The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  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 harbour 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. Eye-witnesses tell of people going to bed healthy only to die before they awoke. Doctors sometimes caught the malady at a bedside and succumbed before their patient. The Florentine historian Giovanni Villani (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 to 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 I 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.*

  *Petrarch uses as his inspiration a letter written by the Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 BC).

  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 believed 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: 20 March 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 of life--and therefore of time--for all humanity.

  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.

  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 traveller 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 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-term 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 than ever to labour 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 Temperantia, 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.

  *Lorenzetti died of plague when the Black Death swept through Tuscany in 1348.

  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 clock-like regulation of the universe. In 1334 the German spiritualist Heinrich Stise (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 Stise 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 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 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 duelling 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 kalendarii * Working with a commission of experts on calendar reform, he proposed cancelling 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.

  *Nicholas of Cusa was also the author of two of the earliest scale maps of land areas, 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.

  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 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 armour 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, mo
nths 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 ‘Farmer’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 saints’ days. Easter is marked on 13 April 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.