customs, hastened to adopt those which they had
learned to be better.
This was not entirely true. Several Irish hard-liners returned to their bleak
monastery on the Scottish island of Iona and continued to flout Rome. These
included Bishop Colman, who retreated first to the Celtic monastery on Iona
and then to western Ireland with thirty monks to avoid accepting the Roman
calculation of Easter. As late as 687, a quarter century after Whitby, the Irish-
trained bishop Cuthbert admonished die-hard Celts to stay the course with
Rome. He told his disciples to have “no dealings with those who had
wandered from the unity of the Church either through not celebrating Easter
at the usual time or through evil living.”
Soon after the synod the pope dispatched Theodore of Tarsus, a native of
Asia Minor, to take over as archbishop of Canterbury. His name had been at
the bottom of the short list; he was apparently selected because several others
refused to take the position. It was under Theodore that the monasteries at
Jarrow and Wearmouth were
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founded by Benedict Biscop. Theodore also oversaw the religious integration

of the Celts and Catholics leading up to Bede’s time, a period that turned out
to be a brief moment of near stability in Anglo- Saxon Britain. It lasted until
the ninth century, when the first Viking long boats appeared off the beaches
of Northumbria.
Bede in his History is clearly a partisan of the Catholics’ method for dating
Easter. But he does not leave it at that. As a teacher and practitioner of
computus, he set out to prove that the Church was correct beyond a doubt
about the true Easter. This effort began modestly in 703, when he was about
thirty years old. He wrote a short work on time reckoning, Liber de
temporibus, for his students: a combination how-to, analysis, and refutation
of the Christian Celts’ stand on Easter. In this work the young Bede also
confirmed Dionysius’s system of 19-year cycles to determine Easter and his
use of anno Domini. This seal of approval brought these systems into the
mainstream of the Middle Ages, which widely read and revered Bede over
the next several centuries. In 725 he wrote a longer version of the Liber de
temporibus at the request of his students, titled De temporum ratione, a tome
that has been found in over a hundred libraries and collections of medieval
manuscripts across Europe, attesting to its popularity. No comparable
scientific work was written about time and the calendar in the Latin world
until the era of Roger Bacon, almost five centuries later.
De temporum ratione and the shorter pamphlet are part compilation of
known ideas and part original thinking. Bede started with an assumption that
might have made Augustine squirm : that the universe as created by God was
a place of order in which all phenomena could be rationally and logically
explained, even if much of it was beyond human comprehension. Following
the ancients, he writes that this universe consists of the elements earth, air,
fire, and water, and that
MONKS DREAM WHILE COUNTING ON THEIR FINGERS III
the earth lies at the center—surrounded, as Christian theology taught in that
period, by seven heavens: air, ether, Olympus, fiery space, firmament, the
heaven of angels, and the heaven of God. (This is where we get the term
“seventh heaven” to describe something truly wonderful.) He provides
primers on how to count to one million using one’s fingers—the only handy
counting device available to Bede—and how to master Roman and Greek
numerals. He also explains the divisions of time as they then existed,
following Isidore of Seville’s list, from the smallest unit to the largest:
moments, hours, days, months, years, centuries, and ages.
Bede also writes about the long-held Christian belief that the earth had
passed through six ages since the Creation. The first five, he said, had been
marked by the Creation, the Flood, Abraham, David, and the captivity of the
Jews in Babylon. The sixth and current age began with the birth of Christ.
This idea of a “calendar” of six ages came from the words of the apostle Peter.
He says in the Bible that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and
a thousand years is one day.” In the Middle Ages Christian chronographers
interpreted this to mean that each age of the earth would last roughly a
thousand years. This was probably not Peter’s intent, since he seems to be
saying in this passage that time to God is meaningless because he is omnip-
otent and timeless. Nevertheless, Western chronographers before and after
Bede used this passage to date the beginning of the world to about five
thousand years before Christ’s birth.
Bede, however, studied the problem and came up with his own dating of
the five ages, based on a careful reading of Old Testament texts translated
directly from Hebrew to Latin rather than relying on third- or fourth-hand
translations from Hebrew to Greek to Latin. He concluded that the time span
from the Creation to the birth of Jesus was 3,952 years. As for the duration
of the sixth age—after which Christ himself was supposed to inaugurate a
seventh and final age of heaven on earth—Bede stuck with Augustine of
Hippo’s admonition to avoid trying to predict the future, which the monk
from Jarrow agreed that only God knows.
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Incredibly, Bede’s calculation of the first five ages of the earth led to an
accusation of heresy, because his time span was at odds with those of other
revered chronographers, including Isidore. Someone at a Saxon feast held at
Jarrow shouted the allegation after a liberal amount of alcohol had been
consumed. The charge infuriated Bede; he shot off a letter defending himself
that suggested his accusers were ignorant fools. Apparently nothing came of
the accusation.
In the sections of De temporum ratione about Easter, Bede calculated the

holy day up to the year 1063 using Dionysius Exiguus’s basic system of
calculations, with one change. Instead of figuring the dates in arbitrary 95-
year periods Bede used a 532-year cycle in which the Easter date repeats
itself, based on multiplying the 19-year lunar-solar cycle times four (to
account for the leap year) times seven (the cycle of a week from Sunday to
Sunday). At least one earlier mathematician had stumbled on this cycle,
though Bede was the first to use it systematically.
But Bede was not content simply to record categories and make
calculations like other computists before and after him. Turning to empirical
observation, he designed a complicated sundial that he checked every day to
keep track of equinoxes. He hoped this would provide him with an objective
estimation of the true Easter. In 730 he set out to prove to a friend that the
equinox did not fall on March 25, as some insisted. Bede confirmed this with
his sundial and kept up his daily record of the shadows cast to show that
another equinox fell on September 19, 182 days later. Continuing his
observations for another six months, he discovered that the spring equinox in
731 did not fall on precisely the same line (horologii linea) on his sundial as
before, suggesting that the leap-year system of 36514 days was not entirely
accurate. This was an extraordinary find for a man using a sundial in dark-
ages England. It is a pity that he had no working knowledge of a more
accurate timepiece, such as a water clock. As it
was, Bede had no way to divide the solar year into units smaller than very
basic fractions, which means he had no way to quantify his discovery. He
also got the true spring equinox wrong, since by 731 the error in the Julian
calendar had caused it to drift more than six days since Caesar’s reform in 45
B.C.. This put the true spring equinox during Bede’s experiment at March 18
or 19.
Bede, a refreshingly candid critic of his own work, suspected that his
calculations were not entirely accurate. He invited others to improve them
while he kept working to refine his observations himself. Since northern
Britain is far less sunny than the Mediterranean, and lines of shadow on even
the best sundial face are fuzzy and lacking in detail for many months of the
year, Bede looked around for other natural time markers. He discovered tides.
Taking long walks along the sand-and-rock coast of Northumbria, he seems
to have kept a close, scientific eye on the ebb and flow of the ocean,
eventually figuring out how to use the tides to measure the phases and orbit
of the moon. He used them to concoct a formula for finding the zodiac sign
the moon was passing through given its phase, allowing him to come up with
an improved method for fixing the age of the moon on the first day of a given
month. This project had little to do with the Easter computation, but it proved
useful for astrologers, who used his zodiac equations to predict the future in
a way that would have greatly disturbed the pious monk from Jarrow.
Bede went further than most toward embracing objective science, but he
remained limited by the mind-set of his era’s spirituality. We cannot forget
that Bede was primarily a religious man devoted to his canonical duties and
that most of his scholarly work was not scientific, but religious. We must
also remember that Bede counted with his fingers as much out of choice as
necessity, reiterating the familiar explanation that monks were not supposed
to delve too deeply into the details of God’s creation. When confronted with
the need for complex fractions in calculating time, he simply rounded up or
down, perhaps insisting like Isidore that God’s reckoning, so far as it was
understood, consisted of single-digit numbers—the ones that could
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be counted on the fingers of a human hand. Likewise he taught that there was
no need to measure half or quarter hours with water clocks; that the “God-
given hour” was a small enough unit of time. He told his students to use the
twenty-four-hour system for scholarly purposes, but warned them this had no
application to everyday life, particularly for the vulgus (great masses), who
had no way to measure hours accurately and seemed to prefer the informal
system of “hours” gauged by looking up at the position of the sun. “It is not
for man to know the moments set by God,” Bede quoted from the Bible.
Still, Bede devised a clever theory that attempted to explain the apparent
discrepancies between secular time and sacred time. He suggested that there
exist three categories of time—time determined by nature, such as the solar
year of 365 1/4 days; time fixed by custom, such as the 30- and 31-day
months that belong to neither the solar year nor a lunar phase; and time set
by an authority either human or divine, such as the Olympiad every four years
or the Sabbath every seventh day. Like Augustine of Hippo, he believed
God’s time superseded all other forms. This hierarchy of truths about time
allowed Bede to embrace science, on one hand, and a world of miracles and
God’s omnipotence, on the other. Indeed, this is a man who carefully studied
sundials but also filled his histories with stories about bishops curing blind
men and prophecies about monks being massacred.
Bede finished his Ecclesiastic History of the English People four years before
his death in 735, concluding with an enigmatic statement. “What the result
of this will be the future will show,” he writes, a curiously modern-sounding
mix of pride and uncertainty, and a sense that humanity still had more to
learn—a notion rare in his era, when most people believed that mankind had
attained all of the knowledge it ever would, and that the world would soon
end. Remembered fondly by his own peers and by subsequent generations,
Bede’s furtive
MONKS DREAM WHILE COUNTING ON THEIR FINGERS 115 embrace of the
scientific method was centuries before his time, and would later amaze and
hearten scientifically oriented thinkers such as Roger Bacon.
Even more remarkable was Bede’s appreciation of time as being real and
measurable; something that could be organized into an ordered system of
epochs, years, months, and days. For Bede time moved in a progression along
a calendar, a concept few people in his day embraced, as they lived from
season to season and endlessly passed the hours, whether in sowing or
chanting designated Psalms at the appointed time each day. This was perhaps
Bede’s greatest achievement: that he almost single-handedly kept time
moving when everywhere else it had stopped.
Ckar
ass
Time belonged only to God and could only be lived out. To

grasp it, measure it, or turn it to account or advantage was a
sin. To misappropriate part of it was theft.
—-JACQUES LE GOFF
*Sources are unclear about whether or not this sandglass existed. Most accounts do not
mention it at all, with some experts contending that the sandglass was not invented until
much later, in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. Others say sandglasses existed as
early as the second century, B.C.
Sometime around the turn of the ninth century the first Holy Roman
116
Emperor, Charlemagne (742—814), was said to have acquired a sandglass
large enough that it ran a full twelve hours before it needed to be turned.*
Details of what this timepiece looked like are not recorded. One imagines
teams of strong men in Frankish costumes— tights, loose tunics, and bands
of cloth wrapped around their legs— standing ready to flip a giant
contraption made of polished wood and blown glass, filled with hundreds of
pounds of sand. Looking on was an emperor in late middle age who by then
had inherited or conquered virtually all of modern France, the Spanish
Pyrenees, Belgium, the Netherlands, Gennany, Austria, Luxembourg,
Switzerland, Corsica, northern and central Italy, and parts of the Czech
Republic and the Balkans. It had been four centuries since so much territory
in western Europe was unified under the rule of a single man.
Charlemagne, with a flowing beard, protruding belly, and large,
117
118 CALENDAR
animated eyes, was a ruthless warrior who spent most of his seventy years in
the saddle leading countless campaigns. He loved to eat game roasted on a
spit, ignoring his doctor’s warnings that it was bad for his health. At night he
listened to storytellers recount Frankish legends and excerpts from
Augustine’s City of God. He also was fascinated by timepieces. Besides his
twelve-hour sandglass, he received in 807 a famous gift from Sultan Harun
ar-Rashid (766-809), fifth caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty and master of the
Islamic world.
Best known to Eurocentric Westerners as the sultan in The Thousand and
One Nights, al-Rashid’s reign in Baghdad is known as a golden age for art
and science in the Arab world, a period when the conquerors who had burst
out of Arabia a century and a half earlier were settling down and integrating
Islamic, Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian cultures under their rule. They
created a great flowering of learning of the sort that Charlemagne could only
dream about in his cold stone-and-timber castle at Aachen, his capital west
of the Rhine in what was then a landscape of rolling hills and dense forests
near modern Bonn.
Responding to an embassy sent by Charlemagne, the caliph dispatched to
Aachen a number of gifts: an elephant, a luxurious Persian tent, silk robes,
perfumes, ointments—and an elaborate clock. It was made of brass, “a
marvelous mechanical contraption, in which the course of the twelve hours
moved according to a water clock, with as many brazen little balls, which
fell down on the hour and through their fall made a cymbal ring underneath.
On this clock there were also twelve horsemen who at the end of each hour
stepped out of twelve windows, closing the previously open windows by
their movements.”
For Charlemagne, such timepieces represented learning and progress,
much like a Model T or an early Remington typewriter once signaled
modernity in small, isolated towns across America. But al-Rashid’s gift also
must have underscored the Europeans’ backwardness. They had nothing
approaching such a wondrous device as the caliph’s clock, a situation
Charlemagne reportedly understood and deplored. Indeed, this remarkable
warrior, when not off conquering, devoted considerable energy during his
CHARLEMAGNE’S SANDGLASS 119
47-year reign to support learning and a respect

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for intellectual pursuits notably lacking since the dismemberment of Rome

four centuries earlier. Encouraging literary scholarship, architecture, and art,
Charlemagne issued decrees requiring all priests to be well versed in basic
knowledge. “Let those who can, teach,” he ordered in 789.
He also insisted that his subjects learn and teach computus after hearing
that few bishops or priests understood enough about mathematics and time
reckoning to make competent calculations for the Easter holidays, or to
maintain the Christian calendar. “Let the ministers of God’s altar . . . collect
and associate with themselves children . . . that there may be schools for
reading-boys,” Charlemagne commanded in his 789 edict. “Let them learn
psalms, notes, chants, the computus and grammar, in every monastery and
bishop’s house.”
Following the lead of Caesar and Constantine, who transformed their
calendars as part of grand schemes to launch new political and religious eras,
Charlemagne attempted to reform his calendar, too. Most important, he and
his scribes incorporated into the civil machinery of his empire the anno
Domini system of dating favored by Dionysius and Bede. Charlemagne also
followed in many of his decrees a growing trend in Europe to number the
days of the months in sequential order instead of using the cumbersome
Roman system of kalends, nones, and ides. On Charlemagne’s tomb, planted
in the center of the octagonal cathedral he built at Aachen, the inscription
reads:
In this tomb lies the body of Charles, the Great and Orthodox Emperor, who
gloriously extended the kingdom of the Franks, and reigned prosperously for
forty-seven years. He died at the age of seventy, the year of our Lord 814, the
7th Indiction, on the 28th day of January.
The emperor also tried to Frankify the names of the months, with less
success. He proposed naming the months after the seasons of the year,
festivals, and holy celebrations. Under Charlemagne’s system, January
became Wintarmanoth, meaning “the month of cold,” and April became
Ostarmanoth, still another reference to the goddess Eos-
tre or Ostar, namesake for Easter. Though it never caught on, this calendar
did have far more relevance to Franks in the late eighth and early ninth
centuries than months designated by Latin tribes on the Tiber a millennium
and a half earlier, who named their lunar months after goats, pagan gods, and
Latin numbers. Charlemagne’s months run as follows:
Charlemagne’s Months
Wintarmanoth Hornung Roman Months
Lentzinmanoth Ostarmanoth January February
Winnemanoth Brachmanoth March
Heuvimanoth Aranmanoth April May
Witumanoth Windumemanoth June July August
Herbistmanoth Heilagmanoth September
October
In the midst of the darkness enshrouding November
Europe this sudden passion for an December
intellectual life seems a miraculous
turnaround. Here was a barbarian king,
disgusted with the low ebb of learning,
throwing open his court to what his own
chroniclers describe as a virtual cult of scholarship. At Aachen and elsewhere
Charlemagne’s scholars, artists, and musicians collected manuscripts,
published histories and ballads, and corrected translations of the Bible. His
architects and engineers built a 500-foot-long bridge over the Rhine at Mainz
and erected numerous churches and palaces, including the magnificent
Aachen Cathedral, a classic of the Romanesque-Byzantine style. Famous for
its wide arches and octagonal interior, it was adorned by Charlemagne “with
gold and silver, with lamps, and with lattices and doors of solid
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bronze. He had the marble columns for this structure brought from Rome and
Ravenna.”
Scholars attracted to Charlemagne’s patronage of learning, which
included generous stipends, journeyed from all over Europe. From central
Italy came the religious poet Paulinus of Aquileia and the grammarian Peter
of Pisa. From north Italy came the Lombard scholar Fardulf, originally taken
as a hostage during Charlemagne’s Lombard conquest; Fardulf later became
a Charlemagne loyalist and was named abbot of St. Denis in northern France.
Others came as exiles from Moslem-occupied Spain.
But the most important scholar of all who came to Aachen was Alcuin of
York (732-804), trained at Jarrow by Bede’s students. Praised by the
Frankish chronicler Einhard as “the greatest scholar of the day,” Alcuin
wrote widely on religious subjects, arranged votive masses for days of the
week, corrected the unrefined Latin of the Franks’ religious texts, and
standardized a new lower-case alphabet unknown in ancient Rome (and
which you are reading right now). Alcuin served as Charlemagne’s personal
tutor between 781 and 796, as this largely untaught barbarian chieftain made
an admirable attempt to educate himself in between battles and campaigns.
“The king spent much time and labor with him studying rhetoric, dialectics,”
says his enthusiastic aide and chronicler Einhard, “and especially astronomy;
he learned to reckon, and used to investigate the motions of the heavenly
bodies most curiously, with an intelligent scrutiny.”
This all sounds marvelous—except that it was not entirely true. Indeed, the
emperor’s reign fell far short of the grand renaissance he dreamed of, and
which some historians have claimed. Medievalists today insist
Charlemagne’s intellectual accomplishments were mostly superficial, the
pastime of a bright but unrefined warlord who treated learning as a
precocious child might admire a shiny stone or delight in
trying to work out a riddle or a puzzle. The emperor, these historians say,
built libraries and filled them with manuscripts, but treated them as treasured
ornaments, like fine cloth or rare spices—objects of status rather than texts
to read and learn from. Of course, he was hardly alone in this attitude during
an age when even supposedly learned monks spent lifetimes endlessly
copying manuscripts that few understood or bothered to read closely. As for
his clocks, Charlemagne considered them to be little more than toys,
exquisite playthings that gave him a veneer of high culture when in reality
his own artisans and scholars lacked the knowledge and skill to design and
construct anything approaching the great water clock of Sultan Harun al-
Rashid.
Charlemagne seems to have collected scholars in much the same way. As
a barbari fascinated by these symbols of a sophisticated culture, he did not
entirely comprehend them but hoped to emulate them nonetheless. Even
worse, most of these scholars were barely educated themselves. In 809, two
decades after Charlemagne issued his edicts ordering that children be
educated, this was proven when a legal proceeding at Aachen summoned the
greatest experts in the empire on ecclesiastic time reckoning. These ‘‘experts”
were questioned in regard to Charlemagne’s orders to teach computus
throughout the empire, but it is obvious from the record of the proceeding
that they had little understanding of this science. Dressed in the medieval
academic’s dark, heavy robes and felt hats, paid for by the emperor, these
men of learning sadly did not grasp even the basics of Bede’s mathematics
and calculations—or much else.
Charlemagne himself, educated as a warrior in the centuries-old tradition
of Germanic leaders and kings, could barely read and could not write despite
years of lessons from Alcuin and Peter of Pisa—and despite the insistence of
Einhard that the emperor had mastered astronomy and time reckoning.
“He . . . used to keep tablets and blanks in bed under his pillow,” admits
Einhard, “that at leisure hours he might accustom his hand to fonn the letters;
however, as he did not begin his efforts in due season, but late in life, they
met with ill sue-
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cess.” Most of his nobles were entirely illiterate. Nor could most of his
scribes and scholars except Alcuin write in decent Latin.
Another exception was Einhard himself, who wrote a reasonably clear,
notably secular history of Charlemagne’s era. He also seems to have been
more keenly aware of the intellectual shortcomings of the imperial court than
other would-be scholars of his day. “I, who am a barbarian,” he tells us, “and
very little versed in the Roman language, seem to suppose myself capable of
writing gracefully and respectably in Latin.” He also complains that his
history will be derided by both those who clung to the writings of the ancients
and “despise everything modem” and those who despised all learning,
including “the masterpieces of antiquity.”
In such an environment it was all but impossible for true scholarship to
flourish. Nor was it a place and a time where the calendar was likely to be
fixed, even as it now drifted against the solar year by almost seven days since
Caesar’s reform.
In 800 Charlemagne accepted the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the
pope, an event that signaled the Church’s acknowledgment of what had been
the political reality in Europe since at least the beginning of the Moslem
conquests: that St. Peter’s could no longer depend on either local Germanic
kings in Italy or the Byzantines to protect Christendom in the West. Lacking
armies and political power, the popes had long been leaning toward the
Franks as their new protector. Charlemagne had cemented this relationship
in 774 when he crushed the Lombards, who then ruled the northern half of
Italy, bringing the still nominally independent papal territories under his
protection. This added a measure of security for the prelates at St. Peter’s,
though politics in Rome remained tumultuous enough that sixteen years after
driving away the Lombards Charlemagne again found himself leading troops
to Rome to aid a pope besieged not by an army but by powerful local factions
in the
chaotic city. In a potent demonstration of the Church’s frailty as an earthly

power, Pope Leo III was waylaid in 799 in Rome, where Einhard says his
enemies “had inflicted many injuries . . . tearing out his eyes and cutting out
his tongue.”
Charlemagne’s response was characteristically decisive. In November of
800 he marched on Rome, restoring order so swiftly that a grateful Leo
proposed a novel reward that sharply underscored the dependency of the
Church on the Frankish royal house: naming Charlemagne emperor of a new
“Holy” Roman empire. This was an astute political move by the newly blind
and dumb Leo, fusing the secular might of Charlemagne with the formidable
religious power of the Church, an update of Constantine’s fusion of the
Roman imperium with the Church some five centuries earlier. Charlemagne
reportedly resisted the crown at first, supposedly out of modesty, though
unlike Caesar when Mark Antony offered him the diadem eight and a half
centuries earlier, Charlemagne did not refuse the crown when it was publicly
offered during a mass at St. Peter’s on Christmas day, 800.
Neither Leo nor Charlemagne may have realized it at the time, but this
crowning was not merely an act joining a desperately weak pope with a
powerful patron. It also acknowledged and reinforced two enormous changes
in Europe that would profoundly affect all aspects of life over the next several
centuries, including the calendar and the science of time reckoning.
First was the consolidation and victory of the Catholics in finally
eradicating virtually all other sects in the West, as all Christians fell in line
behind their rules for everything from dating Easter and punishing heresy to
when it was acceptable to have sex. The second was formalizing the rising
new political and economic order in Europe we call feudalism. Though still
unformed and incomplete when Leo placed the jewel-encrusted gold diadem
on the long white hair of the Frankish king, the rough outline of the fiefs,
duchies, baronies, and royal domains were then taking shape in a system that
would dominate Europe for centuries—with the Church as an integral
component, both as a huge
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feudal landowner and as a legitimizer of sovereigns who as a class would

henceforth claim their rule was sanctioned by God.
In this way the princes of Europe and the pope essentially agreed to a pact
that gave the Catholic Church authority over all religious matters—including
most science—backed by the power of the princes and their gendarmes and
armies. At the same time the Church provided the princes a potent religious
undergirding to support their authority; and an all-pervasive code of conduct
that would comfort their subjects with its message of hope and redemption,
while keeping them under tight control.
Obviously this “pact” was another body blow to any scientific endeavor
that might challenge a dogma purporting to know the truth in all matters,
including time. It also meant that anyone who presumed to suggest reforming
the Latin calendar would have to go to St. Peter’s rather than to kings and
princes—something no one dared attempt until Roger Bacon tried it four and
a half centuries later.
If the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was illiterate and treated time as
a game and timepieces as toys, then what did time mean to a farmer in the
Rhine River valley in the year 800? What sort of calendar did, say, a weaver
use in central France? Or a fisherman on the often drizzly coast of Bede’s
Northumbria?
Little is known about commoners during a period when even chronicles
and official records of kings and nobles are scarce. On a continent of
illiterates barely getting by, most people seem to have spent their days hoeing
fields, avoiding wild beasts, worrying about crops and the weather, burying
the dead, celebrating marriages and local saint’s days, and telling stories
around hearth fires during the long, cold, deadly winters. They lived, ate their
meager portions, bore children, repaired leaks in their thatch roofs, tried to
avoid armies if they came into the area, took an excited peek at the lord or
king if
he came along their road, grudgingly paid taxes, attended mass, followed the
orders of the lord’s foreman, and died, all in a continuous cycle of days and
years that to them had no discernible past or future.
Most Europeans lived in isolated rural communities, ignorant of the wider
world. For instance, archaeology reveals that most people in Britain lived in
farmsteads either by themselves or in little clusters. The latter were not even
real towns; they were more like settlements of wood-plank or sod huts
thatched in straw. Few towns, in fact, existed, or would exist until later in the
Middle Ages, when groups of farmers banded together to form villages, and
local squires and lords gathered their peasants into communal-style systems
for agriculture. Some lords were beginning to organize their large estates into
reasonably efficient units, some worked by slaves and others by serfs. But
the transition from the chaos of the barbarian era to true feudalism was barely
underway.
In 800, cathedrals, castles, and local administrative manors for kings and
nobles were the most highly organized communities in western Europe. This
is where craftsmen, tradesmen, servants, and beggars congregated, though in
small numbers since there was little work— or spare change—for these
classes. Even a “city” such as London— described by Bede as “an emporium
of many peoples coming by land and sea”—was really just a larger than
average cluster of fading Roman stone buildings, a small port, and a
community that shipped a few slaves and possibly some wool in exchange
for luxury items, metals, and a scattering of other products from the continent
that few could afford.
To us, the world of the farmer on the Rhine and the weaver in France
would have been one of dust and foul smells and mostly unhealthy-looking
people wearing crude wool tunics, leggings, and loose-fitting leather shoes,
or no shoes at all. During the day they worked from dawn to dusk in
backbreaking manual labor when crops had to be planted, tended, and
harvested; in the off season they had less to do. At night they slept in straw-
topped huts in compounds
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shared with farm animals and heated with fires and stones baked hot during
cold winter days.
In Charlemagne’s time and throughout the Middle Ages, over half the
children died before age five. Life expectancy was only 35 years. Farming
methods were crude, with wooden hoes, sticks, and little knowledge of
fertilizer or systems of crop rotations. This meant famines were frequent and
often deadly. Even in good times the diet was poor: barley or millet with a
few vegetables in gruel served daily with a piece of stale bread and an
occasional slice of cheese or fruit. Epidemics raged across districts and
kingdoms every few years. Between 540 and 600, six known plagues struck
major Mediterranean cities in the East and West, wiping out many, many
thousands of people. Most feared was smallpox, apparently first seen in
Europe in 451 when Attila’s warriors became stricken before a coalition of
Romans, Ostrogoths and Franks defeated his Huns in France at the crucial
Battle of Catalaunian Fields. Russian folklore also warns about kissing the
Pest Maiden, and those who knew the Bible lived in fear of the fourth
horseman in the Book of Revelations, sitting on his “pale horse . . . and his
name that sat on him was Death.”
Thieves and bandits ran amuck in 800, though there was little to steal
outside the well-guarded estates, cathedrals, and small walled towns. Poems
and stories from that long-ago era tell of a great fear of wild animals; dark,
haunting forests where no one dared venture; and imaginary beasts and devils
with fiery eyes and horns. People were earthy and pragmatic, but in the
absence of scientific explanations for why the sun rose and fell and countless
other mysteries they were also highly credulous and susceptible to even the
most ludicrous superstitions and rumors. In 810 a buzz spread across
Frankland that an enemy of Charlemagne was poisoning cattle with a magic
dust. Another rumor insisted that “cloud-borne ships” manned by “aerial
sailors” were on their way to ravage the land. Even the sensible Bede
offhandedly describes dozens of miracles occurring within living memory of
his own time—such as the curing of the blind man by Augustine, the
archbishop of Canterbury, while meeting with the heretic Celts under the oak
tree on the border of Kent and Wales.
Few people in this world had a need for formal calendars. Like Hesiod’s
Greeks and pastoral cultures around the globe, Europeans in the age of
Charlemagne were primarily interested in predictable cycles and cues from
nature. Chaucer, for instance, starts The Canterbury Tales with a calendric
guide to the seasons and crops that Hesiod would have understood perfectly:
Whan that April with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engenred in the four;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken
melodye . . . Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
Anyone living in England during Chaucer’s age would have instantly

understood the references to April as the time of “shoures soote”—“showers
sweet”—and of “zephirus eek with his sweete breath,” referring to the west
wind that blows sweetly after the “droghte” of March. Indeed, Chaucer
considers it vitally important to establish first in his reader’s mind the time
of year when “folk to goon on pilgrimages,” though he evidently has little
interest in the actual year or date beyond noting that this is April: the start of
spring.
And why should he? He was writing for an overwhelmingly agricultural
people closely connected to the soil, for whom time was more
130 CALENDAR
than anything a powerful constant: a progression of youth and old age, birth
and death, and as always the rise and fall of the sun each day. Nothing
symbolized this better than the medieval wheel of fortune that perpetually
turned, with one’s lot sometimes up and sometimes down in a never-ending
cycle. This great wheel of life represents the insecurity of an age when death
and disaster lurked everywhere, and it explains to a large extent the mind-set
of resignation about progress and change that deeply permeated this culture,
caught in a constricting, repeating, seldom-altered circle of time.
Fused onto this world were the cycles and time schemes of the Church,
the most obvious religious time marker being the weekly observance of
Sunday, the day of rest and worship, which remains today the most constant
time marker in a Christian’s religious life. Next came the regular progression
of saint’s days. These saints came in two varieties: the major saints and
apostles, whose days were marked by feasts and ceremonies, and the
hundreds of lesser saints, whose days were marked by a reading of their Eves
in monasteries and perhaps a prayer by someone looking for a special favor
connected to that saint’s cult.
By 800 the number of saints with their own day of remembrance and
worship numbered in the many hundreds in some areas. Because Rome
would not formalize the process of achieving sainthood until centuries later,
the Northumbrians in Britain were essentially free to declare their own saints;
so were the Lombards, Burgundians, Bavarians, and Irish. They often
became a matter of fierce local pride and identity, such as St. Patrick in
Ireland and St. Andrew in Scotland. Some became potent national symbols
as people began to think of themselves as Irish, French, Scottish, and Basque.
In Charlemagne’s time saint’s days were called “birthdays”—geneth- lios,
or natalis in Latin—which then meant simply “commemoration,” and which
comes from the custom in pagan Rome of celebrating deified rulers on a
particular day.†††† Typically a saint’s day fell on the date of
††††The actual word “birthday” comes from an Old Norse word, burdardagr, and the
German geburtstag.
his or her martyrdom. Complete lists of saints began appearing in the fourth
century, describing in often gory detail their burnings, hackings, crucifixions,
mutilations, and drownings; the particulars of place and time; and the
locations of a saint’s relics—a fragment of bone, a tooth, or a swatch of hair.
Many of these holy men and women became identified with some important
attribute. St. Nicholas became the patron saint of children and virgins; he was
also revered by sailors before becoming the model for our St. Nick, or Santa
Claus. His day is December 6. St. Agnes’s day is on January 21; she is still
venerated by many Cath- olic women “for her chastity and purity.” And St.
Giles, a seventhcentury bishop whose lameness has made him revered as the
patron saint for anyone who is ill or disabled, has his day on September 1.
People prayed to these and other saints for good crops, rain, and healthy
children almost as pagans once prayed to specific gods assigned to oversee
agriculture or fertility. For many these cults offered an intimate faith tied to
a real person whose holy life had given them special powers in heaven to
intervene either directly in a person’s affairs or as a supplicant to God on that
person’s behalf. In this way the calendar of the saints became both a
progression of religious dates and festivals and a highly personal cycle of
time in which cultists eagerly anticipated certain days, which they marked
with gifts and prayers.
The major saint’s days became so well known and widely observed that
many people used them in place of Caesar’s scheme of months and days. A
farmer would tell his friends that he last roofed his hut not on March 21, but
on St. Benedict’s day,‡‡‡‡ and he would remember that his second child was
born on St. Augustine’s day, not on August 28. Likewise, travelers in the
Middle Ages talked about arriving in Rome or Paris on the Feast of the
Assumption or during the feast of St. Stephen rather than on a numbered date.
“He passed over the bar of Sanlucar on Sunday, the morning of Saint Lazarus,
with great festivity,” writes a chronicler of a sixteenth-century conquistador
leaving Spain on a ship bound for the Americas. The Christian calendar of
‡‡‡‡St. Benedict’s Day was changed to July 11 in 1969 to avoid Lent.

132 CALENDAR
saint’s days and festivals was also used to name places. Florida—“flowers”
in Spanish—was named after the day Juan Ponce de Leon arrived there in
1513, on the day of the Pascua Florida, the “feast of flowers” to celebrate
Easter.
To remember all of these saints, monks and priests wrote poem- songs
listing each one and why he or she was revered, which they memorized and
frequently repeated. One of the earliest of these is a verse calendar of saints
from Britain, the “Metrical Calendar of York.” Penned in the late eighth
century, the same century Bede wrote his History, it contained the names of
some 81 saints, many of them now so obscure that a line or two in this
calendar poem is the only information about them that survives. Who, for
example, is St. Cletus? Or St. Linus? One wonders whether over the centuries,
as memories and details of these forgotten saints grew dim, the monks
chanting their names even knew who they were:
At its beginning November shines with a multi-faceted jewel:

It gleams with the praise of All Saints.
Martin of Tours ascends the stars on the ides.
Thecla finished her life on the fifteenth kalends.
But Cecilia worthily died with glory on the tenth kalends.
A better and certainly more entertaining method for preserving dates and
details about the saints evolved into a new literary form in Middle Ages: the
martyrology, books that dated saint’s days and described details of their lives.
Bede, for instance, wrote a classic martyrology with 114 entries, researched
with his usual thoroughness. He also uses our modern system of assigning a
number to each day of the month, rather than the kalends and ides used in the
contemporaneous “Metrical Calendar of York,” yet another indication of the
many different dating schemes then in use. A typical entry in Bede:
23 November, at Rome, the feast of St. Clement, the bishop who, at the Emperor
Trajan’s request, was sent into exile in the Pontus.§§§§ While there, because
he converted many to the faith through his miracles and teaching, he was cast
into the sea with an anchor tied to his neck. But as his disciples prayed the sea
receded three miles, and they found his body in a stone coffin within a marble
oratory, and the anchor lying nearby.
Writing and copying calendars of saints’ lives became a major focus of

scholars and artists during the Middle Ages. Every morning monks read
descriptions of that day’s saints. Even today a large department at the Vatican
stays busy keeping track of the thousands of officially recognized saints and
the thousands of others who have been canonized or beatified as steps toward
possible sainthood.
Saint’s days in the Middle Ages remained an informal method of dating
for centuries, though scholars and kings preferred more formal systems for
dating edicts and compiling chronicles. In the centuries following the
collapse of Rome this tended to be the Roman scheme of kalends, nones, and
ides, though as the empire became a more distant memory Europeans began
replacing it with a number of alternatives. As we know, Bede and
Charlemagne embraced our own system of dies mensis, where the days of
the month are counted in a simple numeric order from 1 to 30 or 31. Others
used a variety of other methods, including one called the Bologna custom,
practiced widely in Italy, which counted days from the first to the middle of
the month, but then started counting backward toward the last day of the
month. Another scheme used verses in a poem in which each Latin syllable
represented a day of the month. For example, in one of these poems the verse
for the first 17 days of January ran: “Cisio Janus Epi sibi vendicat Oc Feli
Mar An” with Ci corresponding to January 1, si to January 2, and so forth.
The idea was that people could memorize the verses—which usually
conunemorated appropriate local saints— and would then know the proper
day in its proper order.
§§§§The Black Sea.

134 CALENDAR
But few fanners on the Rhine or weavers in France ever stopped to think
about such things. To these people, who had little control over their
environment or their lives, the whole idea of attempting to calculate and
measure something as unfathomable and unremitting as time was either
blasphemous or laughable. The few written insights into the mind-set of
commoners on the subjects of time, calendars, and science in general suggest
a great deal of snickering at monks, scholars, and astrologers bumbling about
counting on their fingers and staring at the sky. The Miller in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales pokes fun at an astronomer-astrologer, but the verse might
also have applied to anyone with their head in the clouds, so to speak:
Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee

Ye, blessed be alwey, a lewed man
that noght but oonly his bileve kan!
So ferde another clerk with astromye, He walked in the feelds, for to
prye Upon the sterres, what ther sholde bifalle, Til he was in a marle-
pit yfalle.
In other words, this “clerk,” or scholar of astronomy, did not heed what every
“lewed”—unlearned—Christian knew and believed: that “men should not
know of God’s private affairs.” He foolishly studied the moon and stars and
was such a dolt, according to the Miller, that he was looking up when he
should have been looking down at his feet—and fell in a “marle-pit.”
Still, even the simplest Christian presumably had at least a vague
knowledge of critical events in Christian history. In fact, for most people this
timeline remained far more real than a history of their own era: the sequence
of the Creation and events in the Old Testament;
CHARLEMAGNE S SANDGLASS 135
and episodes in Christ’s life and the lives of the saints. These events needed
to be recorded and dated to become valid, and it was this need that motivated
time reckoners such as Dionysius and Bede to devise their year-by-year
dating schemes in an age when otherwise few people cared about what year
it was beyond year 6 or 10 in the reign of their local king or squire.
Several chronological schemes were proposed and used besides Dionysius
Exiguus’s anno Domini. These included the old Roman system of fifteen-
year interdictions, which had started with the first year of Constantine’s reign
in 312. Iberians used something called the Era of Spain, which tracked Easter
cycles starting with the Roman conquest of Iberia in 38 B.C. Others observed
the Era of the Passion, with year 1 dated back to A.D. 33, supposedly the
date of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. But none was as popular as a
possible alternative to the year of our Lord than a timeline based on the date
of the Creation as year 1. Bede, for instance, carefully studied what he
considered the relevant passages in the Bible and somehow came up with a
specific day that he believed God began forming the sky, earth, and water:
March 18, 3952 B.C.. If Europeans had decided to use Bede’s calculation of
the Creation, our year 2000 would be 5951 A.c.—after the Creation.
And what about predicting the future? Time in Christianity was, of course,
heading someplace: to Christ’s second coming and eventually to eternity,
events that would occur along the same timeline as past events. This made it
tempting for medieval chronologists to try to date not only the beginning of
the world, but the end. A century before Charlemagne, one scholar in the
royal Frankish court calculated, using poor addition, that the world was 5,928
years old in the year 727. Applying this to the notion that the world was
moving through six ages of 1,000 years apiece, this computor decided that
the world would end in exactly 72 years.
136 CALENDAR
Bede, following the example of Augustine, condemned such predictions.

