Clio/Give Us Back Our Eleven Days

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"Give Us Back Our Eleven Days!"

This is a rather convoluted story. Clio hopes you won't mind if it takes a while to tell.

There are several calendars in use among humans today, but the world has standardized to an astonishing degree on the Gregorian calendar. Even those who use other calendars to time their lives or rituals find that they are now in a position of having to forcibly interact with the Gregorian calendar.

But the Gregorian calendar did not reach that level of acceptance instantly, even from Clio's long perspective. It was first adopted (by mandate of Pope Gregory XIII, for whom it is named) in Italy in 1582, and adopted by Europe over the next 200 years. On the far end of the timeline, it was adopted by China for the first time, ineffectively, in 1912 ... by Russia in 1918 ... by Greece in 1923 ... and by China for the second time in 1949. In that long interval, quite a bit of confusion ensued as people travelled back and forth between "Old Style" and "New Style" countries.

The problem with the Julian calendar that most of the European/Western world had been using was that it was losing days. By the time Gregory issued his decree, the calendar year was ten days behind the solar year. The gap kept getting longer; by the time Russia switched, the ten days had become thirteen.

The Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar, was at least an improvement on what had gone before. Prior to that, the Romans had been using a lunar calendar, as were most world cultures of the time. They had twelve lunar months, with recognizable names: Januarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. (Januarius and Februarius were added to the front of the year after the others; originally the Romans had a ten-month year, which explains the ordinal names of the last six months. Quintilis and Sextilis were later renamed after Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus.)

A calendar of twelve lunar cycles seems like a good match for the solar year when one is observing the seasons and the moons by eye. But it isn't, not quite. At approximately 29 and a half days per month, the lunar year equals about 354 days ... and a solar year consists of 365.242199 days, or a little less than 365 and a quarter. (That "little less" will become important later.)

The solar year determines the seasons. Since the seasons are very noticeable phenomena (see A Year of the Seasons), it soon became obvious to cultures using a lunar calendar that the seasons were "moving" with respect to the months, because of that 11-day slide every year.

Various solutions were tried over the ages, all fairly unwieldy. They generally involved inserting extra months now and again. The most stable of these added seven extra months, here and there, over a nineteen-year cycle ... a system which the Chinese and Jewish lunar calendars still use. Even so, it was obvious that something better was needed.

Following the Sun

The solar year had been independently discovered by some cultures. The Mayans and the Aztecs had elaborate systems of solar and lunar timekeeping, and their solar year was 365 days. Stonehenge, in England, may have been an attempt to get a precise solar year by finding the exact moment of the summer solstice. (Clio knows, but she's not permitted to say.)

And the Egyptians not only knew of the 365-day year but also invented leap year, noticing through careful measurement that they needed about an extra six hours each year. Adding a day every four years made up that extra quarter-day per year, making their solar year 365.25 days long on average - not quite there yet, but better than anyone had done before. Their calendar year was about 11 minutes "fast" over the solar year.

This is where the Romans enter the story. After Caesar spent time in Egypt, seducing and/or being seduced by Cleopatra, he took their calendar back with him to Rome. He took Rome's existing twelve months, and decreed that they'd alternate between 30 and 31 days each, with Februarius being the lone exception - 29 days, thirty in a leap year. In doing so, he had to declare a large shift in order to "catch up" - 49 BCE was decreed to be longer by 90 days, making it a 445-day year. This was known as the Year of Confusion.

Over the years, the days got shifted around confusingly until the present system of days-per-month resulted. The week became seven days long and the "day of rest" moved from Saturday to Sunday for the Christians. (Blame or credit the Emperor Constantine for the latter two.) More importantly, as the Catholic church ascended, their calendar became sacred to Christians - it had the dates for holy ritual which they believed were specified by God. In some cases these dates were determined by elaborate calculations (especially Easter). This made the church reluctant to change the calendar, even as scholars everywhere were discovering that the calendar was flawed.

Gregory Alters Time

By the time 1582 brought Gregory's decree, two things needed to be changed: The ten days of accumulated time that the calendar was ahead of the solar year needed to be removed, and the 11 minute 14 second error needed to be compensated for somehow.

The error was corrected by three out of every four hundred leap years. Three out of four leap years falling on the turn of a century would no longer be leap years; 2000 would be, but 1700, 1800, and 1900 would not. This made the calendar year 365.2425 days long on average.

As for the extra days, Gregory simply struck them out of the calendar. The day after October 4 was decreed to be October 15. This news was not well received - there was rioting, financial chaos, and so forth - but almost all European Catholics eventually struck ten days from their calendar somewhere and changed over.

The Protestants took longer, which meant that in some cases a single country, such as Germany, had two separate calendars within its borders, making it one day of the year in some towns and ten days earlier in others.

One of the many theories for the minor and inexplicable holiday April Fools' Day is that it stems from this calendar movement - i.e. an April fool was someone who forgot and celebrated the new year on the old date. This may seem strange - April being a long way from January - but, as the story goes, the new year season was celebrated from March 25 to April 1 in France, not being moved to January 1 until after the calendar reform. However, all of the stories behind this holiday are somewhat suspect, and Clio has no desire to investigate any of them further.

England (and its colonies) did not adopt the new calendar until 1752, and the fuss was even more massive than it had been on the Continent. Mobs gathered, shouting "Give us back our eleven days!" - having waited long enough to change over that an extra day had to be dropped. Lest this strike you as needless fuss, Clio would like to point out that landlords, for example, were insisting on charging a full month's rent on a nineteen-day month. Human nature never changes.

Despite being notably better than its predecessors, the Gregorian calendar is not quite ubiquitous. As noted at the beginning, several cultures still use a lunar calendar to chart their holy days. The Russian Orthodox church and several other Christian sects still use the Julian calendar. The Islamic calendar, used not just for ritual but for everyday timekeeping in some nations, is a lunar calendar.

And Clio feels the need to point out that the Gregorian calendar does not, even now, keep perfect time. It will probably need another correction sometime in the 4000s - assuming life on Earth exists that long.

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