The Calendar (37 page)

*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.

Most confusing of all was Sweden, which adopted the German Protestants’ new Easter calculation but did not remove 10 days from 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 one day off from the Julian. In 1712 they reverted back to the Julian calendar by adding an extra leap day, 30 February. 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 done 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 travelling with a state delegation to Constantinople from Venice, which had a trade treaty with the Turks. Arriving on 27 May, 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 the age of eighty could not be expected to live for ever.

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.

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 calendarists’--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.

*The monasteries on Mt. Athos are allowed to retain the Julian calendar because they are part of the Church of Constantinople, which tolerated their position.

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
Times
of London. 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, and most had enough food. Yet daily life in 1582 remained much as it had for centuries: filled with hard labour 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 labour, 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 non-complying Nuremberg to the newly Gregorian Regensburg? If he was muleteer driving a caravan loaded with charcoal, was he considered 10 days late? And would a woman married on 10 June in Regensburg be unmarried in Nuremberg the same day, which was their 1 June?

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 saints’ 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 PM, or a favourite television programme they did not want to miss.

In Moravia a local saga about the change suggests the sort of thinking 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 turmoil 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 in 1582 (1533-1603) 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 any-thing-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 travelled 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 accompting 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.

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 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.