He insisted that future time belonged to God, “who, as the Everlasting,
created times whenever he wanted, knows the end of times, and puts an end
to the fluctuating processes of time when he wishes.” Still, most people who
thought about such things believed that however old the earth might be, the
end was near. “The world is growing old,” wrote Fredegar, a seventh-century
Frankish chronicler who wrote in corrupt Latin. “We live at the end of time.”
Medieval chroniclers were constantly looking for portents of the grand
finale: plagues, earthquakes, eclipses, battles, and omens of every kind.
Mystics looked for signs of the Antichrist’s coming, with writers such as the
remarkable theologian and poet Hildegard von Bingens offering vivid
descriptions of what he would look like: “A beast with monstrous head, black
as coal, with flaming eyes, wearing asses’ ears and with gaping jaws
decorated with iron hooks.”
Amidst this official pessimism certain dates took on meaning at least for
a few, such as the coming of the year 1000, though the anno Domini system
was still not widely followed.***** Even where it was, Christians did not
necessarily fear the end. They expected trials and tribulations and a final,
horrific apocalypse, as predicted in the Bible. But they also looked forward
to what would come after the current age ended and the calendar truly
stopped—when Christ would usher in an age of eternal happiness for the
elect, which of course included them.
Meanwhile, as Christians waited for Armageddon they had more
immediate concerns: they lived, ate, worked, bore children, sang songs,
laughed, cried, and died as they always had, with only an occasional thought
about the Antichrist or the last days of a calendar most medieval Europeans
were at best vaguely aware of.
***** Actually the first millennium came in the year 1001, since there is no year zero in
our calendar.
But despite the “vast indifference to time” that permeated Europe during the
reign of Charlemagne, already under way were real changes that centuries
later would usher in a revolution in the perception of time. For even though
Charlemagne saw clocks as curiosities, his keen interest in them and the idea
of telling time made a lasting impression on future generations. At the same
time a new invention was spreading slowly across the West: the bell. Called
glocka in German—whence came our word clock—bells were used to signal
hours and other times of the day. By legend, church bells were invented in
the fifth century in the town of Nola in Campania—thus the term
“Campanola bells.” Another legend credits Pope Sabinianus (pope from 604
to 606) with ordering churches to mark the hours of the day by ringing their
bells. Bells probably spread first to monasteries, where monks used hand
bells to signal canonical hours. Later tower bells summoned people to mass.
Bells probably had a minimal impact on the average person. Yet they were
the first mechanical “clocks” to govern everyday life in Europe, usually rung
according to time as measured on a water clock or sundial. Imagine a farmer
in a field being told to have an acre plowed by the time the bell tower rang
noon, when before he had been told by his lord simply to work until the sun
was high. Or think of a clock that signaled the beginning of a mass with an
exactitude never before known when hours were measured using the position
of the sun in the sky. This was an entirely different way of viewing time, with
a measurement of it being assigned a specific value.
The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne died on January 28, 814. His empire
died soon after, as his heirs argued and fought and divided his realms among
them. With it perished the political order that Charlemagne had briefly
imposed. So did the emperor’s infatuation with learning, manuscripts, and
marvelous timepieces, which it turned out was not shared by his immediate
successors. They dismissed the schol-
138 CALENDAR
ars from the court and closed the schools for children opened by the emperor.
Still, the age of Charlemagne ignited a spark, with the scholar Alcuin of York
and others compiling encyclopedias and collecting manuscripts. It also
provided an example and a context for quality, taste, humanistic culture, and
sound grammar, which laid a foundation for a slow—very slow—evolution
toward an era when dates and calendars would begin to matter to more than
just a few monks sitting in their cloisters trying to calculate the age of the
world and when the end would come.
But Europe was not where the action was for time reckoning and the
calendar anyway in Bede’s or Charlemagne’s era. Indeed, as Europe slept,
developments were under way far to the East, where science was not ignored
and a long line of brilliant thinkers were making discoveries that centuries
later would penetrate at last the darkness of the West to astonish and inspire
men like Roger Bacon, and to once again commence the movement of time.
—SEVERUS SEBOKT, SYRIAN BISHOP, A.D. 662
In 476, far away in time and place from Charlemagne’s dark, imposing
castle at Aachen, beyond the eastern border of Frankland and on across the
Balkans, the territories of Byzantium, and the vastness of Mesopotamia and
Persia, a Hindu genius was born on the Ganges River. A blend of Ptolemy
the astronomer, Pythagoras the mathematician, and Bacon the rebel,
Aryabhata was one of a remarkable group of Indian scholars, and a pivotal
figure on one of the stranger journeys ever taken by an assemblage of ideas
across time and geography.
This saga of ideas begins six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and
Egypt. It then moves to ancient Greece, only to hopscotch to India during the
great Hellenistic surge that accompanied Alexander’s armies in the fourth
century B.C. The ideas then arc back west centuries later, landing in the great
centers of Islamic learning after the Arab conquest of Persia and India. The
Arabs in turn carried the knowledge to portals in Spain, Syria, and Sicily,
where it made its way into Europe, to be embraced at last by pre-Renaissance
thinkers such as Bacon.
During the journey each culture that seized on these new ideas
139
140 CALENDAR
added significant contributions, and together over the centuries they

assembled a remarkable body of learning about mathematics, astronomy, and
other fields of science and art that would eventually make it possible for time
reckoners in Europe to correct Caesar’s calendar— and to measure time with
an accuracy essential to propel science into the modern world.
*The Pythagorean theorem is one of the most fundamental concepts in mathematics. It is

critical for making basic astronomical observations for anyone wanting to use the stars or
sun to measure time. The theorem says that in any right-angled triangle, the square of the
hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It is named for the
Greek Pythagoras (sixth century B.C..), though several cultures discovered it
independently.
Aryabhata himself was a key figure in a tradition in India stretching back to
THE STRANGE JOURNEY OF 365.242199 141
at least 1500 B.C.. when light-skinned Aryans—the ancestors of those who

later founded the Hindu religion—swept down from the northwest to conquer
an earlier civilization, the Harappa.
The Aryan-Hindus started writing about mathematics as early as 800 B.C.,
when their priests began laying out complex designs for temples and altars,
and for dividing up land—a process that led to the discovery of the basic
geometric rules that also seem to have marked the first stages of advanced
cultures in Egypt, Sumeria, China, and Central and South America. Hindus
called their version of this property- and construction-inspired math
sulvasutras—suha being the name of cords used by architects to mark off a
structure’s foundations, and sutra referring to rules governing a ritual or
science.
These crude concepts were written down in Sanskrit verse, and were
critical to an early understanding of shapes and their relationship to one
another—including versions of the Pythagorean theorem and early geometric
algebra.* Eventually they turned this body of knowledge skyward to measure
the planets and the stars, which led to sophisticated
142 CALENDAR
attempts to measure time, including astrological predictions of the future

based on the movements of the sun and of the zodiac.
The age of the sulvasutras ended around A.D. 200, during a period of
political instability that lasted until the early fourth century, when the Gupta
dynasty seized most of northern India and launched Hindu India’s classic age.
Taking up where the sulvasutras left off, Gupta astronomers in the fourth and
early fifth centuries made great strides in mathematics and astronomy,
recording them in a series of texts known as siddhantas, or “systems” of
astronomy. Written in the two hundred years before Aryabhata began
working, they provided him with the universe of fundamental concepts he
used for his own work—including estimates of pi, basic rules of trigonometry,
the motion of the planets and stars, and the length of the year.
Aryabhata grew up during the final years of the Gupta golden age, when
India was a world center of art, science, literature, and architecture. Learning
was considered a sacred duty, and educated Hindus were expected to know
not only the basics of reading, writing, and numbers but also to be adept at
poetry, painting, and music. This was the age of the Kama Sutra, the text that
treats love as a fine art, offering alongside lovemaking positions a list of “arts
to be studied, together with the Kama Sutra.” These include swordplay,
composing poetry, “playing on musical glasses filled with water,” chemistry,
teaching parrots to speak, grammar, tattooing—and mathematics.
Gupta India was hardly a paradise for everyone. Governed by a strictly
enforced caste system, the poor endured a life of crushing poverty similar to
that in many Indian villages today, little changed since Aryabhata’s day—
crowded clusters of straw-thatched huts, dusty markets filled with burlap
sacks of rice and peppers, and lean men trudging to and fro to work small
plots of land. Still, excavations in Gupta centers attest to the large numbers
of merchants, artisans, and others in a large middle class who enjoyed a
prosperity on par with the golden age of Rome, which had been a major
trading partner with Gupta India until its collapse. Archaeologists sifting
through Gupta ruins have found heaps of coins and blown glass from Rome;
and
from Roman sites as far away from the subcontinent as Pompeii, others have
unearthed Indian statuettes, vases, mirrors, and busts of Roman men with
Indian hairstyles.
Aryabhata’s birthplace is unknown. Nor does anyone know what he
looked like, though he himself tells us he lived in the busy imperial capital
of Kusumapura. Today the city is a hot and hauntingly quiet stretch of
drooping palms, buzzing flies, and crumbled ruins that extend some 12 miles
along the banks of the Ganges, near modern Patna. This is in northeastern
India, 250 miles north of Calcutta and just 100 miles south of the sudden rise
of the Himalayas. At its height the city was filled with throngs of people:
beggars disfigured by disease, rich traders in white robes, musicians playing
cymbals and flutes, silk-clad Brahmans averting their gaze to avoid making
eye contact with someone from a lower caste, and priests with hair tinted by
henna toting statues of gods and goddesses. Enormous, airy palaces lined the
Ganges, alongside imposing conical temples studded with statuary and
ornaments. The entire city was shrouded with a gauzelike veil of incense,
smoke, and dust.
A leading instructor at a school near Kusumapura, Aryabhata spent most
of his life collecting and compfling everything ever written in India about the
stars, geometry, numbers, and time reckoning in his magnum opus, the
Aryabhatiya, a slim volume written in Sanskrit verse. And while only 123
metrical stanzas long, it packs an enormous amount of information in what
became a handy volume of mathematical and astronomical concepts passed
down and commnented on over the centuries. Some of it is highly accurate,
some not, a contradiction that prompted a famed Arab mathematician named
Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973-1048) to comment that Hindu mathematics offers
two types of nuggets: common pebbles and costly crystals.
Aryabhata starts his poem with an invocation to Brahma, “who is one in
causality, as creator of the universe.” He then divides his work into three
parts: on mathematics (ganita), time reckoning (kalakriya), and the sphere
(gola). In the section on time reckoning Aryabhata describes the Hindu
calendar, including measurements of the months,
144 CALENDAR
weeks, and year, and various time spans relating to Vedic mythology over
the course of millions of years. In the section on astronomy he estimates the
length of the solar year at 365.3586805 days, some 2 hours 47 minutes and
44 seconds off from the true year in Aryabhata’s era, which equaled
365.244583 days.* He also gets the diameter of the earth almost right, at
8,316 miles, but is wildly off on his estimated orbits of the sun, moon, and
planets. Aryabhata believed that the earth was a sphere that rotated on its axis,
and he understood lunar eclipses as the shadow of the earth falling on the
moon. Some historians have even detected what one calls “glimmerings in
his system ... of a possible underlying theory” that the earth might revolve
around the sun, a possible nod toward the truth about our heliocentric solar
system a thousand years before Copernicus.
In his section on math Aryabhata gives formulas for the areas of a triangle
that are correct, and areas for a sphere and a pyramid that are not. He
calculates pi to be 3.1416, another near hit that is so close to the value given
by Claudius Ptolemy some three hundred years earlier that it is possible
Aryabhata was influenced by the great Alexandrian astronomer, though no
direct link is known. Aryabhata wrote a famous stanza giving his value for
pi originally in Sanskrit verse:
Add 4 to 100, multiply by 8, and add 62,000. The result is approximately the
circumference of a circle of which the diameter is 20,000.
*Because the tropical year is steadily slowing, the year in Aryabhata’s era was slightly
shorter than our current year of 365.242199 days. The difference between then and now
is about seven seconds.
Unfortunately Aryabhata docs not explain how he arrived at his formulas
146 CALENDAR
and calculations. Nor does he offer proof for what ends up being a catalogue
of arbitrary rules. One senses that the Aryabhatiya was intended as more of
a supplement or summary for people already familiar with the concepts than
a comprehensive encyclopedia or the-
ory of mathematics. He may have written down details elsewhere in a work

now lost, or perhaps as exercises for his students.
Aryabhata is also credited with writing a work called the Khandak-
hadyaka, which means “food prepared with candy,” possibly referring to the
pleasure it gives. But the original has been lost. Only a heavily edited and
annotated version exists, reworked by another renowned Indian
mathematician, Brahmagupta (598-665).
A debate has long simmered over where Aryabhata’s ideas and the corpus
contained in the sulvasutras and siddhantas came from. Indian historians
have long insisted that it sprang up purely as the product of indigenous genius,
with origins possibly going back to the dawn of civilization on the Indus
River in about 2500 B.C. This is when the ancient Harappa culture began to
flourish in cities made of mud brick that since have all but crumbled away,
making them difficult to learn about. Still, archaeologists have unearthed
evidence—building designs and measuring devices—that suggest the
enigmatic Harappa did master fundamental mathematical principles.
Possibly these were passed on to the Aryan-Hindus who stormed down from
the north to conquer the Harappa and seize most of northern India, though
the history of this period is so murky that no concrete link can be made.
A more definite influence came from Greece after 326 B.C., when
Alexander seized northwest India. In his wake came the concepts of
Pythagoras, Meton, Eudoxus, and Alexander’s instructor, Aristotle. The
conqueror’s armies also stirred up and brought with them the scientific
knowledge of other cultures swept into his brief empire, including Egypt and
Mesopotamia. The Greek hegemony in northwest India lasted only a few
years, falling apart soon after Alexander’s death in 323 B.C. But Greek
knowledge and culture lingered as Greek traders established thriving
enclaves in India and established the lu-
148 CALENDAR
crative trade routes west that persisted throughout the Hellenistic and Roman
eras.
This allowed Indians an opportunity to absorb Greek ideas about
planetary theory and geometry. One of the siddhantas, the Paulisha
Siddhanta, may even be named after a minor astrologer from Alexandria,
Paulos Alexandros (fourth century A.D.). Certainly this work contains
striking similarities to Claudius Ptolemy’s trigonometry and astronomy, on
which Paulos based his work—including a value for pi nearly identical to
that later identified by Aryabhata.
The Chinese may have been another influence. They maintained a
vigorous enough commerce with India that the two cultures swapped styles
of clothing and architecture and even words. This was particularly true after
Buddhism spread across the Middle Kingdom in the late Han Dynasty and
during the period from 220 to 589, known as the Six Dynasties. No direct
evidence exists of mathematical ideas being transferred between China and
India, though the lifetime of the great Chinese mathematician Tsu Ch’ung
Chi (430-501)— who came up with the most accurate estimation of pi in the
world until the European Renaissance—overlaps with that of Aryabhata, who
wrote his Aryabhatiya two years before Tsu’s death. Tsu also measured the
precise time of the solstices, building on the work of another brilliant Chinese
astronomer and court astrologer, Zhang Heng (A.D. 78-139), who corrected
the Chinese lunar calendar in the year A.D. 123 to bring it into line with the
seasons. Tsu also proposed reforms in 463 to China’s lunar calendar, which
apparently were rejected.
But no influence in India was apparently more significant for our calendar—
and the mathematics and equations needed to fix it—than that of another
cradle of civilization: the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia. Or so it
seems, despite the lack of evidence for direct
links between India and Mesopotamia on matters of mathematics and the

calendar. For instance, no manuscripts exist to tell the tale of an Indian
scholar visiting ancient Sumer in such-and-such year. Still, many of Vedic
India’s mathematical and astronomic concepts seem strikingly similar to
some of those used in the Near East, such as the sulvasutra rules for
construction using Pythagorean triads—which appears in Babylon before it
does in India. Other shared concepts include ideas about fractions, algebra,
polygonal areas, and applied geometry that appear first in Mesopotamia and
later in the sulvasutras and siddhantas.
It seems inconceivable that ancient mathematicians and time reckoners
from Ur and Harappa, and later from Babylon and Vedic India, remained
completely ignorant of one another during the many centuries of commerce
between the Tigris-Euphrates region and India. Some Indians almost
certainly picked up a little cuneiform, the writing of Mesopotamia for four
thousand years, perhaps from watching a Babylonian merchant scribbling
down figures on a wax tablet on the coast of Sind, or from a Mesopotamian
ship captain calculating wages to pay his porters in Gujarat.
However the contact may have occurred, it seems likely that somewhere
over the millennia the Mesopotamians sparked an idea that led to one of the
great mathematical discoveries in history: the system of arranging numbers
that mathematicians call “positional notation,” now used by virtually the
entire world. Among many other things, this made an accurate calendar and
higher mathematics possible.
In positional notation, numbers are arranged in a sequence whereby each
number stands for itself multiplied by a base number that increases by one
power of the base with each place. For instance, in our base-10 system the
number 365, representing a rounded-off approximation of the year in days,
is drawn from a set of ten symbols, 1-2- 3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0, that are arranged to
increase tenfold with each place. So we have 3 hundreds (10 2) 6 tens (101),
and 5 digits (10°), the digits referring to the original source of the base-10
system—counting with one’s fingers.
150 CALENDAR
It is a concept so central to our modern system of numbers—and our way

of life—that we hardly think about it, though this was not the case throughout
most of human history. Indeed, the only culture to invent a true positional
notation system in preclassic ancient times was Mesopotamia, whose
mathematicians stumbled on it almost four thousand years ago—predating
all other cultures by millennia.
To fully appreciate the significance of positional notation and a number such

as 365, one has to realize that for most of human history people used either
their fingers or bulky, hard-to-manipulate symbols representing ever-
increasing numbers.
The first written numbers seem to have been sticklike signs scratched onto
bones or rocks long before written languages were invented. We still use a
version of them today to count small numbers of things that accumulate over
short periods of time: yellow-breasted warblers sighted during a morning
hike; runs batted in during an afternoon baseball game; or the number of
patients seen at a wellbaby clinic every hour. For instance:
8 = IIII III
But this system quickly becomes impossibly cumbersome even with a

number as simple as 365, roughly the number of days in a year:
K«Ô1«IO1W1N)H|O1N)NI^1W1«IO)W
iNlUlMUllflllNlNlNlNlMlNlNlNlNlNllNlNllll
1N1NH|1N1III1III1N1N1N1NI«1N11N1N1N1N1N1N1*I
iNlNmilNlNUllMlllllNlNlllllNlN
It takes several minutes just to write out this number—never mind using
it to add or subtract, or to write out and perform a more so-
phisticated calculation such as determining the angle of the earth to the sun,
or the shape of a temple along the Euphrates or the Ganges. This led early
civilizations to devise more compact system of symbols, often closely related
to early forms of written languages. For example, the Egyptians invented a
hieroglyphic-inspired sequence of numbers:
1 10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000 1,000,000
And in the Americas the Maya used a system of lines and dots originally
represented by sticks and pebbles, later adding hieroglyphic symbols to
represent larger numbers:
15 20
Other cultures such as those of the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese used
letters of their alphabets to represent numbers:
Greeks:†††††
ABTAEFZHeiK A M N 5 O n
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
qP2TY0XTQA
90 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
†††††When small letters were introduced into the Greek alphabet, these small letters
replaced the older capitals.
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Romans:
IVXLCDM
1 5 10 50 100 500 1,000
Chinese:*
—» ^X O 35.-^ -^^ -H +== = =
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50
± =L i i £ * «
60 70 80 90 100 1,000 10,000
Here is how these cultures would have written the number 365, the
number of days in a solar year, rounded off:
(T"\ G"T (ri nnnu i
in Egyptian / / / nnnu
in Chinese
£
in Maya in
Greek in TEE
Latin CCCLXV
*The Chinese developed a second system of numbers called “rod numbers” that use a
base ten position notation system using 18 number symbols instead of nine. Much later,
they added a zero—the first use coming in A.D. 1247.
I II ' III Illi Hill T IT BI HR — = = = ^ ± 4= i i
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
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These number symbols were a great improvement over sticklike signs, but
still presented problems for calculating or recording complicated equations
and large numbers. This is why a positional system was such a phenomenal
breakthrough—a leap of inspiration made by a long-forgotten Mesopotamian
who undoubtedly became frustrated with writing out large numbers. Perhaps
he was a scribe assigned the unenviable task of counting barrels of wine
coming and going from Ur’s royal palace. Or an architect designing a
ziggurat but running out of space on a clay tablet as he made his calculations,
and so he
365 = III 1 Hill
invented a quick shorthand to save space. Here is what 365 looks like in
cuneiform with its positional notation:
ww
In this system each J stands not for a power of 10, but of 60, since
Mesopotamians used a sexagesimal system rather than a decimal one. The
smaller 1=1; the Mesopotamians also used the symbol 4 to represent 10. This
means that six J’s equal (60X6), or 360, with five small J’s added to make
365—a cuneiform number that is certainly easier to write out than 365 in,
say, Egyptian. Still, even cuneiform could be unwieldy. Indeed, ancient
Sumerians and Babylonians often had to contend with writing out long
strings of repeating symbols for each digit from 0 to 60, rather than our
simple symbols of 1 through 9, and 0. When Babylonian astronomers
calculated the length of a lunar year versus a solar year, the equation rounded
off would have looked like this:
365 days UUIT W

-354 days HUI <£< U
11 days <I
It was this problem of unwieldiness—and more—that the Indians solved

by inventing our system of nine numeric symbols sequenced in positional
notation, later adding zero for the tenth symbol.
How exactly the Vedics of India figured out this brilliantly simple scheme
is another mystery, though they might have been inspired to transform
Mesopotamia’s base-60 positional system into their own base 10. Some
historians also speculate that a connection exists between Indian numbers
and ancient Chinese rod numerals, which also have symbols for 1 through
10 used—after the third century A.D.— in a positional system.
Whatever its origin, these symbols that eventually became our own
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first appear in carvings on stone columns across north India as early as 250
B.C. or before, when Hindu mathematics was making the transition to a
positional system. Written out in the early Hindu script known as Brahmi,
the first nine numbers look like this:
_==YrG7^>
123456789
Subsequent versions in the evolution between the earliest Brahmi

numerals, circa 250 B.C., and the numbers used by Aryabhata seven
centuries look like this:
Modern Number Progression of the Centuries Version in

Use, c. A.D. 500
1 - - -' ^ 7 t
2 a ■>*.*. a.
3 Ba. $ a. A
a. a
4 +$> >V¥
5 *HH v X
L4
6 te
7 777
8 777^C
9 «:<??<? *U
But this system still was not purely positional. Brahmi, lacking a zero,
also had individual symbols or groups of symbols to represent 10 through 90,
100, 500, and 1,000. In Brahmi the number 365 is:
7=4 r
The evolution from this version of Brahmi to a ten-digit positional

notation is not entirely clear. Historians suspect that the motivation
158 CALENDAR
to drop the Brahmi symbols beyond the number nine came from the demands
of the Hindu religion, which uses a calendar encompassing enormous spans
of time to date its creation myths. These form a religious chronology
stretching back millions of years, requiring the manipulation of large
numbers—which is far easier when one uses powers of ten. The Indian use
of counting boards also encouraged the development of number symbols that
were simple and few in number.
The timing is also uncertain. Aryabhata was certainly aware of positional
notation and apparently used it in his day-to-day calculations. But because
he wrote his treatises in metrical verse he used words and letters to represent
numbers—the equivalent of us writing out “twenty-nine” rather than 29—in
an attempt at mathematics as poetry.
The first known use in India of the nine-digit positional system has been
discovered on a plate and dated to the year 595. The number is a date—346—
written in a decimal positional notation.
The first outside mention of the Hindus’ system of nine numbers comes
in 662 from the Syrian Severus Sebokht, an academic and bishop who lived
in a Greek community founded a century earlier by scholars fleeing Athens
after Justinian closed Plato’s Academy, which he had accused of fostering
paganism. Apparently Sebokht became piqued at his colleagues’ disdain for
any knowledge beyond the Greek sphere. Writing about the Hindus, he cites
their “subtle discoveries of astronomy . . . their valuable methods of
calculation, and their computing that surpasses description. I wish only to
say that this computation is done by means of nine signs.”
But nine does not make ten, meaning the system was not complete without
zero, a concept critical to understanding the advanced mathematics needed
to create an accurate calendar. Zero developed as Indians using the nine
numbers for calculations found themselves
needing to keep an empty column on their counting boards to represent

“nothing,” an idea they transferred to writing out numbers by leaving a space.
But this could be confusing, since a space could mean either an empty
position in a single number or the space between two separate numbers. To
avoid confusion somebody along the way decided to make something of
“nothing.”
Who was first to scratch out a symbol for zero is yet another mystery. In
Mesopotamia a symbol for the empty position appears late for this ancient
civilization, arriving around the time of Alexander’s invasion or just after,
represented by two small wedges placed obliquely:
^=0
At roughly the same time or shortly thereafter the Indians began using a
dot, a symbol that became widespread enough by the sixth century that the
Indian poet Subandhu used it as a metaphor in his poem Vasavadatta:
And at the time of the rising of the moon with its blackness of night, bowing low, as
it were, with folded hands under the guise of closing the blue lotuses, immediately
the stars shone forth . . . like zero dots . . . scattered in the sky as if on the ink blue
skin rug of the Creator who reckoneth the total with a bit of moon for chalk.
The Indians referred to this “nothing”-dot as sunya, meaning void or

empty. Our word zero comes from sifr, the Arabic version of sunya, which
medieval Europeans altered to ziphirum in Latin.
Greeks of the classic age had no symbol for zero, because their numerical
system did not require a zero place. But they were aware of the concept of a
number that stood for nothing. Indeed, Aristotle rejected it as a nonnumber
to be ignored, since one cannot divide by zero, or divide zero by itself.
Nevertheless, Eurocentric scholars long assumed that the symbol for zero
was invented by the Greeks, with no proof at all, speculating that it came
from the Greek letter omi-
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cron—0—the first letter in the Greek word ouden, meaning “empty.” But
this unwarranted belief that Indians could not have come up with such a basic
concept has given way to recognition that ancient Greeks did not really use
such a symbol for zero, and that Indian mathematicians seem independently
to have invented the dot and then the round goose-egg symbol. The first use
of this symbol for zero in India appears in the year 876 in an inscription
found in the Gwalior region south of Delhi, containing two numbers with
zeros:
50: ô 270: ^
This comes two centuries after Severus Sebokht’s mention of the nine
Hindu numbers, though archaeologists have found the round symbol for zero
in two numbers in an inscription in Malaysia—the numbers 60 and 606 as
/^© and/Sod—that dates to A.D. 684. The Malay peninsula was then under
Indian influence. Some historians also believe a treatise on mathematics
known as the Bakhshali Manuscript may have been written as early as the
third century A.D. It contains numbers with zeros and a fully developed
decimal placevalue system. The numbers include:
330: ^- 846,720: 3?^?’
The first use of zero as a fully formed number seems to have appeared
around the time of Brahmagupta in the seventh century, when this great
Indian mathematician tried, but failed, to explain how zero could be divided
by itself. The Maya also invented a true zero in about the third century A.D.,
using several symbols, including a half-open eye—-O—which they used to
indicate missing positions as they wrote out numbers to represent time
intervals in their calendar.
This explanation of zero does not quite finish our story about the
mathematics needed to correct the calendar, since the year is not 365 days
long, but 365.242199 days, give or take a few seconds. In other words, we
have this pesky fraction to contend with, expressed here as a decimal fraction.
This concept—and the ease with which we are able to represent this value—
also did not come easily or all at once. Beyond the simplest divisions of a
whole number, fractions posed a huge problem for humanity through most
of history.
How do you divide three sacks of grain among five people? And how do
you split up a year, month, day, hour, or minute into smaller parts?
Predictably, the first written symbols for fractions represented only the
simplest divisions. The Mesopotamians used ^ for what we write as 1/2. The
Egyptians used C- for 14, and X for 14, the X probably showing how an
object was cut into four quarters. For other simple fractions using one as the
numerator, Egyptians wrote symbols that look something like our modem
system:
% = ^2 = * 14o = ^
Romans organized their fractions around a division of one into 12 parts.

This grew out of their system of weights, which was based on a unit of
measurement called an as, split into twelve uncias. Symbols were assigned
to each fraction, with I equaling an as (one whole), an 5 equaling 1/2 (six
uncias), a = — for 1/4 and a - equaling 1/12 (one uncia). To write out smaller
fractions, Romans divided the uncia into 24 scrupuli and each scrupulus into
8 calci, and so forth. Each of these smaller groupings had their own symbols
and names, such as H^ for 1/96, called a drachma, and ^ for 1/2304, called a
calcus. Several
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modern words are derived from this system—ounce and inch come from
uncia, and calculus may come from calcus.
But these symbols are far too cumbersome and imprecise for sophisticated
values and calculations. For instance, it was relatively simple for a Roman—
or Bede, or Alcuin in Charlemagne’s court—to write out the Latin whole
number and fraction for the length of Caesar’s year, which is CCCLXV = —
days—365 1/4. But try writing the true solar year of 365.242199 days—the
equivalent of 365 242,199/ 1,000,000—in Roman numerals. No symbol
exists in Latin for such a precise number, a reality that profoundly affected
the pursuit of determining an accurate year. Nor is it possible to calculate in
Roman numerals a value that takes into account variations in the earth’s mo-
tions, including the gradual slowing of the tropical year over the centuries.
As long as time reckoners used the Latin system—or Greek, Egyptian, or
any other numerical system that lacked precise fractions—they were forced
to conclude that it was impossible to calculate a true year. This powerfully
reinforced the belief in the Middle Ages that if such a number existed, it was
known only to God, when in truth the number was simply beyond the
capability of the symbols and numerical system in use at the time—and
continued to be until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Europeans
began broadly adopting the earliest versions of the modern decimal system.
The idea of using decimal fractions came to Europe from the Arabs,
though they were not the first to use positional notation to write out and
determine fractions. Again this distinction seems to belong to the
Mesopotamians, who over the millennia figured out a fraction system based
on their own positional notation scheme—which gave them a precision and
computing power far beyond that of any other system until the European
Renaissance. But because Mesopotamia’s system was based on 60 and not
on a more manageable number such as 10, their remarkable discovery was
limited by the complexity of carving into clay and stone place-values in
negative powers of 60, which not only are indivisible for some fractions but
also quickly become long
and complicated symbols to write out. For instance, the length of the year in
cuneiform numerals is:
365.242199 = mm v <R w£ w
Which breaks out in base 60 as:
365 + .233333 + .008611 + .000255 6(60) + 5 + 14(60) -1 +31(60)-
2
+ 55(60)-3 mmw <n «<T <U
The Chinese by the third century A.D. had also discovered how to write
fractions using their positional notation, and did so using our familiar base-
10 system. But their discovery does not seem to have traveled beyond the
Far East. As for the Indians, for some reason they did not develop decimal
fractions, despite having base-10 positional notation for whole numbers.
Instead they devised an early version of placing one number over another to
represent fractions—a numerator over a denominator—that was apparently
borrowed from Greek mathematicians in Alexandria, with one difference:
they placed the denominator over the numerator. The bar line was introduced
later by Arab mathematicians.
Of course, the vast majority of people in ancient times had little use for
fractions beyond the most simple divisions of a whole. Only a handful of
mathematicians and astronomers cared to be more precise—and even they
tended to simply round off numbers either to the closest simple fraction or to
the nearest whole. This is undoubtedly why early astronomers, from
Hipparchus and Ptolemy to Aryabhata, were able to note that the 365 1/4-
day year was wrong, but seemed willing to accept this rounded-off number
as tolerable enough that none called for a correction, or for reforms in the
official calendar.
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When Aryabhata wrote his Aryabhatiya in 499, at the precocious age of 23,
Gupta culture and learning remained at a high point. But even as he pondered
pi and the position of planets, a dark cloud was fast engulfing the empire: the
Huns. This eastern branch of the scourge that had hastened the crash of Rome
had for years been hammering away mercilessly against the Gupta frontier
to the northwest.
By the time the Aryabhatiya appeared, the Huns had broken through the
Guptas’ main defensive lines to devastate parts of northwestern India. But
unlike Rome, the Guptas, with help from the Chinese in the north, had
weakened the military strength of the hordes over the years to the point that
the invaders were unable to thoroughly conquer the Indians or destroy their
culture. During the middle third of Aryabhata’s life the Huns set up a shaky
kingdom that ruled from modern Afghanistan to central India, never reaching
Ku- sumapura. Aryabhata lived long enough to see a coalition of Indian kings
and warlords drive them back into Kashmir in 542, when he was 66 years
old. He also had lived long enough to see the golden age of Gupta culture
slowly eroded, even if the continuity of Indian culture was preserved.
As the political situation worsened, the spirit of open inquiry and free
thinking that had thrived earlier was squelched by a turn to conservative
Vedic values. This apparently got Aryabhata into some trouble with his more
controversial theories, particularly his supposed hint that the earth might
circle the sun. At least this seems to be the case given the vigor with which
later Indian scholars, perhaps anxious to conform to the more rigid orthodoxy
of the day, dismiss this theory less on academic than religious grounds.
How Aryabhata responded to his critics is unknown. But we have a clue
to his true feelings, and his willingness to express them, in a short passage at
the end of the Aryabhatiya. It reads like something
Roger Bacon would have written as a fevered defense of science. “He who
disparages this universally true science of astronomy,” says Aryabhata,
“which ... is now described by me in this Aryabhatiya, loses his good deeds
and his long life.”
But unlike Bacon, Aryabhata was revered by scholars and laymen alike,
during and after his lifetime. Every great Indian mathematician and
astronomer who came after him used the Aryabhatiya as the basis for their
work and acknowledged his contributions. This includes Var- ahamihira
(505-587), a contemporary of the elderly Aryabhata* who wrote an
encyclopedia that cites the master of Kusumapura, but emphasizes astrology
over astronomy—a choice Aryabhata would have rejected as unscientific.
The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598-665) also held Aryabhata in
high esteem, incorporating some of the earlier master’s works into his
own—and unfortunately editing them and adding his comments to the point
that it is hard to tell what belongs to Aryabhata and what to Brahmagupta,
since the originals Brahmagupta worked from have been lost.
Brahmagupta’s reverence did not extend to Aryabhata’s controversial ideas.
Nor did it stop him from offering corrections in his Brahmasphuta-
siddhanta, written around 628, to what he considered his predecessor’s
mistakes on matters ranging from the altitude of the sun’s ecliptic to
Aryabhata’s measurement of the diameter of the earth.
Aryabhata’s impact was so profound in his homeland that in 1975 modern
India honored this ancient genius by launching a scientific satellite named
the Aryabhata on an Indian Intercosmos rocket. Unlike the ideas of its
namesake, the satellite failed after only four days and came crashing back
into the atmosphere on February 11, 1992.
After Brahmagupta, India continued to produce noted mathematicians,
including Bhaskara (1114-1185), considered by mathemati-
166 CALENDAR
cians to be the most brilliant in his field anywhere during the twelfth century.
But he was the last true standout in medieval India.‡‡‡‡‡
All of these men contributed mightily to the evolution of concepts that
three centuries after Aryabhata’s death would continue their journey to the
West via a people that in Aryabhata’s era were primitives barely known to
the great civilizations of the day. Living on a vast desert to the south of the
empires of Persia and Byzantium, they began stirring to life only in the final
years of Brahmagupta’s life, then suddenly they burst out of their desert
peninsula to begin the conquest of much of the Near East and southern and
central Asia. In the process they discovered and then embraced the ancient
knowledge of India, Greece, and Mesopotamia, creating an unlikely
amassing of ideas drawn together in what became the early medieval era’s
greatest center of learning: Baghdad.
‡‡‡‡‡In 1887 another mathematics genius was born in India, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who
tragically died at the age of 33. His natural fluency and intuition with numbers has been
compared to the free-ranging and eclectic style of thinking of Aryabhata and other earlier
Hindu mathematicians.
From ouse om to
Darkest Europe
It was He that gave the sun his brightness and the moon her
light, ordaining her phases that you may learn to compute the
seasons and the years. God created them only to manifest the
Truth. He makes plain his revelations to men of knowledge.
—THE KORAN, C. A.D. 630
In 773, some 250 years after Aryabhata’s death, a delegation of diplomats
from the lower Indus River Valley arrived in the new Arab capital of
Baghdad. Dressed in brightly colored silks, turbans, and glittering gems, this
group probably traveled by sea from the Indus delta around the desert coast
of modem-day Iran and up the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf to the
port city of Abadan—some 30 miles inland now because of silt built up over
the centuries. They would then have sailed up the Tigris about 200 miles to
Baghdad, passing by the hot, dry banks lined with tiers of ancient, irrigated
terraces and stone cities dating back to the time of Sumer and Ur, arriving at
last outside the gates of al-Mansur’s magnificent city.
A half century after the Arabs had conquered the lower Indus River
Valley, in 711, this delegation was one of many dispatched by local Indian
authorities to the court of Caliph al-Mansur to provide him with news about
their province, and to settle outstanding disputes. They also hoped to impress
the great caliph, the founder of the Ab- basid dynasty, with the richness and
sophistication of their country by showering him with gifts—perhaps a gem-
encrusted suit of armor, a flute carved out of ivory, a highly prized falcon,
or a silk tapestry depicting scenes from their province.
167
168 CALENDAR
This particular delegation also brought with them an astronomer,

undoubtedly having heard that al-Mansur was not only a mighty general and
military ruler, but also a patron of the arts and sciences. The astronomer’s
name was Kanaka. An expert on eclipses, he reportedly carried with him a
small library of Indian astronomical texts to give to the caliph, including the
Surya Siddhanta and the works of Brahmagupta (containing material on
Aryabhata). Nothing more is known about this Kanaka. The first known
reference to him was written some five hundred years later by an Arab
historian named al-Qifti.
According to al-Qifti, the caliph was amazed by the knowledge in the
Indian texts. He immediately ordered them translated into Arabic and their
essence compiled into a textbook that became known as the Great Sindhind
(Sindhind is the Arabic form of the Sanskrit word siddhanta).
No one is sure if this incident per se ever happened. But something like it
must have, in order to bring the works of India into the sphere of the early
Islamic scholars, whence they would travel to Christian Europe through
Syria, Sicily, and Arab-controlled Spain. A version of the Great Sindhind
would be translated into Latin in 1126. This was one of dozens of critical
documents that would contribute to the
knowledge base needed to propel Europe into the modern age, and to
calculate a true and accurate year.
Kanaka allegedly visited the court of the caliph in Baghdad about a century
and a half after one of the most extraordinary moments in history: the sudden
maelstrom that came out of Arabia in the mid- 600s. Driven by a potent
fusion of religious zeal and a centuries-old martial tradition among the tribes
of the desert, the armies of the Prophet Mohammed were at first a
phenomenon of arms and religion, though they soon became an unlikely
force for the advancement of learning. This came in part from the Prophet’s
FROM THE HOUSE OF WISDOM TO DARKEST EUROPE
169
command that the
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faithful seek knowledge, but also because the Arabs did not follow the
example of the barbari in the West, who had looted and destroyed the cities
and provinces of Rome. Instead the Arabs assimilated the cultures of the
peoples they conquered—much the same way the early, uncouth Romans
had done centuries before when they eagerly embraced and absorbed the
cultures they conquered in Greece and the Near East.
In a sense the Arabs arrived just in time. Most of the ancient centers of
learning, and the cultures that had nourished them, were in a state of
exhaustion or outright collapse by the mid-600s, after decades of warfare and
internal decay. To the East the Gupta era was ending as India broke up into
small kingdoms and struggled to fend off fresh onslaughts from the Huns; in
the Near East a long war fought between Byzantium and Persia ended with
a peace treaty in 628, leaving both empires gravely weakened; to the west
the barbari continued to battle over what was left of Rome.
Not surprisingly, this period produced little original thinking and was a
low point in intellectual output from the Himalayas to the British Isles—with
some notable exceptions, such as Brahmagupta in India and a few scattered
scholars still struggling to work in the Greek tradition within the Byzantine
Empire. But even there the output was meager as the rump of the old Roman
Empire, pressed by enemies on all sides, had become more stridently
orthodox. Indeed, for decades the imperium and Church had been repressing
rival Christian sects, pagans, and anyone else who did not fall in line behind
an increasingly strict religious dogma—including scholars.
171
*Most scholars date the end of the ancient Greek culture to the closing of the academy in
529.
This religious retrenchment in Byzantium had begun under Justinian in
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Cassiodorus’s time. In 529 he had closed the nine-hundredyear-old Academy

of Plato in Athens and had dispersed its scholars, claiming it was a hotbed
of paganism.* Fearing for their lives as well as their intellectual freedom,
many of these scholars had fled to Persia,
173
where they established a kind of Academy in exile. This was a pale imitation
of the original, though this community of scholars remained viable enough
that when the Arabs seized Persia a century later these Greeks were able to
play a major role in bringing the texts and learning of the ancient Hellenes
to the attention of Arab scholars.
The events leading up to the meeting between al-Mansur and Kanaka began
modestly. In 610, roughly 30 years after Cassiodorus’s death in faraway Italy,
a 40-year-old merchant in the desert oasis and trading post of Mecca claimed
to have seen the archangel Gabriel in a vision. Commanded by the angel to
lead a movement to purify and complete the religious tradition of Judaism
and Christianity, Mohammed began to preach a simple message to the
pagans in his town: one of total submission (which is what the word Islam
means in Arabic) to one god: Allah.
At first only his family and a few friends responded favorably. Nearly
everyone else laughed at him, eventually forcing him and a tiny band of
followers to flee Mecca in 622 for another desert oasis, nearby Medina. This
later became known as the “Year of the Migration” (hijra in Arabic, hegira
in English), which is the starting point of the Moslem calendar—a calendar
Mohammed later insisted should remain purely lunar, to differentiate it from
the lunisolar calendar of the Jews and the solar calendar of the Christians.
The Medinans welcomed Mohammed as a sagacious leader and arbiter of
disputes, and he shrewdly used this reputation to build a power base. This
allowed him to eventually unite the entire peninsula of Arabia under his
authority and to organize a potent new military force inspired by his new
religion of self-sacrifice and devotion to God. By 630 he had conquered his
former hometown of Mecca, where the people now embraced his religion.
Then Mohammed died on June 8, 632.
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His death threw his followers into a state of confusion, but only briefly,
as one of Mohammed’s most important disciples, his brother- in-law Abu
Bakr, took over as the first khalifat rasul-Allah—“successor to the apostle of
God”—or caliph. This did not settle the leadership crisis then or afterward.
But it did allow the Arabs to take advantage of their newfound unity and
their religiously inspired warriors to launch a rampage of conquest that
within two decades of the Prophet’s death crushed the armies of Persia,
overran Egypt, Syria, and parts of Asia Minor, and nearly took Byzantium.
In a second wave of conquests from 696 to the 720s the armies of Islam
pushed north to the Caspian Sea and Turkestan, northeast into modern Iran
up to the Aral Sea, and even briefly into Kashgar, on the edge of China’s
sphere of influence. To the southeast they conquered the lower Indus Valley.
In the west they seized North Africa and raged into Spain, turning back only
when they reached France and were confronted by a powerful Frankish army
led by Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel.
By the mid-eighth century the expansionist military force of Islam was
largely spent for the moment, and the Arabs began to take stock of what they
had conquered—politically, economically, and culturally. Having come
from a desert where few were literate and the lifestyle modest, they brought
little material culture to the ancient civilizations now under their sway. Their
significant contributions were language and religion, and this is where their
talent as master assimilators came into the fore, as they seized on the clothing,
dress, architecture, philosophy, literature—and science—of the Persians,
Greeks, and Indians they now ruled.
The possibilities offered by this crucible of cultural interaction burst forth
just over a century after Mohammed’s death when al-Mansur built his
magnificent new city as a symbol of his awesome power and of learning.
Urbane and sophisticated, al-Mansur and the early Ab- basids lavished the
wealth and power of their empire on science and the arts. The Arabs’ golden
age of literature, architecture, and science, centered in Baghdad, reached its
apex during the reigns of al-Mansur’s
175
successors Haroun ar-Rashid (ruled 786-809) and his son al-Mamun (ruled
809-833). This was when the Indian texts first brought by Kanaka, and the
others that came later, were translated, organized, and studied along with the
knowledge of the ancients from Greece and Persia, and eventually
synthesized into the forms that would later reach Europe.
Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer and orientalist,

compared Baghdad during its glory years to the Paris of his century, a city
that would also have rivaled Rome at its height. But the truth is that no one
will ever know for sure the splendor that was Baghdad, for it was utterly
destroyed, almost to the last brick, first during a period of civil war among
the later Abbasids, and then in 1258 by an invading Mongol army.
At the core of Baghdad was a massive inner city of palaces, administrative
buildings, and army barracks. Known as the Round City, it stretched for two
miles in diameter, and was ringed by three concentric walls. In the center
stood the caliph’s Golden Palace, on an axis where four highways radiated
outward in cardinal directions to the four corners of the empire. Surrounding
the Round City were suburbs that grew up in all directions. These included
sections for Jews and Christians, considered adherents of sister religions to
Islam, and several large compounds for monasteries built by the Nestorian
sect of Christianity. Banished two centuries earlier by Justinian, the
Nestorians brought to Baghdad stacks of Greek scientific texts, which they
helped translate into Arabic.
Someone walking through the hot, sunny streets of this Mesopotamian
city in 800, the same year that Charlemagne was crowned emperor in the
half-ruined city of Rome, would have passed a profusion of people—beggars,
slaves, artists, thieves, merchants, and government officials dressed in a mix
of styles from Persia, Greece, and
176 CALENDAR
India; soldiers swaggering in polished armor; and traders from as far away
as Spain and China.
According to an Arab chronicler named Abu al-Wafa Ibn Aqil, writing in
Baghdad during the mid-eleventh century, the city was filled with palaces,
gardens, fountains, and mosques of exquisite beauty—as well as hospitals,
schools, and libraries. Along the Tigris, says Ibn Aqil, the rich built elegant
residences, riding to and fro in small boats “in good trim . . . with beautiful
finery and marvelous woodwork.” He spends pages describing the great suqs,
or markets, and their busy streets set aside for shoemakers, flower vendors,
tailors, moneychangers, swordsmiths, perfumeries, and other merchants sell-
ing everything imaginable. One of these suqs, he says, was “unequaled for
the beauty of its architecture,” with “tall buildings with beams of teakwood
supporting overhanging rooms.” Another was known as “the meeting-place
of learned men and poets.” Still others offered shops full of books and
entertainments ranging from recitations of the Koran to fencing and
wrestling shows.
Scholars, engineers, scientists, and artists flocked to Baghdad from every
corner of the empire, and were honored and well paid. Many came bearing
manuscripts, and the early years of the Abbasid period became a great era of
translation. This project was made infinitely simpler when the first paper
factory opened in Baghdad in 794, using a process the Arabs learned from a
Chinese prisoner captured during the 712 conquest of Samarkand, in modern
Afghanistan. This invention would be passed on to Europe centuries later,
just in time to provide late medieval scholars with an easy-to-make and
inexpensive material on which to write out their own translations of ancient
works.
As the translations and the originals began to stack up in the universities and
libraries of Baghdad, al-Mamun ordered a museum and library complex built
that became known as the House of Wisdom, the
177
Bait al-hikma. Completed by 833, it became the most outstanding single
repository of knowledge and scholarship since the great library in Alexandria:
a place where scholars pondered the ancient writings and, as time went by,
developed theorems, concepts, and applications of their own.
By the second decade of the ninth century, just a generation after
Kanaka’s arrival, a new and vibrant Arab intelligentsia were making
breakthroughs in everything from medicine, chemistry, and optics to a new
philosophy of science that framed the pursuit of knowledge in terms of better
serving God.
In the realm of time reckoning and astronomy, the Arabs first applied
Greek and Indian ideas about measuring time to a practical need for their
religion: when exactly they should kneel and pray, which Mohammed
required all Moslems to do five times a day. This inspired early Arab
astronomers to use and improve upon Greek instruments such as the
astrolabe, sundial, and globe to better calculate the angles of the sun at
various times of day. Astronomers also advised architects throughout the
Moslem world where to build mosques so that the faithful could follow
another command of the Prophet—that they always face the direction of
Mecca when they pray, whether they are in the Hindu Kush or on the Rock
of Gibraltar.
Moslem astronomers and mathematicians also went to work refining the
Islamic calendar. This calendar—whose year 1 began in our year A.D. 622,
when Mohammed fled Mecca for Medina—was established by the second
caliph, Umar, around A.D. 634. Years in the Islamic calendar are indicated
with the abbreviation A.H., which stands for the Latin anno hegirae, or “the
Year of the Migration.” Since then it has been running at the standard lunar
time of 354 days a year, drifting across the seasons to start on the same day
every 32 1/2 years.
Each month in the Islamic calendar begins about two days after the new
moon, when the first sliver of the crescent moon is sighted. Because the lunar
month averages about 29 1/2 days, Umar arranged the twelve months of the
Moslem year to alternate between 29 and 30 days:
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Name Length in Days

