The Calendar

by David Ewing Duncan

  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 21 March 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--’Defence 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 towards 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 littered 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 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 ingenious 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 1 January 4713 BC, which he based on calculations concerning Creation.

  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 BC, 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 14 September 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 1 January, the date used by Julius Caesar.

  Gregory enthusiastically approved the plan, which was set for implementation 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 20 October 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 Mondragone, Gregory’s favourite villa outside of Rome.

  On 24 February 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.

  On 1 March the text was posted at the doors of St 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 honour 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.

  14 Ten Days Lost Forever

  I grit my teeth, but 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*

  *Montaigne actually wrote ‘eleven days’, which was mistaken. His error suggests that even among intellectuals the reform was confusing.

  When bells chimed across Europe in the waning moments of 4 October 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 5 October 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 every
where 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 arriving 10 days early. Bankers scratched 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 1 January 1502 to 11 January 1502.

  *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 25 December.

  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 4 October to no change at all: to the day that had always come next, 5 October.

  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-Reformation. Clavius and others insisted that the bull was never intended to be provocative against rival churches, either Protestant or Eastern Orthodox. But the mere fact that Gregory took his authority 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 had 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 28 May. By 12 June 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 17 October 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 21 December, which was followed by 1 January. This meant skipping Christmas, which Thomas Stokes, an English merchant and spy living in Flanders, confirmed in a letter written on 2 January 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 anglia* and here they write the 2 January 1583.

  *’English style’.

  Informed that some countries had not made the switch as scheduled, the pope on 7 November issued a reminder for noncomplying countries, ordering them to omit the 10 days between 10 and 21 February 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 12--22 January 1584; most other German Catholic states, along with Bohemia and Moravia, became Gregorian by the end of 1584.

  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 worshipping 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 loathsome and abominable errors, his sacrilegious 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 co-authored 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 0.S. and N.S. for short. It also meant that someone leaving, say, Catholic Regensburg in Bavaria on 1 January would arrive in Lutheran Nuremberg, some fifty miles away, on 21 December the previous year.* Worse, Christian holidays including Easter now fell on different days in a reprise of what the 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 re-emerging eight hundred years later, but this time across the length of Latin Europe.

  *Regensburg accepted the Gregorian calendar in 1583. Nuremberg in 1699.

  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.