The Calendar (19 page)

23 November, at Rome, the feast of St Clement, the bishop who, at the Emperor Trajan’s request, was sent into exile in the Pontus.* While there, because he converted many to the faith through his miracles and teaching, he was cast into the sea with an anchor tied to his neck. But as his disciples prayed the sea receded three miles, and they found his body in a stone coffin within a marble oratory, and the anchor lying nearby.

*The Black Sea.

Writing and copying calendars of saints’ lives became a major focus of scholars and artists during the Middle Ages. Every morning monks read descriptions of that day’s saints. Even today a large department at the Vatican stays busy keeping track of the thousands of officially recognized saints and the thousands of others who have been canonized or beatified as steps toward possible sainthood.

Saints’ days in the Middle Ages remained an informal method of dating for centuries, though scholars and kings preferred more formal systems for dating edicts and compiling chronicles. In the centuries following the collapse of Rome this tended to be the Roman scheme of kalends, nones and ides, though as the empire became a more distant memory Europeans began replacing it with a number of alternatives. As we know, Bede and Charlemagne embraced our own system of
dies mensis,
where the days of the month are counted in a simple numeric order from 1 to 30 or 31. Others used a variety of other methods, including one called the Bologna custom, practised widely in Italy, which counted days from the first to the middle of the month, but then started counting backward toward the last day of the month. Another scheme used verses in a poem in which each Latin syllable represented a day of the month. For example, in one of these poems the verse for the first 17 days of January ran:
‘Cisio Janus Epi sibi vendicat Oc Feli Mar An,’
with
Ci
corresponding to 1 January,
si
to 2 January, and so forth. The idea was that people could memorize the verses--which usually commemorated appropriate local saints--and would then know the proper day in its proper order.

But few farmers on the Rhine or weavers in France ever stopped to think about such things. To these people, who had little control over their environment or their lives, the whole idea of attempting to calculate and measure something as unfathomable and unremitting as time was either blasphemous or laughable. The few written insights into the mind-set of commoners on the subjects of time, calendars and science in general suggest a great deal of snickering at monks, scholars and astrologers bumbling about counting on their fingers and staring at the sky. The Miller in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
pokes fun at an astronomer-astrologer, but the verse might also have applied to anyone with their head in the clouds, so to speak:

Men sholde nat knowe of Goddes pryvetee
Ye, blessed be alwey, a lewed man
that noght but oonly his bileve kan!
So ferde another clerk with astromye,
He walked in the feelds, for to prye
Upon the sterres, what ther sholde bifalle,
Til he was in a marle-pit yfalle.

In other words, this ‘clerk’, or scholar of astronomy, did not heed what every lewed’--unlearned--Christian knew and believed: that ‘men should not know of God’s private affairs’. He foolishly studied the moon and stars and was such a dolt, according to the Miller, that he was looking up when he should have been looking down at his feet--and fell in a ‘marle-pit’.

Still, even the simplest Christian presumably had at least a vague knowledge of critical events in Christian history. In fact, for most people this timeline remained far more real than a history of their own era: the sequence of the Creation and events in the Old Testament; and episodes in Christ’s life and the lives of the saints. These events needed to be recorded and dated to become valid, and it was this need that motivated time reckoners such as Dionysius and Bede to devise their year-by-year dating schemes in an age when otherwise few people cared about what year it was beyond year 6 or 10 in the reign of their local king or squire.

Several chronological schemes were proposed and used besides Dionysius Exiguus’s
anni Domini.
These included the old Roman system of fifteen-year interdictions, which had started with the first year of Constantine’s reign in 312. Iberians used something called the Era of Spain, which tracked Easter cycles starting with the Roman conquest of Iberia in 38 BC. Others observed the Era of the Passion, with year 1 dated back to AD 33, supposedly the date of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. But none was as popular as a possible alternative to the year of our Lord than a timeline based on the date of the Creation as year 1. Bede, for instance, carefully studied what he considered the relevant passages in the Bible and somehow came up with a specific day that he believed God began forming the sky, earth and water: 18 March, 3952 BC. If Europeans had decided to use Bede’s calculation of the Creation, our year 2000 would be 5951 AC--after the Creation.

And what about predicting the future? Time in Christianity was, of course, heading somewhere: to Christ’s second coming and eventually to eternity, events that would occur along the same timeline as past events. This made it tempting for medieval chronologists to try to date not only the beginning of the world, but the end. A century before Charlemagne, one scholar in the royal Frankish court calculated, using poor addition, that the world was 5,928 years old in the year 727. Applying this to the notion that the world was moving through six ages of 1,000 years apiece, this computor decided that the world would end in exactly 72 years.

Bede, following the example of Augustine, condemned such predictions. He insisted that future time belonged to God, ‘who, as the Everlasting, created times whenever he wanted, knows the end of times, and puts an end to the fluctuating processes of time when he wishes’. Still, most people who thought about such things believed that however old the earth might be, the end was near. ‘The world is growing old,’ wrote Fredegar, a seventh-century Frankish chronicler who wrote in corrupt Latin. ‘We live at the end of time.’

Medieval chroniclers were constantly looking for portents of the grand finale: plagues, earthquakes, eclipses, battles and omens of every kind. Mystics looked for signs of the Antichrist’s coming, with writers such as the remarkable theologian and poet Hildegard von Bingen offering vivid descriptions of what he would look like: ‘A beast with monstrous head, black as coal, with flaming eyes, wearing asses’ ears and with gaping jaws decorated with iron hooks.’

Amidst this official pessimism certain dates took on meaning at least for a few, such as the coming of the year 1000, though the
anno Domini
system was still not widely followed.* Even where it was, Christians did not necessarily
fear
the end. They expected trials and tribulations and a final, horrific apocalypse, as predicted in the Bible. But they also looked forward to what would come after the current age ended and the calendar truly stopped--when Christ would usher in an age of eternal happiness for the elect, which of course included them.