Muharram 30
Safar 29
Rabi’u’l-Avval 30
Rabi’u’th-Thani 29
Jamadiyu’l-Avval 30
Jamadiyu’th-Thani 29
Rajab 30
Sha’ban 29
Ramadan 30
Shavval 29
Dhi’l-Qa’dih 30
Dhi’l-Hijjih 29
Most of these month names predate Islam, with some referring to

seasons—suggesting that the Arabs’ calendar may have been lunisolar
before Mohammed’s day. The second month, Safar, meaning “yellow,”
originally came around in autumn when leaves were turning color.
Mohammed also designated four months that were sacred, when Moslems
were forbidden to go to war or to conduct raids; of these, the ninth month,
Ramadan, is the holiest, when Moslems are supposed to fast and abstain from
sex during the daylight hours in order to learn self-discipline, and to
concentrate on spiritual matters. Some believe the word Ramadan comes
from the Arabic ramz, “to burn,” because the fast is supposed to “burn” away
one’s sins. In the Koran Mohammed writes:
As to the month of Ramadan in which the Koran was set down to be man’s
guidance ... as soon as any one of you observeth the moon, let him set
about the fast.
From this relatively simple early calendar Arab astronomers in the House
of Wisdom and elsewhere worked to make the most precise lunar calendar
possible. Their solution was a 30-year cycle of 360 lunar months, which is
179
accurate against the true orbit of the moon to within
180 CALENDAR
a day of drift every 2,500 years. But this system requires frequent
intercalations, with one day being added to the final month, Dhi’l- Hijjih, in
the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 10th, 13th, 16th, 18th, 21st, 24th, 26th, and 29th years of
each 30-year cycle.
To facilitate this and other practical astronomical inquiries, Caliph al-
Mamun ordered an observatory built in Baghdad in 829, and one soon after
outside of Damascus. Astronomers also set up a network of observation
points across the empire that allowed them to conduct experiments. One of
these set out to determine the size and circumference of the world, which
Arabs assumed was round. Taking measurements on a plain north of the
Euphrates and near Palmyra, astronomers were able to calculate the width of
a degree of the meridian,* coming up with 56 2/3 Arabic miles. This is just
2,877 feet wider than the actual degree.
*This refers to a measurement made by locating a meridian and moving north or south
along it until one has moved exactly one degree of latitude.
His name means “Mohammed, the father of Jafar and the son of Musa, from Khwa-
rizmi.”
One of the astronomers involved in the project of measuring the distance
between two meridians was almost certainly Abu Jafar Mohammed ibn Musa
181
al-Khwarizmi (780-850), perhaps the greatest of the scholars working at the
House of Wisdom during the golden age, and the most influential
mathematician on any continent during the early Middle Ages. + As famed
among Arabs as Euclid and Ptolemy, and later respected by the Europeans
of Roger Bacon’s day, al- Khwarizmi was probably born near the Aral Sea
in modern Turkestan, called Khwarizmi in his era. Working in the city of
Merv, south of the Aral Sea, he became famous enough to be summoned to
Baghdad
182 CALENDAR
in 820 by al-Mamun, who appointed him “first astronomer” and later head
of the library at the House of Wisdom. An Arab version of what Europeans
call a “Renaissance man,” al-Khwarizmi wrote on a dizzying number of
subjects from mathematics and astronomy to geography and a history of the
Arab caliphates. He also led three scientific missions to India and Byzantium
to meet with scholars and collect manuscripts.
He is best known, however, for being one of the first major scholars in the
Arab world to use the accumulating store of knowledge from India, Greece,
and Persia to make his own discoveries. These include the invention of
modern algebra. Indeed, the word algebra itself comes from one of al-
Khwarizmi’s books, Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah (Calculation by
Restoration and Reduction). Later this became a standard textbook of
mathematics in European universities until the sixteenth century. The word
algorithm—algoritmus in Latin—comes from medieval Europeans’ use of
al-Khwarizmi’s own name to refer to the study of mathematics.
Al-Khwarizmi wrote out the oldest surviving zij—set of astronomic
tables—in the Arab world, much of it based on Indian charts possibly
brought to Baghdad by Kanaka. This zij later made the journey to Spanish
Cordoba and onward to the rest of Europe, where a Latin translation made in
1126 became one of the most influential works on astronomy in medieval
Europe.
Perhaps most important of all was a small booklet al-Khwarizmi penned
in 825. Called Algoritmi de numero Indorum when it was later translated into
Latin, this short treatise detailed something the great sage of Baghdad
apparently picked up from reading Brahmagupta: the numerical system of
the Indians—the nine symbols and a placeholder called sunya. Amazed by
the usefulness of these simple symbols and of positional notation, he
demonstrated in his pamphlet their superiority to the Greek numbers then
used in Baghdad, and to the cruder Bedouin numbers the Arabs had brought
with them from the desert. At
183
the time he wrote his booklet the “new” Indian symbols looked something
like this:*
^ ^ 8 y c \5 rc
Later Arab mathematicians expanded on the system described in al-

Khwarizmi’s pamphlet and on the Indians themselves to take the Hindu idea
of sunya—the Arabs’ cifra, our zero—and use it not merely as a placeholder,
but as a number like any other in certain calculations and equations. They
also made a mathematical leap that the Indians did not, applying the system
of positional notation to create decimal fractions—the first of which appear
in an obscure book by an otherwise unknown Syrian mathematician named
Abul Hassan al- Uqlidisi in 952 or 953. These discoveries made it possible
just before the end of the first millennium of the Christian era to actually
write out the number that represents the true solar year—365.242199 days—
though as of yet no one had been able to come up with such an exact
astronomic value. It also would have been written without the dot for the
decimal point, which was added much later.
Al-Khwarizmi’s contemporaries in Baghdad were delighted with his little
book. Used to a dizzying rush of new knowledge in this era of learning and
scholarship, they quickly dropped the old methods of counting and embraced
the new—which greatly accelerated the development of mathematical theory
that would lay the foundation for modern science, including the reform of
the calendar.
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*No one knows what the symbols looked like in al-Khwarizmi’s booklet because no
original has survived in Arabic. The only extant copies are Latin translations.
Scholars in Damascus to the west began using the new numbers just a few
185
years later, but this invention took almost a century and a half to make the
long journey to Spain, Sicily, and other, more distant outposts of Islam. It
took longer still to make the leap across the borders to a conservative Europe
largely uninterested in new ideas,
186 CALENDAR
particularly those connected to a people they considered heathens in league

with the devil.
Al-Khwarizmi was hardly the only genius at work in the Arab world during
its glory years between the founding of Baghdad as the Abbasid capital in
763 and the final dissolution and fragmentation of the Islamic empire in the
1200s and 1300s. It is impossible to mention all of these, though a handful
stand out above the rest in terms of the calendar. These include another
denizen of the House of Wisdom born around the time of al-Khwarizmi’s
death. Abu Allah Mohammed Ibn Jabir al-Battani (c. 850-929), known in
Europe as Albategnius. In a book called On the Motion of the Stars he
expounded on Indian trigonometric methods to show that the distance from
the earth to the sun varies during the year, something we now know happens
in part because the earth’s orbit is elliptic. Al-Battani also refined values for
the length of the year by comparing it with calculations made by Ptolemy in
139. He came up with a figure that was 2 1/2 minutes too short—but that was
because Ptolemy had placed his equinox a day late. Had Ptolemy been
correct, al-Battani’s year would have been only half a minute short.
A half century later another Arab astronomer, Abu ar-Rayhan Mohammed
ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973—1048), was born in central Asia. There he thrived
despite the growing instability in the region as the Abbasid caliphate
collapsed and its territories fragmented into shifting emirates ruled by local
shahs and warlords.
Before the age of 30, in the midst of wars between rival kings, al- Biruni
was able to make extensive observations of equinoxes and to travel to and
fro taking highly accurate measurements of latitude. Also before turning
30—even as he was forced at times to go into hiding because of politics—he
managed to write at least eight works. These included a treatise on
timekeeping, a timeline of past events dated
187
according to the Moslem calendar, and arguments for and against the earth’s
rotating on its axis, taking up the debate of Aryabhata versus later Indian
astronomers.
Al-Biruni later became a diplomat for one rival shah and was imprisoned
by another, though he was eventually allowed to continue his work as he
followed an invading Moslem army into India. There he learned Sanskrit and
studied every ancient text he could find, compiling his findings into a book
called India. This offers a remarkably candid and critical analysis of Hindu
mathematics and the siddhantas. In his late sixties al-Biruni wrote a study on
the specific gravity of gems; at the age of 80 he wrote an alphabetical guide
to 720 drugs, listing each according to their names in five languages.
The year al-Biruni died yet another Arab scholar and poet was born, Umar
ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami (ca. 1048-1131)—known in the west as Omar
Khayyam. Admired today outside of the Arab world exclusively as one of
the greatest Islamic poets, Omar Khayyam was much more. Prolific in a
number of fields, in mathematics he greatly expanded on al-Khwarizmi’s
algebraic principals and on Euclid’s geometry; as an astronomer he spent 18
years working in an observatory in Isfahan, 200 miles south of modern
Teheran in Iran, where among other things he measured the solar year at
365.24219858156 days. This was both accurate and overly precise
considering the gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation. Omar Khayyam also
devised a solar calendar with eight leap years of 366 days every 33 years—
a slightly unwieldy system that nonetheless was more accurate than the
Gregorian calendar. Apparently he proposed his new calendar as a reform to
his local shah in 1079. How this ruler responded is unknown.
In one of his famous versus from The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam offers a
poet’s assessment of what it means for a scientist to try to measure time—
and the arrogance of those who blithely count and add and take away days
on a calendar:
Ah, but my calculations, people say,

Have squared the year to human Compass, Eh?
FROM THE HOUSE OF WISDOM TO DARKEST EUROPE 188
If so, by striking from the calendar

Unborn tomorrow and dead Yesterday.
Another scholar working in the Islamic world, the Jewish astronomer

Abraham bar Hiyya ha-Nasi (1070-1136), wrote in Barcelona the first
Hebrew work devoted exclusively to the study of the calendar, including a
prediction based on the Torah of when the Messiah might appear. Yet
another astronomer appearing very late in the classic Arab era was Ulugh
Beg (1394—1449), the ill-fated son of a shah, who briefly ruled Samarkand
and was put to death by his own son during a coup. Ulugh Beg gave a
measurement for the length of the year that came to 365 days, 5 hours, 49
minutes, and 15 seconds—just 25 seconds too long.
Still, the Arabs came very close to calculating a true value for a year they
did not use in their own religious calendar, a measurement few Europeans at
the time even cared about. Even those who did care struggled with crude and
incomplete formulas and data, a situation that seemed all but hopeless—and
might have remained so if not for the eruption of learning out of Baghdad
and other Islamic centers, a wave so powerful that it reached beyond even
the distant rim of what was then the civilized world.
Why, as Bede himself admits . . . does a full moon appear in the shy in most
cases one day, and in others two days, before the computed date?
—HERMANN THE LAME, 1042
No one in Baghdad during the heady days of al-Khwarizmi could have

guessed that their work would help spark a revival of learning in Europe. A
traveler trekking from the caliph’s court to Aachen in the year 800 would
have laughed at the idea that these foul-smelling barbari, ruled by an
emperor who could not write, whose scholars copied old manuscripts rather
than reading them, and whose mathematicians still counted with their fingers,
would four centuries later produce a Roger Bacon. And three centuries after
that a Copernicus.
Such a traveler would marvel at a people who had forgotten the
mathematics, science, and philosophy first conceived by ancients from
whom they traced their own cultural roots. He also would have smiled at the
irony, if he had been able to predict the future, of a people who would one
day rediscover the ancient knowledge they had lost in part from Arabic
translations of the original European texts.
At first the process of transferring the concepts crucial to Europe’s
reawakening was almost imperceptibly slow. In 800 our adventurous Arab
would have found at best several hundred ancient texts at Charlemagne’s
court, and a castle full of half-educated Franks still in awe of Bede. A scholar
from Baghdad—or Damascus—arriving in
189
190 CALENDAR
Latin Europe a century later, in 900, would have seen little difference. Even
another century after that, in 1000, he would have witnessed only a few
stirrings. Not until 1100 would our original traveler’s great- great-great-
great-great-great-great-great-grandson see any significant change, three
centuries after Charlemagne tried—and failed—to rejuvenate learning in
Europe.
Visitors checking the status of Latin time reckoning would have discovered
roughly the same progression—computists in their monasteries during the
800s still worrying over lists of saint’s days, updating Easter tables, and
spending lifetimes trying to devise arcane systems for better measuring time.
In Frankland an intrepid Arab traveler might have met the teacher, theologian,
and scholar Rabanus Maurus (c. 780—856), a student of Alcuin and a prolific
writer who spent many years of his long life fussing over how to divide the
hour into ever smaller units: a useful idea, except that one has to ask why
anyone in the ninth century would need to use, say, his atom, which he
declared to be 1/22,560 of an hour. Also, how would one measure the passage
of such an infinitesimal moment of time with a water clock?
Other time reckoners during this period are now as notable for their
unusual names as for their painstaking labors on computus and the calendar.
They include three time reckoners whose work spanned the mid-ninth to the
mid-eleventh centuries, all named Notker, and all who lived in the same
Swiss monastery at St. Gall near Zurich. These were Notker the Stammerer,
Notker the Peppercorn, and Notker the Thick-Lipped.
The 900s were little better than the 800s, with one major exception: a
monk named Abbo of Fleury (945-1004), who advocated the use of water
clocks that were more accurate than the sundial used by monks since before
Bede. This allowed him to make slightly more accurate measurements than
the venerable one for days, months, and
LATINORUM PENURIA (THE POVERTY OF THE LATINS) 191
years. Abbo also proposed a change in Dionysius Exiguus’s chronology

using anno Domini, substituting the old Latin style of passing from year 1 to
year-1 to a timeline that added a placeholder in the zero position. To
designate this “new” year he used the symbol for null, since zero itself had
not yet reached Europe. This suggested change was ignored, however. So
was his idea that the date for Christ’s death as calculated by Dionysius was
incorrect by some 20 years. But Abbo was an anomaly in a field that was
becoming wearisome by the year 1000 with its rehashing of the same old
formulas and arguments.
The last important work done in the traditional mold of computus and time
reckoning was authored by yet another scholar-monk with an unflattering
name, Hermann the Lame (1013—1054) of Reichenau, in western Germany
near the border with Switzerland. Insisting early in his life that all scientific
conclusions should be supported by “the insuperable truth of nature”—an
astonishing admission in his day— Hermann used the recently arrived
astrolabe and a special column sundial that he invented to compare what he
saw in the sky to the fixed numbers used for centuries by computists. The
first time reckoner since Bede to trust observation, he verified that the
Church’s calendar—including Easter and many feasts and saint’s days—was
out of sync with the cosmos. “Whence comes the error that the real age of
the moon so often does not correspond to our reckoning, computus, or the
rules of the ancients . . . ?” he asked in 1042.
Hermann’s frustration was compounded by his repeated attempts to
correct Bede and other computists, all of which failed to match up with what
he saw in the sky. This left the lame monk of Reichenau wondering toward
the end of his short life—he died at age 41—if the centuries-old tradition of
computus and time reckoning was hopelessly flawed, based on erroneous
assumptions about the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. But neither
Hermann nor anyone else was will-
192 CALENDAR
ing to take this a step further and challenge the Church in an era when
questioning St. Peter’s was the same as doubting the Lord.
Hermann was hardly alone with his discomfiture. He was among the
forerunners of a new breed about to come of age in a Europe finally shaking
off its slumber. Men who would be raised and educated not in monasteries
but in Europe’s slowly reviving cities, where news of other cultures was
arriving along with the first scatterings of long-lost texts by Greeks and
newer writings by Arab and Indian scholars. Read and pondered, these would
challenge not only the validity of old assumptions about the sun, moon, and
the nature of time, but also the nature of the entire universe, including the
role of man, and of God himself.
This new thinking would emerge during the eleventh and twelfth centuries
in part because of a legacy set in motion centuries earlier by Charlemagne:
the economic order he imposed. Far more lasting then his attempted
renaissance of learning, feudalism by the twelfth century had long been the
dominant system in west and central Europe, introducing a degree of stability
unknown in the chaotic centuries after the collapse of Rome.
In 843, almost three decades after Charlemagne’s death, the Treaty of
Verdun had established the principle that “every man should have a lord.” In
theory, this meant that even the pope and emperor were subject to a higher
authority—God—who sat at the top of what was later called the Great Chain
of Being. Under this arrangement prelates came after the pope and monarchs
after the emperor. Then came in the designated order bishops, priests, and
greater and lesser nobles; and under them came squires, merchants,
craftsmen, farmers, laborers on down to the lowest slave, and even to leafy
plants, worms, and houseflies.
This hardly meant that politics in Europe around the year 1100
were serene. Kings, nobles, knights, squires, and occasionally bishops and
popes fought among themselves almost as a birthright. Borders and dynasties
shifted continually. Yet over the centuries since Charlemagne the basic
outline of modern Europe had slowly evolved, with the states of France,
Germany, and northern Italy emerging in the 900s, after a series of dynastic
wars among Charlemagne’s heirs.
To the south Christian princes had begun the long reconquest of northern
Spain, capturing nearly a third of the peninsula from the disunited Moors by
1100. In the east missionaries had Christianized the Slavs, some of whom
now called themselves Poles, Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, and Russians. The
Vikings were giving up Thor and Wodin and settling down as Christian
Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, ending a two-century reign of terror
against Britain and the coasts of northern Europe. In Britain William the
Conqueror, duke of Normandy, seized England in 1066 and unified its
realms, while the clans and tribes to the north joined to form the kingdom of
the Scots.
The other big victor in the years since Charlemagne was the Cath- olic
Church. By 1100 it reigned supreme, finally winning out over virtually all
rival sects to achieve the monopoly of faith first envisioned by Constantine
at Nicaea eight centuries earlier. In southern France and elsewhere religious
malcontents made rumblings about the Church’s all-too-secular emphasis on
wealth and politics—and the propensity of some clergy to favor silks and
gold over matters of the spirit. Scholars following the lead of Hermann the
Lame and others also whispered in quiet corners of cloisters and cathedral
schools that certain Catholic tenets concerning science and philosophy might
be mistaken. But by and large the Roman Church was enjoying what would
become under Pope Innocent III (pope from 1198 to 1216) the high-water
mark of its power and influence.
The Church could horribly abuse its power, and seems to us centuries later
to have been hopelessly dogmatic and repressive. But for the average
Christian in 1100 Catholicism was mostly a huge comfort: a universal set of
laws and beliefs that provided a powerful sense of
LATINORUM PENURIA (THE POVERTY OF THE LATINS) 179 spiritual unity and a
deeply desired salvation, particularly for serfs and peasants—which meant
just about everyone.
Indeed, the world was as arduous then as it had been for centuries. There
had been a few improvements: the relative stability brought by feudalism;
improvements in agricultural techniques, such as the invention of the heavy
plow to use with horses; and increases in production that meant more food.
But most people continued to live lives out of time toiling in fields and
vineyards, repairing grass- thatched huts before the first winter storms,
singing their children to sleep, suffering from rotten teeth, dying of measles
and simple colds— an existence in which calendar time still did not matter
and the seasons came and went in a never-ending cycle that few expected to
change.
The major exception were the aristocrats, the great landowners who since
Charlemagne’s day had sat atop the feudal pyramid. Unlike everyone else,
by 1100 they had seen their lives transformed, for the simple reason that they
were fabulously rich. This privileged class had filled their coffers with gold
and grain for three full centuries, growing even wealthier as production
increased and the population in their fiefs and principalities expanded, with
more wilderness cleared for growing millet, oats, cucumbers, grapes, figs,
sheep, and cattle.
Aristocrats spent their newfound fortunes on thick-walled castles, private
armies, gaudy suits of armor, falconry, flashy tournaments, feasts, and
luxury goods imported from the East—silk capes, taffeta tunics, spices, and
gems. Eventually this unbridled consumption became so embarrassing to
pious Christians that the Church routinely passed “sumptuary laws” banning
such extravagances. These were just as routinely ignored by the rich and
some clergy, who pranced about in dazzling finery made all the more
conspicuous by the contrast with the rough-sewn wool and coarse linen worn
by nearly everyone else.
But these baubles had one positive side effect that would eventually alter
the mind-set of Europeans as profoundly as the new thinking among certain
scholars: the trade that delivered the goods. As more silks and perfumes were
shipped in and raw goods such as grain and wool were shipped out, the
nascent network of ships, shipyards, ports,
180 CALENDAR
accountants, merchants, sailors, and investors grew, filling the shipping lanes
of the Mediterranean with Latin goods for the first time since the fall of Rome.
Soon this web of trade reached inland from the ports, giving rise to towns
and cities along the highways into central Italy, France, and Germany—
which in turn became bases of operations for merchants, muleteers,
craftsmen, innkeepers, sheriffs, ne’er-do-wells, and financiers. The pace was
most brisk in Italy, where merchandise arrived from Europe’s interior to be
loaded on ships in Venice, Naples, Pisa, and Rome and shipped to Byzantium
and Syria. These vessels then returned to Italy with holds stuffed with wares
to be offloaded and carried in caravans to Paris, Cologne, distant London,
and hundreds of expanding market towns in between.
Ideas and information also arrived from afar, stimulating the minds of
those Latins who met the oddly dressed merchants from the Moorish capital
of Cordoba or from Arab-ruled Sicily and watched them use strange devices
such as the astrolabe. Europeans also heard the strangers tell stories about
faraway places—mostly yarns of the Arabian Nights variety, but also shop
talk about numbers, bookkeeping, navigation by the stars, and how to design
a better warehouse. This intercourse, though it affected only a tiny percentage
of Latins, provided at least a peek into the East’s advanced state of knowledge
in fields such as mathematics and astronomy. A few intrepid Europeans even
visited Sicily, Constantinople, Egypt, and Syria, accompanying trading
vessels or, in the case of the Crusades, conquering so-called infidels.
Inevitably this tentative contact with far-flung cultures set certain Latins to
scratching their heads over the issue of calendars and measuring time—not
from a standpoint of theology, philosophy, or the endless computus
tinkerings of monks, but rather from the practicality of having to draw up
contracts with dates of delivery, inventories, and
accounting records. This process was at least as important as the contribution

of intellectuals in shifting the perception of time among ordinary Europeans.
But two points of confusion soon emerged among the practical- minded
on the docks and in the markets, neither of which would be completely
resolved for centuries: whose calendar, and whose number symbols and
counting system should be used?
The first conundrum grew out of the multitude of methods, formal and
informal, that people in this period employed to measure time. Arab
merchants used Islam’s lunar calendar and various versions of civil solar
calendars, while Europeans continued to use Caesar’s basic calender: 365 1/4
days, 12 months, 7-day weeks. Yet even in Europe details varied widely. For
instance, no consensus existed on matters as basic as when the year started,
which could vary from town to town and fief to fief. Some localities
celebrated New Year’s Day on Christmas, called stylus nativitatis (Christmas
style) or stylus curiae Romanae (style of the Roman curia), since the papal
chancellery sometimes opened their year on December 25. Many people used
the date inaugurated by Caesar and used by the old empire: January 1, dubbed
stylus communis (style of the people) and occasionally stylus circumcisionis,
since this was the feast of the circumcision of Jesus. Other communities had
the year starting on Good Friday, or the day after, or on Easter. Still others
began their year in March, around the time of the vernal equinox, when some
old German calendars and Rome’s preJulian calendar began. Incredibly, this
custom prevailed in Britain (and the American colonies) until 1752, when the
Gregorian calendar was finally accepted by order of Parliament, and New
Year’s Day was moved from March 25 to the date everyone else in Europe
had by then adopted: the first of January.
The naming of dates also varied as widely as ever. Many educated Latins
still used the Roman kalends, nones, and ides, though more people were
switching to our modern system of dies mensis, counting the days from 1 to
28, 29, 30 or 31. Other date reckoners used letters and syllables for naming
the days. Most popular of all was the contin-
182 CALENDAR
ued use of naming days for saints and feasts, despite the confusion of
different localities attaching their own saints to certain days. Even widely
celebrated holy days were sometimes observed on one day in, say, Hamburg,
and on another in Sussex.
These calendric differences were not a problem during the long centuries
when almost all communication and commerce had ceased. When no one
cared if it took weeks to get to Rome, and only the occasional ship from
Constantinople or Antioch docked in Venice, it didn’t matter if one was a day
or two late, or if two different Christian martyrs in two different localities
were worshiped on the same day. As trade grew more lively, however, people
tried to sort out the Babel of day names and dates—with little success. This
is because no central authority existed to standardize the calendar other than
the Church. St. Peter’s, though, remained firmly locked into the notion that
time belonged to God, not to bankers and sea captains: a core belief that
would have to be changed before the calendar could be reformed.
In 1100 the prospects for this happening seemed next to nil, even if a few
people were noticing that a great deal in nature and in commerce seemed to
operate with its own coherent set of rules independent of church doctrine.
Still, virtually all Europeans continued to believe that God controlled
everything and that truth was revealed to humans only inasmuch as God
allowed. So ingrained was this thinking that the earliest conservative reaction
to the new knowledge was not only condemnation but dismay that anyone
would waste time on such wrongheaded notions as attempting to more
accurately measure time. One conservative writing in the mid-1100s assailed
the ceaseless inquiries of certain scholars into “the composition of the globe,
the nature of the elements, the location of the stars, the nature of animals, the
violence of the wind, the life-processes of plants and roots.”
A young Turk of the era, the French philosopher William of
Conches (1100-1154), responded with an outburst of support for objectivity

that sounds like Roger Bacon a century later:
Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their
ignorance, they don’t want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like
peasants and not to ask the reason behind things. ... If they learn that anyone is so
inquiring, they shout out that he is a heretic, placing more reliance on their monkish
garb than on their wisdom.
Conches got away with such stridency in part because his argument remained
obscure and his ideas outlandish to the mainstream. It would be another
century before such new thinking became widespread enough that
traditionalists would more actively try to thwart it. Besides, the sum total of
the new knowledge remained modest in 1100, with scholars forced to search
for answers in the few texts that had survived the dark years, many of them
encyclopedic summaries of certain ancient works and ideas, but incomplete
and often poorly written.
Yet even as scholars and would-be scholars despaired, a few pioneering
thinkers from Europe were learning about and beginning to visit the great
centers of Arab culture thriving just beyond their frontiers. What they saw
and heard about stunned and shamed them as they realized the extent of their
own ignorance; what one scholar called Latinorum penuria, the poverty of
the Latins.
Even the most enlightened scholars of the time could not imagine the extent
of their loss. Trapped behind their veil of darkness, the Latins had entirely
missed the Gupta’s flowering of mathematics and astronomy and knew
nothing of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and other Indian scholars. Some over
the decades had heard rumors of Islam’s golden age, but few, if any, had ever
heard the names of al-Khwarizini, al-
184 CALENDAR
Battani, or al-Biruni. Most Europeans were ignorant even of the Byzantines,

beyond a few key ports and cities in Italy that had kept in furtive contact over
the centuries.
In part this was understandable. Most outsiders were enemies, including
at times the Byzantines, who continued to challenge the Lombards and other
Westerners for control of southern Italy, and were sometime rivals in the east
during various crusades. As for the Arabs, they stood like a colossus astride
the borders of Europe, a military superpower that fearful Christians thought
of not as an enlightened culture of scholars but as the army of Satan himself.
How else to explain their triumphs against God’s people?
In a whirlwind they had snatched away Spain and stormed across the
Pyrenees to seriously threaten France. Conquering large chunks of the old
Roman Empire, including all of North Africa, they had launched raids
throughout the 800s from the Mediterranean into France and Italy. In 827
they captured Sicily and in 838 their armies fought at Naples, summoned by
Lombards as allies against the Byzantines. Four years later the Arabs
garrisoned a base at Bari, on Italy’s heel. Four years after that, in 846, Arab
squadrons landed at Ostia and threatened Rome. Unable to penetrate its walls,
they sacked the Vatican cathedrals of St. Peter and St. Paul, which lay outside
the main city walls, and desecrated tombs of the popes.
During the 900s they launched raids from Italy and Spain deep into central
Europe, capturing towns that still bear Arab names as far north as Switzerland.
For three centuries, from the mid-700s to the mid- 1000s, Arab armies and
raiding parties menaced the western Mediterranean, dominating its sea lanes
and leaving Europeans terrified they would launch a major invasion.
But the Arabs brought far more to their new domains in Europe than
curved sabers and copies of the Koran. Following the pattern of their earlier
invasions in Asia and Africa, the era of conquest in Spain and Sicily soon
gave way to periods of cultural assimilation and learning. Against the
backdrop of raids and skirmishes on the frontier, art and scholarship
flourished in the new Moslem cities, where scholars
LATINORUM PENURIA (THE POVERTY OF THE LATINS) 185 gathered under the
patronage of caliphs and emirs who imported vast numbers of texts to fill
new libraries built in Cordoba, Seville, Toledo, and Palermo. This rush of
knowledge finally brought to the frontiers of Latin Europe works by ancient
Greeks, Romans, and Indians, and the latest works by Arabs writing on
everything from the anatomy of the human eye to Hindu numbers.
In Spain, al-Khwarizmi’s Algoritmi de numero Indorum and other texts
had reached Cordoba by the late ninth century joining a vast treasure trove
of manuscripts housed in a new library built by Caliph Abd ar- Rahman III
(891-961)—a patron of art and learning who filled Cordoba with
monumental buildings that fused Arab, Romanesque, and Persian motiffs in
the style known as Moorish, with its graceful arches, fluted columns, onion
domes, and vast gardens. Under his successors, the collection of texts begun
by Abd ar-Rahman was said to house 400,000 volumes, which if true meant
it rivaled the number of volumes in Alexandria’s library.
Likewise, the emirs governing Sicily imported texts and encouraged
learning, though the island’s apex of Arab culture came not under their rule
but after it was conquered by a Christian: Roger Guiscard (1031-1101), son
of a baron in Normandy.
Originally a mercenary seeking riches and adventure, Roger trekked to
southern Italy from France in the 1060s to join four of his brothers in the
long-simmering struggle over this disputed territory— which they ended by
throwing out the Lombards and Byzantines and seizing the place for
themselves.§§§§§ With Roger in the lead, they also invaded Sicily, tossing
out the Arabs by 1072.
Once secure in his capital of Palermo, Roger renamed himself Roger I,
count of Sicily. He then established one of the odder amalgamations of
cultures in the Middle Ages, blending Christian and Moslem with older
currents of history on an island rich in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
traditions. By Arab terms an uncultured Christian, Roger nonetheless won
the loyalty and admiration of Moslems,
§§§§§Roger was one of twelve brothers.

186 CALENDAR
whom he welcomed into his domain—including Arab soldiers and advisors,

and a stable of Eastern scholars, philosophers, and astrologers.
Two of Roger’s successors expanded on this strange Arab-Norman
cocktail. His son Roger II (1095-1154), known as the “half-heathen king,”
ruled both Sicily and southern Italy like an Arab sultan, dressing in Persian
silks and opening up his court to Moslem intellectuals. Roger II’s grandson
and successor, Frederick II (1194—1250), inherited not only Sicily and
southern Italy but also Germany and the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.
Elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1220 Frederick maintained an oriental-
style harem and surrounded himself with philosophers and sages from
Baghdad and Syria, dancing girls from the Orient, and Jewish scholars. From
Syria he imported experts on falconry; from Spain he brought a translator
who created a Latin summary of Aristotle’s biological and zoological works.
Frederick founded the University of Naples in 1224, endowing it with a large
collection of Arabic manuscripts on Aristotle and other ancients. Copies of
Latin translations were sent to the universities in Paris and Bologna.
Frederick also led a successful Crusade to Palestine in 1228- 1229—the fifth
crusade—and recaptured Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth.
Still, the infusion of Arabic knowledge was very slow, with only a few
scattered documents making the journey from Cordoba, Palermo, and
Damascus before 1200. Some of the earliest translations were penned in
northern Spain beginning in the mid-tenth century at the monastery of Santa
Maria de Ripoll at the foot of the Pyrenees, mostly works on geometry and
astronomical instruments. Next came works by Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and
others, coming out of Roger’s Sicily, northern Spain after the fall of Toledo
to the Christians in 1085, and Byzantium and Palestine as the Crusaders
stormed across the east starting in 1096.
Leading translators and collectors of manuscripts in these early days

included Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 946—1003), later Pope Sylvester II. He
trekked to northern Spain to carry home Latin translations of Arab treatises
on the abacus and the astrolabe. Another was Adelard of Bath (c. 1075—
1160). He journeyed by ship along the new eastern trade routes to the
Crusader-held coast of Syria, where he translated Euclid into Latin using
Arabic translations of the original Greek. Most prolific of all these early
translators was the Italian Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114—1187). Fluent in
Greek and Arabic, he was a leading figure in the new college of translators
set up by the Spanish archbishop Raymond after the capture of Toledo (and
its library), rendering into Latin texts by Galen, Aristotle, Euclid, al-
Khwarizmi, and Ptolemy, among many others.
Independent-minded thinkers in Europe welcomed each precious
manuscript with fascination, though the transfer of knowledge was hardly
swift or comprehensive. Most Europeans, even those with some education,
remained locked in the timelessness of the Middle Ages and remained
ignorant of the new knowledge. Others condemned the texts as products of
pagans and devils. Still others resisted anything new because they either
failed to understand it or preferred their own familiar ways and traditions—
much as Americans today continue to use inches instead of centimeters.
Even those who embraced Aristotle and al-Khwarizmi were often confused
by poor translations and by the random selections that arrived: a fragment of
a Platonic dialogue one year and a chapter or two of Euclid the next.
An example is the reception of the new Hindu numbers as they completed
their journey west from India to the Arabs and onward to the Latins. Indeed,
the Europeans took centuries to fully integrate what the Arabs had largely
absorbed just a generation or so after the 789 arrival of Kanaka in Baghdad.
The first Hindu number known to have been scrawled on a European
manuscript appeared in northern Spain in 976 and used the “western” Arabic
form of the numbers one through nine.
188 CALENDAR
IRÂ?G7K^
Twenty years later, in the 990s, Gerbert of Aurillac taught the Hindu
numbers to his students, undoubtedly picking them up after a stint in Spain.
But Gerbert apparently failed to understand their computive power and
limited his use of them to special counting boards. These boards failed to
catch on, however, in part because people who tried to use the boards had no
idea which way was up for the strange symbols. For instance, they seem to
have confused a A with a ^ .
Mention of the numbers all but disappeared for another entire century
until the Englishman Robert of Chester (c. 1100) visited Spain and translated
al-Khwarizmi’s little book into Latin in 1120. This and other translations of
al-Khwarizmi inspired several Latin textbooks on the “new arithmetic,”
including descriptions of the decimal system and positional notation. Still, it
took several more centuries before Europeans entirely abandoned Roman
numerals, despite their clumsiness and inferiority to Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Even bankers and merchants resisted them at first, worrying that they were
easier to falsify than Roman numerals. Some less-educated merchants also
suspected that the symbols were a secret code used by orientals and other
Europeans to cheat them.
As late as the fifteenth century, when Hindu-Arabic numbers took the
form we now use, Europeans were still having trouble making the transition.
In a preface to a calendar in 1430 the maker gives the length of the year as
“ccc and sixty days and 5 and sex odde howres.” Later in the century, two
years after Christopher Columbus sailed to America, another author
described the year as MCCCC94—1494. Yet another used the new
positional system along with the more recently arrived zero, but mixed up
Hindu and Latin numbers to come up with the year, 1502, written as IV0II,
with I (1) in the thousands place, V (5) in the hundreds, 0 (zero) in the tens,
and II (2) in the digits. Dutch painter Dirck Bouts (c. 1400-1475) dated a
painting he placed in the cathedral in Louvain with MCCCC4XVII. This
may be 1447, but who knows?
Progress was equally slow for other mathematic concepts crucial to fixing
the calendar, including decimals and zero, neither of which was routinely
taught in universities until at least the mid-fourteenth century. The first
systematic treatment of decimal fractions in Europe had to wait until 1582,
the year of the Gregorian calendar reform, when Dutch mathematician
Simon Stevin (1548—1620) explained the system in a book called La
Thiende (The tenth). But Stevin did not use our modern form for his decimals,
having no decimal point. He would have written the fraction for the length
of the solar year as:
@® @@@® 365242199 instead

of:
365.242199
The invention of the decimal point is usually attributed to either

mapmaker and Galileo rival G. A. Magini (1555-1617) in a 1592 work, or
to the leading astronomer on Gregory XIII’s calendar commission,
Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), who used them in a table of sines in 1593.
As for zero, its first significant appearance in Europe comes during the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, at roughly the same time as the other nine
Hindu-Arabic numbers started to come into wide use— first as a place
marker on counting boards devised by Gerbert and others, then as a digit in
positional notation. It took longer for zero to be thought of as a real number
in mathematical equations, though by the turn of the seventeenth century it
and positional notation were familiar enough for William Shakespeare to use
them as a metaphor for infinite gratitude in The Winter’s Tale, written in
1610:
Like a cypher . . .
I multiply with one, “We thank you,”
Many thousands more, that go before it.
190 CALENDAR
This reticence over something as basic as numbers begins to explain why

it took so long to reform the calendar, a process that was far more difficult
and complicated than deciding whether to use 5 instead of V, or 365 instead
of CCCLXV. For unlike numbers—or zero or a decimal fraction—the
calendar belonged to God, and was assumed to be an immutable timetable
of faith and worship that no one had dared challenge, not even the likes of
Bede and Hermann the Lame. Which made the entire question of time and
the calendar more and more perplexing as Europe reawakened and time
ceased to be something that one could ignore or relegate exclusively to God.
Whether traditionalists liked it or not, secular time was restarting in
Europe, and with it a need to reevaluate the nature of time—how to measure
it, use it, and understand it. This issue lay at the heart of a looming larger
question: how to react to an influx of new ideas that in some cases directly
challenged not only details of Church dogma but the fundamental beliefs of
an entire society. This would become the central dilemma of scholars from
1100 to 1300: how to account for knowledge that seemed to come out of
nowhere, and in essence offered a new kind of religion that put its faith in
observation and logic. It was this debate that would ring across Europe
during the High Middle Ages, primarily in the halls and courtyards of this
era’s profound new invention: the university.
The Battle Over Time
Since the General Council forbade any alterations in the calendar,

modern scholars have had to tolerate . . . errors ever since.
—JOHN OF SACROBOSCO, 1235
Imagine the 14-year-old son of a wealthy shipowner in Pisa, or the second

