The Calendar (25 page)

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, 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.

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 wrong-headed 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 encyclopaedic 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 centres 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 rumours of Islam’s golden age, but few, if any, had ever heard the names of al-Khwarizmi, al-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?