*Actually the first millennium came in the year 1001, since there is no year zero in our calendar.

Meanwhile, as Christians waited for Armageddon they had more immediate concerns: they lived, ate, worked, bore children, sang songs, laughed, cried and died as they always had, with only an occasional thought about the Antichrist or the last days of a calendar most medieval Europeans were at best vaguely aware of.

But despite the ‘vast indifference to time’ that permeated Europe during the reign of Charlemagne, already under way were real changes that centuries later would usher in a revolution in the perception of time. For even though Charlemagne saw clocks as curiosities, his keen interest in them and the idea of telling time made a lasting impression on future generations. At the same time a new invention was spreading slowly across the West: the bell. Called
glocke
in German--whence came our word
clock--
bells were used to signal hours and other times of the day. By legend, church bells were invented in the fifth century in the town of Nola in Campania--thus the term ‘Campanola bells’. Another legend credits Pope Sabinianus (pope from 604 to 606) with ordering churches to mark the hours of the day by ringing their bells. Bells probably spread first to monasteries, where monks used hand bells to signal canonical hours. Later tower bells summoned people to mass.

Bells probably had a minimal impact on the average person. Yet they were the first mechanical ‘clocks’ to govern everyday life in Europe, usually rung according to time as measured on a water clock or sundial. Imagine a farmer in a field being told to have an acre ploughed by the time the bell tower rang noon, when before he had been told by his lord simply to work until the sun was high. Or think of a clock that signalled the beginning of a mass with an exactitude never before known when hours were measured using the position of the sun in the sky. This was an entirely different way of viewing time, with a measurement of it being assigned a specific value.

The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne died on 28 January, 814. His empire died soon after, as his heirs argued and fought and divided his realms among them. With it perished the political order that Charlemagne had briefly imposed. So did the emperor’s infatuation with learning, manuscripts and marvellous timepieces, which it turned out was not shared by his immediate successors. They dismissed the scholars from the court and closed the schools for children opened by the emperor. Still, the age of Charlemagne ignited a spark, with the scholar Alcuin of York and others compiling encyclopaedias and collecting manuscripts. It also provided an example and a context for quality, taste, humanistic culture and sound grammar, which laid a foundation for a slow--very slow--evolution toward an era when dates and calendars would begin to matter to more than just a few monks sitting in their cloisters trying to calculate the age of the world and when the end would come.

8 The Strange Journey of 365.242199

There are also others who know something
Severus Sebokt, Syrian bishop, AD 662

In 476, far away in time and place from Charlemagne’s dark, imposing castle at Aachen, beyond the eastern border of Frankland and on across the Balkans, the territories of Byzantium, and the vastness of Mesopotamia and Persia, a Hindu genius was born on the River Ganges. A blend of Ptolemy the astronomer, Pythagoras the mathematician and Bacon the rebel, Aryabhata was one of a remarkable group of Indian scholars, and a pivotal figure on one of the stranger journeys ever taken by an assemblage of ideas across time and geography.

This saga of ideas begins six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It then moves to ancient Greece, only to hopscotch to India during the great Hellenistic surge that accompanied Alexander’s armies in the fourth century BC. The ideas then arc back west centuries later, landing in the great centres of Islamic learning after the Arab conquest of Persia and India. The Arabs in turn carried the knowledge to portals in Spain, Syria and Sicily, where it made its way into Europe, to be embraced at last by pre-Renaissance thinkers such as Bacon.

During the journey each culture that seized on these new ideas added significant contributions, and together over the centuries they assembled a remarkable body of learning about mathematics, astronomy and other fields of science and art that would eventually make it possible for time reckoners in Europe to correct Caesar’s calendar--and to measure time with an accuracy essential to propel science into the modern world.

Aryabhata himself was a key figure in a tradition in India stretching back to at least 1500 BC when light-skinned Aryans--the ancestors of those who later founded the Hindu religion--swept down from the northwest to conquer an earlier civilization, the Harappa.

The Aryan-Hindus started writing about mathematics as early as 800 BC, when their priests began laying out complex designs for temples and altars, and for dividing up land--a process that led to the discovery of the basic geometric rules that also seem to have marked the first stages of advanced cultures in Egypt, Sumeria, China and Central and South America. Hindus called their version of this property-and construction-inspired maths
sulvasutras
--
sulva
being the name of cords used by architects to mark off a structure’s foundations, and
sutra
referring to rules governing a ritual or science.

These crude concepts were written down in Sanskrit verse, and were critical to an early understanding of shapes and their relationship to one another--including versions of the Pythagorean theorem and early geometric algebra.* Eventually they turned this

body of knowledge skywards to measure the planets and the stars, which led to sophisticated attempts to measure time, including astrological predictions of the future based on the movements of the sun and of the zodiac.

*The Pythagorean theorem is one of the most fundamental concepts in mathematics. It is critical for making basic astronomical observations for anyone wanting to use the stars or sun to measure time. The theorem says that in any right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It is named for the Greek Pythagoras (sixth century BC), though several cultures discovered it independently.

The age of the
sulvasutras
ended around AD 200, during a period of political instability that lasted until the early fourth century, when the Gupta dynasty seized most of northern India and launched Hindu India’s classic age. Taking up where the
sulvasutras
left off, Gupta astronomers in the fourth and early fifth centuries made great strides in mathematics and astronomy, recording them in a series of texts known as
siddhatitas,
or ‘systems’ of astronomy. Written in the two hundred years before Aryabhata began working, they provided him with the universe of fundamental concepts he used for his own work--including estimates of pi, basic rules of trigonometry, the motion of the planets and stars, and the length of the year.