son of a prosperous squire in Kent, circa 1240. How would each have reacted
to the news that his father, with the support of the local lord, was sending
him to a university in Bologna, or in Oxford?
They might have been dimly aware of the new knowledge arriving in
Europe, particularly the boy in Pisa. In the harbor he would have seen dark-
skinned Arab traders in turbans haggling with his father and scratching out
strange, compact symbols for numbers that differed from the ones Latins
used. He might also have heard from former university students about the
halls at Bologna, where black-robed masters delivered lectures revealing
untold secrets of the ancients: powerful knowledge that his father wanted
him to learn so that he could help the family. But it was also dangerous
knowledge, or so he might have been told by a local priest or elder looking
out for the boy’s spiritual well-being, who warned him to beware of ideas
that would offend God and the Church.
The boys in Kent and Pisa would have left home in the early autumn,
sometime before lectures began on or just after St. Michael’s day, September
29, or some other date no one would have been
191
192 CALENDAR
precise about following. Beyond this, the boys probably gave no more
thought to dates and exact times than our farmer on the Rhine or the weaver
in France did in the year 800. By now a few people were using reasonably
accurate water clocks, but mechanical clocks had not yet been invented—at
least, there are no definitive records of any. And public bell towers clanging
each hour from the town square remained decades in the future, with several
rising up over cities near Pisa in the early and mid-1300s and the first large
clock appearing in England at Windsor Palace in 1351.
Otherwise, the boys would have reckoned time by looking up into the sky,
eyeballing the arc of the sun as Geoffrey Chaucer does in The Canterbury
Tales to move us through the timeline of his journey. As the day in his story
ends, Chaucer writes (in updated English):
From the south line the sun had now descended So low, it stood—so
far as I had in sight— At less than twenty-nine degrees in height. Four
o’ the clock it was to make a guess; Eleven foot long, or little more or
less, My shadow was, as at that time and place, Measuring feet by
taking in this case My height as six, divided in like pattern
Proportionally; and the power of Saturn Began to rise with Libra just
as we approached a little thorpe.
Chaucer, who also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, was undoubtedly

more adept at making such “guesses” than our young men from Pisa and
Kent. Yet his inclusion in his tales of references to angles of the sun suggests
his audience by the mid-1300s was familiar with the idea, though even then
the times and measurements are given as “more or less,” as if this is close
enough for pilgrims trekking leisurely along the road to England’s most holy
city.
THE BATTLE OVER TIME 193
Packing up a satchel on the appointed day, the squire’s son in Kent would
have started off with prayers for a safe journey in the cool darkness of his
village church. Then, before the sun rose too high, he would have set off for
London, possibly accompanied by a servant, joining a highway like the one
Chaucer wrote about: filled with messengers, knights, monks, merchants,
ne’er-do-wells, highwaymen, and pilgrims.
London would have seemed enormous to this country boy. A city of
perhaps 20,000 packed inside thick stone walls, it drew in people from all
over England, and a few from foreign lands, with ships at anchor on the
Thames from as far away as the Levant. Merchants bought and sold in
markets reeking of dung, perfume, and exotic spices. Our student-to-be
would have seen beggars in rags wailing for a few grains of barley, courtiers
in colorful Every from the royal palace, soldiers sporting broadswords in
sheaths attached to their belts, and merchants from France and Italy
calculating everything so quickly on abacuses that one could hardly see their
fingers move.
Staying overnight in a London inn, the boy would have continued
eastward toward Oxford, following the snaking, narrowing, lazy flow of the
Thames, and passing by hedgerows ablaze with autumn colors and the earthy
smell of fields turned over for the winter. Arriving at the gates of Oxford, the
squire’s son would have seen a small, sleepy market town along the river,
where perhaps a few hundred students had come to live among the
townspeople—who often found the students loud and obnoxious. Oxford at
one point shut down between 1209 and 1214 when a student killed a
townswoman, and a local mob hanged two or three students in retaliation.
Mostly the students stayed in modest houses of stone and thatch in the
neighborhood surrounding St. Mary’s Cathedral. The boy would have seen
none of today’s grand quads, libraries, and other university
194 CALENDAR
buildings, because in 1240 they had not yet been built. The only evidence
that he was in a university town was the sight of other boys and men dressed
in black robes; among them a scattering of masters, including perhaps Roger
Bacon, who might have been teaching then at Oxford.
Taking a deep breath, the boy would have turned into one of the small,
cramped buildings where he was told the registrar kept his records, just as
his counterpart in Bologna was strolling into the equivalent office to
matriculate in this ancient city in northern Italy. Neither realized that he was
headed toward an encounter with the unknown unlike anything their fathers
or grandfathers could have imagined, a new way of approaching the world
that was already turning the university into a major intellectual battleground
between the forces of faith and reason, the sacred and the secular. This battle
would forever alter the way Europeans thought about themselves and the
universe, and it would shift the fundamental perception of time away from
“more or less” to ever more precise expectations in the generations that
followed the boys from Kent and Pisa.
The universities did not start out as crucibles for an intellectual revolution.
Originally referred to as universitas magistrum or universitas scho- larium—
“university of masters” “university of students”—at first they were little
more than gatherings of students in certain cities, attracted by masters whose
fame allowed them to charge fees. Many of the earliest university teachers
came from the ranks of translators who had trekked to Toledo and Sicily and
returned to teach the “secrets” of Aristotle, al-Biruni, and Euclid. These
universities operated in rented halls and hostels, with wealthier students
renting their own rooms, and those with fewer resources, such as our
shipowner’s son and squire’s son living either with their masters or in inns
and local hostels. The spirit of these enclaves was one of a shared adventure
in learn-
ing—a profound experience for young men coming from Pisa, Kent, and
elsewhere. Students with more ecclesiastic leanings, or in economic straits
and in need of free housing, joined one of the new Catholic orders attached
to the universities, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans.
The greatest of the early masters was Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1144), son
of a minor Breton lord and a proponent of the newfangled logic of Aristotle.
An intoxicating lecturer, he is sometimes credited with single-handedly
attracting the original crowds of students that made possible the university in
Paris. The young Abelard epitomized the sort of person drawn to the new
style of learning in the twelfth century. Brilliant and relentless in his
scholarship, freewheeling and passionate in his lifestyle and personality, he
represented a profound shift away from the cloistered approach of learning
and toward a search for the truth in open discourse and disputation, and
through the unfettered power of his intellect.
Predictably, conservatives criticized the new thinking and the entire
project of the universities, launching a centuries-long battle between
traditionalists and men such as Abelard. As early as the 1060s a leading
cardinal, Pier Damiani (1007-1072), warned that the new learning
represented a grave danger to bedrock medieval beliefs and might eventually
cause a split between the world of reason and that of faith. He and others of
a similarly contemplative bent worried not only about offending God but
about the unsettling effect on the faithful should basic tenets of the Church
be undermined. Less philosophical critics simply condemned the new
teachings, calling heresy anything that contradicted the Church. Still, the
universities proliferated, with Bologna the first to receive an official charter
in 1088. Paris received its in 1150 and Oxford in 1167, though the rush did
not come until the 1200s and 1300s, when dozens of schools were officially
opened, from Salamanca in Spain (1218) to Krakow in Poland (1364).
The university curriculum began with training in four or five general areas:
theology, law, medicine, arts or philosophy, and music. The masters also
taught what was known about astronomy, mathematics,
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and other sciences, though these more empirical subjects tended to be

overshadowed by the deep philosophical and theological controversy
touched upon by Hermann the Lame, promulgated by the Arabs, and shouted
about by Abelard: what to do about the growing evidence that two truths
existed, that of the Church and that suggested by nature and reason.
This was hardly a new quandary. It revisited an old debate from the
waning days of the Roman Empire, depicted by St. Augustine as the “city of
God” versus “the city of man.” It also was a recasting of the ancient dispute
between, on one hand, the Aristotelian notion of the particular and the
individual, of empiricism and logic, and, on the other, the Platonic ideal that
the general and the universal are everything, and that perfection exists but is
beyond human comprehension. In ancient times a great pendulum had swung
back and forth between these two worldviews, with Caesar and the Rome of
the early emperors representing a swing toward the secular, and Constantine
and later Augustine swerving over to embrace the sacred.
Now for Europe in the High Middle Ages, this debate had returned in full
fury to become an epochal argument, one that would either propel it into a
new age of empiricism and secularism or sustain it in a world of mysticism
and faith.
For several centuries, until long after Copernicus and even Galileo, the
outcome would remain unclear, with traditionalists fighting back at every
turn. Abelard himself was eventually destroyed, in part because of his own
outrageous departure from acceptable behavior when he wooed the young
Heloise, the teenage niece of a prominent canon in Paris, had a son with her,
then married her in secret—which prompted the girl’s irate uncle to have the
master scholar castrated. More serious for Abelard’s career, if not his
anatomy, was his practice of intentionally upsetting his enemies by
publishing such works as his Sic et Non, which explicitly laid out the
contradictions of various Church leaders on important theological points. He
also challenged orthodox views on the nature of God, Christ, and the Holy
Spirit, a
sore spot of Catholicism since the age of Constantine, when the Council of
Nicaea condemned Arianism over this same issue.
After being charged with heresy for his ideas, Abelard retired to a
hermitage, became an abbot, and was eventually tried by his enemies—led
by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090—1153). The French-born leader of a
movement toward more mysticism and reliance on faith, not less, Bernard
spoke for the old guard when he criticized those who learned “merely in order
that they may know,” insisting that “such curiosity ... is blamable.” Calling
Abelard a “hydra of wickedness” he condemned all learning that was not
directly necessary to serve God, proclaiming that the only road to truth was
to maintain a “pure conscience and unfeigning faith.”
Abelard’s downfall did not squelch the new thinking, as Bernard un-
doubtedly hoped it would. But it did remind scholars of a need to be prudent
in what they said and wrote, at least in public. “When the object of the dispute
can be explained more clearly through the rules of the art of logic,” wrote the
Italian scholar and ecclesiastic Lanfranc (c. 1005-1089), a confidant of
William the Conqueror and later the archbishop of Canterbury, “I conceal
the logical rules as much as I can within the formulas of faith, because I do
not wish to seem to place more trust in this art than in the truth and authority
of the Holy Fathers.”
Despite this, a growing number of intellectuals followed Abelard’s lead in
seeking truth through logic and nature—though few as effectively as an Arab
in Cordoba named Abu al-Walid Mohammed Ibn Rushd (1126-1198),
known in the West as Averroes. A teenager when Abelard died, Ibn Rushd
lived in an era when the Islamic world itself had been locked in a debate
between the sacred and the secular, with the same enormous stakes. By now,
however, the great Islamic empire was long gone, succeeded by shifting
emirates and sultanates
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that tended to be religiously conservative and uninterested in learning. And

with it was gone the era of the House of Wisdom, when Aristotle and
Mohammed could be studied side by side. One exception had long been
Moslem Spain, though it was now ruled by North Africans more orthodox
than previous emirs, even as the Moors slowly lost territory to the Christians.
It was against this backdrop that the physician, judge, and philosopher Ibn
Rushd wrote what Europeans considered the most thorough and enlightening
commentaries to date on Aristotle and the Aristotelian universe. Called “the
commentator,” a play on Aristotle’s appellation “the philosopher,” Ibn
Rushd conceived of a philosophical argument that tried to solve the dilemma
between the sacred and the secular by insisting that two contradictory truths
could exist: one for science and “natural reason” and one for “revelation.”
According to his philosophy:
When a conflict arises we will therefore simply say: here are the conclusions to
which my reason as a philosopher leads me, but because God cannot lie, I adhere to
the truth he has revealed to us and I cling to it through faith.
At first Ibn Rushd’s “double truth” was merely frowned upon. Then it was
aggressively challenged by religious authorities in Christian Europe and
Islamic Cordoba. Declaring that Aristotle was not a god, but a man and
therefore fallible, bishops and imams alike objected to Ibn Rushd’s insistence
that science was on par with divine truth. They also were horrified by Ibn
Rushd’s assertion that while science proved that God was the mechanistic
mover of the universe, God himself was a “machine” entirely removed from
interference in human affairs. According to Ibn Rushd, it was the laws of
nature—of this machine—that uphold the eternity of the universe and the
passage of time. This idea denied a range of core Christian and Moslem
beliefs, including creation, the doctrine of an active and fully engaged God,
and the immortality of the individual soul.
Ibn Rushd’s ideas nonetheless resonated with many intellectuals in
Europe, working their way into a gradual rethinking of time by Christians,

begun with the likes of Hermann the Lame. For instance, around 1200, a
Norman mathematician and encyclopedist named Alexander of Villedieu
suggested there may be two truths in regard to time reckoning. He makes no
direct mention of Ibn Rushd’s work, and as a pious Catholic he would have
been horrified to be mentioned in the same sentence with this near-heretical
Arab. Yet he was advanced enough in his thinking to use Hindu numbers,
and was reasoning along the same line as Ibn Rushd when he divided the
measurement of time into two categories: what he called philosophical
computus, by which he meant time as measured by science, which is
infallible; and ecclesiastic time, which he curiously referred to as “vulgar”
computus, “the science of dividing time according to the custom of the
Church.” But Alexander dodges the potential controversy of his categories
by telling us that he does not want to discuss the philosophical computus, but
will confine his comments to the ecclesiastic.
Eventually the Italian master Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) solved the
dilemma, at least temporarily, by rejecting the incompatibility of the two
truths. He argued that in fact both “truths” point in the same direction: toward
God and toward the universe of ideas and morals created by God. To do this
Aquinas made the breathtakingly bold assertion that Platonic universals
could be proven by Aristotelian logic. In other words, this brilliant Italian
philosopher and theologian, born in a castle to the noble counts of Aquino
and trained in Naples and Cologne, attempted in a comprehensive manner to
unite the worlds of Aristotle and Plato.
Part of Thomas’s argument rested on a theory that time and the universe
could not be eternal, as Aristotle claimed, but must have started with an
original, unmoved mover, which Thomas says is God. He then sets out in his
massive Summa Theologica, which he worked on until his death in 1274, to
apply the rules of science as argued by Aristotle to prove the reality of God’s
perfection, of the Creation and the existence of the human soul, and of the
ethical foundation of Christian virtue. This attempted conciliation of the
sacred and the
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secular provided the great philosophical compromise of the Middle Ages,

permitting intellectuals on both sides of the great divide of the two truths
some breathing room.
But Thomas’s opus was not initially well received either by the followers
of Ibn Rushd, who accused him of faulty logic, or by the Church. At first
conservative Church leaders condemned his Summa as being overly radical,
though just a generation after Thomas’s death his philosophy was embraced
by the Church. It became the official theological response to the new
knowledge and a counter to Ibn Rushd—a point vividly made in a painting
rendered during this period of an enormous Thomas enthroned, “crushing”
under his feet a tiny, bearded, and turbaned Ibn Rushd. Thomas was made a
saint in 1323.
For a time Thomas’s philosophy comforted conservatives and scholars
who shared Alexander of Villedieu’s discomfort in acknowledging truths
that seemed to contradict the Church. But it also gave a green light of sorts
for science to seek its own truths, though within strict limits—as Bacon
would discover, and many years later Galileo. Another period painting amply
demonstrates this, illustrating a gigantic St. Augustine, dressed in glittering
medieval robes, crushing underfoot a tiny Aristotle in a simple tunic. Yet the
Aquinas compromise had the advantage of at least quieting the all-
encompassing theological debate so that men such as Bacon could begin to
turn their attention toward using the new knowledge of the Greeks, Arabs,
and Indians for scientific endeavors, rather than to score points in heated
philosophical debates.
But Ibn Rushd and like-minded Islamic scholars did not win even this
partial victory in their own homeland. Toward the end of Ibn Rushd’s life the
conservatives in Spain struck hard against the celebrated schools in Cordoba,
denouncing Ibn Rushd and other intellectuals and later disavowed his work.
For even as Europe finally began to absorb the learning brought to its
frontiers by Arabs, the world of Islam was falling deeper into a period of
political turmoil and outside threats from Mongols and others, hastening a
growing chill in its intellectual life.
With the fate of the human soul and the beliefs of a thousand years hanging
in the balance, scientific pursuits remained largely fringe endeavors for
intellectuals during the 1100s and 1200s. Peter Abelard, for one, brushed off
mathematics, astronomy, and virtually all science, insisting in 1140 that
“philosophy can do more than nature.” As for time reckoning, he dismissed
it as being in the same low category as usury, useful in the hallowed halls of
the university only for collecting fees from students based on elapsed time.
Thomas Aquinas a century later was equally dismissive of time reckoning,
refusing to allow that it was real in Aristotelian terms. Like Abelard, Thomas
argued that time fixing should be excluded from the theoretical sciences, also
ranking it as a lowly mechanical art unworthy of scholarly contemplation.
Even those who pondered the new texts with an eye toward learning more
about science tended to simply read Ptolemy, Galen, Euclid, and the Arab
astronomers, rather than trying to apply their ancient ideas to anything new.
Still, a scattered handful of scholars pored over the mass of new
knowledge and tried to make sense of it, and attempted to apply it to
everything from human anatomy to more accurately measuring time.
One of the first hands-on time reckoners steeped in the new knowledge
was Reiner of Paderborn (c. mid-twelfth century), dean of the cathedral at
Paderborn in the northern Rhine Valley. Now all but forgotten, Reiner wrote
a treatise in 1171, Computus emendatus, that applies the new Hindu
numbers and mathematics to the old formulas of computus involving the
Easter calculation—and proves that the old 19- year lunisolar cycle was
misaligned with the true movements of the sun and moon. This error
amounted to one day lost every 315 years— that is, every 315 years the 19-
year cycle of lunar and solar years slipped a day against the Julian calendar.
Reiner’s measurements also led him to the near-heretical conclusion that all
attempts by computists
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to date the age of the world, and to create a timeline of history dating back to
creation, were mistaken, given the errors in the calendar.
In 1200 Conrad of Strasbourg wrote that the winter solstice had fallen
behind by 10 days since Caesar’s time. Conrad’s estimate established the
figure of 10 days as gospel among reform-minded time reckoners, though
they argued about whether one should calculate the drift from Caesar’s
founding of the calendar in 45 B.C. or from the time of the Council of Nicaea
in 325, when time reckoners fixed the equinox on March 21.
A few years after Conrad, the English scholar Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175-
1253) recalculated Reiner’s lunar-solar slip and amended it to the gain of a
day every 304 years—closer to the actual drift against the Julian year of a
day every 308.5 years. He also proposed a solution: that one day be dropped
from the lunar calendar every three centuries. Grosseteste, chancellor of
Oxford University and later a bishop, also closely studied measurements of
the solar year, confirming once and for all that the values arrived at by
Hipparchus, Ptolemy, al-Battani, and other Arabs and Greeks were superior
to those worked out by Bede and centuries of computists. This led him to
suggest a new starting point for the Easter calculation—a spring equinox of
March 14 instead of March 21—to compensate for the centuries-long drift in
the calendar against the calendar year. Grosseteste is also remembered
because of the standards he set for science. Known for his work in geometry
and optics as well as astronomy, he was an early advocate of using
experimentation and observation to verify theories. This was an idea years
ahead of its time. For while most intellectuals were trying to reconcile
contradictions between the new knowledge and the old dogma, Grosseteste
was taking the next step and trying to reconcile the contradictions between
reason and experience—between the new knowledge as written in books and
empirical evidence.
By Grosseteste’s time few serious time reckoners were denying that the
errors existed in the lunar and solar calendars. But this hardly meant they
were all for reform. Another Englishman, John of Sac- robosco (c. 1195—
1256), proved the errors down to the minutes and seconds using an astrolabe
and a deep knowledge of Arab, Greek, and Indian mathematics and
astronomy. Yet he was able to offer only one modest reform in the solar
calendar: that the calendric order be re
stored by canceling the leap day every 288 years. Otherwise John stuck with
Bede’s admonition to follow the “universal custom” of accepting the errors,
insisting that the Church was the final authority. Referring to the Council of
Nicaea in 325, he wrote: “Since the General Council forbade any alterations
to the calendar, modern scholars have had to tolerate errors ever since.”
John’s reticence must have resonated with scholars. For three hundred years
his textbook on time reckoning remained a standard in universities. Even
Protestants republished it in 1538, soon after they changed the university at
Wittenberg to a Lutheran institution.
Into this mix in the mid-1200s came Roger Bacon, another firebrand
visionary along the lines of Abelard. He not only took up the cause of Robert
Grosseteste in pushing for reform of the calendar but he also became a
staunch advocate of Grosseteste’s championing of empiricism and the
objectivity of science. Even further ahead of his time than Grosseteste—
centuries further—Bacon demanded that scholars
stop talking and debating and start doing. In his Opus Mains—written in the
1260s, the same decade that Thomas Aquinas was laboring over his Summa
Theologica—Bacon writes:
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The Ptolemaic Universe; Astroligia directing the attention of Sacrobosco to Ptolemy, from
Urania Ptolemaeus, 1538.
The Latins have laid the foundations of knowledge regarding languages,

mathematics, and perspective; I want now to turn to the foundations provided by
experimental science, for without experience one cannot know anything fully.
In possibly Bacon’s most famous passage he vividly illustrates his point:

If someone who has never seen fire proves through reasoning that fire burns,
changes things and destroys them, the mind of his listener will not be satisfied
with that, and will not avoid fire before he has placed his hand or something
combustible on the fire, to prove through his experience what his reasoning had
taught him. But once it has had the experience of combustion the mind is assured
and rests in the light of truth. This reasoning is not enough—one needs
experience.
As passionate and arrogant about his cause as Abelard was about the use of
logic a century and a half earlier, Bacon argued that nature had been
established by God and therefore needed to be explored, tested, and absorbed
to bring people closer to God. He warns that a failure to embrace science is
an affront to God and an embarrassment to Christians, who were forced to
acknowledge the superiority of Arab science.
A prime example of this embarrassment, he said, was the habit of
Christian time reckoners and mathematicians to round off numbers rather
than trying to calculate them precisely. This was an intentional jab at time
reckoners such as Bede and Bacon’s contemporary John of Sacrobosco—
those who admitted to calendric errors but settled for approximations rather
than challenge the Church. This had led, writes Bacon, to a calendar that in
that very year (1267) was causing havoc for devout Christians.
The errors I have mentioned are terrible in themselves, yet they bear no
comparison to those which follow from the facts now stated. For the whole order
of Church solemnities is thrown into confusion by errors of this kind respecting
the beginning of the lunation according to the Calendar, as well as by the error
in determining the equinoxes. And not to refer to other years for evidence of this
error, I shall state the case in this present year.
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Which he does in detail, explaining what this meant for pious Christians, in
terms much starker than Reiner of Paderborn or Robert Grosseteste would
have dared:
Wherefore the feast of Easter, by which the world is saved, will not be celebrated at
its proper time, but there is fasting this year through the whole true week of Easter.
For the fast continues eight days longer than it should. There follows then another
disadvantage that the fast of Lent began eight days too late; therefore Christians were
eating meats in the true Lent for eight days, which is absurd. And again then neither
the Rogations nor the Ascension nor Pentecost are kept this year at their proper times.
And as it happens in this year 1267, so will it happen the year following.
Bacon’s ardor for correcting obvious errors came in part from a belief that
the Antichrist was about to arrive on earth; shortly after this event would
come the end of the world. This left Christians little time to use science to
bring order to civic life and to perfect the Christian way of life, or so Bacon
argued in his strange amalgam of science and spiritualism.
Bacon did not stop with condemnations, however. He demanded a
change—taking his case directly to the papacy when given his surprise
opening in 1265 from Guy Le Gros Foulques, the soon-to-be Pope Clement
IV.
But Bacon was not after a simple mechanical solution. He framed his
argument philosophically by dividing time into three categories: that which
is “designated by nature, ... by authority, and ... by custom and caprice.” He
defined natural time as the measurable passage of years, seasons, months,
and days; authoritative time as that used in civil and ecclesiastic calendars;
and time by custom as when people arbitrarily impose periods of time, such
as months that number 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.
Bacon derived his three-part definition from Bede, though the venerable
monk had concluded that the authority of God’s time superseded the others.
Bacon argued the opposite: that natural time was
God’s time, and that time as interpreted by an authority such as the Church
can be mistaken. This provided the philosophical underpinning that in
Bacon’s view gave Rome the right and the responsibility to correct the
calendar, both as Europe’s only authority capable of ordering a change and
as God’s authority on earth.
But Rome was still grappling with what to do about Abelard and the
onslaught of reason, and it hardly seemed prepared to move several steps
ahead to embrace Bacon’s essential idea—that human intellect through
experimentation and observation could correct and negate core Church
teachings. This leaves us with a mystery as to whether or not Clement IV
shared Bacon’s ideas—or would have been receptive to his demand for
reform had he lived.
One thing is sure: Clement’s advisors, those who received and presumably
glanced at the friar’s opus, were not receptive. After the pontiffs death no
one at St. Peter’s so much as mentioned Bacon. Years later the French lawyer
and bishop Guillaume Durand (c. 1230—1296), who joined the papal service
under Clement, wrote an entire volume on time reckoning, without so much
as mentioning Roger Bacon.
Yet change was in the air as the year 1300 arrived, much of it coming not
from the endless debates and scholasticism of the universities or the gilded
basilicas of Rome but more than ever from the rising merchants, traders,
bankers, kings, generals, shipowners, and other practical-minded people.
They who felt a keen need not only to measure time accurately but also to
find better ways to build ships, plant millet, fashion swords, and construct
battlements. By the 1290s the word computus itself had shifted its meaning
to something more familiar to us today. Indeed, back in 1250 the Italian conto
still meant time reckoning, while just a generation later a young Dante
Alighieri (1265-1321) was writing love poems in which conto describes the
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relationship between two lovers—not physically, but in terms of economics

and accounting, that is, how lovers reckon and balance income and
expenditure. The word computare was becoming closely connected with
finance, with conto in Italian, cuenta in Spanish, and later kanto in German,
all meaning to count or reckon not stars and epacts of lunar cycles but money.
At the same time a civic calendar of sorts was beginning to take shape
along with the renewed sense of linear time crucial to conducting ongoing
business and government. This new age was signaled by Pope Boniface
VIII’s declaring 1300 to be a “century” year, which he marked with a jubilee
to celebrate thirteen centuries of Christendom—starting a tradition that
continues to the present, with jubilees now held every quarter century.
Boniface’s affair attracted 20,000 pilgrims drawn by the spectacle and by the
pope’s offer of special indulgences. The event also signaled a new awareness
of the calendar, and the final triumph of Dionysius Exiguus’s system of
counting years from the supposed birth of Christ.
It also was an effort by Boniface to emphasize the primacy of Rome in an
age when the papacy was being challenged by the power and authority of
kings, dukes, and counts, and by what would become modern state
governments replete with ministers, lawyers, tax and spending authorities,
and bureaucrats. The jubilee recalled the lavish feasts held by ancient Roman
emperors on special anniversaries, and was meant to demonstrate the
supremacy of Rome and papal rule then and forever. This sentiment was
made more starkly clear two years later when Boniface issued a papal bull
that ordered all Christians to recognize the supremacy of the pope in all
matters. Directed primarily at Boniface’s enemies of the moment, Edward I
of England and Philip IV of France, the pope wrote: “Therefore we declare,
state, define and pronounce that for every human creature to be subject to the
Roman pope is altogether necessary for salvation.”
It says a great deal about change in Europe that a pope even needed to
issue such a proclamation just one hundred years after Pope In-
nocent III reigned over the papacy’s unchallenged supremacy. It says even
more that Philip, who had been feuding with Rome over his right to tax and
regulate the clergy, plotted to kidnap Boniface and bring him to Paris.
Storming a palace where the pope had gone to write an order
excommunicating Philip, the king’s henchmen held the pope three days, until
Boniface was rescued. The pope died a month later, reportedly from shock
over the incident.
Another seminal moment in European history, this soap-opera affair
symbolized the rising power of secularism in politics just as Abelard and
Bacon signaled the start of a new secularism of the intellect. It also would
trigger a century of chaos in the papacy, as it was drawn into the struggles
and power plays among the emerging great powers of Europe. In 1309 a
French-sponsored pope was crowned in Lyons, and established residence at
Avignon in Provence, launching a 68- year absence from the holy city that
nearly split the Church in two.******
Still, in the years immediately after Boniface’s jubilee the overall attitude of
Europeans remained positive, with trade increasing, the population growing,
and frequent outbreaks of original thinking. The early 1300s was the age of
Dante, who finished The Divine Comedy in 1321—a work filled with
allusions to time, which by then was becoming a subject not just for
ecclesiastics, traders, and scientists but also for poets. In his canto on paradise,
Dante’s narrator (also named Dante) describes the source of time—what he
calls the primum mobile, a ring of heaven situated above all the heaven-
planets. This, he says, is the invisible, unmoving force of the divine mind
that directs the daily revolutions of the planets around the earth, which is of
course in the center:
******Between 1378 and 1417, rival popes resided in Avignon and in Rome.
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The nature of the universe which stills

The centre and revolves all else, from here, As from its starting-point,
all movement wills.
This heaven it is which has no other “where” Than the Divine

Mind; ’tis but in that Mind That love, its spur, and the power it rains in
here . . .
As in a plant-pot, then, time has its roots

Herein, and where the other heavens trace Their course, thou mayst
behold its shoots.
This is a poetic version of Aquinas’s complementary truths: of Plato’s

universal, unmoving mover situated in an Aristotelian hierarchy where cause
and effect are clear. The reader is invited to “behold” the inner workings of
the heavens (and, in earlier cantos, hell and purgatory), and to join Dante the
pilgrim in his quest to understand them as part of the great natural scheme of
God’s universe.
This also was the age of the poet Petrarch, the painter Giotto, and the
sculptor Nicola Pisano; when dozens of universities opened; when
clockmakers built the first public bell towers in major cities across Europe,
and Genoan sailors set foot on the Canary Islands in the first step toward the
European exploration of Africa and westward into the Atlantic Ocean.
For the calendar, however, little of interest happened during the first four
decades of the 1300s. Then in 1345 the newly installed pope at Avignon, the
French nobleman Clement VI (1291—1352), abruptly decided the calendar
needed to be reformed.
It is not entirely clear why, though Clement seems to have been motivated
by the age-old problem with Easter, and perhaps by Bacon’s arguments that
such an obvious error was an embarrassment to a Christendom increasingly
worried over what outsiders thought about it. Whatever his reasons, this pope,
known for his pomp, his extravagant living, and his patronage of the arts,
dispatched letters to calendar
experts on September 25, 1344, asking them to come to Avignon to consider

and advise on the correction of the calendar. In his mandate the pope ordered
the scholar’s expenses to be paid by their local bishops.
The most important of these scholars was Jean de Meurs, an Aristotelian
at the University of Paris who wrote two works in the 1320s touching on how
to measure time. In one he compared the passage of time to what happens
when someone plays or sings a musical piece, with its beginning and ending.
Jean called this natural time, which interacts with abstract or mathematic
time, which is how music is subdivided according to measures, notes, and
other breaks.
In his 1345 response to Clement, titled Epistola super reformatione
antiqui kalendarii (Letter about the reform of the ancient calendar), Jean and
another time reckoner named Firmin told the pope that their ideal solution
for realigning Caesar’s calendar with the sun was to remove the appropriate
number of days from a single year’s calendar. They insisted that determining
this was relatively easy, given the accuracy of the latest star charts that built
on Arab and Greek texts, and on observations of Reiner, Grosseteste, and
others.
Jean warned, however, that removing days from the calendar might cause
tunnoil for governments and commerce: quarrels about payments and
contracts, and perhaps riots. He also pointed out that if the Catholics changed
their calendar, they would be celebrating fixed holy dates such as Christmas
on different days than Christians in the East and in other schismatic sects,
setting back the still important Catholic goal of a truly universal church.
Jean and Firmin were more optimistic about reforming the 19-year lunar
calendar. Recalculating Grosseteste’s value for the error, they came up with
a day gained every 310 years—-just one and a half years off from the true
Julian value of about 308.5 years. By 1345, Jean wrote, this error had
accumulated to a slip of four days. They suggested that the pope restore the
lunar calendar to its proper alignment by removing these days from the 19-
year cycle, and order that a day be dropped thereafter every 310 years. The
best year to start the re-
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form, they said, would be 1349—the year after a leap year and the first year
in the next 19-year Metonic cycle. Jean and Firmin drew up a calendar
incorporating their proposed changes.
Clement VI did not formally respond to the proposal, but it seems likely
that he agreed with the reforms. Indeed, this modest correction seemed well
on its way to being implemented as the 1349 date approached—possibly to
be followed by a reform of the solar calendar.
But it was not to be. For as 1345 passed into 1346 and 1347, the future of
calendar reform—and of Europe itself—was being decided not in glittering
Avignon but in a remote Genoan outpost on the Crimea, where a small fleet
of trading vessels was setting sail to cross the Black Sea and then the
Mediterranean. Heading off just before the winter winds at the end of the
sailing season, the sailors and merchants on board these ships and others
departing various Eastern ports were transporting more than spices and cloth.
For in their blood a microscopic cargo was growing and spreading that would
kill most of these men before they reached their destination. And with them
would die what appeared to be in the time of Clement VI a nascent
renaissance, one that might have solved the calendar conundrum two
centuries before Gregory and Clavius.
the sole reason that the length of years and months and solar and lunar
motion were not yet considered to be sufficiently well determined. Since that time,
in fact, I have turned my attention to the observation of these phenomena.
—NICOLAUS COPERNICUS, 1543
In October 1347, two years before Clement VI’s calendar reforms were
to begin, the Genoan trading ships from Crimea arrived in the Sicilian harbor
of Messina. Anyone watching the vessels approach would have known
something was wrong. They were moving too slowly, with only a few oars
beating time in the crystal-blue waters. And once the ships finally moored,
an onlooker would have immediately seen the cause—that the men on board
all were dead or dying. They looked like ghouls, with black boils and
blotches and strange black swellings the size of apples in their armpits, necks,
and groins, oozing pus and blood.
The disease was bubonic plague, and it spread like wildfire in waves north
from Italy and from other coastal cities of the Mediterranean. Originating in
China or India—no one knows for sure where—the bacterium Yersinia pestis
was passed to humans by fleas carried by rats. But no one understood this at
the time, which added the element of the unknown to the terror.
The plague could strike someone down in three days or less. Eyewitnesses
tell of people going to bed healthy only to die before they awoke. Doctors
sometimes caught the malady at a bedside and suc-
213
214 CALENDAR
cumbed before their patient. The Florentine historian Giovanni Vil- lani (c.
1275—1348) reportedly died in the middle of writing a sentence: "E dure
questo pistolenza fino a—” (In the midst of this pestilence there came to an
end).
In 1348 an Englishman named Henry Knighton reported to the pope that
“there died in Avignon in one day one thousand three hundred and twelve
persons.” Others describe up to 50,000 dead in Paris and 100,000 in Florence,
with daily death tolls in the hundreds in Pisa, Vienna, and elsewhere. These
are almost certainly exaggerations, since few cities had populations this large
to start with, and accurate estimates are hard to come by. Probably some 30
million perished in about two years—a third of all Europeans.
The horror prompted the poet Petrarch (1304—1374) to write his brother
at Monrieux, after hearing that he and a dog were the sole survivors out of
35 people in the monastery where he lived.
Alas! my beloved brother, what shall 1 say? How shall I begin? Whither shall I
turn? On all sides is sorrow; everywhere is fear. . . . [For] without the lightnings
of heaven or the fires of earth, without wars or other visible slaughter . . . well
nigh the whole globe, has remained without inhabitants . . . houses were left
vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the
dead.††††††
Obviously no one in this time cared one whit about the calendar or about
the planned 1349 reform. Indeed, the sudden loss of so many people plunged
the continent into a deep crisis on nearly all fronts— economic, political, and
intellectual—that it would not fully recover from for a century or more.
Many believed God was raining down pestilence in a latter-day Flood to
punish a sinful age, including a Church that had grown too concerned with
riches, fetes, and the affairs of the world. Others be-
††††††Petrarch uses as his inspiration a letter written by the Roman statesman Cicero
(106— 143 B.C..).
FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO COPERNICUS 215
lievcd these were mankind’s final days and that nothing mattered, so they
launched themselves into orgies and feasting. The resulting collapse of
confidence in all authority eventually led to peasant revolts and riots across
Europe as kings and the clergy tried, and failed, to revive the old feudal order,
which was becoming moribund anyway with the rise of trade and commerce
in the cities.
Europeans reeling from the plague were equally repelled by what passed
for science, which had been utterly useless in stemming the disaster. When
the French king Philip VI asked the medical faculty at the University of Paris
for an explanation, the doctors turned not to physiology or cures but to the
stars and the calendar. They actually blamed the plague on a date: March 20,
1345. On this day, they said, a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars
had occurred in the 40th degree of Aquarius—which was not a good omen,
apparently. These physicians also admitted to causes “hidden from even the
most highly trained intellects,” though it was the crossed-stars theory that
became the accepted explanation for the Black Death among intellectuals.
The pamphlet the Parisians produced containing this explanation was
republished and translated from Latin into various vernacular languages and
into Arabic, where it was “affirmed” by Arab physicians in Cordoba and
Granada.
During the plague years time itself seemed to pause, as people groped to
understand what had happened. This was a period when time was truly a
thing to fear: the present filled with the moans and death throes of friends
and family, the past haunted by those now dead—and, for those who
believed the plague was punishment for mankind’s sins, by past infidelities.
As for the future, no one dared think about it. It was as if people were literally
holding their breath, trying to keep away what one Welsh poet called the
“rootless phantom,” and wondering if this was truly the end oflife—and
therefore of time—for all humanity.
216 CALENDAR
Yet even as the plague struck, Europe was reaching a critical juncture in its
perception of time. Starting in the early 1300s, with the first mechanical
clocks, came the conception of the hour as a secular unit of time. This was
entirely separate from the old canonical “hours” used by monks, which were
intended less to keep time than to demonstrate one’s faith through following
a highly regulated day of prayers and spiritual activities.
No one is sure when the clock was invented or by whom. In the tradition
of the Middle Ages, with its de-emphasis of the individual, all we know is
that sometime after the year 1300 one or several inventors fashioned out of
metal several notched wheels attached to an escapement mechanism, which
was then assembled with a gear train, axle, pulleys and weights, and “hands”
to mark off intervals of time. The device was driven by the weights slowly
dropping, which turned the notched wheel of the escapement mechanism and
forced the axle to turn in regular ticks, which turned the hands. Later the
weights would be replaced by coiled springs and later still by springs and
pendulums.
One of the earliest drawings of a mechanical clock using weights and
pulleys was by Giovanni Dondi in 1365, by which time the escapement
system had been in use for decades (see page 217).
Initially the mechanical clock did little to change the medieval mind-set,
which may be one reason why no one bothered to write down details about
its discovery. The clock’s impact was felt at first in just a few cities, and only
by those people living close enough to the clock tower to read it or to hear
its chimes every hour, and later every half and quarter hour or so.
Nor were these primitive clocks always reliable. They were prone to
slowing down and speeding up, and to wide variations from clock to clock
in what time it was and what amount of time constituted an hour. The day
also started at different times in different places, depending on local custom.
This meant that a traveler could hear the first hour of the day sounded on a
bell in his home village at dawn, arrive at the next village in time to hear the
first hour sounded at noon
Sketch of clock by Giovanni Dondi, 1365.
and end up at his destination at midnight to hear the next first hour rung in.
This added to an already confusing calendar of different names for days and
different starting dates for the year.
For the new generations of clock people, however, the long-tern effect
was more profound than they realized, since time could now be measured
objectively rather than remain subject to the interpretation of whoever was
eyeballing the angle of the sun, or was deciding how long a person should
work, or figuring out what time a merchant should deliver a cart full of apples
to the lord’s castle. This made the clock the new lord and arbiter of time for
everyone within its range, whether king or priest, peasant or pope.
This new reality crept into the consciousness of various groups in different
ways. For merchants and traders, clocks connected time more
218 CALENDAR
than ever to labor and making money—and into making the most of the
present moment, since the clock starkly underlined the reality that one had
only a set amount of hours and days to conduct business. In the merchant
town of Siena the painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290— 1348) illustrated this
new immediacy in a 1338 painting hanging in this trading city’s town
hall.‡‡‡‡‡‡ It shows Temporantia, the goddess of temperance, holding an
hourglass, and sitting above people going about their business. We see the
scholar in his study, the preacher in his pulpit, the advocate in his courtroom,
the cobbler selling shoes, the housewife at her oven. Death is also here,
underlining the need to make the most of things while there was still time.
Even the spiritually inclined embraced the clock, rejecting the centuries-
long shunning among their predecessors of water clocks and other
mechanical time devices. Some of them considered the clock to be a symbol
of God’s clocklike regulation of the universe. In 1334 the German spiritualist
Heinrich Suse (c. 1295-1366) described a vision in which he had seen Christ
in the form of an elaborate clock with chimes sounding out the hours. For
Suse the clock mirrored the human soul, keeping its steady, inner time in
accord with God’s own eternal time.
Scholars too did some deep thinking about the mechanical clock. In 1377
the naturalist and prelate Nicholas Oresme (c. 1325-1382) wrote in his Book
of Heaven and the World that the universe was like an horloge: a clock that
was neither fast nor slow, never stopped, and worked in every season, by
night as well as by day. Oresme also compared the planets and their motions
to the balancing of a clock’s weights by the escapement mechanism. “This
is similar to when a person has made an horloge and sets it in motion,” wrote
Oresme, “and it then moves itself.”
Possibly Oresme, who lived in Paris, was inspired by the large mechanical
clock installed in the palace of the French king Charles V in 1362. By order
of the king, after 1370 this clock became the standard
‡‡‡‡‡‡Lorenzetti died of plague when the Black Death swept through Tuscany in 1348.
timepiece to set all others by—one small example from a period in which
time was again being seized by the secular world. Like Julius Caesar 14
centuries earlier, Charles was assuming the role of a magister temporis, a
master of time, using his civil authority to organize time in the most practical
way he knew how, while letting it be known that as king he was arrogating
to himself a power once reserved for God.
This new time consciousness was set against the backdrop of a century
afflicted not only by plague and economic depression, but also by a major
split in the Church—which hardly boded well for reforming the calendar.
The schism began when two popes were elected at the same time by rival
groups of cardinals in 1378, one based in Rome and one in Avignon. This
left the papacy in shambles and the prestige of the Church at a low point even
after the papacy was restored in Rome with a single pontiff in 1417.
Meanwhile the Hundred Years War between France and England raged
on, in a conflict famous for producing knights and adventurers such as the
Black Prince (Edward of Woodstock, the Prince of Wales [1330—1376] and
the Breton Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320—1380); and the occasional
warrior-saint such as Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431). This also was the age of
the mercenary in Europe, when the incessant warfare of kings, despots, and
popes fed a booming industry of knights, archers, and pikesmen fighting in
the army of the highest bidder. It was not unheard of for mercenaries to
switch sides in the middle of a battle or campaign if the “enemy” offered
more gold. And when a campaign ended, the mercenaries would often
terrorize the peaceful countryside.
Predictably, learning and scholarship were not high priorities for warring
kings and prelates. Nor did scholars produce much original work during a
period where the great surge of intellectualism after
220 CALENDAR
the founding of the universities and the arrival of new knowledge was
wearing thin, with university curricula and approaches to learning becoming
in many cases stale and in need of reinvigoration.
During this troubled time, the Church attempted to repeat the success at
Nicaea so many centuries earlier by calling a series of great councils. The
first of these, held from 1408 to 1418 in Constance— on the border between
Germany and Austria—attempted to deal with the schism, finally finding
success when a single pope was elected in 1417 to take up residence in Rome.
At the same time, at least one important figure at the Council of Constance
tried to interest one of the “antipopes,” John XXIII, in reforming the calendar.
This was Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly (c. 1350-1420), an astronomer and former
chancellor of the University of Paris who presented a treatise at Constance
detailing the usual laments about faulty measurements and Easter. In his
Exhortatio super correctione calendarii—“plea to correct the calendar”—he
offered his reform ideas, which were mostly a rehashing of Grosseteste,
Sacrobosco, and especially Roger Bacon, who by now was an acknowledged
master on this subject, over a century after his death in obscurity.
Pope John responded by issuing a decree in 1412 to correct the drift in the
lunar calendar by removing four days, the solution suggested by Jean de
Meurs in 1345. But amidst the turmoil of dueling popes, John’s edict was
ignored. The proposal also foundered because astronomy still lacked precise
planetary and star charts with which to calculate a proper correction.
Cardinal d’Ailly himself admitted “that the true length of the year is still not
known to us with complete certainty.” Other efforts at reform failed to catch
on at Constance in 1415 and 1417.
In 1436 the astronomer and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401- 1464)
delivered to another council—this one held at Basel, in Switzerland—yet
another compendium of the problem in his De correctione
Kalendari: §§§§§§ Working with a commission of experts on calendar
reform,
§§§§§§Nicholas of Cusa was also the author of two of the earliest scale maps of land
areas,
he proposed canceling seven days in 1439 and thereafter adding one day
every 304 years. But critics objected again on the grounds that the astronomy
remained too uncertain. They also worried that removing days would create
economic confusion with deadlines, contracts, and interest payments thrown
into disarray. Anyway the Church remained far too distracted with its own
affairs to affect a change.
By the mid-1400s Europe was beginning to recover from the disastrous

