The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  The year al-Biruni died yet another Arab scholar and poet was born, Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami (c. 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 modem 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.

  In one of his famous verses 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?

  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 centres, a wave so powerful that it reached beyond even the distant rim of what was then the civilized world.

  10 Latinorum Penuria (The Poverty of the Latins)

  Why, as Bede himself admits . . . does a full moon appear in the sky 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 traveller 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 traveller 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 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 traveller’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 saints’ days, updating Easter tables and spending lifetimes trying to devise arcane systems for better measuring time. In Frankland an intrepid Arab traveller 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 1/22560 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 labours 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 years. Abbo also proposed a change in Dionysius Exiguus’s chronology using anni Domini, substituting the old Latin style of passing from year 1 to year-1 to a timeline that added a place-holder 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 mould 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 saints’ 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 towards 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 willing 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 o
f 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, labourers 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 birth right. Borders and dynasties shifted continually. Yet over the centuries since Charlemagne the basic outline of modem 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 Catholic 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 favour 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 spiritual unity and a deeply desired salvation, particularly for serfs and peasants--which was 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 plough 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 armour, 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, 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 Day, called stylus nativitatis (Christmas style) or stylus curiae Romanae (style of the Roman curia),
since the papal chancellery sometimes opened their year on 25 December. Many people used the date inaugurated by Caesar and used by the old empire: 1 January, 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 Day. Still others began their year in March, around the time of the vernal equinox, when some old German calendars and Rome’s pre-Julian 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 25 March 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 continued 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 worshipped 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.