effects of the plague. Politics remained unsettled, with more campaigns and
skirmishes. Byzantium fell in 1453, when the Turks breached the once
invincible walls of Constantine’s ancient city using a newly arrived
invention, the cannon.
As the fifteenth century waned the Church finally began to put its house
in order, turning to serious debates over its role in a Europe that was quickly
becoming more secular, and over an outdated medieval dogma being
challenged by the new philosophy of the nascent Renaissance. Humanism, a
movement that emphasized human welfare, values, and dignity stood in
opposition to the medieval emphasis on spiritualism, pageantry, and the
absolutism of the Church and papacy. At the same time, the awe felt by
earlier generations of intellectuals for texts by Ptolemy, Aristotle, Euclid,
and other ancient masters, who previously had been the last word on science
and philosophy, were beginning to give way to a new curiosity to use this
knowledge as a basis to explore the world and to test the old ideas.
This was mirrored across the social spectrum as Europe’s economy
revived between 1460 and 1500, and the Europeans began to expand their
thinking and influence in the world. In commerce, European
including attempts at the longitude and latitude of Europe. And he repeated the idea that
the earth rotates, as suggested by Aristarchus, Aryabhata, and others.
222 CALENDAR
ships sought markets farther afield than ever, with explorers heading off in
all directions. In 1470 Portuguese sailors discovered the Gold Coast while
tracing the coast of Africa in newly invented caravels. In 1486 they found
Angola. Six years later Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain bankrolled
Christopher Columbus to trek across the Ocean Sea. That same year the
Spanish defeated the last of the Arabs occupying Iberia.
In warfare, engineers invented or borrowed and improved upon new
methods for making armor and battlements. They learned to use cannon and
gunpowder, borrowed from the Turks and Arabs, who had borrowed them
from the Chinese. At the same time tinkerers, scientists, and entrepreneurs
became both more common and more bold, in the spirit of Roger Bacon. The
resulting inventions included the printing press, in about 1470, perhaps the
most important creation of this era.
Among other things, the printing press allowed calendars to be mass-
produced, bringing for the first time a standardized, easy-to-read rendering
of days, weeks, months, and holidays to people other than astronomers,
ecclesiastics, kings, and tax collectors. The earliest printed calendars used
symbols so that illiterates could count the days, and employed illustrations
of saints and pictures to represent feast days. In the calendar, a “Fanner’s
Calendar” printed in Zurich for the leap year 1544, the days are depicted with
black triangles, except for Sunday, which is red. Other symbols list the
passing progression of the zodiac; kalends, nones, and ides; phases of the
moon; and saint’s days. Easter is marked on April 13 with a cross.
Toward the end of the century, Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance
inventors were at work. So were a new generation of artists— Leonardo once
again, Michelangelo, and Raphael, to name only three—who applied the
science of the ancients to a new visual sense of perspective, beauty, and
symmetry in composition that blended reality and a classic Greek sensibility
for perfection and beauty in paintings and sculptures.
Meanwhile the calendar at the turn of the sixteenth century had
drifted away from the true seasons of the earth by over twelve days since
Caesar, and over nine days since the Council of Nicaea. In 1500 no one could
measure this error exactly, but every intellectual acquainted with
mathematics, astronomy, or theology knew about it. But how to fix it? And
who decided?
These questions popped up at yet another Church-wide council begun at the

height of the Renaissance in Italy. In 1512, Pope Julius II convened the Fifth
Lateran Council (1512—1517) at the Lateran Palace in Rome, presided over
by Julius and his successor, Leo X. Again, calendar reform was not a major
agenda item in a meeting called to settle issues such as how much power the
pope wielded over kings, and the raising of a Christian army to combat the
Turks—whose troops after taking Byzantium had surged into Europe to seize
Greece and much of the Balkans.
Calls for calendar reform had been increasing, however, even as the
difficulties of how to accomplish this became more complicated. For
instance, should the proper date for the equinox be based on the year of
Caesar’s reform, the time of Christ, the Council of Nicaea, or the creation of
the world? What was the correct meridian on which to
base the Easter calculation: Rome? Jerusalem? And what happens when the
equinox falls at the end of the day in Rome and lands on the next day in the
Holy Land?
A number of astronomers tried to deal with these questions by improving
the charts measuring the equinoxes to make them more accurate. None got it
right, though. Indeed, as the new charts circulated, the glaring errors in the
calendar became more widely known, and a persistent source of
embarrassment for the Church. The wide dissemination of printed calendars,
such as the oft-copied “Shepherd’s Calendar,” first issued in 1493, added to
a sense of urgency as more
224 CALENDAR
people than ever used the Church’s calendar for business, governing, and
personal planning.
In 1514 Pope Leo X invited the period’s greatest expert on the calendar,
the Dutch astronomer, physician, and bishop Paul of Mid- delburg (c.
1450—1533), to head up a commission on reforming the calendar. A few
years earlier, in 1497, Paul had written a strident tract to the pope demanding
he reform the calendar. In 1513 he wrote another impassioned tract opening
with letters appealing to Leo, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I, the
College of Cardinals, and the Lateran Council.
As head of Leo’s new commission, Paul started by criticizing past
reformers, particularly those who wanted to drop days from the year to
correct the calendar’s drift. He proposed fixing the calendar not by dropping
days, but by changing the date of the vernal equinox to March 10—which he
wrongly estimated to be the proper date for his time. He suggested that in the
future the equinox be allowed to drift through the calendar every 134 years—
this (wrong) number coming from a set of astronomic charts considered
highly accurate at the time: the Alfonsine Charts, completed in 1272 by
astronomers at the Cas- tilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-1284). Paul
also proposed a slight rearrangement in the lunar calendar, including
dropping a day every 304 years—and the naming of lunar months after the
ancient Egyptian months, to avoid using Moslem or Jewish names. The
proposals were to be considered in December 1514, with the changes to be
made retroactive to January 1, 1500, when the astrologically minded Paul
noted a mean conjunction of the sun and moon had occurred along the Rome
meridian at noon on the first day of this important jubilee year. Surely, said
Paul, this was a sign from God concerning his desire to reform the calendar.
Leo X ordered letters dispatched in 1514 from the papal curia to all
important Christian monarchs asking for opinions on the proposal from their
astronomers and other experts. But only a few responded, in part because
they were not given much time before the decisive meeting that December.
The British for one did not respond, though four letters from Leo X to
Henry VIII survive in the British archives, all apparently unanswered. On
July 21, 1514, Leo’s first letter describes the problem and laments that “Jews
and heretics” were laughing at the flawed Christian calendar. Leo asked
Henry to send his best astronomer or theologian to Rome, or else a written
version of their views on the calendar. Two years later, on June 1, 1516, the
pope’s second letter complains of the poor response to the first missive,
which led to the cancellation of the planned December calendar conference.
He asks Henry to respond in time for the next session of the council,
scheduled for later that year. Two other letters that year repeat the pope’s
request, which presumably went out also to other kings who failed to answer.
This lack of interest apparently doomed Paul’s effort at reform.
One papal letter that was not ignored prompted a response from a young
German-Polish astronomer then living in Frauenburg on the Baltic coast of
Poland—listed as a respondent by Paul under the name Nicolaus Copernicus
Warmiensis. Known as Mikolaj Kopernik in Poland, we know him by his
Latinized pen name of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).
In his early forties when the papal letter arrived, Copernicus was a canon
at Frauenburg’s cathedral in this often cold, stormy coastal town near the
Gulf of Danzig in what was once East Prussia. A man with a long nose, wide
eyes topped by arching eyebrows, and a quiet demeanor—at least this is how
he looks in his self-portrait—Copernicus had settled here after years of
studying and teaching at universities in Krakow, Bologna, and Padua, where
he had earned degrees in law and medicine. In 1500 he had traveled to Rome
for the jubilee. He also met and worked in these early years with a number
of leading scholars, with whom he kept in contact for the rest of his life.
Around 1506, when Copernicus returned to the Frauenburg area,
226 CALENDAR
he began the astronomic studies and observations that would occupy the rest
of his life. By 1512 he had written a short, unpublished manuscript outlining
his early thinking about his planetary theories.******* Two years later, in
1514, the pope’s missive arrived, an event alluded to by Copernicus himself
in his 1543 dedication for De revolutionibus, in which he also tells us his
response to the pope’s inquiry:
For not many years ago under Leo X when the Lateran council was considering
the question of reforming the Ecclesiastical Calendar, no decision was reached,
for the sole reason that the magnitude of the year and the months and the
movements of the sun and moon had not yet been measured with sufficient
accuracy. From that point on I gave attention to making more exact
observations of these things and was encouraged to do so by that most
distinguished man, Paul [of Middelburg], Lord Bishop of Fos- sombronc, who
had been present at those deliberations.
After Paul’s commission sputtered out, the matter of the calendar was
dropped again for over 60 years during yet another tremendous upheaval in
the Church: the rise of Protestantism.
It was born during the final year of the Lateran Council, in 1517, when
Martin Luther (1483-1546) tacked a document on the door of the cathedral
at Wittenberg in Germany, complaining about the sale of indulgences by the
Church. Luther at first did not intend to start a revolution, though he followed
his act of defiance by preaching what amounted to a direct challenge against
Rome. Insisting that the Bible should be the sole authority in the Church, and
that salvation lay solely in faith—the first denying the pope’s authority and
the second contradicting core Catholic doctrine—Luther touched a powerful
nerve of discontent. In the 1520s he broke off with Rome to head up a
movement that swept through Europe, attracting as many as half of all
Christians in the West by midcentury.
This in turn incited a backlash of conservatism in the Catholic
*******This was finally published in 1530.

Church, and an intense counterreformative effort by the papacy and loyal

Catholic monarchs to stamp out Protestantism. It included a new Inquisition
launched by Pope Paul III in 1542 and the founding of the Jesuits in 1540,
in part to create religious and theological stalwarts to argue against and fight
the spread of Protestantism.
During these years of upheaval Copernicus worked quietly in Frauenburg:
writing, taking astronomical observations, fulfilling his duties as a cathedral
canon, and tending to the occasional patient as a medical doctor of some
renown.
Apparently he lived in rooms occupying a three-story turret set in the
cathedral’s thick surrounding walls, built in the fourteenth century as a
defense against the pagan-leaning Slavs. Standing high above a small
freshwater lagoon just off the Gulf of Danzig, the turret gave the canon an
excellent view of the shoreline, the deep-blue Baltic, and the stars. He used
relatively simple astronomical instruments—an astrolabe, an annillary
sphere,††††††† and various devices to measure the altitudes of celestial
objects, including the sun. Copernicus later published some of these
observations in De revolutionibus. He also jotted them over the years of quiet
study in his tower rooms into the flyleaves and margins of books in his
library. It was in these rooms that Copernicus worked and reworked the opus
that became De reuolutioni- bus—which included attempts to properly
measure and calculate the length of the year.
Copernicus tried to fulfill his promise to Leo X by making his own fresh
calculations based in part on his own sightings, and by using those made by
Greek and Arab astronomers over the centuries. Summing up his findings
and thoughts in De revolutionibus, he begins a section called “On the
Magnitude and Difference of the Solar Year” by first explaining the
difference between the two types of “years” measured by astronomers.
First is the seasonal or tropical year, which is the time it takes for
†††††††This was a concentric series of metal rings, each representing a planet’s orbit.
Arranged in a sphere, they could be used to measure and calculate planetary movements.
228 CALENDAR
the seasons to cycle through and start again. This has been the “year” we
have referred to throughout this book and which is the basis for our season-
based calendar year. It is determined by measuring the length of time
between vernal equinoxes, when the planes of the equator and the sun’s
ecliptic intersect in the spring. The other year is the “star” year, also called
the sidereal year, which measures the time it takes for the earth to revolve
around the sun back to an exact starting point in space. The difference in
these two “years,” we now know, is about twenty minutes, with the tropical
year running faster each year than the sidereal year. Known as the precession
of the equinoxes, the phenomenon of a slower tropical year was first
discovered by Hipparchus in ancient Alexandria, though it took until Newton
for astronomers to understand its cause: gravitational pulls and tugs from the
sun and moon, against an earth that is not a perfect sphere— which cause the
earth’s axis to wobble slightly.
But Copernicus did not know this. Nor did Ptolemy in A.D. 139 or the
Arab astronomer al-Battani in 882, whose calculations Copernicus trusted
and used to compare his own observations for the tropical year:
We too made observations of the autumn equinox at Frauenburg in the year of Our
Lord 1515 on the 18th day before the Kalends of October. . . . The time between our
equinox and that of al-Battani there were 633 Egyptian years and 153 days and 6 3/4
hours. . . . But between the observation made by Ptolemy at Alexandria, there were
1376 Egyptian years 332 days 1/2 hour. . . . Therefore during the 633 years between
al-Battani and us there have fallen out 4 days 22% hours, or 1 day per 128 years; but
during the 1376 years after Ptolemy approximately 12 days, i.e., 1 day per 115 years.
Naturally Copernicus was perplexed by the difference between Ptolemy’s

and al-Battani’s numbers, not realizing that both of their measurements were
wrong. This led to an erroneous conclusion blaming the discrepancies on
irregular motions of the earth that he believed affected the tropical year as
measured by the equinoxes.
Still, Copernicus came up with a remarkably accurate measurement
of the tropical year: 365.2425 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 29
seconds: one of the closest estimates yet to the true value (at that time) of
about 365.2422 days—365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. He
also provided measurements and data that would become important four
decades after the publication of his tome as Pope Gregory’s calendar
commission struggled to come up with an acceptable measurement of the
year.
Given the confusion over the supposed “irregularity” in the tropical year,
Copernicus preferred to use the sidereal measurement, which he estimated
to be 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 40 seconds, or 365.25671 days. This
is about 30 seconds greater than the true value. “But also in the case of the
astral or sidereal year an error can come about,” he admits, “but nevertheless
a very slight one and far less than the one which we have already described”
for the tropical year.
Copernicus labored over his opus for over 30 years but remained reluctant
to publish De revolutionibus, knowing his sun-centered hypothesis would
not be well received by traditionalists both in the Church and in academia.
Indeed, for millennia humankind had assumed the earth was the center of the
universe—a theory “proved” by Ptolemy and every other major astronomer,
ancient and modern. To say otherwise was laughable to people of that day,
even if it came from a man such as Copernicus, who was widely revered as
an expert on astronomy. It took considerable persuasion by Copernicus’s
friends and admirers—led by his disciple and colleague Georg Joachim Rha-
ticus (1514—1576)—to talk the elderly Copernicus into finally publishing
De revolutionibus.
He did so shortly before he died at age 70, but not before Copernicus
added a dedication to Pope Paul III, acknowledging that his views were
controversial but begging the indulgence of the Church to consider the
science behind his hypothesis.
According to a friend who stood by his deathbed, the old astronomer
finally got to glimpse his published masterpiece on the very day he
succumbed to a months-long illness, on May 24, 1543. “He had lost his
memory and mental vigor many days before,” wrote this friend
230 CALENDAR
The Copernican Solar System, PerJit Description of the Celestiall Orbes, Thomas Digges, 1576.
in a letter to Rhaticus, “and he saw his completed work only at his last breath
upon the day that he died.”
Despite Copernicus’s fears, his book initially attracted little controversy.

Very few people could understand it, and those who did went
along with a preface added to the book without Copernicus’s permission that
described its contents as mere conjecture rather than probable fact. An
exception was the vehement reaction of Luther and the Protestants. As
biblical purists, they viewed any deviation from the scriptures as subversive,
and refuted Copernicus’s sun-centered planetary system with passages in the
Bible that seemed to imply that the earth stands still while the sun moves.
“The fool wants to overturn the whole science of astronomy,” said Luther,
“but, according to the Scripture, Joshua bade the sun and not the earth to
stand still.”‡‡‡‡‡‡‡
For seventy years the Roman Church remained silent about Copernicus.
Then Galileo Galilei (1564—1642) began peering in the early 1600s through
his newfangled telescope at the planets and stars, leading him to publicly
endorse Copernicus’s sun-centered hypothesis in 1613—a contention that
two years later led to Galileo being denounced to the Inquisition as a heretic.
He cleared himself of the charge, but created such a sensation that the Church
officially investigated the Copernican theory early in 1616, with Church
authorities ordered to examine the fundamental Copernican assertion “that
the earth is the center of the universe and is wholly stationary,” and “that the
sun is not the center of the universe, and is not stationary, but moves bodily
and also with a diurnal motion.” On February 24, 1616, the Qualifiers of the
Holy Office concluded that a sun-centered theory was “foolish and absurd in
philosophy, and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the
teachings of many passages of Holy Scriptures.”
This came at a time when the Counter-Reformation had sharply focused
the Catholics toward following strict dogma. This rigidity led the Church to
make a profound error when the Inquisition in 1635 forced Galileo to abjure
the heliocentric theory or face torture or possible execution. As it turned out,
this was one of the last great attempts by the old order of the Middle Ages to
subjugate science to dogma, and the sacred to the profane.
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡Luther is referring to an Old Testament story in which the Jewish prophet

Joshua during a battle commanded the sun to stay in the sky.
232 CALENDAR
But this came later. In the years immediately following the publication of
De revolutionibus astronomers reading it were less interested in the sun-
versus-earth debate than in studying and using Copernicus’s observations
and general theories on planetary motions—including his estimates of the
length of the year and his measurements of lunar phases. Indeed, the work
of Copernicus, combined with other astronomic charting of the era, set the
stage for two virtually forgotten men—a mathematician from Bavaria and a
physician from southern Italy—and a pope named Gregory, who would
finally come up with a most elegant solution to fix the calendar, and even
more importantly, to enact it.
of Time
The patriarch admitted that it

has very good. is the Pope is
I hope
eager. quite
—CHRISTOPHER CLAVIUS, 1581
None of the three men responsible for fixing the calendar was a conqueror,
notorious lover, heretic, or lone monk pondering the cosmos from a cell in a
monastery. They were not even particularly flamboyant, and certainly not
freethinkers in the spirit of a Bacon or even a Paul of Middelburg—all of
which might account for their success.
They included an obscure physician from the toe of Italy who was the
genius behind the reform, a Jesuit astronomer famous for being wrong about
many of his most cherished theories, and a lawyer turned pope remembered
as much for his failures as for his successes. Each contributed to the reform
named for one of them, and each in the story of his role offers an explanation
for why the calendar was finally fixed 1,627 years after Caesar launched it,
and after so many centuries of false tries and frustrations.
The doctor was Aloysius Lilius.§§§§§§§ Born about 1510 to a family of
modest means, little is known about Lilius—the “primus auctor” of the
Gregorian reform, according to a prominent member of the calendar
§§§§§§§Luigi Lilio in Italian.

233
234 CALENDAR
commission. He is said to have studied medicine and astronomy at Naples,

settled in Verona, and taught at the University of Perugia before returning
late in life to his hometown of Ciro, in southeastern Italy, where he concocted
the solution to the calendar conundrum and designed the reforms. Indeed, if
the pope had offered a prize for solving this age-old problem—as the British
later offered a prize of ^20,000 to anyone who solved the ancient puzzle of
determining longitude at sea—Aloysius Lilius could have rightly claimed it.
But this forgotten man never had the chance. For before his solution could be
presented in 1576 to the pope’s commission in Rome, Lilius took ill and
died.********
After Lilius’s death, his brother Antonio, also a physician acquainted with
astronomy, presented Aloysius’s plan to the calendar commission. They
quickly embraced it as their leading proposal, admiring it for its simplicity,
elegance, and avoidance of controversy. Antonio stayed on in Rome as his
brother’s representative. Later he was the recipient of what passed for a
discoverer’s “prize” in the sixteenth century: a 1583 bull from Pope Gregory
that granted him the exclusive right to publish the reformed calendar and its
new rules for a period of ten years. This potentially lucrative license was later
rescinded when Antonio failed to produce enough copies fast enough to meet
the demand, a delay that nearly derailed the reform.
The second prime mover was the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clav- ius
(1537-1612), the man behind the scenes who championed Lilius’s ideas (after
an initial skepticism) and shepherded the reform through the minefields of
scientific and ecclesiastic controversy before and after 1582. Until he died in
1612, Clavius worked hard to defend and
********Some accounts say Lilius died in Rome.

SOLVING THE RIDDLE OF TIME 235
explain the new calendar, ensuring that it would spread beyond the handful
of countries that initially accepted it.
As a prominent public figure in Rome during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, more is known about Christopher Clavius than about
Lilius. Yet little exists to flesh out who he really was. In a portrait of Clavius
rendered in 1606 he is dressed in a simple Jesuit robe and a four-cornered hat.
A portly, satisfied-looking man with a pudgy, bearded face, he looks
sympathetic, even kind—the sort of scholar who is serious but never stuffy,
smart but not precocious; one that students are fond of, and one that
politicians and prelates feel comfortable assigning to commissions.
To his contemporaries Clavius was a revered sage of math and astronomy,
acclaimed as “the Euclid of his times” in part because he penned a widely
used translation of the original Euclid, along with several other works
considered important in his day. Even the era’s greatest scientific firebrand,
Galileo Galilei, came to him for validation of his telescopic observations of
the moon, sun, and planets. Clavius hailed them as important to astronomy,
but since he was a confirmed defender of Ptolemy he disagreed with Galileo’s
interpretation that craters on the moon, Venus passing through its phases, and
moons around Jupiter suggested Copernicus was correct. Clavius also has the
distinction of having his face inscribed on a marble relief on the base of
Gregory XIII’s imposing statue in St. Peter’s (probably Clavius) which
shows a priest handing the pope a copy of the calendar reform.
Yet Clavius today is nearly as obscure as Aloysius Lilius. In part this
comes from the bad luck to have lived between Copernicus—Clavius was
five years old when De revolutionibus was published—and the young Galileo,
who burst onto the scene in Clavius’s final years. But more than anything,
Christopher Clavius is obscure because he adhered to a worldview that turned
out to be wrong. This made him a hero to traditionalists while he was alive,
but a fool to those who came later.
Clavius was surprisingly young when Pope Gregory named him to his new
calendar commission, convened in the mid-1570s. Born on
236 CALENDAR
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CHRISTOPH IE CLAVIUS.
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Christopher Clavius about 1606

March 25, 1537, in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, Clavius’s life to us is a

blank page until he joined the recently formed Society of Jesus—the
Jesuits—in Rome on April 12, 1555. Studying in Rome and then at the
University of Coimbra in Portugal, Clavius returned to Rome in the early
1560s to finish his education and then to teach at the Jesuits’ own Collegio
Romano, where he became a professor of mathematics. But for a few short
trips, he would remain in Rome until his death.
As a mathematician and astronomer, Clavius was a minor figure, notable
mostly for his work on Euclid, algebraic notation, and the calendar—and for
his staunch defense of an earth-centered universe. Yet Clavius was flexible
enough to constantly update his own theories to incorporate Copernican data
and Galileo’s observations, attempting to squeeze it into an increasingly
strained Ptolemaic interpretation.
Clavius’s willingness after 1582 to at least consider new ideas as Rome’s
senior astronomer seems to have exercised a restraining influence on the
inevitable showdown between the ideas of Copernicus and those of Ptolemy,
primarily benefiting the young Galileo, whose reputation was enhanced by
Clavius’s support of his telescopic discoveries. Galileo judged Clavius to be
“worthy of immortal fame,” and forgave him for rejecting the Copernican
theory, a shortcoming he blamed on the old man’s age.
Others were not so forgiving. In 1611 the English poet and satirist John
Donne (1572—1631), a former Catholic in this sometimes virulently anti-
Catholic kingdom, penned a vicious satire of the Jesuits and their founder,
Ignatius Loyola (1491—1556), titled Ignatius His Conclave. Donne
describes Loyola in hell trying to convince Satan to reject Copernicus
because the Polish astronomer had not done enough to obfuscate the minds
of men and therefore keep them from the truth. In the midst of this the poet
mentions Clavius, whom he could not place in hell because in 1611 the old
astronomer was still alive. But Donne did have his Loyola tell the dead
Copernicus about a candidate possibly more “worthy” for the netherworld,
describing among other
238 CALENDAR
things Clavius’s work on calendar reform, which the English, as Protestants,

considered tainted because it came from Rome:
If therefore any man have honour or title to this place in this matter, it belongs wholly
to our Clavius* who opposed himselfe opportunely against you, and the truth, which
at that time was creeping into every man’s minde. Hee only can be called the Author
of all contentions, and schoole-combats in this cause; and no greater profit can bee
hoped for heercin, but that for such brabbles, more necessarie matters bee neglected.
And yet not onely for this is our Clauius to be honoured, but for the great paines also
which hee tooke in the Gregorian Calendar, by which both the peace of the Church,
and Civill businesses have beene egregiously troubled: nor hath heaven it selfe
escaped his violence, but hath ever since obeied his apointments: so that S Stephen,
John Baptist, & all the rest, which have bin commanded to worke miracles at certain
appointed dates... do not now attend till the day come, as they are accustomed, but
are awaked ten daies sooner, and constrained by him to come downe from heaven to
do that businesse.
The final person in our troika was born Ugo Buoncompagni (1502- 1585).
The son of a noble family in Rome, he became a prominent ecclesiastic
lawyer and senior papal official before being elected Pope Gregory XIII at
age 70, on May 14, 1572. One of several pontiffs in the sixteenth century
who worked to rebuild the authority of the Church and to reform its worst
excesses, he was zealous in trying to stamp out Protestantism, chiefly by
lavishing money on building up Catholic colleges across Europe, and by
launching Church reforms in Germany, Poland, and Belgium. He also
dispatched Jesuit missionaries to countries such as India, the Philippines, and
China, where European ships had begun to sail with some regularity.
But Gregory also suppressed knowledge that failed to agree with Church
dogma, establishing an infamous index of banned books that
*This is a satirical use of the name given to Clavius by the Jesuits, who called him “our
Clavius.”
later listed Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. He also supported military

efforts by Catholic monarchs against Protestants, and connived in attempts
to undermine England and Queen Elizabeth I—including ill- conceived
military ventures to thwart English efforts to conquer and dominate Ireland.
But all this pales against Gregory’s infamous response to the slaughter of
thousands of Huguenots in Paris that began on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572.
Hearing the news, the newly installed pope is said to have ordered a Te
Deum—a hymn of praise to God—and issued a medal.††††††††
In Rome Gregory supported grandiose building projects; he also was
known as a man who enjoyed pomp and celebration, nearly bankrupting the
Vatican treasury with his edifices and fetes. His tenure as ruler of the papal
state—a swath of land running across the middle of Italy and governed
directly by the Vatican—was marked by peasant riots over steep taxes and
by a rise in banditry and lawlessness, which he proved incapable of stopping.
But most of this has been forgotten, with Gregory chiefly remembered as
the pope who finally corrected time, a feat that begs the question: why this
pope?
Probably his motivation came from the same zeal he devoted to promoting
education and putting the Church back onto a more sound intellectual track.
But it also came from the lawyer Ugo Buoncom- pagni’s systematic attempts
as pontiff to enact reforms approved by the various church councils,
particularly those passed at the various sessions of the Council of Trent
(1545—1563), where Buoncompagni served as Pius IV’s deputy and may
have drafted some of the decrees. One of these ordered the reissuance of the
mass book and breviary— the Catholic list of daily hymns and ceremonies—
which implied the need for an updated calendar. Indeed, the first words in the
momentous 1582 bull announcing the calendar reform do not claim the au-
††††††††Catholic apologists insisted he did so without knowing the extent of the

massacre, and that he actually wept when he heard the truth.
240 CALENDAR
thority of science, the Church, or even God, but the decree of Trent, as if this
legalistic sanction mattered most to this old lawyer-pope:
Among the most serious tasks,‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ last perhaps but not least of those
which in our pastoral duty we must attend to, is to complete with the help of God
what the Council of Trent has reserved to the Apostolic see.
As the pace of reform quickened, the story of the calendar returns to the same
city where Julius Caesar had launched his calendar 16 centuries earlier—
though it could hardly have been more different.
Rome in the sixteenth century had ceased long before to be important as a
commercial, political, or intellectual center. Nor did the Roman Church wield
the all-embracing authority it once had enjoyed as Europe’s religious
overlord, now that Protestantism had broken up its monopoly of the spirit,
and kings and princes had eclipsed its influence in the realms of politics and
finance. Still, the Church remained the only force in Western Europe capable
of exerting anything like a universal authority. It also had been the guardian
of the calendar for centuries, for better or for worse, and was now riding a
certain momentum from years of reform talk and council decrees aimed at
making a fix.
Rome itself in the 1570s looked ruined and exhausted, its ancient
monuments, palaces, and temples shattered and half buried by dirt and
rubbish, its ancient walls and columns picked apart for centuries and
incorporated into a disconcerting hodgepodge of old and new. Even the once
mighty Forum, where 16 centuries earlier Caesar had stood up to announce
that he was establishing a new calendar, was now called the Campo Vaccino,
the “Cow Pasture.” Buried under eons
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡Like all bulls, this one was named after its opening lines. In Latin, this has been
shortened to Inter gravissimas.
of trash and dust, and mostly dismantled for its marble and bricks, this place
that had been the center of the Roman world was now the domain of bovines
chewing tufts of grass growing around broken columns and archways.
The Eternal City that Clavius and Gregory lived in during the years of the
calendar commission stood inside the sprawling ancient walls built in the
third century by Emperor Aurelian. Diminished now from as many as a
million people in imperial times to perhaps sixty thousand—though in the
1570s it was beginning to grow again—the city’s inhabited areas were
clustered near the Tiber, where those who stayed through the barbarian
invasions had moved for easy access to water after the aqueducts were cut.
This left large sections inside the walls empty of people. These vast stretches
of space were used for vineyards, gardens, garbage dumps, and pastureland,
and were marked here and there by scattered farmhouses and convents.
Forests grew on the slopes of the Palatine, Caelian, and Aventine Hills. Deer
and boar ran wild amidst the ruins of ancient villas covered with ivy and trees
in which hundreds of pigeons squawked and fluttered.
Because of the water problem and the location of St. Peter’s near the river,
Rome’s center had shifted north from the Forum to the C- shaped bend in the
river between the Capitoline Hill to the south (just above the Forum-turned-
pasture) and the Piazza del Popolo to the northwest. Still very much a
medieval city, Rome in those days was a confusing knot of narrow, winding,
fetid streets filled with people, animals, dung, dust, and sewage and edged by
brick houses, shops, stalls, and offices. This was broken up here and there by
piazzas and by a scattering of new Renaissance churches, including St.
Peter’s Basilica with its half-finished dome by Bramante and Michelangelo.
Rome’s fractious noble families had recently erected a number of splendid
new palaces and villas, many of them on hills with breathtaking views of the
city.
Another new building project was an extensive upgrading of Christopher
Clavius’s own Collegio Romano, which Gregory XIII took on as part of his
efforts to improve Catholic universities. He lavished
242 CALENDAR
funds and support on the previously struggling Collegio, in part because of

his close ties to his favorite astronomer, who made a special pitch for
improvements in the departments of mathematics and astronomy.
The pope’s attention to Roman education was long overdue. Before his
improvements, the Collegio Romano had been one of two clearly second-rate
outposts of learning in a city known for raucous local politics, pilgrimages,
indulgences, and papal fetes, but not for intellectual pursuits. Rome in the
1570s still lacked any meaningful tradition of universities and scholarship.
Nor did its officials offer much public support for scientific or technical
research—unlike cities such as Florence, where the ruling Medicis hired
Galileo as their court mathematician in 1610, or the Holy Roman Imperial
court, which commissioned the astronomers Tycho Brahe (1546—1601) and
later Johannes Kepler (1571—1630) to advise Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia.
In the lovely Tuscan village of Siena is a painting of Pope Gregory XIII

crowned and enthroned, leaning forward and listening intently to a scholar
on the calendar commission describe the error in Caesar’s calendar. This man
looks like Clavius as depicted when he was older, with a white beard and
four-cornered hat. Pointing to a picture of the zodiac on the wall he is
explaining to the pope the difference between the Julian calendar, marked on
a band outside the zodiac, and the true seasonal year, portrayed on the inside.
He stands amidst members of the commission, some of whom are dressed in
the flowing robes, broad-brimmed hats, and priestly hoods popular at that
time in Italy. Seated around a table, the commission is surrounded by books
and astronomic tools, including an armillary sphere the scholarly speaker is
manipulating with his left hand as he points to the zodiac chart with his right.
The names of the members of the commission that worked through
The Reform oj the Calendar

Pope Gregory XIII Meets with His Calendar Commission, c. 1581
the 1570s and early 1580s were not recorded, except in the final report
presented in 1581 to the pope—which is probably the meeting depicted in the
Siena painting. Nine individuals signed this report, presumably all of them
members of the commission, though one seems to have been simply a witness.
The signatories included a cardinal, a bishop, a former Syrian patriarch, a
man from Malta, a French lawyer, a Spanish historian and theologian, a
physician, and two scholarscientists.
The cardinal and the bishop were senior church officials now all but
forgotten. They are Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514—1585), a scholar,
Hellenist, and contender for the papacy, who served as president of the
commission, and Bishop Vincenzodi Lauri of Mondovi. Why they were
chosen is unknown, though in Sirleto’s case the appointment of someone so
senior and respected was clearly a signal by
244 CALENDAR
the pope to the Vatican bureaucracy and to everyone else within the Church
that Gregory was serious about reform. Sirleto and Lauri may also have been
experts on the Church calendar and its history, and on the deliberations of
Church councils.
The patriarch was Ignatius of Antioch, a Jacobite Christian from Syria who
had arrived in Rome in 1577 or 1578 to seek a personal reconciliation with
the Roman Church. A refugee from the still- mysterious East whom some
suspected was a fake—until he was confirmed as genuine—Ignatius was
knowledgeable in mathematics and medicine, and he brought to the
commission an Eastern perspective on astronomy and the calendar. He
provided Clavius and the scientists with useful comments on their proposed
reforms, written in Arabic and translated into Latin. He signed the 1581
report in Arabic and Syriac.
The man from Malta, Leonardo Abel, seems to have signed the final report
just to serve as a witness to Ignatius’s signatures, apparently because he was
fluent in Arabic. The French lawyer signed his Latinized name as Seraphinus
Olivarius Rotae, an auditor Gallus who may have been summoned to help
the commission sort through the many legal implications of the reform for
both canon and civil law. The Spaniard was Pedro Chacon, who probably
advised the committee on past and present papal and Church pronouncements
on the calendar, and on the critical issues of Easter and saint’s days. He also
authored some of the key documents of the commission.
The scholar-scientists included the Dominican friar Ignazio Danti (1536—
1586), the second most famous commission member after Clavius. A
mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and artist, Danti was a professor of
mathematics at Pisa and later at Bologna. Summoned to Florence he also
worked on astronomic projects under Grand Duke Cosimo I (Cosmos de’
Medici), preparing maps, an enormous terrestrial globe, and instruments he
used to observe the vernal equinoxes in 1574 and 1575. From this he came
up with the length of the year as 365 days, 5 hours, and 48 minutes.
Comparing this to Ptolemy’s erroneous calculation of 365 days, 5 hours, and
55 minutes,
Danti joined Copernicus and other astronomers by concluding that the

tropical year was variable. After a falling-out with Cosimo’s son, Danti
relocated to Bologna, where he measured the solstices in 1576 with a gnomon
he built in the church of St. Petronius. He used this data to confirm the error
in the Julian calendar and its drift against the true year.
In 1580 Danti was summoned to Rome by the pope to join the commission,
and also to design the frescoes and astronomic instruments in a new building
devoted to astronomy and to calendar reckoning. Known as the Tower of the
Winds, this 240-foot tower north of St. Peter’s dome and above the Vatican
archives, was built between 1578 and 1580 and decorated with Danti’s
designs between 1580 and 1582. These included a series of enormous
frescoes of the four winds, rendered in the style of Titian as voluptuous
cupids flanked by images of astronomers at work. Danti also equipped the
main room of the tower with an enormous anemometer (wind gauge) attached
to a weathervane. He etched into the floor a map of the stars and zodiac,
situated so that a small hole in the wall would shine a ray of sunlight onto the
map, varying according to the seasonal angle of the sun. This created in the
Tower of the Winds a crude seasonal calendar. In 1583, after the reform,
Danti was named bishop of Alatri in Italy, where he died in 1586.
The final member of the commission was Antonio Lilius, who represented
his late brother’s interest after presenting Aloysius’s ideas in 1576—an event
Gregory mentions in his 1582 bull by recalling that “a book was brought to
us by our beloved son Antonio Lilio, doctor of arts and medicine, which his
brother Aloysius had formerly written.”
This “book,” still in manuscript form, was easily the most important
document in the entire reform process. Yet over the centuries it has
246 CALENDAR
disappeared without a trace. What survives is a short booklet issued by the

commission, titled Compendium novae rationis restituendi kalendarium,
“Compendium of the new rational for reforming the calendar.” This is a
synopsis of Lilius’s plan sent out to various experts and important princes,
monarchs, and prelates for comment.
The Compendium was also believed lost until the historian Gordon Moyer
located not one but several copies in 1981—all printed in Rome in 1577. The
booklet is a short quarto volume containing 24 pages, with a title page that
prohibits the selling or reprinting of the book “under penalty of
excommunication.” All of the copies of the Compendium found by Moyer in
archives in Florence, Siena, and Rome are attached to other short volumes
critiquing Lilius’s ideas— with some offering modified plans of their own.
The controversies that continued to swirl around talk of changing the
calendar broke down along the familiar lines of science, theology, Church
doctrine, and the practical impact of reform on the lives of people,
governments, and the economy. By the 1570s, however, the emphasis was
different, with the once potent theological concerns of God and time
weighing in far less than debates about astronomic theory, Church cosmology,
and how to mechanically come up with the best solution for fixing the
calendar.
First on the list of contentious issues was the age-old conundrum: what is
the true length of the year?
No one had yet come up with a method for determining the true year
beyond a doubt—an issue still not entirely resolved today, given the
variability of the earth’s movements—even if the science of astronomy in the
sixteenth century was slowly improving. Indeed, by the late 1570s it had
become refined enough that Clavius and the commission could seriously
consider whether the calendar should be changed to a system based on the
actual motions of the earth (or the sun, if you were a follower of Ptolemy),
instead of one that used a mean value of measurements. The latter was the
method employed in both the Julian calendar, with its leap-year system, and
by the Church’s lunisolar calendar for determining Easter. Neither calendar
had ever been linked to
planetary theory; this had long appalled astronomers, who thought that the
only way to create an error-free calendar was to drop the idea of a mean and
to go on “real time,” so to speak.
Clavius, for one, initially hoped to link up the reformed calendar as closely
as possible to the true astronomic year. “I should think that in order to restore
and keep account of astronomy it would be rather important to adopt the true
motion,” he wrote to a friend in Padua on 24 October 1580, “but these
gentleman [of the commission] do not understand this for several reasons.”
Lilius, however, argued in favor of a mean, insisting that astronomic
theory remained too uncertain despite its advancements. He also believed that
trying to devise a calendar based on planetary theory would be far too
complicated for people who were not astronomers. What was needed, he said,
was a mean calculated to be as close as possible to the true motions of the
moon and the perceived motions of the sun.
Apparently the commission agreed, concluding that a calendar must be
simple enough for all to understand and use, even if it is slightly off the true
astronomic year—the challenge being to make the margin of error as small
as possible. Even Clavius evidently came around and was persuaded to go
with Lilius, since he later defended this choice after the reform was
introduced.
That issue settled, the commission’s next task was to decide which of the
many measurements of the year they believed to be most reliable.
A half century earlier Copernicus had scratched his head and pondered the
same question. He had decided that there were no good measurements for the
tropical year, which seemed to him to speed up and slow down with no
discernible pattern. This led him to rely on the more stable sidereal year in
De revolutionibus. Calendar makers did not have this option, however, since
their concern was with creating a “year” that matched the seasons, not the
position of the earth in space—the two being slightly different, given that
pesky phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes.
To understand this problem, and how it is possible to have two
248 CALENDAR
different kinds of years, first visualize the earth as a simple sphere or ball
circling the sun. The sidereal year is the amount of time it takes for the earth
to circle the sun relative to a fixed celestial object, such as a star; in other
words, to reach the exact point in the orbit where it began.
A = The starting and finishing point

of the earth's orbit in space.
That’s easy. Where it gets tough is when you realize that the earth not only
spins around like a top—this is where we get our day and night—but also
“tilts,” its plane of rotation on its axis tilting relative to the plane of its orbit
around the sun (the ecliptic).
To imagine this, think of the globe that sat in the front of your classroom
in grammar school, with a line drawn around the fattest part: the equator.
Without any tilt, the equator would always be the closest place on the earth
to the sun, and we would have no seasons. But in fact the earth does tilt—so
that in June the northern hemisphere is aligned with the sun on its ecliptical
plane, when it is summer in
THE TROPICAL YEAR
December June
Solstice Solstice
the north. Roughly six months later the earth tilts so that the southern
hemisphere is aligned relative to the plane, making it summer in the south
and winter in the north. In between the tilt brings the equator into perfect
alignment with the ecliptic, marking the equinoxes that occur in March and
September.
Hipparchus in Alexandria was one of the first astronomers to notice the
difference between the two types of years when he took measurements of the
year according to the equinoxes on his skaphe, from 141 to 127 B.C. He then
must have compared this to the year as measured by the Egyptians, who for
centuries had been measuring sidereal year rather than a tropical year. This
is because they used as their time “ruler” the annual rise of the Dog Star,
Sirius, catching it at the moment it could be seen crossing the peaked point
of an obelisk.
Based on Hipparchus’s observations, Claudius Ptolemy three centuries
later proposed a simple formula for the precession, hypothesizing that the
drift of the tropical year against the stars was fixed, and amounted to one
degree per century.
250 CALENDAR
By the time of the calendar commission this had been proven wrong
beyond a doubt, first by Arab astronomers and then by others, as the Patriarch
Ignatius, the commission’s expert on the Islamic scientific tradition, pointed
out to the pope in a letter in 1579 and in his comments on the Compendium
in 1580. The Arabs, however, had also believed in a fixed rate of
precession—coming up with different numbers than Ptolemy—while
Copernicus and others had concluded the tropical year was indeed variable,
though there was significant disagreement about how much.
This scientific debate over how to calculate a true year was further
complicated by the ancient cosmologic theory that most educated people, as
well as the Church, still considered true in the sixteenth century. This was
that the heavens were composed of a series of concentric spheres, with the
earth in the center and the moon, sun, planets, and stars orbiting in successive
spheres—a precise and unchanging configuration that could not easily
accommodate the possibility of a variable year, or of a starfield that seemed
to be drifting slightly each year.
One explanation was that another, even higher sphere of stars might exist,
or perhaps several more. This possibility created a great deal of muddle and
confusion as traditional astronomers and ecclesiastics struggled mightily to
make new and still sketchy data fit into their age-old conception of the
universe.
The two astronomers on the calendar panel, Clavius and Danti, each had
to convince himself that the year was in fact variable at a time when this was
still controversial. For Danti the confirmation came when he took his
measurement of the equinoxes in Florence in 1574 and 1575 and found that
the length of the year differed from Ptolemy’s measurements. The proof for
Clavius came when he constructed a celestial globe for the Collegio Romano
and calculated the rate of precession for the years between Copernicus’s
observations in 1525 and the year Clavius built his contraption in 1575. This
was a change from his earlier blanket acceptance of all things Ptolemaic.
Indeed, Clavius kept an open mind about the precession during the
commission’s debates, once referring the members to an unpublished essay

by a certain Ricciardo Cervini, written in 1550, which argued that there was
no precession at all, though Cervini failed to convince anyone.
Given the turmoil over the precession—and the larger controversy
looming over Copernicus versus Ptolemy—Aloysius Lilius wisely ignored
the entire issue in his solution. According to Clavius—our major source,
along with the Compendium, for what Lilius was thinking, since Lilius’s own
manuscript is lost—the old physician opted simply to choose a value for the
year based on what was then one of the more popular astronomical tables.
These were the Alfonsine Tables, originally written in 1252 and updated over
the years. They gave a mean tropical year of 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes,
and 16 seconds. This was some 30 seconds slower than the true year, but still
quite close. The mean value for the year used in the reform itself, which is
our calendar year today, is slightly more accurate at 365 days, 5 hours, 49
minutes, and 12 seconds—a year that runs only 26 seconds slower than the
true year.
This final mean for the Gregorian year allows us to summarize some key
measurements, estimates, and guesses of the length of the tropical year taken
over the centuries, most of which the commission had access to during the
decade of their deliberation.
Historical Lengths of the (Tropical) Year

Measurement
(days, hours, Margin of Error
Year(s) Source minutes, seconds) from the Current Year
Present Atomic Clock 365d 5h 48m 46s* None
141-127 B.C.. Hipparchus 365d 5h 55m +6m 14s
45 B.C. Julius Caesar 365d 6h + llm 14s
A.D. 139 Ptolemy 365d 5h 55m 13s +6m 27s
*This value is the standard length for our current era; determined in 1956, it is the mean
year calculated for 1900.
252 CALENDAR
Year(s) Source Measurement Margin of Error

499 Aryabhata 365d 8h 36m 30s +2h 47m 44s
882 al-Battani 365d 5h 48m 24s -22s
c. 1100 Omar Khayyam 365d 5h 49m 12s +26s
1252 Alfonsine Tables 365d 5h 49m 16s +30s
c. 1440 Ulugh Beg 365d 5h 49m 15s +29s
1543 Copernicus 365d 5h 49m 29s +43s
1574-75 Ignazio Danti 365d 5h 48m -46s
1582 Gregorian calendar 365d 5h 48m 20s -26s
Once Lilius had decided on his mean year, he pondered the next crucial
problem of reform: how to close the gap between Caesar’s year and the “true”
year. This meant comparing the Alfonsine year of 365 days. 5 hours, 49
minutes, and 16 seconds to the Julian year of 365 days, 6 hours. The
Alfonsine runs short of the Julian by 10 minutes 44 seconds—equal to a day
lost every 134 years.
Lilius seems to have tried different ideas to work this cumbersome
measurement into a simple formula for dropping an appropriate number of
leap days from the calendar. He rejected the long-standing proposal
advocated by Bacon and others to drop a day roughly every 134 years. Instead
Lilius took as his inspiration the simplicity of the Julian leap-year formula,
with its easy-to-remember four-year rule, hoping to come up with a similarly
convenient dictum to solve the Julian gap.
As the good doctor tinkered with various solutions shortly before his death,
he discovered that the gap amounted to three days gained against the true
year every 402 years (134 years * 3). This he rounded off to three days every
400 years, a more accessible number that became the basis for the leap-
century rule—which drops three days from the calendar every four hundred
years by canceling the leap year in three out of four century years. This
formula, based on tables not entirely precise and a base number that is
rounded off, ended up being remarkably accurate, running ahead of the
seasons by only one day every 3,300 years.
Lilius also proposed two well-known options to recoup the days already
lost due to the drift of the Julian calendar, which he thought
should be cut by ten days to restore the equinox to the time of Nicaea. He
suggested making up the days either by skipping 10 leap years over the
course of 40 years, or—more radically—by removing ten days all at once.
The other big problem for Lilius and the calendar commission was repairing
the Catholic lunar calendar used to determine Easter. Indeed, for the pope
and other Christians the project of cinching up the solar calendar—and
restoring the spring equinox to its proper place in the tropical year—was
never an end in itself, but part of a religious fix required to restore the Feast
of the Passion to its “proper” date.
Easter, of course, is supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first full
moon after the spring equinox—a seemingly straightforward formula, except
for the ancient problem that the moon and sun do not match up in their
respective years. To compensate for this Christian time reckoners had long
used the 19-year Metonic cycle—which theoretically brought the sun and
moon into sync because every 19 years of solar time equaled 235 lunar
months.
Well, almost. In reality the moon’s cycles run roughly an hour and a half
behind the 19-year solar cycle, a mismatch that had been alarming computists
and astronomers for some time.
Lilius calculated that the lunar-solar gap equals about 1 hour, 27.5 minutes,
which meant that the moon was drifting against the Church’s lunisolar
calendar by a whole day every 312.7 years. By the 1570s this error had
amounted to more than four complete days.
To halt this lunisolar mayhem, Lilius and the commission scrapped the old
Metonic assumption that the phases of the moon, particularly the critical full
moon, always matched up in the 19-year cycle with the solar year. Instead
Lilius concentrated on trying to work out
254 CALENDAR
a new method for keeping the lunar calendar from sliding a day every 312.7
years.
Again, this was no easy task, given that 312.7 is hardly an easy number to
divide into a Gregorian calendar of 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 20
seconds. But once more Lilius came through, with a simple discovery that
eight periods of 312.7 years equal almost 2,500 years—a number that can be
divided almost perfectly into seven periods of 300 years plus one period of
400 years. This was Lilius’s lunar solution: dropping one day from the lunar
calendar every 300 years seven times, and then an additional eighth day after
400 years. For simplicity’s sake Lilius and the commission again proposed
making the corrections and dropping the days at the end of appropriate
centuries.
Lilius’s manuscript was initially received with some doubts and resistance,
but soon it became the panel’s lead proposal as Clavius and company studied
it and sent it to various experts for comments. One so-called expert, Giovanni
Carlo Ottavio Lauro, at one point seems to have tried to slow up the review
process by taking Lilius’s manuscript—and holding it for several months.
Supposedly this was to make unspecified “corrections,” though Lauro
actually used the time to delay action so that he could finish his own proposal.
His tactics so infuriated Lilius’s supporters on the commission that they
appealed directly to the pope, asking that the manuscript be returned—which
it was—and the “chimeras” of Lauro be ignored.
Lilius’s solution won out at last when the pope issued on January 5, 1578,
the Compendium of the doctor’s manuscript to universities, heads of state,
and important prelates for their comments. The Compendium was sent rather
than Lilius’s much longer manuscript to save time now that calendar reform
fever had struck Rome—or at least the small group of people who cared about
such matters in the Eternal City. It also allowed the calendar committee to
add its own remarks
and amendments, which Clavius later says were minimal. The 20- page
Compendium was written by the commission member from Spain, Pedro
Chacon, presumably with input from Lilius’s brother, Antonio.
After the publication, more comments poured into the commission. It

received a vigorous response compared to past reform efforts, such as the one
initiated earlier in the sixteenth century by Paul of Mid- delburg. This time
the Compendium attracted dozens of letters, still preserved in the Vatican.
Most simply gave their nod of approval; others contained comments,
proposals, and counterproposals, some of them fascinating. The court
mathematician for the duke of Savoy, Giovanni Battista Benedetti, made a
number of suggestions in an April 1578 letter—including a calendar
correction of 21 days, which would land the winter solstice on the first of
January. Benedetti further proposed changing the length of the months to
coincide with the presence of the sun in each of the 12 zodiac signs. Other
commentators advocated various dates for the equinox and complained about
using a mean for the length of the year. Some went to the trouble of pub-
lishing their alternative plans and circulating them, hoping to get a hearing
with the commission and the pope.
Royalty also responded. For instance, King Philip II of Spain, in a short
letter signed with a flamboyant El Rey, “The king,” approved of the plan, but
insisted that the equinox be kept on March 21—out of deference for Nicaea,
but also for the practical reason that a great expense would be spared if the
date did not have to be changed in mass books and breviaries.
256 CALENDAR
The complaints of astronomers and other scientists would continue over the
next several decades as the new calendar took hold. Most agreed with the
technical side of the reform, including the Protestants Tycho Brahe and
Johannes Kepler. Both found the reform scientifically sound and the best they
had seen. Brahe from the beginning dated his letters using the new calendar,
and Kepler in a posthumous article offered his arguments in the form of a
dialogue between a Protestant chancellor, a Catholic preacher, and an expert
mathematician. In the end he concluded that Easter, which was causing so
much consternation among opponents and proponents of the calendar, “is a
feast and not a planet.” In 1613, Kepler argued in support of the reforms, but
failed to persuade the Protestant sovereigns, a resistance that lasted until 1700.
Even then Kepler’s own Rudolphine Tables were substituted for the
Gregorian values when determining Easter. In some years, this caused
Germany to celebrate Easter on a different day than Catholics and other
Protestants.
A great many astronomers found fault with the new calendar, including
several mathematicians in Prague who refused to help the bishop there revise
the calendar of feasts because they claimed to find the science unsound.
Others disagreed, sometimes vehemently, for religious reasons. These
included the Protestant astronomer Michael Maestlin (1550—1631), a
professor at Tubingen in southern Germany and one of the teachers of
Johannes Kepler. He insisted that the pope had no authority to institute such
a reform, and also criticized Gregory for calling the new calendar “perpetual,”
because this denied the coming of the last Judgment. This argument was later
refuted by another German defender of the calendar, who suggested that by
Maestlin’s reasoning people should also stop building houses.
Maestlin and others repeated criticisms that the reform should adhere more
closely to the true movements of the sun (i.e., the earth) and moon. They
complained about the methods used to determine Easter in the lunar reforms,
worried over whether the equinox under the reform would always fall on
March 21, and challenged the sources for the length of the year. Many
astronomers and mathematicians—
including several assigned by monarchs and bishops to prepare the reforms

for public dissemination—not only offered criticism but published their own
solutions, sometimes side by side with the new calendar, to the confusion of
anyone trying to understand the pope’s reforms.
Other astronomers, led by Christopher Clavius, defended the new calendar.
In 1595 he wrote a refutation of Maestlin, directed at the calendar’s many
critics, called Novi calendarii Romani apologia, adversus Michaelem
Maestlinum—“Defense of the new Roman calendar, in reply to Michael
Maestlin.” He explained, among other things, why the commission adopted
a system of mean rather than absolute motions.
Clavius also defended the use of a mean by pointing out that it was
impossible for all Christians to celebrate Easter at exactly the same moment
given the spread of Christians across several meridians. In 1606 Clavius
answered his critics in the 800-page Explicatio (Explanation). In all, Clavius
penned six treatises on the calendar, characteristically well-reasoned and
scientifically sound documents that went a long way toward quieting the
criticism and smoothing the way for reform in countries that initially
hesitated to go along with the new calendar.
One of the most well known scholarly critics of the calendar was a bitter
rival of Clavius, the French scholar and Calvinist Joseph Justus Scaliger
(1540-1609). He found the reform Uttered with supposed errors and even
stooped to name-calling, referring to Clavius as a “German fat-belly.” But
this did not keep Scaliger from later using the Gregorian system for his most
famous project: creating a timeline of historical events according to the rules
of astronomy. This was a monumental task, one that modernized the old
medieval preoccupation with chronology and brought together all of the
historical timelines and descriptions of events he could find. Indeed, he and
Clavius were not so far apart in their respective tasks, the portly German
setting out to align the calendar as closely as possible with the movements of
the sun and moon, and Scaliger trying to get the past and
258 CALENDAR
future to correspond with a generally accepted standard. The year after the
calendar reform Scaliger published Opus de emendatione tempore (1583),
establishing chronology as a science.
Scaliger invented his own chronological calendar: the Julian day calendar,
an ingeneous if complex system that does not use individual years at all, but
a cycle of 7,980 astronomic years that counts a day at a time, with no
fractional days, no mean year, and no leap years. He came up with his number
by multiplying three chronologic cycles: an 18-year solar cycle, a 19-year
lunar cycle, and the 15-year indiction period used by the Romans. All three
cycles began together at the same moment at the start of his “Julian cycle,”
but would not converge again until the end. This was useful for anyone trying
to create a uniform timeline, since the date from any one of the three base
cycles could be translated into the two other cycles.
This may sound far too obtuse for the average person. However, Scaliger’s
calendar lives on today among astronomers, who do not need a calendar
based on a mean of the tropical year but one that is astronomically exact.
How else could one properly measure the time between, say, two appearances
of the comet Hale-Bopp, or two pulses of a quasar? Scaliger began his Julian
cycle at noon on January 1, 4713 B.C., which he based on calculations
concerning Christ’s birthdate.
The other great chronologist of the early modern era was Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727), whose work in astronomy finally demolished what was left of
the Ptolemaic school in planetary theory, and whose work on light, gravity,
and mathematics launched modern physics. A man of many interests,
Newton later in life became obsessed with properly dating the past. This
included an elaborate attempt to correlate biblical events with those recorded
in civilizations ranging from Assyria to Rome.
His astronomy and methods of dating long-ago events were brilliant, using
recorded eclipses, the rate of drift in the precession of the equinoxes, and
careful measurements of stars, equinoxes, comets, and novas. But his attempt
to date myths and legends of dubious historic validity and his adamant piety
about using the Bible to date events
tainted his actual timeline. He insisted, for instance, that the world was
created by God in 4004 B.C.., as determined by Irish archbishop and student
of the Scriptures James Ussher (1581—1656). He attempted to establish the
entire timeline based on the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of
the Golden Fleece—an effort admirers called “masterly” and the work of
“genius,” but others dismissed as “no better than a sagacious Romance.”
On September 14, 1580, the commission signed its official report to Gregory
XIII, with Aloysius Lilius’s solutions largely intact. They also added a clause
to standardize New Year’s Day on January 1, the date used by Julius Caesar.
Gregory enthusiastically approved the plan, which was set for im-
plementation in October 1581—October being a month with few holy days.
A final delay kept this from happening when the commission waited for a
Flemish scholar named Adriaan van Zeelst to deliver promised
improvements on Lilius’s solution, though all he seems to have accomplished
was to cause the postponement of the reform until 1582.
The bull itself was written in the fall of 1581, mostly by Pedro Chacon.
On October 20, 1581, he sent a draft from Turino to Cardinal Sirleto in Rome.
Chacon then died a few days later, leaving the final version of the bull to be
written by commission member Vincenzo di Lauri. Sirleto also dispatched
Antonio Lilius, Aloysius’s brother, to work with the pope’s aides on the final
bull at Mondra- gone, Gregory’s favorite villa outside of Rome.
On February 24, 1582, the 80-year-old Pope Gregory XIII sat down at a
table that is still preserved at Mondragone and signed the bull that would
make this the last year of Julius Caesar’s calendar, at least for those staunchly
Catholic countries still willing to accept a decree from the much-deflated
authority of the Roman See.
260 CALENDAR
On March 1 the text was posted at the doors of Saint Peter’s, the
chancellery of Rome, and other locations in the city. Printed together with
the new perpetual calendar and the basics of the new system, copies were
dispatched to every Catholic country through the papal nuncios as everything
was prepared for a new calendric era, named for the pope who made the
reform possible.
Gregory deserved this honor for the sheer bureaucratic feat of pushing
through the reform when so many others had failed. Still, it seems unfair that
the mysterious doctor who actually devised the reform didn’t get some small
measure of immortality for his troubles—perhaps a star named for him. Or,
like Clavius, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, a crater on the moon.§§§§§§§§
§§§§§§§§Curiously, Clavius’s crater is larger than those named after his more famous
rivals. It also is the crater where the action took place in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A
Space Odyssey.
I grit my teeth, hut my mind is always ten days ahead or ten days behind: it keeps
muttering in my ears: “That adjustment concerns those not yet born.”
—MONTAIGNE, 1588*********
When bells chimed across Europe in the waning moments of October 4,

1582, the calendar did something it had not done since Julius Caesar’s time:
it jumped 10 days, at least in those countries that obeyed the pope’s bull.
Anyone alive on what would have been October 5 instantly lost ten days
of his or her life, according to Rome’s new calendar. This genuinely upset
people, who felt the days had somehow been stolen from them. In Frankfurt
a mob rioted against the pope and mathematicians, who, they believed, had
conspired to commit this theft. Others openly expressed their fear and
unease at upsetting the saints they prayed to for everything from good crops
to the afterlife in paradise. And everywhere people asked: What if the new
days were wrong? What if the saints did not listen?
More mundane but practical were the sailors, muleteers, weavers,
swordsmiths, and kings who worried about taxes not collected, wages not
earned, and deadlines coming due 10 days early. Bankers scratched
*********Montaigne actually wrote “eleven days,” which was mistaken. His error
suggests that even among intellectuals the reform was confusing.
261
262 CALENDAR
their heads over how to calculate interest during a month only 21 days long,
and local priests tried to explain to anxious parishioners that holy days were
not the only dates bumped up; so were most other dates††††††††† from
birthdays and wedding anniversaries to local fairs and civil ceremonies. Even
the birthday of the pope had changed: from January 1, 1502 to January 11,
1502.
But the situation in October 1582 was far more confused than this. For
only a scattering of countries actually enacted the hard-fought reform, with
most people waking up on the morning after October 4 to no change at all:
to the day that had always come next, October 5.
Had the Vatican issued its edict even a century earlier, it almost certainly
would have been obeyed across a Europe then overwhelmingly Roman. But
in 1582 the continent was a writhing, shifting patchwork of Protestants and
Catholics; of kingdoms and dukedoms siding with Rome, or against it, or
resting uneasily somewhere in the middle; of families and villages riven by
loyalties to one faith or the other; of the Inquisition trying to root out not only
Protestants but also Jews, Moslems, supposed witches, alleged heretics, and,
in the case of Galileo, respected scholars who failed to kowtow to Rome’s
policies concerning the nature of the universe.
This was the era of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris; of the
Catholic-backed attack of the Spanish Armada against Protestant England;
of terror campaigns by Spanish troops against Dutch Protestants; of
England’s terrorism against Catholics in Ireland; of the Raid of Ruthven in
Scotland, where Protestant nobles kidnapped King James VI and imprisoned
him for 10 months; and of countless battles, sieges, and declarations of
independence by Protestant cities and states in Germany and central Europe.
Set against this backdrop, Gregory’s bull was a regrettably political
document, a command from the pope as strident as anything produced by the
pontific pen during these tumultuous days of the Counter-
††††††††† Some holidays did not shift ten days, but remained anchored in the new
calendar on their original date, such as the Sabbath on Sunday and Christmas on December
25.
TEN DAYS LOST FOREVER 263
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Page from an astronomical calendar for October 1582,

J. A. Magini, Novae Ephemerides, 1582
Reformation. Clavius and others insisted that the bull was never in-
tended to be provocative against rival churches, either Protestant or
Eastern Orthodox. But the mere fact that Gregory took his authority
264 CALENDAR
from the Council of Trent—a Counter-Reformation council called primarily

to lay out reforms and policies to stem the Protestant tide— guaranteed that
non-Catholics would resist the reform as an illegal and immoral edict from a
papacy they did not recognize—even if the science was sound.
Of course, staunchly Catholic countries immediately complied with the bull,

though many complained about the edict being issued a mere eight months
before the reform was to go into effect. Calendars had already been printed
and events planned for October 1582; all these now had to be altered. Still,
Italy, Spain, and Portugal managed to make the deadline.
The nuncio of Savoy, for one, received the new calendar from Rome on
May 28. By June 12 he had delivered copies to the duke of Savoy and the
archbishop of Turin, who agreed to the change and ordered copies of the
calendar posted on church doors across this dukedom, which straddled the
border of modern Italy and France. One of these copies made its way to the
British ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham (1538—1605). He sent it
along to the English secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532—
1590), with a dispatch on various state matters, on October 17, 1582:
I send you . . . the Duke of Savoy’s letters ratifying the Pope’s new calendar,
with the bull of the Pope’s nuncio . . . The French king has likewise granted to
this nuncio that the Pope’s calendar shall be under his privilege printed and
published.
Nations less secure in the Catholic fold, or in less of a hurry, did not
immediately comply. France waited until December, when King Henry III
ordered the change. Belgium and the Catholic states of the Netherlands also
delayed until the end of 1582, with Flanders and parts of Belgium making
the jump the day after December 21, which
was followed by January 1. This meant skipping Christmas, which Thomas

Stokes, an English merchant and spy living in Flanders, confirmed in a letter
written on January 2, 1583 (Gregorian time) to Walsingham in London.
Yesterday by proclamation from the Court, and proclaimed here in this town,
“that yesterday” was appointed to be New Year’s Day and to be the first of
January; so they have lost Christmas Day here for this year—Bruges, the 23
December 1582, stillo anglea* and here they write the 2 January 1583.
Informed that some countries had not made the switch as scheduled, the
pope on November 7 issued a reminder for noncomplying countries, ordering
them to omit the 10 days between February 10 and 21, 1583. Gregory also
chided these holdouts, ordering that “the method set out below shall be
universally adopted, the whole unhindered by excuses or obstacles.” By 1584
the remainder of Belgium had made the change. Hungary complied in 1587.
This covered most of Catholic Europe in the West, except for the Holy
Roman Empire, which was itself a microcosm of greater Europe: a crazy
quilt of rival kingdoms, duchies, fiefdoms, and city-states, some Catholic and
some Protestant, and nominally lorded over by the Holy Roman Emperor. At
the moment this was Rudolf II (1552-1612), king of Hungary and Bohemia.
Rudolf is mentioned by name in the bull of 1582, with the pope making a
personal appeal to him to carry out the reform. But he lacked the authority
or the arms to impose much of anything beyond his own power base.
This left the individual German states largely on their own. In October
1583 Bavaria and Austria converted. So did Wurzburg, Munster, and Mainz
in November of that year, though each dropped a different set of 10 days.
The Catholic cantons of Switzerland changed on January 12-22, 1584; most
other German Catholic states, along with Bohemia and Moravia, became
Gregorian by the end of 1584.
*“English style.”
266 CALENDAR
Protestants in Germany and elsewhere rejected the reform, often with great
bitterness and passion. James Heerbrand, a professor of theology in the
German city of Tubingen, accused Gregory—whom he called Gregorius
calendarifex, “Gregory the calendar maker”—of being the “Roman
Antichrist” and his calendar a Trojan horse designed to trick real Christians
into worshiping on the incorrect holy days.
We do not recognise this Lycurgus (or rather Draco, whose laws were said to be
written in blood), this calendar-maker, just as we do not hear the shepherd of the
flock of the Lord, but a howling wolf. ... All his loathe- some and abominable errors,
his sacriligious and idol-worshipping practices, his vicious, perverse and impious
dogmas that are condemned by the word of God . . . these little by little he will once
more insert into our churches.
Heerbrand vilified the new calendar as an extension of the Council of Trent

and accused the pope of promulgating a religious change rather than a civil
one. His advice: act as shepherds against the “slobbering wolf that threatens
your flock,” and “stand firm in that liberty of yours, and fight for it as befits
strong athletes and soldiers of Christ.”
Other Protestant intellectuals argued that the pope’s calendar was against
nature, with one tract insisting that farmers no longer knew when to till their
fields and that birds were confused about when to sing and when they should
fly away. Another pamphlet coauthored by the anti-Gregorian astronomer
Michael Maestlin frightened farmers in Bohemia and elsewhere by
proclaiming that the pope really was stealing 10 days of everyone’s life.
Catholics countered with absurdities of their own, insisting that in Gorizia,
Italy, a nut tree had responded to the papal reform by blossoming 10 days
early. Other Protestants agreed with Martin Luther’s reaction when he heard
about Catholic reforms: how earlier in the sixteenth century that civil
authorities, not popes,
ought to be in charge of how society measured time. Still others insisted that
the Julian calendar had been chosen by God and should not be altered by
popes or kings—a position that the Catholic Church itself had of course taken
for centuries, using the same argument to block reform of the calendar.
For the people of Germany and elsewhere this jumble meant that people now
had to cope with two calendars: the Julian in the Protestant countries and the
Gregorian in the Catholic ones—soon to be known as the “old style” and the
“new style.” or O.S. and N.S. for short. It also meant that someone leaving,
say, Catholic Regensburg in Bavaria on January 1 would arrive in Lutheran
Nuremberg, some fifty miles away, on December 21 the previous
year ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Worse, Christian holidays including Easter now fell on
different days in a reprise of what Venerable Bede had complained about in
distant Northumbria during the Dark Ages. “It is said that the confusion in
those days was such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year,”
wrote Bede in 732, a sentiment now reemerging eight hundred years later,
but this time across the length of Latin Europe.
Later, in 1700, Protestants in Germany and Denmark adopted most of the
Gregorian reforms, including the removal of 10 days and the century leap-
year rule. But they deviated on how they calculated Easter, which ended up
producing an Easter date identical to the Catholics’ except in certain years—
such as 1724 and 1744, when Catholics and Protestants celebrated the
Paschal feast on different days. In 1775 Frederick the Great finally
suppressed the Protestant Easter calendar, after which the complete
Gregorian calendar ruled in Germany.
Most confusing of all was Sweden, which adopted the German Protestants’
new Easter calculation but did not remove 10 days from
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡Regensburg accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1583, Nuremberg in 1699.

268 CALENDAR
their solar calendar. Instead they dropped a single day in 1700, conforming
to the Gregorian century leap-year formula that was being followed by all
reformed countries that year. This left the Swedes with a different calendar
than anyone else: 10 days out of sync with the Gregorian, but also 1 day off
from the Julian. In 1712 they reverted back to the Julian calendar by adding
an extra leap day, February 30. Only in 1753 did the Swedes at last adopt the
Gregorian year.
The Eastern Orthodox Church also rejected the reform, a last-minute effort
by Rome to include them having proven unable to undo centuries of enmity.
If anything, the old hostility had grown worse since the fall of Byzantine to
the Turks more than a century earlier—a defeat made more bitter to many
Eastern Christians because they believed that the West had stood by and did
nothing to help.
Since the fall of Constantinople the churches of the East had been thrust
into a minority position within a powerful Moslem empire, though they
continued to operate in their chief cities. But the central authority linked to
the old Greek empire was gone, leaving local churches in Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, and elsewhere to fend for themselves in the sometimes
hostile environment of Ottoman rule.
Even to send an official delegation from Rome to Orthodox leaders was a
risky proposition in the 1570s and 1580s, given the Turks’ sensitivity to
anything that would encourage an alliance between Christians in the East and
West. They were particularly edgy in the wake of military setbacks on their
European frontier with the West in the Balkans, and after the 1571 Battle of
Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. There a combined Spanish and Italian fleet had
decisively defeated the Turkish navy and ended the Ottoman domination of
the Eastern Mediterranean sea lanes.
So the pope sent his calendar emissary east under cover, dispatching in
May of 1582 a certain Livio Cellini in the guise of a trader traveling
with a state delegation to Constantinople from Venice, which had a trade

treaty with the Turks. Arriving on May 27, Cellini went the next day to visit
Jeremiah II Tranos, the patriarch of Constantinople.
This was not the first contact with representatives of the Greek Church
regarding the calendar. Gregory’s commission had earlier sought input from
the Orthodox bishop in Venice and had worked closely with the Syrian
member of their panel, Patriarch Ignatius, hoping to assuage the Greeks and
to bring them along. The commission seriously talked about inviting
representatives from the East to attend reform discussions in Rome. But this
was rejected in 1581 by Clavius and the others. They feared it would delay
the reform and perhaps kill its chances, in part because so much depended
on Gregory himself, who at age 80 could not be expected to live forever.
In Constantinople, Jeremiah was sympathetic to the reform, though he
explained to Cellini that many of the other Eastern churches would be openly
hostile to anything that came from Rome. Still, the patriarch made an effort
to persuade the others. This was wrecked, however, when the news arrived
that Gregory had unilaterally issued his bull the previous February. A synod
held in Constantinople in November 1582 harshly condemned the reform as
being against tradition, the Scriptures, the councils, and the wishes of the
founders of the Church. They also chided the entire process of reform by
decree from Rome as a vanity of the pope.
The Eastern churches remained entirely opposed to the Gregorian
calendar until just after the First World War, when a congress of Orthodox
churches met in 1923 in Constantinople. One of the items on the agenda was
the “new” calendar, which was not formally adopted by the
congress.§§§§§§§§§ Since 1923, several individual churches in the East
have adopted portions of the new calendar, including the switch to the
Gregorian solar year. They retained the old system for calculating Easter,
however, and to this day celebrate Christ’s resurrection on a different day
than Christians in the West.
§§§§§§§§§The conferees in this tumultuous gathering agreed on nothing else either.

270 CALENDAR
These partially reformed churches include those of Constantinople,

Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Poland, and most recently
Bulgaria, which made the conversion in 1968. The churches in Jerusalem,
Russia, and Serbia and the monasteries on Mt. Athos in Greece continue to
adhere entirely to Caesar’s calendar, which now runs 13 days behind the
Gregorian calendar. Small bands of “old cal- endarists”—called
Palaiomerologitai—continue to hold out in Greece, following the Julian
calendar despite being excommunicated by their church for failing to abide
by the reforms.********** Only the Orthodox Church of Finland, with
about 60,000 members in this overwhelmingly Lutheran nation, has
switched entirely to the Gregorian calendar, including Easter.
How the average person reacted to the new calendar in the 1580s can be
glimpsed only in bits and pieces, since Europe as yet had no Rome daily
newspaper, no Paris Match, and no London Times. And few people kept
diaries and journals—a practice that would have to wait for the newly literate
upper middle class that began to appear late in the next century, and the new
consciousness of time and individual worth during the Enlightenment that
made people believe that what happened to them was worth writing down.
For people living in regions that adopted the new one, the change probably
made little difference anyway from a practical standpoint, once a villager in
Tuscany or the Loire Valley got over the shock of holy days changing and
dealt with any lingering fears of 10 days lost. In 1582 most people still led
very insular lives compared to today, seldom straying from their villages and
fields. A few more were educated than in the time of Bacon and certainly
more than in the era of Charlemagne,
********** The monasteries on Mt. Athos are allowed to retain the Julian calendar
because they arc part of the Church of Constantinople, which has tolerated their position.
and most had enough food. Yet daily life in 1582 remained much as it had
for centuries: filled with hard labor during planting and harvest, but with
comparatively little to do the rest of the year; with moments of pleasure
interspersed with the age-old perils of disease, war, famine, and—for some—
religious persecution.
Time continued to intrude ever more urgently into the ancient cycle of life
and death, with the continued spread of clocks and bells and a growing time
consciousness of labor, trade, taxes, contracts, and so forth, which few
people could avoid by 1582. This meant that most Europeans living in
Gregorian countries would have heard about the change sooner or later, if
only because they now prayed to saints on different days. Yet a certain
timelessness would persist for some until well into the twentieth century, and
remains even today in scattered places.
For those people who lived in a village that went Gregorian when the next
village over stayed Julian, the calendar change would have been more
obvious. For instance, how would the 10-day gap affect our person trekking
over the mountains from noncomplying Nuremberg to the newly Gregorian
Regensburg? If he was a muleteer driving a caravan loaded with charcoal,
was he considered 10 days late? And would a woman married on June 10 in
Regensburg be unmarried in Nuremberg the same day, which was their June
1?
Most people undoubtedly reacted to such oddities and inconveniences
with a grumble and a shrug. Dates and systems of dating had been scrambled
for so long, with competing saint’s days, different New Years, and names for
days that people were probably used to having to think simultaneously in
more than one system. This is probably what our muleteer would have done.
Anyway, he would not have fretted as much as we would today over such
discrepancies, for the simple reason that few people in the 1580s cared about
following the exact time. Most clocks still kept time only to the quarter hour.
And no one had a train to catch at exactly 5:02 P.M., or a favorite television
show they did not want to miss.
In Moravia a local saga about the change suggests the sort of think-
272 CALENDAR
ing and talking that was going on by regular people concerning the calendar.
In this tale a simple innkeeper named Bartholomaeus tries to understand the
move from old to new. Presented as a tale of good versus evil, Bartholomaeus
is advised by a priest and a devil. Moravia being a Catholic country, one can
guess which advisor was which— and the outcome.
Throughout the great Gregorian time switch, few people probably focused
on the role of science, not realizing that this shift was one of the first
instances in the early modern age where a change affecting almost everyone
was compelled less by religion than by a new respect for scientific
accuracy—in this case, for getting the time right.
Nowhere was the tunnoil over the calendar more evident than in England,
which in the early 1580s was a country of three or four million people just
beginning its rapid rise to the status of a world economic and military power.
For now, however, this small island kingdom was weak and isolated, ruled
by a Protestant queen who had spent her entire reign trying to protect herself
and her realm against the great Catholic powers of the day, particularly Spain.
Imprisoned in 1554 by her Catholic sister, Queen Mary, who suspected
her involvement in a Protestant plot, and having survived several Catholic
conspiracies including an attempted assassination, the wily Elizabeth I
(1533—1603) in 1582 was as embroiled as ever in trying to fend off her
enemies. This makes it all the more surprising that when she heard about the
pope’s bull she did not reject it outright. Instead she asked her friend and
advisor John Dee (1527-1608) to study and comment on the reforms.
A scientist, astrologer, and longtime confidant of Elizabeth, Dee was a
fascinating character, a man who in many ways epitomized the Elizabethan
era of Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis
Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh—a period of unusual impetuosity, wit,

exploration, entrepreneurship, conquest, and an anything-goes mentality.
Dee himself was a graduate of Cambridge, an editor of Euclid, an expert on
navigational instruments, and an astrologer and conjurer who discoursed on
everything from the nature of angels to Copernican theory. The son of Henry
VIII’s chief carver and manager of the royal kitchen, Dee also had traveled
widely as a young man, furthering his studies of astronomy and cosmology
in Belgium and lecturing to large crowds at the university at Reims. A minor
sensation on the continent, Dee was offered positions at the courts of the
French king and of Ivan the Terrible in Russia.
Instead he returned to England in 1551 to became an intellectual at the
court of Queen Mary, soon switching his allegiance to the queen’s half sister,
Elizabeth. At one point Dee faced a charge of treason for supporting
Elizabeth but was acquitted. This earned him the devotion of Elizabeth, who,
when she became queen after Mary’s death in 1558, asked Dee for
astrological advice on the best date for her coronation. Later she called him
simply “hyr Philosopher.”
Dee took his work on the calendar very seriously. In 1582 he penned a
long, passionate treatise in support of the reform, titled:
A playne discourse and humble advise for our gratious Queene Elizabeth, her
most Excellent Majestie to peruse and consider, as concerning the needful
reformation of the vulgar Kalendar for the civile yeres and daies ac- compting
or verifying, according to the tyme truely spent.
Dee also included on the flyleaves a little ditty intended to flatter Elizabeth
and to not-so-modestly point up his own effort with Elizabeth as on a par
with those of Sosigenes and Caesar:
As Caesar and Sosigenes

The Vulgar Kalendar did make, So Caesar’s pere, our true Empress. To
Dee this work she did betake.
274 CALENDAR
This work started with a simple introduction to the problem, and then
includes a circular timeline, or dial, around which Dee wrote the great names
in the history of the calendar: Caesar, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Bacon, and
others. He then plunged into an analysis of the science behind Aloysius
Lilius’s reforms, particularly the length of the year. Consulting Copernicus’s
De revolutionibus, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and Erasmus Reinhold’s Prutenic
Tables, he satisfied himself that the work done by Lilius and the calendar
commission in Rome was sound and that the reforms were a sensible
solution—with one exception.
Not being a Catholic, Dee had trouble with the dating of the calendar
correction back to the Council of Nicaea. He vigorously argued for a
restoration back to the time of Christ, which meant dropping 11 days, not 10.
Dee later relented with great regret, supporting a 10- day drop to conform
with the rest of Europe. He also wrote out a proposed calendar for 1583 with
the 10 days deleted, advocating a less traumatic plan than the pope’s
elimination of the days all at once. Under this calendar England would have
dropped three days in May, one in June, and three each in July and August,
at times that avoided important days and holidays.
Once finished, Dee sent his treatise and sample calendar to the man who
apparently headed up the queen’s official commission looking into the matter,
Lord Burghley, the lord treasurer of England. Dee began the report with
another poem, emphasizing in exceptionally bad verse that the point of this
reform was to be true to science:
At large, in brief, in midell wise, I humbly give the playne Advise For
word of tyme, the Tyme Untrew If I have myst, Command anew Your
Honor may: So shall you see, That Love of Truth, doth govern me.
Burghley read the Discourse and then consulted with three other
intellectual advisors to the queen: the mathematician Thomas Digges
(d. 1595), Sir Henry Savile (1549-1622), and a Mr. Chambers. These experts
added their approvals and referred the matter to the Queen’s chief councilors.
They too approved the plan, as did the Queen, who set a date for
implementation in May 1583.
Before they could move, however, one hurdle remained: the approval of
the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal (c. 1519— 1583), and key
bishops in the Church of England. To secure this, Walsingham, the secretary
of state, dispatched a letter on March 18, 1583, †††††††††† asking the
archbishop to confer with his bishops and return his response “with all
convenient speed, for that it is meant the said callendar whall be published
by proclamation before the first of May next.” Walsingham followed up on
this just 11 days later, on March 29, with another note urging Grindal to
respond quickly. He suggested that the queen herself was anxious to receive
his official nod. “Her majesty doth now find some fault that [she] doth yet
hear nothing of the reports thereof that she looked to have received your
Grace,” wrote Walsingham.
Nothing could have been plainer, except for one problem—Archbishop
Grindal said no.
Part of his obstinacy was a long-standing feud between him and the queen
that undoubtedly would have led to his forced resignation had he not died
that very year. But more than this was the aged archbishop’s deep distrust of
Rome, a stance that represented a strong current in the Anglican Church and
in an English society in the 1580s that was proud to the point of xenophobia
about their new religion, their hatred of Spain and the Catholics, and their
love for their queen.
The savvy Elizabeth understood this—which makes her support of the
measure all the more perplexing. Possibly she was simply succumbing to the
eagerness of the intellectual circle at her court, the poets, scientists,
adventurers, and philosophers who spent their time delighting one another—
and Elizabeth—with their wit, wisdom, and
††††††††††That is, on March 28, 1583, according to the new Gregorian calendar. Because
England not only was on the Julian calendar but started their year on March 25.
276 CALENDAR
earthy good sense, when they weren’t intriguing against the queen’s enemies
at home and abroad. But Elizabeth was also a pragmatist, a consummate
political tightrope walker with an uncanny ability to fend off enemies and
impassion loyalists.
Apparently she agreed with “hyr Philosopher” that the reform was good
science. She may also have been convinced by Dee’s assessment that the
reform had a British connection through Roger Bacon. Undoubtedly she had
a political motive, though what it was is unclear. It may have been part of
her delicate game of tacking toward and away from Spain in these years
leading up to the attempted invasion by the armada. Or possibly it was an
attempt to enforce her will on the archbishop in their long-standing tug-of-
war.
Whatever it was, Grindal dispatched his reply on April 4, including
comments from key bishops and a “godly learned in the mathematicalls. ”
The gist of the letter to Walsingham was a masterful strategy that avoided
saying no outright. Instead, Grindal asked for a delay by insisting that a
change this sweeping should be discussed in a general council of all
Christians, such as the one convened in Nicaea by Constantine.
After our hearty commendations unto your honour, may it please you to understand,
that upon receipt of your letters in Her Majesty’s name, and the view of Mr. Dee’s
resolutions . . . we have upon good conference and deliberation . . . that we love not
to deale with or in anye wise to admit it, before mature and deliberate consultation
had, nott only with our principall assemblie of the clergie and convocation of this
realme, but also with other reformed Churches which profess the same religion as we
doe, without whose consent if we should herein proceed we should offer juste
occasion of schisme, and so by allowinge, though not openly yet indirectly, the
Pope’s dewyse and the [Trent] counsayle, [cause] some to swerve from all other
Churches of our profession.
Grindal thus deflected the pressure exerted on him personally by insisting on

a meeting that would never happen, even among the fractious Protestants.
Grindal also argued that the Church of England
could not under the rule of Scripture or God endorse an edict from a papacy
that “all the reformed Churches in Europe for the most part doe hold and
affirme ... is Antichrist.” In a long list of reasons why the calendar should
not be reformed, Grindal and his bishops also reminded Walsingham that it
would be particularly loathsome to accept an edict issued as a bull, since it
was this same instrument of the pope’s authority that had excommunicated
Elizabeth in 1570.
Dee countered by saying that the new calendar had nothing to do with the
pope, that it was astronomy that dictated the change. He pointed out the need
of a rising maritime power to conform with its trading partners on the
continent in something so basic as dates. But the matter was dropped after
an abortive attempt to pass it in Parliament in 1584 (Old Style)—titled “An
Act giving Her Majesty authority to alter and make new a Calendar
according to the Calendar used in other countries.” This bill was introduced
on March 16 and possibly reread on March 18. It then disappears along with
all efforts to change the calendar, for reasons that are not recorded. Possibly
the queen and her advisors simply dropped the matter so as not to push the
issue of the state versus the church as the possibility of war with Spain
increased.
Shortly after the calendar debate ended, Dee left the English court for
eastern Europe, traveling with his family and a “spirit medium” named
Edward Kelley. In Bohemia he continued his intellectual pursuits and got
involved with several dubious affairs involving astrology and angel readings
with Kelley at the court in Prague. For the rest of his life Dee argued for the
adoption of the new calendar in England, though after the attempted invasion
by Spain in 1588—launched with the support of the pope—the revulsion for
all things Roman made any reform impossible.
It would be another 170 years before Britain finally adopted the Gregorian
calendar; it was one of the last major European countries to do
278 CALENDAR
so. This was despite serious reform attempts in 1645 and 1699, both blocked
by a still strident Church of England and by Puritans taking the line that the
“old stile” calendar was the true style of God.
But as Britain became a major international military and economic power,
the inconvenience of the “old stile” and “new stile” became increasingly a
nuisance for businessmen and an embarrassment for anyone with
connections on the continent. “The English mob preferred their calendar to
disagree with the Sun than to agree with the Pope,” chided Voltaire. And in
Latin someone wrote a ditty reprinted in a pro-reform tract in 1656:
Cur Anni errorem non corrigit Anglia notum,

Cum faciant alii; cerncre nemo potest.
Why England doth not th years known error mend, When all else do; no
Man can comprehend.
Still, over the years most people in Britain and, as time went on, in its
colonies seemed to take the inconveniences in stride, with overseas letters
dated with two dates—O.S. and N.S. Over the years the English even seem
to have developed a certain amount of pride (or arrogance) in being
different—something akin to Americans’ turning up their noses at the metric
system today.
And here the matter stood until one spring day in 1750, on the tenth of May,
when a stodgy earl named George Parker (1697—1764) stood up to deliver
to the Royal Society an address with a seemingly deadly dull title: “Remarks
upon the Solar and the Lunar Years, the Cycle of 19 years, commonly called
The Golden Number, the Epact, And a Method of Finding the Time of Easter,
as it is now observed in most Parts of Europe.” Parker, an amateur
astronomer well connected with
the Newtonian circle in Greenwich and London, started his talk by updating
just how far off the Julian year had drifted against the true year since Caesar’s
time—and since the Gregorian reform. As a point of reference, he used what
was then perhaps the most accurate measurement of the year ever—365 days,
5 hours, 48 minutes, and 55 seconds—calculated by the late royal astronomer
Edmund Halley (1656-1742), the man who gave his name to Halley’s Comet.
“We do as yet in England follow the Julian Account or the Old Style in
the Civil Year,” Parker noted toward the end of his mostly technical talk, “as
also the Old Method of finding those Moons upon which Easter depends:
Both of which have been shewn to be very erroneous.”
Most likely, the earl’s speech would have gone unnoticed except for one
member of the audience: the recently retired secretary of state Philip Dormer
Stanhope (1694-1773), the earl of Chesterfield. Famous for his wit and
sophistication, and for his sagacious letters to his son and godson, the 56-
year-old Stanhope was for some reason fired up by the old earl’s speech and
launched an effort to push for reform at last in Britain.
Still an important member of the Whig Party and a prominent intellectual
during this golden age of the drawing room, Stanhope first consulted with
mathematicians and astronomers. He then took his cause to the leaders of his
party; starting with his longtime political colleague Thomas Pelham (1693-
1768), the secretary of state and future prime minister.
Pelham initially gave the idea a cool reception, as Stanhope later
recounted. “He was allarmed at so bold an undertaking,” Stanhope wrote,
“and conjured me, not to stir matters that had been long quiet, adding that he
did not love new fangled things.” In another account of this meeting, the
editor of Pelham’s memoirs, William Coxe, agrees that the future prime
minister was none too thrilled. “The noble secretary was too deeply
impressed with the favorite maxim of Sir Robert Walpole,” wrote Coxe,
“tranquilla non movere [do not disturb things at rest], to relish a proposal,
which was likely to shock the civil and religious prejudices of the people.”
280 CALENDAR
To overcome this inertia Stanhope set out to embarrass his countrymen

into change, pointing out to everyone who would listen what he later wrote
in a letter to his son: that other than England, Russia and Sweden remained
unreformed. “It was not, in my opinion very honorable for England to remain
in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company, the inconveniency
of it was likewise felt by all those who had foreign correspondences, whether
political or mercantile.” Stanhope also took his proposal to a medium that
was unavailable to Christopher Clavius or to John Dee in the 1580s: the
popular press. He penned a number of amusing and informative articles
under a pseudonym in an eighteenth-century London periodical, The World.
The affable earl also talked up the change in fashionable London townhouses,
parliamentary antechambers, smoking rooms, and estates.
Eventually winning Pelham’s approval and that of other senior gov-
ernment ministers, Stanhope in 1751 introduced a bill for reforming the
calendar in Parliament: “An Act for Regulating the Commencement of the
Year, and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use.” In a letter to his son, he
writes: “I had brought a bill into the House of Lords for correcting and
reforming our present calendar. ... It was notorious, that the Julian calendar
was erroneous, and had overcharged the solar year with eleven days.” He
then described his preparations for the bill and his presentation, in part as a
lesson for his son on how to comport oneself in presenting a complicated
matter in public.
I determined, therefore, to attempt the reformation; I consulted the best lawyers

and the most skillful astronomers, and we cooked up a bill for that purpose. But
then my difficulty began: I was to bring in this bill, which was necessarily
composed of law jargon and astronomical calculations, to both of which I am
an utter stranger. However, it was absolutely necessary to make the House of
Lords think that I knew something of the matter; and also to make them believe
that they knew something of it themselves, which they do not. For my own part,
I could just as soon have talked Celtic or Sclavonian to them, as astronomy, and
could have understood me full as well: so I resolved ... to please instead of
informing them. I gave them,
therefore, only an historical account of calendars, from the Egyptian down to the
Gregorian, amusing them now and then with little episodes. . . . They thought I was
informed, because I pleased them; and many of them said, that I had made the whole
very clear to them; when, God knows, I had not even attempted it.
Stanhope had laid his groundwork well. The bill sailed through the usual
three readings and was passed on May 17 with a unanimous vote and
approved by King George II on the 22nd, after which Stanhope quipped that
it was his “style that carried the House through this difficult subject” and not
the content of what he said concerning the mathematics and science, which
“he himself could not understand.”
The act itself ordered 11 days expunged from the calendar in Great Britain
and in its colonies, with Wednesday, September 2, 1752, followed by
Thursday, September 14. The 11th day was added because in 1700 the
Gregorians, according to Lilius’s century leap-year rule, had not observed a
leap year and did not add a day. This meant that the Julian calendar, which
had added a day, was 24 more hours out of step. The act also mandated that
in the future the calendar year and Easter be observed according to the
Gregorian system, and that the year would begin on January 1 in England
instead of March 25.
Stanhope and Parliament took pains to legislate details of the changeover
to minimize problems with banking, contracts, holidays, and matters public
and private. For instance, the act explains that all court dates, holidays,
“Meetings and Assemblies of any Bodies Politick or Corporate,” elections,
and all official obligations according to “Law, Statute, Charter, Custom or
Usage” shall be “computed according to the said new method of numbering
and reckoning the Days of the Calendar as aforesaid, that is to say, 11 Days
sooner than the respective Days whereon the same are now holden and kept.”
Similar provisions applied to markets, fairs, and marts, “whether for the
sale of Goods or Cattle, or for the hiring of Servants, or for any other Pur-
pose,” and to rents, usages of property, contracts, “the Delivery of such
Goods and Chattles, Wares, and Merchandize,” with the Act ordering
282 CALENDAR
that no one was to pay wages or count or pay interest for the 11 lost days.
Even those who happened to be turning 21 years of age between September
3 and 13, 1752, O.S.—this was the legal age of majority in Britain—did not
get a break. Nor did soldiers about to be discharged from the army,
indentured servants at the end of their contracts, or criminals about to be
released from jail. They all had to wait the proper number of “natural days”
that would have occurred under the old calendar.
During the months between the vote and enactment the government
acquired an unlikely ally in the Church of England, which had finally lined
up in favor of reform and adopted a slogan: “The New Style the True Style.”
This became the motto of preachers across Britain, who added an appeal to
patriotism by repeating John Dee’s assertion that Roger Bacon, an
Englishman, was among the first to call for reform some five hundred years
earlier.
The act was also disseminated in the London Gazette and in other
newspapers and almanacs. For instance, The Ladies Diary, or Woman’s
Almanack, published in London, offered a detailed explanation of the change
on their cover and in their calendar for the month of September (see pages
283-284).
Still, many people in Britain reacted with dismay when September

actually rolled around—and, in some cases, with anger at the confusion over
11 days lost. William Coxe, editor of Pelham’s memoirs, summarized the
response:
In practice . . . this innovation was strongly opposed, even among the higher
classes of society. Many landholders, tenants, and merchants, were
apprehensive of difficulties, in regard to rents, leases, bills of exchange, and
debts, dependent on periods fixed by the Old Style. . . . Greater difficulty was,
however, found in appeasing the clamour of the people against the supposed
profaneness, of changing the saints’ days in the Calendar, and altering the time
of all the immoveable feasts.
In London and elsewhere mobs collected in the streets and shouted, “Give
us back our 11 days.” This became a campaign slogan in 1754
The LADIES Diary:

Woman's ALM AN ACK
ForThe YEAR of our LORD, 1752.
Being Difaule, or LEAP-YEAR, of 355 Days only;
And th • Firft Year Corrected to Solar Time, and the General Date of
all Europe. Containb.an Imprcvemt-' of AR TS and SCIECE ta,
For the Uft and -Picture of the
Being the Forty Ninth ALMANACK
4
The
The Ladies Diary, Cover and (on the next page) Month of September,
London, 1752
284 CALENDAR
175a SeptembcrhathonlyXIX Days In this Year

Firft Quarter, 15th, 2 After.
Full Moon, 23d, at Noon. E.T. Equat. 4
Laft Quarter, 30th, 1 After.
JO d. 23 h. 43 m. and therefore 11 Days is left out of Account, in this Month, a* the mafl convenient,
for redwing tbe Kaiendar or Tear to its firfl ejiahlifh'd Order. And f>r keeping tbe/bort ell and
longefl Days (or the Solflices) and alfo tbe Days of it b. Eng (or tbe Equinoxes ) on the fame nominal
Days of tbe Monthfor tbe future, it is ordain'd by Act of Parliament, that every fourth hundred Tear
is to confid of 366 Days as ufual, but all other whole hundred Tears of 36 $ Days only : Tbe Tears
between •which whole hundreds to be common and Riffextile as formerly, and tbe Date of tbe Tear
henceforward to begin on the firfl of January.
’4 Holy Croft Day, Holy- Rood, or Exalt, of the 9 33

15 F Crof Day 12 hours 20 minutes long IO 24
16 S Day decreed 4 hours 14 min. 11 iS
17 A 15 Sand, after Trinity. Lambert, Bifh. and Mar. Morn.
18 M Planetary Hour by Day 62 minutes o it
191 1 Birth of tbeEirg. Mary. Dunfan. Sun 6’ zAfaft 2;
20W
Faft. ,_ 2 2;
St. MATTHEW, Apoftle.Evangchft, and Martyr 35
Equal Day anti Night in alltht Habit. World, ûn 4
23 S Sun f A^y iaofa^ , 24! A rifes anti Jets at 6 * Unity. ) rifes
\truly
16-Sunday after Trinn §un apparent I') rifts and [fets nt 6, 6 A (
ZCiM allowing for Rfratlion6 S^
zbIT St. Cyprian, Abp. of Carib. aud Mart. 7 9
27 W Daydecreafed 4 hours 56 minutes Sheriff's of
7 S'-
28 TLONDON Sworn. Day br. 4L 1 im S. Michael 8 39
29 &a& all An. L. Mayor of Lan. Elected
9 38
£ 20S. fer. Pr. Con. & D. Sun ri. 6h. 1 im. fets 5, 48 10 4^
S TH E third of September the fourteenth is nam’d, For which,
Bntijb Annals will ever be tam’d ; For by Wfdom and A-t to the Houfe
made appear. The Sun was rer.u -'d to attend on the Tsar;
His Julian Vagaries long Time has he known; But has now got a new-
bridal Tear of his own.
in Oxfordshire, where the son of George Parker, the astronomer who made
the speech that ignited Stanhope, was standing for Parliament. This election
was depicted in a famous set of etchings by William Hogarth (1697—1764).
In one of the etchings a banquet is being held by two Whig candidates—one
of them is “Sir Commodity Taxem”— for their supporters. Everyone is
reveling, with numerous small scenes showing people eating, a doctor
tending to an injured man, musicians playing, and a man being struck in the
head by a brick tossed by parading Tories. Lying on the floor at the feet of
the wounded man is a poster: GIVE us BACK OUR 11 DAYS.
Other protesters shouted out a popular anti-reform ditty:
In seventeen hundred and fifty-three The style it was changed to Popery.
In Bristol, riots over the reform apparently ended up with people killed.
On January 6, 1753, which would have been the day after Christmas Day
under the Old Style, a period journal reports:
Yesterday being Old Christmas Day, the same was obstinately observed by our
country people in general, so that (being market day according to the order of our
magistrates) there were but a few at market, who embraced the opportunity of raising
their butter to 9d. or l0d. per pound.
Also in Bristol a certain John Latimer reports that the Glastonbury thorn,
which blossomed every year exactly on Christmas Day, “contemptuously
ignored the new style” when it “burst into blossom on the 5th January, thus
indicating that Old Christmas Day should alone be observed, in spite of an
irreligious legislature.”
In the City of London, bankers protested the reform and the concision it
caused for their industry by refusing to pay taxes on the usual date of March
25, 1753. They paid up 11 days later, on April 5, which remains tax day in
Britain.
In a lighter vein, a correspondent wrote a letter to The Inspector that
286 CALENDAR
was published in the September 1752 issue of the popular Gentleman’s

Magazine:
Mr. Inspector,
I write to you in the greatest perplexity, I desire you’ll find some way of
setting my affair to rights; or I believe I shall run mad, and break my heart into
the bargain. How is all this? I desire to know plainly and truly! I went to bed last
night, it was Wednesday Sept. 2, and the first thing I cast my eye upon this
morning at the top of your paper, was Thursday, Sept. 14. I did not go to bed till
between one and two: Have I slept away 11 days in 7 hours, or how is it? For
my part I don’t find I’m any more refresh’d than after a common night’s sleep.
They tell me there’s an act of parliament for this. With due reverence be it
spoken, I have always thought there were very few things a British parliament
could not do, but if I had been ask’d, I should have guess’d the annihilation of
time was one of them!
Most people, however, did not seem too rattled by the change, with most
diarists at the time simply mentioning the event with little comment. James
Clegg, a 62-year-old minister and farmer living in Derbyshire, jotted down
what he considered key events in his life for September 1752:
1. heavy rain all the forenoon, I was back home close at work writing my last will
and was at home all day.
2. at home til afternoon then took a ride out into Chinley, visited at old William
Bennets and at John Moults at Nase and returnd safe Blessed be God.
14. This day the use of the new Stile in numbring the days of the months
commenceth and according to that computation, the last day of October will be my
Birthday. I was at home til afternoon, we had an heavy shower of rain which raizd
the water, after it was over I went up to Chappel on business and returned home in
good time.
Newspapers also noted the change, but little more. None reported on the
riots or other problems, since this was not yet part of what constituted a duty
or practice of the general press. The General Advertiser of London printed
excerpts from the act in its September 2, 1752 (Old Style) edition. The next
day, September 14, was marked in the paper with a simple N.S. after the date.
Otherwise the paper ran its usual mix of news from world capitals, shipping
notices, stock quotes, and advertisements. The latter included on this first
day of the new calendar an announcement that “The Evening Entertainments”
at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, “will end this evening, the 14th of September,
N.S.” There also was to be a violin concert that night at Islington, a sale of
ten barges at Billingsgate at noon the following Tuesday, and a meeting of
the governors of the Small-Pox Hospital on the 20th of September. High
water at London Bridge was at 5:28 P.M.
Across the Atlantic in the British colonies, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor

Richard’s Almanac, published in Quaker Philadelphia, noted:
At the Yearly Meeting of the People called Quakers. . . since the Passing of this
Act, it was agreed to recommend to the Friends a Conformity thereto, both in
omitting the eleven Days of September . . . and beginning the Year hereafter on
the first Day of the Month called January.
The author of this notice, R. Saunders, then extended a wish to his readers
“that this New Year (which is indeed a New Year, such an one as we never
saw before, and shall never see again) may be a happy Year.”
In this same almanac Franklin himself, then 46, jauntily told his readers:
288 CALENDAR
Be not astonished, nor look with scorn, dear reader, at such a deduction of days, nor
regret as for the loss of so much time, but take this for your consolation, that your
expenses will appear lighter and your mind be more at ease. And what an indulgence
is here, for those who love their pillow to lie down in peace on the second of this
month and not perhaps awake till the morning of the fourteenth.
A number of colonial newspapers—including The Boston Weekly News-

Letter, The Carolina Gazette, and The New York Evening Post— noted the
arrival of the New Style but say little more.
Britain was not the last country to change in Europe. Sweden changed the
next year, in 1753. Then there is a long gap, with the heavily Greek Orthodox
countries in the Balkans waiting until the early twentieth century. Bulgaria
made the switch in either 1912,1915, or March of 1916, depending on which
source one believes. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia converted around 1915,
during the German occupation; Romania and Yugoslavia made the change
in 1919. Russia waited until 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, but had
to drop 13 days— February 1—13—to make up for the accumulation of days
by which the Julian calendar was in error 336 years after the Gregorian
reform. Greece did not reform its civil calendar until 1924.
Countries and people outside of Europe mostly had no reaction to the new
calendar in the decades and centuries following 1582—the exception being
in the Americas, where the reform was imposed by Spain and Portugal on
those people they had conquered. These included the Aztecs, Incas, and
Mayas, whose brilliant work in astronomy and calendars was already mostly
forgotten and expunged by the Europeans, though to this day isolated groups
of Mayans, for one, continue to use their ancient calendar. Later, Britain,
France, the United States, and other colonial powers imposed their calendar
on Indian tribes in the Western Hemisphere.
In Asia, the Japanese adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1873, during the
Westernization period of the Meiji emperors. Most countries and peoples on
this continent and in Africa preferred to keep their own calendars unless
forced to change by European colonial powers. Many continue to use
traditional calendars for religious and cultural events.
China resisted until 1912, though the Gregorian calendar did not take hold
throughout that country until the victory of the Communists in 1949. On
October 1 of that year a triumphant Mao Zedong climbed up onto a stand
atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the main entrance to the imperial palace in
Beijing. He then ordered that Beijing be henceforth the capital of China, that
the red flag with a large gold star and four small stars be the official flag of
China, and that the year be in accord with the Gregorian calendar.
But by then this calendar, launched 2,000 years earlier by Julius Caesar and
modified 1,600 years later by a lackluster pope, had become the world’s
calendar: a code for measuring time that today all but the most isolated
peoples use as the global standard for measuring time. This is despite its odd
quirks and the twists of history that produced it, following an improbable
timeline of its own from Sumer and Babylon to Rome, from Gupta India and
the Islamic east to a gradually reawakening of Europe, the Renaissance, Lord
Chesterfield’s England, and beyond.
Today the quest continues in the age of atomic time—which takes us, at
last, to Building 78 at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.,
where time is now measured not by watching the moon and sun, or with a
sundial, water clock, pendulum, wound-up spring, or quartz crystal, but with
a tiny mass of a rare element called cesium.
Time
I am standing in front of the master clock.

It resides in a small bunker-like structure, on top of a grassy knoll. Here
the output of some 50 individual atomic clocks converge into a bank of
computers behind a thick pane of glass at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Smack
in the middle of the panels and pulsating lights is a digital read out ticking
past in bright red numbers: hours, minutes, and seconds. This is literally the
pulse of North America in this age of atomic time. It also contributes to a
larger system that keeps time for the entire world, accurate within a billionth
of a second a year, or .0000000000114079 of a year.
Except that official time is no longer really measured this way, using
antiquated seconds and years. Since 1972, when the atomic net went online,
the Coordinated Universal Time—UTC—has been measured not by the
motion of the earth in space but by the oscillations at the atomic level of a
rare, soft, bluish-gray metal called cesium.
Apparently every atom oscillates—something I was unaware of before I
visited the Naval Observatory. But before anyone gets alarmed, you should
realize that all matter absorbs and emits a certain amount of energy, and that
this happens in some elements with extraordinary regularity—absorb, emit,
absorb, emit, absorb, emit—a process not
290
LIVING ON ATOMIC TIME 291
unlike the steady swing of a pendulum, and which can be picked up by

instruments as a steady frequency.
In 1967 the rate of cesium’s pulse was calibrated to 9,192,631,770
oscillations per second. This is now the official measurement of world time,
replacing the old standard based on the earth’s rotation and orbit, which had
used as its base number a second equal to 1/31556925.9747 of a year. This
means that under this new regime of cesium, the year is no longer officially
measured as 365.242199 days, but as 290,091,200,500,000,000 oscillations
of Cs, give or take an oscillation or two.
What this means is that we humans have fulfilled the dream of Caesar,
Aryabhata, al-Khwarizmi, Bacon, Clavius, and so many others: by creating
a device at last that can measure a true and accurate year.
But alas, this is not the end of our story.
As we know, the earth wobbles and wiggles, causing random fluctuations
in the earth’s rotation. Which is why the master clock is too accurate, and
must be periodically recalibrated. This is done by adding or subtracting leap
seconds to compensate for the actual motion of the earth. Otherwise the
master clock would gradually fall out of step with earth time, eventually
rendering the atomic time-grid as erroneous for the nanosecond crowd as the
Julian calendar became for those who could not tolerate drifts of minutes a
year. Since 1972, leap seconds have been added almost every year. So far,
none have been subtracted.
Think of the irony. After a millennia of struggle to come up with a true
and accurate year, we have actually overshot the mark. For in the end the
earth itself is not entirely accurate—a fact that would have astonished Roger
Bacon and many an astronomer and time reckoner who fought to objectify
time by using nature as their standard, as represented by the motions of the
earth, planets, and stars. It seemed— well, more natural to them than a year
devised by a church, emperor, parliament, or even a newfangled mechanical
clock, which had to be rewound and reset and often ran fast or slow.
So we are left with yet another gap, one between atomic time and earth
time, which fluctuates according to the whims of nature, if ever
292 CALENDAR
so slightly. Even with sophisticated modern instruments, time reckoners

today can only watch and record the earth’s bobs and dips as it drops a
nanosecond here and gains two or three there. But they remain as helpless to
predict the size of this gap at any moment as Bede was in the eighth century
with his gap: between what he observed was the length of the year according
to his sundial, and what the Church’s calendar said the year should be. Indeed
in his day the same problem existed with sacred time being too perfect
compared to earth time, inasmuch as people believed it was perfect: though
in this case the perfection came from God, not of cesium.
Which leaves anyone living by the clock or the calendar trapped in a
conundrum of our own making, between our seemingly genetic compulsion
for order and perfection, and the plain reality that nothing is perfect,
particularly nature—something we relearn every hurricane season, and
whenever the latest Theory of Everything falls short.
Further complicating matters is the fact that our little planet offers not one
or two but several “years” to measure, each slightly different. I have several
times mentioned the Sidereal Year: the year as measured by the time it takes
for the earth to orbit the sun. And of course the Tropical Year, defined as a
year measured from one March equinox to the next, though this is not
entirely accurate in modern astronomy, if one gets picky. Officially, a
Tropical Year is the time interval it takes for the earth to make a full orbit of
the sun, using as the starting and stopping point the vernal equinox. This is
slightly different than the value for the equinoctial year, since the earth’s
rotation is slowing ever so slightly over time. This means that the point
where the equinox started in a given year in relation to the sun is not going
to be exactly the same point a year later due to the slowing, and to other
planetary fluctuations.
If this is not numbing enough, we also have the year as measured from
one June solstice to the next, from one September equinox to
the next, and so forth—all of which offer up minutely varying values for the
length of the year that would have left the heads spinning of Sosigenes, Bede,
Roger Bacon, and all the rest.
In the spirit of full disclosure, for those who are interested, I list below the
various “years” and their values for the year 2000.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡
Year Mean Time Interval,

Year 2000 (in days)
Sidereal 365.2564 days
Tropical 365.24219 days
Between two March equinoxes 365.24237 days
Between two June solstices
365.24162 days
Between two September equinoxes
Between two December solstices 365.24201 days
365.24274 days
Our calendar year is linked to the year as measured between two March
equinoxes, as originally established by Caesar and Sosigenes. Pope
Gregory’s correction in 1582 brought our calendar year within 26 seconds
of the equinoctial year, where it remains today.
At the moment, I can see from my desk a clock, my watch, a wallcalendar, a

planning calendar, and a small icon on my computer with the date and time.
In my briefcase is an electronic organizer and a schedule of baseball games
for the Baltimore Orioles. And at home we have at least a half-dozen more
calendars and Lord knows how many clocks; schedules for my son’s and
daughter’s soccer games, school schedules, schedules for paying bills, and
dates everywhere.
This begs the question: Why do we need to measure a picosecond when I
cannot even keep track of what I am doing day to day?
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡These values were determined by astronomer Jean Meeus in 1992, except

for the sidereal year.
294 CALENDAR
I posed this to historian Steve Dick at the U.S. Naval Observatory. An

affable, quiet man with short brown hair and a well-kept mustache, he
laughed and said that everyone asks this. “You would be surprised at how
many uses there are,” he said, starting with navigation—which was the
original impetus to start a national time synchronization system here at the
Naval Observatory in the nineteenth century.
According to him a billionth of a second translates into the space of about
one foot for navigation, which can be significant if you are a pilot at night in
the fog trying to land a Boeing 747 on a runway or an F-14 Tomcat onto an
aircraft carrier. These sorts of minute measurements are critical for
synchronizing television feeds, bouncing signals off satellites, calculating
bank transfers, transmitting everything from e-mail to sonar signals in a
submarine, and keeping “smart” missiles on course so they slam into an
enemy’s chemical weapons complex instead of the middle of a populated
neighborhood. Hikers in the wilderness are using the master clock to find
trails down to a foot or two in accuracy by using handheld GPS (Global
Positioning System) locators. These locators cost as little as $250, and work
by simply holding the device up to the sky and waiting for it to link up with
three or more satellites. Once contact is made, the locator flashes an exact
location in degrees, minutes, and seconds.
But wait—trying to determine a true year gets much more mind- boggling
than this. For when we get down to the world of nanoseconds time begins to
change in other ways that must be compensated for. Time in fact begins to
warp or bend noticeably at this level of precision under certain situations, as
Albert Einstein noted. He theorized that time is relative to the speed one is
traveling through space. That time for someone moving at the speed of light
(186,282 miles per second) would move much more slowly than someone
moving, say, on the earth as it hurtles through space around the sun at about
20 miles a second.
This was proved in 1971 when two scientists borrowed four atomic clocks
from the Naval Observatory and flew them east and west around the globe in
jet airliners. Comparing the nanoseconds of these
voyages off the earth to atomic clocks on the ground showed that people
flying in the jets at less than one-millionth the speed of light experienced a
slowing of time equal to 59 nanoseconds going east and 273 nanoseconds
going west—the difference caused by the fact that the earth is rotating to the
east.
What does this mean for measuring the year? For one thing, it means that
every time someone flies their “year” grows by a few billionths of a second:
which is entirely meaningless, since the earth’s fluctuations affect the length
of the year in the range of a thousandth of a second. But who knows. It may
matter a great deal if humans learn to travel at great speeds through space,
where a “year” in a spaceship moving at 186,000 miles per second would last
far longer than 365.242199 earth days.
Lost in this expanding universe of cesium, nanoseconds, warps, and

recalibrations is the lowly calendar, with its twelve months and 365 little
boxes (366 in a leap year): a device for measuring time that does not oscillate,
bend time, or have anything to do with the electromagnetic spectrum.
Invented in its present form over two thousand years ago and corrected only
once four centuries ago, it is old enough to be an artifact in a museum.
Except that it remains vital to everyone.
Not that it is even close to perfect. There is a host of minor flaws that
annoy people, and are forever keeping a small, but vibrant group of would-
be reformers hoping to get a new and improved calendar named after them.
These flaws include:
• The divisions of the year—the month, the quarter, the half year— are of
unequal length. This is most unpleasant for anyone trying to run a business,
pay taxes, or gather statistics.
• The days of the week drift each year, with each new year starting
296 CALENDAR
the day after the previous year, or two days after when following a leap
year. Because of the leap year, this drift runs a cycle that repeats itself only
after 28 years. This makes it difficult to fix annual dates, since they keep
moving in the week. The position of the weeks also moves each year within
months and quarters.
• The Gregorian calendar remains in error, running fast against the true year
by about 25.96 seconds a year. Since 1582, this has accumulated to about
2 hours, 59 minutes, and 12 seconds and will equal an entire day about 72
generations from now—in 4909— assuming humans are still here, and are
still using the calendar named for a pope who died 3,330 years earlier.
• The “era” we use to number our years—initially called the “Christian Era”
and now the “Common Era”—remains confusing because there is no year
zero. This means that technically century-years come in the —01 slot, not
—00, and millennium years happen in — 001, not —000. But people prefer
to celebrate the beginning of, say, the twentieth century as 1900, and the
coming millennium in the year 2000, not 2001. Others complain about the
awkwardness of an A.D. and B.C. timeline with “positive” and “negative”
dates.
Over the years, attempts have been made to fix these pesky little problems.
One of the most intriguing of these was the French Revolutionary Calendar—
the “Calendar of Reason.” It did nothing to correct the 25.96 seconds error,
which the revolutionaries were probably unaware of. But they did fix other
calendric conundrums in their zeal to expunge the old order in the same way
Caesar, Constantine, and so many others did.
In this case the French Jacobins simply threw out the Gregorian calendar
and replaced it with their own—which happened to be far more uniform and
convenient. Launched in 1792—the revolutionary Year One—this new
calendar had uniform months of 30 days each, tacking on the extra 5 (or 6)
days at the end. These were reserved for holidays called Virtue, Genius,
Labor, Opinion, and Recompense.* In-
*The Maya and Aztecs used a similar arrangement; so did the Egyptians.
stead of gods and emperors it used names for the months: Nivose for snowing
months, Pluviose for Rainy Month, Thermidor for Heat Month, and
Brumaire for Foggy Month.§§§§§§§§§§ Weeks were 10 days long, with
three weeks per month. Days were likewise divided in a decimal arrangement
into 10 hours each of 100 minutes, with every minute containing 100 seconds.
The Calendar of Reason was a great improvement, but it lasted only until
1806, when Napoleon quietly reinstated the Gregorian system. The
experiment did produce a number of curious watches and clocks with ten
hours, and minutes divided up into decimals; and numerous books published
with single-digit years.
More recently, reform efforts have centered on trying to tinker with the
Gregorian calendar, the most popular being the proposed World Calendar,
sometimes known as the Universal Calendar. This would restore Caesar’s
original distribution of the 12 months as alternating between 30 and 31 days:
which Augustus and the Roman Senate altered in A.D. 8 to give Augustus
the same number of days in August as Caesar had in July. The World
Calendar would start each year and each quarter on a Sunday. And each
month would always start on the same day. Leap days would simply be an
extra day, not attached to a month. One plan was to declare this special day
“World’s Day.”
Supporters of the World Calendar have several times tried to get the
United Nations to endorse this reform—coming close in 1961, which started
on a Sunday. In 1954 the Vatican endorsed the World Calendar; it was even
introduced in the U.S. Congress. But it never caught on.
Other proposals continue to come and go, including a calendar of 13
months with 28 days each, with an extra day (or two) tacked on as special
days. This was the favorite choice of the 1929 National Committee on
Calendar Simplification for the United States, chaired by George Eastman of
Eastman Kodak.1 One of the many more re-
ganized a worldwide effort in 1928—29 to simplify the calendar, without success. The
U.S. committee was composed of dozens of prominent Americans, including Eastman,
Henry Ford, Adolph Ochs, Gilbert Grosvenor, and George P. Putnam?
298 CALENDAR
THIRD QUARTER
cent ideas is something I saw on the Internet. Called “The Goddess Lunar
Calendar,” its proponents advocate a 25-month calendar of alternating 29 and
30 days; with each of the months named after a female deity: Artemis, Bast,
Cybele, and Gaia, to name a few.
Fixing the 25.96 seconds error is much simpler. Indeed, proposals have
been made to slip in a leap-millenniurn rule, which would cancel out the
Gregorian leap-century rule by eliminating a leap day on millennial years
such as the year 2000. This would make the “modified” Gregorian calendar
accurate to within a day every 3,323 years. Undoubtedly, this fix will become
official sometime in the next millenium, or the one after, if in fact the world
is still using Gregory’s calendar.
As for the problem with no year zero, I know of no plans to make a

correction: which at the very least would involve changing every history
book dealing with dates before the year one A.D. In calendar circles new
ideas come and go—with proposals floating around suggesting a new
chronological system that would start with a year one according to formulas
and at various moments in history.
Just the other day a calendar group on the Internet had a brief discussion
that began by someone noting that the September equinox in 1997 would be
the Year 6000 in the time line established by the Irish prelate and scholar
James Ussher (1581—1656). He proposed that God created the world on the
23rd of October, 4004 B.C.. Another participant fired back that under the
Byzantine calendar—whatever that is—the year 7506 had just begun. “The
reason it holds special interest for me is that it starts earlier than any other
calendar I have seen,” writes this calendar-aficionado. “If we used that date,
most of recorded history would have a positive date, and it would eliminate
the need for B.C.”
Another calendar listserver member replied:
“A much simpler solution would be to just add 10,000 to the current year
number. [Then] it would be very easy to observe that, e.g., in 2011 we will
commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the run at Marathon.” He also points
out the ludicrous practice of a B.C. calendar that counts years backward, but
starts each of these negative years on January 1, after which they run forward
through the days and months as if they were on the “positive” side of the
B.C./A.D. split.
This observation was followed by someone mentioning a calendar
proposed several years ago called the Holocene Calendar that would use the
end of the last ice age as its starting point, some 12,000 years ago. Which
prompted a flurry of other responses and ideas in a debate that at least in this
small corner of cyberspace is not going away.
300 CALENDAR
Meanwhile, as the cesium atoms in the master clock continue to oscillate,

and the earth wobbles and slows ever so slightly, most of us carry on as
people have since we first became aware of time—whether we live by the
Gregorian, Holocene, Zoroastrian, Hebrew, Babylonian, Nuer, Moslem, or
Goddess Lunar calendar. We take in stride a calendar used by most of the
world that is flawed, but endures, largely because it works just fine for most
of us, and it is what we are used to.
As I watched the red numbers flash past on the master clock in Building
78, I was out of time myself. My calendar for that date, September 18, said I
needed to be uptown at an appointment at 11:30 A.M., in a mere
8,273,368,593,000,000,000,000 oscillations (or so) of cesium. That’s
roughly 15 minutes in old-fashioned earth time. Though in any time, except
perhaps Einstein’s warped time, I was going to be late, which made me want
to swear at the little square box in my date book so crammed with things to
do that I was going to spend the whole day being late.
Which brought new meaning to the words of Sartre, who I think got it
backward when he said “But time is too large, it refuses to let itself be filled
up.”
He was talking about clock time: the endless cycles of seconds, minutes,
and hours that go on and on. By contrast calendar time is all about those little
boxes of days strung out one after another, all squeezed into a finite and
artificial time span of our own making. After all it was we humans who
invented this thing that is both a miraculous tool and a cage of finite moments
that keep us forever running about, trying to make the best of the short time
we have been alotted. At least those of us in the West who are more obsessed
than anyone else with counting oscillations and cramming little boxes with
things to do.
There are moments when I am hopelessly late, or cannot possibly fit
anything else into my schedule, when I sigh and wish that Cro- Magnon man
13,000 years ago in the Dordogne Valley had set aside his eagle bone
unfinished and had gone to bed. Or gone for a long
walk under the Paleolithic sky. Or gone to play with his little Cro- Magnon
children. Of course, this would have only delayed the inevitable as some
other fur-clad hominid took up the task of carving notches and counting
phases of the moon, launching humanity on its strange, epic quest.
And now I have to go, because I am out of time.
TIME LINE
A Chronology of Events
The Calendar
Pre-History
c. 28000 Cro-Magnon Lunar
Laussel Earth Mother c. 25000 Calendar (?) Bone
Carving, France
Nilometers and
4000 Early Calendars
Solar Calendar
E
gypc
Sumerian Calendar
—c. 2100 360 Days
2000
Stonehenge
Maya tzolkin Calendar, 260 days

1000
Hesiod
First Roman Calendar 10 months, —— c. 800 Works and Days
Romulus 753 __
Roman Calendar 700 — 700 Seven Day Week
Revised, 12 months Babylon
.c. 450 Herodotus The Histories

_ c. 300 Three Maya Calendars in
use, including 365-day
Calendar
141 -127 Hipparchus Length of
Year: 365 days 5 hours 55 minutes
“ 46 Roman Year of Confusion 445
Days
c. 4 Jesus Christ Born
Eagle Bone Calendar (?) c. 11000 La Placard, France

First Known Date Egypt 4241
------------------------------------ 4000
Current Maya Great 3114 — Cycle Begins

Early Chinese Calendar 2357 — Emperor Yao
---------- -------- 500
Metonic Cycle Meton 432 ______
Aristotle 384 - 322
Alexander Founds Alexandria 332
Golden Age of astronomy in Alexandria 307-A.D. 150
Leap Year Proclaimed in Egypt 238 —
Rejected by Priests j
Julian Calendar Enacted 45 —
Julius Caesar Year: 365 d 6 h
500
Tsu Ch’ung Chi —499 Aryabhata
| Chinese Mathematician c. 480 The Aryabhatiya, India
Year: 365d 8h 36m 30s
Fall of Rome 476 —
Augustine of Hippo
Barbari Cross The Mainz 406------ —404 Sacred Time
400
Council of Nicaea
__ 325 Easter Formula
Sunday/ Seven Day Week 321 — __ 312 Constantine the Great
Battle of Mulvian Bridge
300
The Maya Discover Zero c. 300
Age of Sulvasutras Ends India

200
—167 Claudius Ptolemy The

Almagest
Year: 365 d 5h 55m 13s
Lunar Calendar Corrected 123 — Zhang Heng, China
Augustus Modifies
8 Julian Calendar
AD
500
Boethius
Consolation of Philosophy 525 Anno Domini/AD
525 Dionysius Exiguus
Abbot Benedict of Nursia 540

The Benedictine Rule
Brahmagupta 598
Mathematician, India 595 Nine-Digit Hindu Numbers
600
601 Augustine First Archbishop of
Canterbury
Britain Easter Date 632 - 720s Moslem Conquests from

Decided India to Spain
700
Islamic Empire Established
Bede The Ecclesiastic
731 History of the English People
Celtic Monks Massacred c. 610 __ 622 Mohammed

Near Bangor Britain Flees Mecca
Isidore of Seville c. 630 — Starr of Moslem Calendar
Encyclopedia
665 Council of Whitby, 664 —
Bede De temporum ratione 725 —

J 733 Kanaka Arrives in Baghdad
Brings Hindu Mathematics and
Franks Halt Islamic Advance 732-------- Astronomy
Southern France
Water Clock to Charlemagne — 825
Charlemagne
800 ------------------------------------
Crowned Holy Roman Emperor House — 807 Caliph in Baghdad Sends
of Wisdom Founded 820 “ Baghdad al-Khwarizmi
Algoritmi de Numero Indorum
First Use of Zero 876 — in ___882 al'Battani

Euroasia India Year: 365d 8h 36m 30s
900
Renaissance in Italy 1500
Humanism / Secular Time I i
Constantinople Conquered by c. 1470 Invention of the Printing
Turks 1453 Byzantine Empire Press Calendars Printed
Ends
1417
Lunar Drift Attempt ______
1412 "Antipope” John XXIII
1400 ------------------------------------------
First Mechanical Clocks— ___ Schism in Catholic Church _______
Mid 1300s Popes in Avignon and Rome 1378
Attempted Calendar Reform 1345—
Clement VI —1347 Bubonic Plague
Europe, 30 Million Die — c.
Dante Tie Divine Comedy 1307 1320 Chaucer The Canterbury Tales
The Jubilee Pope Boniface VIII
1300
Alfonsine Astronomical 1270 Thomas Aquinas
-------------------------------------------- _ 1270 Summa Theologica
Charts Spain
1267 Roger Bacon
Opus Maius
— c. 1240 Time Reckoners Robert
Conrad of Strasbourg Winter Grosseteste John Sacrobosco
Solstice
1200 10 days in Error —c. 1130 Peter Abelard
Pope Innocent III Peak of 1200 ------------------------------------------
Roman Catholic Influence in —c. 1190 Ibn Rushd, Cordoba
Europe Sacred vs. Secular
1171 Reiner of Paderborn Applies
Hindu Numbers to Computus
Abraham bar Hiyya ha-Nasi Master, University of Paris
Jewish Calendar c. 1125-— 1122
Omar Khayyam 1048-1122 Year: 1100 Suggested Errors in
365d 5h 49m Computus
I2s
1100-1300
Age of the
Universities
Europe
Age of the Translators in
Latin Europe
1000
1000
— 1042 Hermann the Lame

Calendar Commission Formed 1514- Year: 365d 5h 49m 29s
Fifth Lateran Council Paul of Middleburg — c. 1630 Galileo Galilei

Uses Telescope to See
Gregorian Calendar 1517' Planets and Moons
1582 Paul’s
Calendar
Commission Fails
Enacted ______________ 1752 Gregorian

Pope Gregory XIII, Christopher Calendar
Clavius, Aloysius Lilio
Year: 365d 5h 48m 20s 1600
Accepted
Great Britain, Colonies
Gregorian Calendar Accepted ___1917 Gregorian Calendar Accepted

Protestant Germany (1775 - Full Russia
Acceptance)
Atomic Time Begins
Calendar of Reason
1700
, Revolutionary France 1806
Coordinated Universal Time
— 1972 Year:
290,091,200,500,000,000
Oscillations of Cesium
1792
1800
Gregorian Calendar 1873 -------
Accepted japan
1500
-------------------------------------
1517 Martin Luther
Wittenberg Cathedral
1900
1543 Copernicus
Gregorian Calendar Accepted

China 19 49 ______________
World Calendar Failed 1961 Calendar

Reform
------------------------------ 2000 ———

Gregorian Century Leap Year 2012 Current Maya Great
Cycle will end
De revolutionibus
Page
12 Carved Eagle Bone, Possible Lunar Calendar, c. 11,000 B.C.; Le Placard,
France. From The Roots of Civilization, by Alexander Marshack,
McGraw-Hill, 1972. By permission of Alexander Marshack.
16 Early Greeks Greet Spring, Vatican Museum, drawing after J. Harrison,
Epiegomena and Themis, University Books, 1962.
25 Maya Signs for the Months in the 365-Day Count, from Michael D. Coe,
The Maya, Thames and Hudson, 1993. By permission of Michael
D. Coe.
45 Fragments of a Roman Calendar, A.D. first century, the month of March.
Drawing by Herbert E. Duncan, Jr.
58 A Schematic of an Ancient Device Used for Calculating the Days of the
Week from the Ancient Ordering of the Planets.
204 The Ptolemaic Universe; Astroligia directing the attention ofSacrobosco
to Ptolemy, from Urania Ptolemaeus, 1538. From the Collection of
Owen Gingerich. By permission of Owen Gingerich.
309
310 ILLUSTRATIONS
217 The astrarium of Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio. Sketch from a
manuscript in the library of Eton College, Windsor, England.
Reproduced with permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton
College.
230 The Copernican Solar System, from Peifit Description of the Celestiall
Orbes, by Thomas Digges, 1576.
236 Christopher Clavius in about 1606, by E. de Boulonois after Francisco
Villamena. From I. Bullart, Academie des Sciences (Amsterdam,
1682). Image used by permission of the University of Wisconsin—
Madison Libraries, Special Collections. Photograph courtesy of
James Lattis.
243 “The Reform of the Calendar,” Pope Gregory XIII Meets with His
Calendar Commission, c. 1581, Archivo de Stato di Siena, Italy.
By permission of the Archivo de Stato di Siena.
263 Page from an astronomical calendar for October 1582. J.A. Magini,
Novae Ephemerides, 1582. From the collection of Professor Owen
Gingerich. By permission of Owen Gingerich.
283, The Ladies Diary, Cover and the month of September, Lon- 284 don,
1752. The British Museum, London. By permission of the British Museum.
298 The World Calendar, 1957.
I wrote this book as a storyteller fascinated by the unusual and unexpected
tale of how the calendar used by most of the world came to be. I make no
claims to scholarly expertise in the far-ranging fields of time reckoning,
astronomy, mathematics, the philosophy of time, theology, or history. I have
done my best to meticulously and accurately research what was necessary in
each of these fields to write this story. I have consulted with experts who
generously gave their time and generally agreed with my interpretations, or
helped me to correct them. Obviously any mistakes or misinterpretations are
my own.
The following are highlights of sources used in writing this book. I
conservatively consulted many hundreds of sources, both primary and
secondary. On general historic topics I tended to consult a number of
secondary sources, checking them against one another, and asking my expert
readers to review the material. On calendar issues I used primary sources
where possible. I worked extensively in the Library of Congress and visited
and worked in the British Library in London and Vatican Library and
archives in Rome.
I found surprisingly few recent books written on the calendar, though an
excellent and lively work on the history and meaning of time was recently
published by the astroarchaeologist Anthony F. Av- eni, called Empires of
Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures (Kodansha International, 1995). I also
found particularly helpful J.T. Fraser’s Time: The Familiar Stranger (The
University of Massachusetts Press,
311
312 BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES
1987); Margo Westrheim’s thin but highly informative volume Calendars of

the World (Oneworld, 1993); and P.W. Wilson’s classic The Romance of the
Calendar (Norton, 1937). Also The Book of Calendars, ed. by Frank Parise
(Facts on File, 1982).
Most indispensable of all the general works was a paperbound collection
of essays I happened to find at the Vatican bookstore in Rome: Gregorian
Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to
Commemorate Its 400th Anniversary 1582-1982, edited by G.V. Coyne,
M.A. Hoskin and O. Pedersen (Specola Vaticana, 1983). This collection
includes offerings from calendar experts from around the world who detail
all aspects of the Gregorian reform, the history of the Catholic ecclesiastic
calendar, the reaction to the 1582 reform, and the currect status of the
calendar.
For ideas and general information on the history of time and science I
consulted Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search
to Know His World and Himself (Vintage, 1983) and an assortment of
encyclopedias: The World Book Encyclopedia (1995); The New Catholic
Encyclopedia (1967); A History of Technology, ed. by C. Singer, et al.
(Clarendon Press, 1954); and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. by
C.C. Gillispie (1970—1980). Atlases and general historic works include
Norman Davies’ Europe: A History (Oxford University Press, 1996); Colin
McEvedy’s The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (1967) and The Penguin
Atlas of Medieval History (1969); and The Times Concise Atlas of World
History, ed. by Geoffrey Barraclough (Hammond, 1982). And the
indispensable Webster’s New Biographical Dictionary (1983); Webster’s
New Geographical Dictionary (1984); and Webster’s New Universal
Unabridged Dictionary (1972).
Internet sites included the New Advent Catholic Supersite, http://
www.knight.org/advent/cathen/; CalendarLand, http://website.juneau .com/
home/janice/calendarland/, a general information site on calendars past and
present from around the world; and Britannica Online, http:// www.eb.com/.
I also used numerous sites on topics ranging from mathematics to
descriptions of cities and countries; and the philosophy of time to the Black
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES 313
Plague.
On early calendars and societies I used Aveni’s Empires of Time;

Alexander Marshack’s classic: The Roots of Civilization (McGraw-Hill,
1972); Dr. Marshack also was kind enough to send me a number of articles
updating his work. I consulted Michael Coe’s The Maya (Thames and
Hudson, 1993); John Phelps, The Prehistoric Solor Calendar (Johns Hopkins
Press, 1955); Archaeoastronomy in the New World, ed. by Anthony Aveni
(Cambridge University Press, 1982); G.S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded
(Delta Dell, 1965), and C. Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete (Cornell
University Press, 1983).
On the general history of science, time and the calendar: Arno Borst, The
Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer
(Polity Press, 1993) and Ancient Inventions, ed. by Peter James and Nick
Thorpe (Ballantine Books, 1994). Also Gerhard Hohrn-van Rossum, History
of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans, by Thomas Dunlap
(University of Chicago Press, 1996). On philosophy, A History of
Philosophy, by Frederick Copleston (Doubleday, New York, 1985).
On the history of astronomy, I drew on A. Pannekoek, A History of
Astronomy (Dover, New York, 1961); Hugh Thurston, Early Astronomy
(Springer-Verlag, New York, 1994); and The Cambridge Illustrated History
of Astronomy, ed. by Michael Hoskin (1997). For ancient Alexandria I
consulted Kenneth Heuer, City of Stargazers (Scribner’s, 1972). On general
astronomy, Fred L. Whipple, Orbiting the Sun, Planets and Satellites of the
Solar System (Harvard University Press, 1981) and Jean Meeus,
Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon and Planets (Will- mann-Bell,
Richmond, Virginia, 1983). Also by Jean Meeus and Denis Savoie, “The
History of the Tropical Year,” Journal British Astronomical Association,
102, 1, 1992: 40-2. On the history of mathematics, Carl B. Boyer, A History
of Mathematics (John Wiley & Sons, 1991) and G.G. Joseph, The Crest of
the Peacock (Penguin, 1992). On the science of time, Paul Davies, About
Time, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (Touchstone, 1995) and Stephen
Hawking, A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988).
For the Roman calendar I used Agnes Kirsopp Michels’ The Cal-
endar of the Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 1967); Van

Johnson, The Roman Origins of Our Calendar (American Classical League,
1974); and Carole E. Newlands, Playing with Time, Ovid and the Fasti
(Cornell University Press, 1995). On general Roman history, Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, JB. Bury, History of the Later
Roman Empire (Dover, 1958); and The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. IX,
ed. by J.A. Crook, et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
On general medieval and Renaissance history I used Norman F. Cantor,
The Civilization of the Middle Ages (HarperPerennial, 1993); Maurice Keen,
The Pelican History of Medieval Europe (Penguin, 1988); and Eugene F.
Rrice, Jr., The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460— 1559 (Norton,
1970). On science in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Science in the
Middle Ages, ed. by David C. Lindberg (University of Chicago Press, 1978);
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of
Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge
University Press, 1997). On the Church in the Middle Ages I used Margaret
Deanesly, A History of the Medieval Church, 590-1500 (Methuen & Co,
1969). I also used Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans,
by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Blackwell, 1994) and Le Goff s Medieval Civ-
ilization, 400-1500, trans, by Juha Barrow (Blackwell, 1995). For primary
sources I used the truly phenomenal “Internet Medieval Sourcebook,” out of
Fordham University, at http://www.fordham.edu/ halsall/sbook2.html, which
includes extensive offerings of complete and often hard to find original texts.
For India I consulted Romila Thapar, A History of India (Penguin Books,
1977); for the history of Islam and the Arab empire, Philip K. Hitti, The
Arabs, A Short History (Regency Publishing, 1996). On the Moslem calendar
I read G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The Muslim and Christian Calendars
(Oxford University Press, 1963).
The Gregorian reform itself is cited in exhaustive detail in a number of
sources already mentioned. I also used a number of primary sources,
including the original bull issued by Gregory XIII, the Compendium Novae
Rationis Restituendi Kalendarium issued by the pope’s calendar commission,
and other documents housed in the Vatican archives and in other libraries. I
drew heavily from the Gregorian Reform of the Calendar, cited above.
To recount Britain’s reform of the calendar I used a number of primary
sources, including British state papers from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I,
and for the 1750s; and several newspapers and pamphlets from England and
the American colonies from 1751—1753. The Gentleman's Magazine also
provides detailed and entertaining accounts of the reform effort in the 1580s
and in 1752. See the issues from March 1751; April 1751; and September
1752. Also see an informative little booklet by H. Dagnall, “Give Us Back
Our Eleven Days: An Account of the Change from the Old Style to the New
Style Calendar in Great Britain in 1752,” (published by the author,
Queensbury, U.K., 1991).
For profiles of major characters I read each subject’s original works, plus
biographies, articles, and biographic citations from encyclopedias and
biographical dictionaries. For Roger Bacon the secondary sources included
Stewart C. Easton, Roger Bacon and His Search for Universal Science
(Russel and Russel, 1971); Winthrop F. Woodruff, Roger Bacon, A
Biography (James Clark & Co., 1938); and Lynn Thorndike, “The True
Roger Bacon,” The American Historical Review, vol. XXI no. 3, January and
February, 1916. On Copernicus I read Angus Armitage’s The World of
Copernicus (E.P. Publishing, Ltd., 1972). On Lord Chesterfield: Colin
Franklin, Lord Chesterfield: His Character and Characters (Scholar Press,
1993). On Christopher Clavius and sixteenth century Roman intellectual life:
James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and
the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
On John Dee: Richard Deacon, John Dee: Scientist, Astrologer, and Secret
Agent to Elizabeth I (Frederick Muller, 1968) and William H. Sherman, John
Dee, The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). On Julius Caesar: J.F.C. Fuller,
Julius Caesar (Da Capo
Press, 1965) and Christian Meier, Caesar (Basic Books, 1982). On

Constantine: Michael Grant, Constantine the Great (Scribner’s, 1993). On
Bede: Charles Jones, Bede, the Schools and the Computus (Variorium, 1994).
ords cannot express my thanks to my family for putting up with me for
months on end working late at night and on weekends to write this book: my
beautiful and understanding wife Laura; my children Sander, Danielle, and
Alex. My dad, who read the manuscript and was a great help and inspiration.
And my mother, who has always been my most enthusiastic supporter.
A warm thanks to Stephen Power, an extraordinary editor who asked me
to write this book, somehow knowing it would be a delight for me and a
wondrous learning experience. To Mel Berger, who has always believed in
me and encouraged me: he is the greatest agent I know of. Thanks to Marcie
Posner, globetrotting agent at William Morris, and Claudia Cross. And also
to Sue Warga, copy editor with no peer, and master of a thousand details.
Thanks to Polly Bart, an extraordinary researcher and friend; and my
assistant Tanya Vlach, who leapt into the fray at the end to help get the book
out the door.
A number of scholars and advisors helped me attempt to understand and
get right the history and facts represented in this text. Thanks to my old friend
Steve Vicchio and other expert readers: Anthony Aveni, Richard Landes,
Tom Settle, Rick McCarty, and Steve Dick. I also appreciate the help of the
librarians and researchers at the Library of Congress, the British Library in
London, the Vatican Library in Rome, and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library
at Johns Hopkins Uni-
318
319 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
versity in Baltimore. Also thanks to Richard Hansen, David Joyce, Clive

Priddle, Brett Robertson, the U.S. Naval Observatory, and the Royal
Observatory in Greenwich, England. And to Richard Harris, Tom Bettag,
and the staff at ABC Nightline, and the staff in the Washington and Rome
bureaus of ABC News.
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations
Abbo of Fleury, 175-76 al-Khayyami, Umar ibn Ibrahim. See
Abel, Leonardo, 244 Khayyam, Omar
Abelard, Peter, 195, 196-97, 201 al-Khwarizmi, Abu Jafar Mohammed
A.D. system, origin of, 91-92 Ibn Musa, 6, 168-71
Adelard of Bath, 187 The Almagest (Ptolemy), 4-5
Aethelberht (king of Kent), 106 al-Mamun, 164
Aethelfrith (Saxon king), 96 al-Mansur, 159-60, 162, 163
Africa, Gregorian calendar reform in, 289 alphabet, lower-case, 120
al-Battani, Abu Allah Mohammed Ibn al-Uqlidisi, Abul Hassan, 170
Jabir, 171 Americas, Gregorian calendar reform in,
al-Biruni, Abu ar-Rayhan Mohammed 288
Ibn Ahmad, 140, 171-72 Anni Diocletiani, 92
Alciun of York, 120,136 Anno Domini (A.D.) system, origin of,
Alexander the Great, 30 91-92
Alexander of Villedieu, 199 antitime, Augustine’s philosophy of, 71
Alexandria, city of, 30-31 Apollodorus, 27
astronomic discoveries in, 31-33 Apollonius of Rhodes, 31
great library of, 30 Aprilis, 38
Alexandros, Paulos, 143 Aquinas, Thomas, 199-200, 201
Alfonsine Tables, 224, 252 Arabic, Hindu numerals, 187-88
algebra, invention of modern, 169 Arabs, invasion of Europe, 184—85
algorithm, 14-step, 73 Arch of Constantine, 52
Algoritmi de numero Indorum (al- Archimedes, 31
Khwarizmi), 169-70 Argonautica (Apollonius), 31
Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Arians, 103
320
Aristarchus, 32 ar-Rahman, Abd, III, 185
Aristotle, 31 ar-Rashid, Harun, 117, 164
Arius, 62
321
322 INDEX
Arsinde, 35 104, 109, 130-31

Aryabhata, 6, 137, 138-42, 155-58 calculation of first five ages of Earth,
value for pi, 141 111-12
Aryabhata satellite, 157 on future time, 134
Aryabhatiya (Aryabhata), 140-42, 157 on method for dating Easter, 107-
Asia, Gregorian calendar reform in, 289 108, 110-11
astrology time calculations, 112—15
Bede’s zodiac equations, 113 Beg, Ulugh, 173
influence on order of days of the bells, 135
week, 57 church, 135
Benedetti, Giovanni Battista, 255
influence on seven-day week, 56
Benedict of Nursia in Umbria, 85-87
astronomical calendar, page from, 263 Benedictine Rule, 85-87
astronomy Bernard of Clairvaux, 197
discoveries in, 31-33 Bhaskara, 157—58
“systems” of (siddhantas), 139 Bingens, Hildegard von, 134
Augustine (Greek archbishop), 95-96 Biscop, Benedict, 97-98
journey to Britain, 104-107 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 78-
Augustine of Hippo, 67, 69-72, 75 81
death of, 76 Bologna, university in, 195
meaning of sacred time, 70-71 Bologna custom, 131
philosophy of antitime, 71 Boniface VIII, 208-209
Augustulus, Romulus, 76 Book of Heaven and the World
Augustus (Oresme),
public sundial erected by, 46 218
Borst, Arno, 46
Roman calendar reform, 42-43
The Boston Weekly News-Letter, 288
Aurelian, 51-52
Brahe, Tycho, 256
autopsies, first systematic, 31
Brahmagupta, 157
Averroes, 197
Brahmasphuta-siddhanta
philosophy of, 197-200 (Brahmagupta),
Aztecs, 25-26 157
sacrifices, 25-26 Brahmi, 149
British colonies, reactions to Gregorian
calendar, 287-88
Babylonians, 17 Britons, ancient, Stonehenge, 22-23
24-hour day, 18-19 bubonic plague, 213—15
Bacon, Francis, xii Bulgaria, Gregorian calendar reform in,
Bacon, Roger, 1-9, 203-207 288
on Julian calendar, 3-5 Buoncompagni, Ugo. See Gregory XIII
three-part definition of time, 206 Burton, Richard, Sir, 164
Baghdad, city of, 164-66
Bakr, Abu, 163
B.C., origin of, 92-93 Caesar, Julius, 27—30
Bede, Venerable, 6, 95-97, 98, 99, 103- calendar reforms, 41-42
INDEX 323
Cleopatra liaison, 27-30
death of, 48
324 INDEX
in Egypt, 33-35 reign, 35-36, 47-48 excerpts

reordering of Roman calendar, 36 from, 127, 132, 192
calculator, word origin, 97 Carlyle, Thomas, xv
calendar commission, Gregory XIII, The Carolina Gazette, 288
242-55, 259-60 calendar index, ix-x carved eagle bone, 12
“Calendar of Reason,” 296-97 Calendar Cassiodorus, Flavius Magnus Aurelius,
Round, 24 calendars 81-85
astronomical, 263 defense of mathematics, 83-84
Catholic, 253 monastery, 83-85
Chinese, 18, 102 Catholic Church, 68, 178
Christian, 128-31 Catholic lunar calendar, 253
earliest printed, 222 Cellini, Livio, 268-69
Egyptian, 19-22 Celtic church, 107—108
farmers, 222 Cervini, Ricciardo, 251
French Revolutionary, 296—97 cesium, 289, 290-91
Goddess Lunar, 298 Chacon, Pedro, 244, 255, 259
Greek, 17, 18 Charlemagne, 116—24
Gregorian, 261-89 calendar reform, 118—19
Hindu, 140-41 death of, 135
Islamic, 102, 166-68 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 127, 132, 192
Jewish, 18 Chi, Tsu Ch’ung, 143
Julian, 258 lunar, 11, 15-19 China, Gregorian calendar refonn in, 289
Mayan, 23-25, 25 Chinese
Moslem, 162 calendars, 18, 102
Roman, 36-44, 45 numeric symbols, 147
Saxon,101-102 Christian calendar, of saint’s days and
shepherd’s, 223 festivals, 128-31
Slavic, 102 Christian council, 60-66
Sumerian, 18-19 Christian holidays, official recognition of,
of 13 months, 297 53
universal, 297, 298 Christian system for dating, 62-65
world, 297, 298 Christianity, 53
caliph’s clock, 117 expansion of, 102-106
Callippus of Cyzicus, 31 future time in, 133—34
cannons, invention of, 221 Christ’s birth, date of, 92
canons, 87 chronological schemes, proposed, 132-
The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 33
INDEX 325
church
beUs, 135
Catholic, 68, 178
Celtic, 107-108
Greek and Latin, split between, 74-
75
Roman, 107-108
and state, fusion of, 53, 66
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem,
53
326 INDEX
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, 53 The Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), 290
City of God (Augustine of Hippo), 69, 70 Copernican Solar System, 230
Clavius, Christopher, 8, 189, 233, 234— Copernicus, Nicolaus, 8, 213, 225-32,
38, 23 6, 246-47, 250-51, 257 247
Clegg, James, 286 Counter-Reformation, 262—64
Clement IV, 3, 6-7 Coxe, William, 279, 282
Clement VI, 210-11, 212 Ctesibius of Alexandria, 32
Cleopatra, 47 Cyrillus, Easter dates time chart, 74
Caesar liaison, 27—30 clocks
caliph’s, 117
in England, first, 192 d’Ailly, Pierre, 220
master, 290—92 Damiani, Pier, 195
mechanical, 216 Dante, 207-208, 209-10
sketch of (1365), 217 Danti, Ignazio, 244-45, 250
time measured by, 46-47 days
word origin, 135 naming of, 55-56
Clovis (king of the Franks), 103 order of, 57-59
Cobham, Henry, Sir, 264 Romulus’ system of numbering, 38- 39
Coliegio Romano, 241—42 24—hour system of, 18-19, 57-58
Colman (bishop), 108-109 Compendium word origin, 59
(Lilius), 246, 254—55 computare, 208 decimal fractions, 189
computus, 207 concept of, 153-55
philosophical, 199 decimal point, invention of, 189
science of, 84—85 Dee, John, 272-74, 276-77
vulgar, 199 Dick, Steve, 294
Computus emendatus (Reiner of dies mensis, system of, 131
Paderborn), 201 Diocletian, 51-52
Dionysius Exiguus, 87-92
Computus paschalis, 92
De correctione Kalendari (Nicholas of anno Domini (A.D.) system of dating,
91-92
Cusa), 220
calculating Easter (tables), 88-91
The Confessions of St. Augustine Divine Comedy (Dante), excerpt from,
(Augustine of Hippo), 69 209-10
Conrad of Strasbourg, 202 Dondi, Giovanni, 216
Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), Donne, John, 237-38
79 Durand, Guillaume, 207
excerpts from, 80-81, 94
Constantine the Great, 49-51
calendar reforms, 53—55 Easter, 64-66
Christian council and, 60-66 calculating, 4, 59-62, 72-75, 110-12
Easter and, 59-62
fusion of church and state, 53, 66
reign of, 51-53
religions, 52-53
conversus, 83
INDEX 327
calculating tables, 88-91 90

date differences between Rome and Eusebius, 61
Alexandria, 74-75 Exhortatio super correctione
time charts for predicting future dates calendarii
for, 73-74 (d’AiUy), 220
Eastern Orthodox Church, reaction to Explicatio (Clavius), 257
Gregorian calendar, 268 70
Eastman, George, 297
ecclesiastic time, 199 “Fanner’s Calendar,” 222
Ecclesiastical History of the English Februarius, 39
People feudalism, 123-24, 125
(Bede), 97 Fifth Lateran Council, 223—25
Egypt Finnin, 211-12
established first known date in Flavius, Cnaeus, 40
history, 20 Florida, name origin, 130
first to use solar calendar, 19 46 B.C. (Year of Confusion), 41-42
Egyptian Foulques, Guy Le Gros. See Clement
New Year’s Day, 21 IV
numeric symbols, 146 Franklin, Benjamin, 287-88
solar calendar, 19—22 Fredegar, 134
year, 21-22, 26 Frederick II, 186
Einhard (Frankish chronicler), 120, 121- French Revolutionary Calendar, 296—
22 97
Einstein, Albert, 294
Elizabeth I (queen of England), 272-77
England Galileo, 231, 235, 237
early Christian, 107-10 General Advertiser, 287
first large clock in, 192 Gentleman’s Magazine, excerpt from,
Gregorian calendar refonn in, 278- 286
87 Gerard of Cremona, 187
reactions to Gregorian calendar, 272— Gerbert of Aurillac, 187, 188
78, 282-87 Germany, reaction to Gregorian
Epistola super refonnatione antiqui calendar, 265-67
kalendarii (Meurs), 211 Global Positioning System (GPS), 294
Eratosthenes, 32 “The Goddess Lunar Calendar,” 298
Estonia, Gregorian calendar refonn in, 288 Great Chain of Being, 177
Euclid, 31 great cycle, current, 24
Euctemon, 31 Great Sindhind (Kanaka), 160
Eudoxus ofCnidus, 31 Greece, Gregorian calendar reform in, 288
Europe Greek Orthodox countries, Gregorian
calendric differences in, 181—82 calendar refonn in, 288
eleventh and twelfth century, 176-80 Greeks
infusion of Arabic knowledge in, 183- greeting spring, 16
328 INDEX
lunar calendar, 15-18

numeric symbols, 146
INDEX 329
Gregorian calendar, 261-89 Ignatius His Conclave (Donne), excerpt

flaws in, 295-96 from, 237-38
Gregory I, 104-105 India
Gregory X, 7 Gupta dynasty, 139, 156
Gregory XIII, 8, 238-40, 259-60 influences on, 142-45
calendar commission, 242-55 mathematicians of, 156-58
calendar reform, 242-55 nine-digit positional system, 149—51
painting of, 242-43, 243 numeric symbols, 148-51, 169—70
see also Gregorian calendar India (al-Biruni), 172
Grindal, Edmund, 275-77 Innocent III, 178
Grosseteste, Robert, 202-203 Isidore of Seville, 100-102
verifying scientific theories, 202 Islam
Guiscard, Roger. See Roger I ancient, 162-164
Gupta dynasty, India, 139, 156 appearance of, 99
Islamic calendar, 102, 166-68
Iznik, city of. See Nicaea, city of
Halley, Edmund, 279
ha-Nasi, Abraham bar Hiyya, 173
Heerbrand, James, 266
Helena, 53 Januarius, 39
Heng, Zhang, 143 Japan, Gregorian calendar reform in, 289
Hermann the Lame, 6, 174, 176-77 Jarrow monestary, 97, 98
Herodotus, 19, 20 Jeremiah II Tranos, 269
Herophilus of Chalcedon, 31 Jewish lunar calendar, 18
Hesiod, 14-15 John of Sacrobosco, 191, 203
Hindu jubilees, 208
Arabic numerals, 187-88 Julian day calendar, 258
calendar, 140-41 Julius II, 223
Hipparchus, 32—33, 249 Junius, 38
The Histories (Herodotus), 19
History (Bede), excerpt from, 103-104
Hogarth, William, 285 kalends, 38
hour Kama Sutra, 139
as secular unit of time, 216 Kanaka, 160
word origin, 59 Kepler, Johannes, 256
hourglass, Charlemagne’s, 116 Khandakhadyaka (Aryabhata), 142
House of Wisdom, 165-66 Khayyam, Omar, 172-73
Hundred Years’ War, 219 Knighton, Henry, 214
The Koran, 159
Kusumapura, city of, 140
Ibn Aqil, Abu al-Wafa, 165
Ibn Rushd, Abu al-Wahd Mohammed.
See Averroes The Ladies Diary, or Woman’s
ides, 38-39
Almanack, 282, 283, 284
Ignatius of Antioch, 244
330 INDEX
Lanfranc, 197 Mayan numeric symbols, 146

Latimer, John, 285 Mayan solar calendar systems, 23-25
Latvia, Gregorian calendar reform in, 288 signs for months, 25
Lauri, Vincenzodi, 243-44 Mesopotamia
Lauro, Giovanni Carlo Ottavio, 254 positional notation system, 144—51
Le Goff, Jacques, 116 leap years, 22, 41, Tigris-Euphrates Valley in, 143-44
42 Leo X, 223, 224-25 Meton, 31
Liber de temporibus (Bede), 110 Metonic cycle, 17—18, 31
lighthouse, Pharos, 30 19-year, 253
Lilius, Aloysius, 8, 233-34, 251-53 lunar Meurs, Jean de, 211-12
solution, 253—54 Middle Ages
Lilius, Antonio, 234, 245-46, 247 early, 95-102
Lithuania, Gregorian calendar reform in, life in, 124—27
288 minute measurements, reasons for, 292—
Long Count, 24 95
Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, painting, 218 Mohammed, 162-63
Loyola, Ignatius, 237-38 lunar calendars monks, medieval, 99-100
error in, 16-19 Montaigne, 261
possible, 11-12, 12 months
lunar month, 17—18 Charlemagne’s, 118-19
lunar year, 15-18 lunisolar year, 17-18 lunar, 17-18
Luther, Martin, 226, 231 Mayan signs for, 25
Roman emperors naming, 42-44
Romulus’, 37—38
Maestlin, Michael, 256—57 moon
Magini, G. A., 189 measurement relationship, 13-14
Magnus, Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey), 28 worship, 13
Maius, 38 year relationship, 10-11
Martius, 38 martyrology, 130 master Moslem calendar, 162
clock, 290-92 mathematicians, India’s,
156-58 mathematics, 31, 169-70, 187-89
algebra, 169 Nabu, day of, 55-56
Cassiodorus’ defense of, 83-84 decimal Natchez, 14
fractions, 153-55, 189 early, 143—55 New Year’s Day
numeric symbols, Hindu-Arabic, 187- Egyptian, 21
88
numeric symbols, India’s, 148-51, 169-
70
numeric symbols, Mayan, 146
positional notation system, 144-51
use of zero in, 150-52, 189
value for pi, 141
matins, word origin, 86-87
Maurice of Constantinople, 105
Maurus, Rabanus, 175
INDEX 331
New Year’s Day (continued) Pompey. See Magnus, Gnaeus

standardization of, 259 Pompeius
The New York Evening Post, 288 Poor Richard’s Almanac, excerpt from,
Newton, Isaac, Sir, 258 287-88
Nicaea, city of, 60 positional notation system, 144-51
Nicene Creed, 66 printing press, invention of, 222
Nicholas of Cusa, 220-21 Protestantism, rise of, 226-27
Nile River, 20-21
Psalm 104:19, 10
nilometer, 21
Ptolemy, Claudius, 5-6, 33, 249-51
nones, 38
Ptolemy I (king of Egypt), 30
Notker the Peppercorn, 175
Notker the Stammerer, 6, 175 Ptolemy II (king of Egypt), 30
Notker the Thick-Lipped, 175 Ptolemy III (king of Egypt), 22
Novi calendarii rotnani apologia, Ptolemaic Universe, 204
adersus Michaelem Maestlinum Pythagoras, 31
(Clavius), 257
Numa, 39
numerals Quintilis, 38
Hindu-Arabic, 187-88
symbols, 144-51
“The Reform of the Calendar,” 243
Reiner of Paderborn, 6, 201—202
On the Motion of the Stars (al-Battani), De revolutionibus (Copernicus),
171 227,229- 30
Opus de etnendatione tempore excerpts from, 228, 229
(Scaliger), 258 Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres
Opus Mains (Bacon), 3 (Copernicus), 8
excerpts from, 3—5, 203-206 Rhaticus, Georg Joachim, 229, 230
Oresme, Nicholas, 218 Robert of Chester, 188
Oswiu, 107-109 Roger I (count of Sicily), 185-86
Ovid, 37 Roger II (king of Sicily and Italy), 186
Oxford, university in, 195 Roman calendar, 37-39
304-day, 39
355-day, 39-41
Paris, university in, 195 Parker, George,
278-79 fragments of, 45
Paul of Middelburg, 224, 225 as political tool, 39-40
Pelham, Thomas, 229, 280 reforms, 41-44
Petrarch, 214 reordering of, 36
Pharos lighthouse, 30 Roman Empire
Philip II (king of Spain), 255 church, 107-109
Philip IV (king of France), 208- 209 collapse of, 67-69
philosophical time, 199 decline of, 50
pi, Aryabhata’s value for, 141
Plutarch, 41
332 INDEX
demise of, 76-78 Sextilis, 38

religions of, 52-53 Shakespeare, William, 189
Roman numeric symbols, 146, 147 “Shepherd’s Calendar,” 223
Romania, Gregorian calendar refonn in, Sic et Non (Abelard), 196
288 siddhantas, 139
Rome, city of, 77-78 sidereal year, 1, 228-29, 247-49, 248
in 1570s, 240-42
siesta, word origin, 87
Romulus, 37-39
Sirius, the Dog Star, 21
naming his months, 37-38
system of numbering days, 38-39 Sirleto, Guglielmo, 243
Rotae, Seraphinus Olivarius, 244 Six Dynasties, 143
The Rubaiyat (Khayyam), 172 skaphe, 32
excerpt from, 172—73 Slavic calendar, 102
Rudolf II (king of Hungary and smallpox, 126
Bohemia), 265 solar year, 17
Rudolphine Tables, 256 current, 1
Russia, Gregorian calendar reform in, 288 see also tropical year
Sosigenes, 34-35, 41
Sothic cycle, 22
Sabbath day, Saturday vs. Sunday as, 53- Stanhope, Philip Dormer, 279-81
55 Stevin, Simon, 189
sacred, vs. secular, 195-200 Stokes, Thomas, 265
sacred time, 69 Stonehenge, 22-23
Augustine’s meaning of, 69-71 Suetonius, 27
St. Agnes, 129 sulvasutras, 138-39
St. Benedict’s day, 129
Sumerian lunar calendar, 18
St. Giles, 129
St. Nicholas, 129
Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 199-200
saint’s days, 128-31 Sunday
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 290 as holy day, introduction of, 53-54
Saturday, vs. Sunday as Sabbath day, 53- observance of, 128
55 vs. Saturday as Sabbath day, 53—55
Saxons sundial, public, 46
calendar, 101-102 Suse, Heinrich, 218
conversion of, 106—107 Sweden
Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 257-58 scientific Gregorian calendar reform in, 288
theories, verifying with experimentation reaction to Gregorian calendar, 267- 68
and observation, 202 Sylvester II, 187
Sebokt, Severus, 137, 150
secular, vs. sacred, 195-200
seven-day week, 55-57 De temporum ratione (Bede), 110
astrology’s influence on, 56 Theodore of Tarsus, 109-10
biological influences on, 57 introduction
of, 53-55
“seventh heaven,” origin of term, 111
INDEX 333
Theodoric (king of Italy), 78-79 excerpt from, 189

Theodosius I, 70 Works and Days (Hesiod), 14—15
Theophilus, Easter dates time chart, 74 World Calendar, 297, 298
La Thiende (Stevin), 189
time
anti, 71 Year of Confusion (46 B.C.), 41-42
Bacon’s definition of, 206 Year of the Migration, 162
calculations, Bede’s, 112-15 year 2000, xi
coordinated universal (UTC), 290 years
ecclesiastic, 199 cycles of the moon relationship, 13
future, Bede on, 134 Egyptian, 21—22, 26
philosophical, 199 leap, 22, 41, 42
sacred, 69-71 lunar, 12, 13, 15-18
Time Line, 302-307 lunisolar, 17—18
timepieces, 116-17, see also clocks sidereal, 1, 228-29, 247-49, 248
Tower of the Winds, 245 solar, 1, 17
Treaty of Verdun, 177 tropical, 1, 227-29, 247-50, 249, 251-
tropical year, 1, 227-29, 247-50, 249, 52
251-52 Yugoslavia, Gregorian calendar reform in,
historical lengths of (table), 251-52 288
Tzolkin, 23-24
Zapotecs of Mexico, 23
Ugric Ostiak, 14 Zedong, Mao, 289
U.S. Naval Observatory, 290 Zeelst, Adriaan van, 259
Universal Calendar, 297, 298 zero
universities, 194—95 appearance of, in Europe, 189 symbol
curriculum, 195—96 for, 151-52
Ussher, James, 259
UTC (coordinated Universal Time), 290
Vandals, 76
Varahamihira, 157 vespers, word origin,
87
Villani, Giovanni, 214
Walsingham, Francis, Sir, 264-65
War of Flowers, 26
Warmiensis, Nicolaus Copernicus. See
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Wearmouth monestary, 97
Wednesday, 55-56 weeks, seven-day, 53—
57 William of Conches, 182-83
The Jointer’s Tale (Shakespeare),
DAVID EWING DUNCAN is the author of four books,
numerous articles, essays, and short stories, and is a television
producer. A longtime science correspondent for Life and a guest
correspondent and producer for Nightline and ABC News, he
has contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Smithsonian,
the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington
Post Book World. He has been a commentator on NPR’s
All Things Considered and a documentary producer for Discover
television. A native of Kansas City, Missouri, he now lives in
San Francisco with his wife and three children.
SBN 0-380-79324-5
FRADE PAPERBACKS
780380 U.S. 513.50

793242 CAN. S19.5C
prove to all readers that the establishment of a consistent
and useful calendar is no dull work of drones and bean
counters, but one of humanity’s greatest achievements and
the embodiment of our culture, history and progress.”
CALENDAR sparkles...Gripping, expansive and scholarly, it will

be indispensable reading for years to come.
Duncan has achieved a rare feat in turning something ordinary

into an extraordinary metaphor of life.”
“This book is as irresistible as the flow of time itself,

rhe story about our age-old efforts to stay in step with the
clocklike movements of the moon, sun and stars is funny
and sad, dramatic and comical, and David Duncan tells it
beautifully, even poetically.”
“Duncan writes the way good teachers teach, conversational,

yet informed...[he] is a popularizer and storyteller...”
‘ David Duncan illuminates our calendar’s remarkable

evolution not just by telling us about time but also by
letting us travel through it...The story takes us to courts
of kings, emperors and popes, from Egypt and India to
Byzantium and Rome, and beyond. And, at every turn,
rhe author brings the key players to life.
*There may have been two Aryabhatas working at roughly the same time, Aryabhata
the Elder and Aryabhata the Younger.
*Wags in Britain made fun of these French months, calling them: wheezy, sneezy,
freezy, slippy, drippy, nippy, and so forth.
f
This committee was convened at the request of the League of Nations, which or-

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“This engaging volume is an account of the human grasp, measurement,

and use of time. It is comprehensive and detailed, yet enthralling in the

“Duncan is a master at weaving together various threads and anecdotes . . .

“In this finely researched book, David Ewing Duncan chronicles

“Good reading for the new millennium.”

“David Ewing Duncan’s CALENDAR is a charming and

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BOOK REVIEW

“Forget Stephen Hawking: The calendar is a brief history of time

“Highly readable . .. wonderful...”

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“Lively and fascinating . . . with a new millennium approaching,

“David Duncan succeeds superbly . . . CALENDAR is a

RESIDENTS: THE PERILS AND PROMISE OF EDUCATING

Determine a True and

David Ewing Duncan

Copyright © 1998 by David Ewing Duncan

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Duncan, David Ewing.

First Bard Trade Paperback Printing: June 1999

Printed in the U.S.A.

1997 according to Christ’s actual birth circa 4 B.C.

Prelude: A Net Cast Over Time xvii

13. Solving the Riddle of Time 233

*A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second.

Seven centuries ago a sickly English friar dispatched a strident missive to

in astronomy, completed the order of the calendar as far as he could in his

around the earth, this calculation was a reasonably close approximation,

Carved Eagle Bone Possible Lunar Calendar Le Placard, c. 11,000 B.c.

what appears to be a pregnant woman holding a horn marked with thirteen

But when House-on-Back, the snail crawls from the ground up

Early Greeks Greet Spring

§This is called a synodic month.

inserting or “intercalating” extra months into the standard 12-month lunar

to the 365-day calendar in a complex cycle of 52 years called the Calendar

20 kins = 1 uinal = 20 days

Maya signs for the months in the 365-day count

Despite the remarkable achievements in time reckoning by Mesoam- ericans

In June of 47 B.C., Julius Caesar finally departed Egypt. As a parting gift he

Modern Date Roman Date

When the new day dawned on January 1, 45 B.C.—the kalends of Januarius,

Thirty days hath September,

As Caesar was making his reforms in Rome he summoned Cleopatra from

By the decided that the

Whether or not one believes Constantine about his visions—even the

a precursor to the imposition of Christianity. Building a resplendent new

Planet Ancient Planet-gods Modern-day Names

Moon Sin Luna Moon Monday lundi lunes

Mars Nergal Mars Tiw Tuesday mardi martes

Jupiter Marduk Jupiter Thor Thursday jeudi jueves

Venus Ishtar Venus Freya Friday vendredi viernes

Saturn Ninurta Saturnus Saturn Saturday samedi sabato

Astrology was so influential in the ancient world that 7 became a kind of

Monday’s child is fair office, Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Recently chronobiologists have discovered that the seven-day cycle, like

Even after Constantine’s edict about Sunday, it took another generation

The second important calendar change introduced by Constantine was when

meaning of passages in holy texts, breaking for sumptuous meals of wine,

Gospels that recount Christ’s biography offer contradictory informa- tion in

§§A month in a local Greek calendar.

anti-Semitism among non-Jewish adherents added to the confusion, as