4 ms·

> being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13 Doesn't that account for 3 mystery days per year? The Gregorian calendar was introduced 1582. That's not

> being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13 Doesn't that account for 3 mystery days per year? The Gregorian calendar was introduced 1582. That's not even 500 years. Makes 500y * 3d/y = 1500d is about 4.5 years. How does this explain "about 300 missing years"?

simiones 4y ago
The Julian calendar is wrong by ~1 day/128 years compared to the true solar year, not 1 day per year. So 3 days => ~390 years. And the computation goes like this: 1. Julian calendar was created in ~45 CE. 2. Gregorian calendar was created in ~1582 CE. 3. To bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, you would have needed to subtract (1582-45) / 128 ~= 13 days. However, they only subtracted 10 days. Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. Correct conclusion: they were not trying to bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, but with a later time, that of the Nicean Council in ~325 CE.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  > Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. I read the whole article and I did not understand this part describing the premise of the conspiracy. Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?
  - simiones 4y ago
    No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige value, without recording this decision anywhere. Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically slightly more plausible in a time before centralized calendars and computing). Later historians simply took the official date for granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The real date was reflected in their astronomical calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of a 13-day one. Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed in the article, and others.
    - mike_hearn 4y ago
      It's not that absurd to believe mistakes could have been made there. The BC/AD system was invented centuries after Christ and only started to become actually known around the 730s: The addition of the B.C. component happened two centuries after Dionysius, when the Venerable Bede of Northumbria published his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in 731, wrote Antonia Gransden, who was a reader in history at the University of Nottingham, in her book "Historical Writing in England: c. 500 to c. 1307" (Routledge, 1997). The work brought the A.D. system to the attention of more people and expanded it to include years before A.D. 1. Prior years were numbered to count backward to indicate the number of years an event had occurred "before Christ" or "B.C. The B.C./A.D. system became more popular in the ninth century after Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the system for dating acts of government throughout Europe." https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html Before the adoption of this system dating was rather chaotic, with dates usually being recorded as "year X of the reign of so-and-so". To line dates up and synchronize them on a timeline was difficult, and synchronization of European, Islamic, Greek and Roman history wasn't even attempted until the 16th century (Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum).
      - mcguire 4y ago
        Mistakes, yes. 300 years? No. 300 years, including the Carolingian Dynasty, the expansion of Islam (i.e. The Battle of Tours), the Norse expansion (eventually leading to the domination of Europe by a bunch of guys named Norman)? Nope, no so much. And that's before you start looking at Islamic, Indian, and Asian data. And then there's radiometric dating and dendrochronology, which are chaotic in their own right, but 300 years? Nah. Weirdly, I was just reading Lynn White's Medieval technology and social change (1966), discussing the introduction of the stirrup and the heavy plow (as opposed to the scratch plow), both of which happened in this period. There's little in the way of good dates, but some very big changes such as the move from individual family subsistence farms to large, ridge-and-furrow strips and Charles Martel's redistribution of church lands to his followers, introducing true heavy cavalry and the feudal system. (Note: may be a bit out of date with modern research.)
      - TechBro8615 4y ago

simiones 4y ago

The Julian calendar is wrong by ~1 day/128 years compared to the true solar year, not 1 day per year. So 3 days => ~390 years. And the computation goes like this: 1. Julian calendar was created in ~45 CE. 2. Gregorian calendar was created in ~1582 CE. 3. To bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, you would have needed to subtract (1582-45) / 128 ~= 13 days. However, they only subtracted 10 days. Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. Correct conclusion: they were not trying to bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, but with a later time, that of the Nicean Council in ~325 CE.

TechBro8615 4y ago
> Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582. I read the whole article and I did not understand this part describing the premise of the conspiracy. Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?
- simiones 4y ago
  No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige value, without recording this decision anywhere. Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically slightly more plausible in a time before centralized calendars and computing). Later historians simply took the official date for granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The real date was reflected in their astronomical calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of a 13-day one. Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed in the article, and others.
  - mike_hearn 4y ago
    It's not that absurd to believe mistakes could have been made there. The BC/AD system was invented centuries after Christ and only started to become actually known around the 730s: The addition of the B.C. component happened two centuries after Dionysius, when the Venerable Bede of Northumbria published his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in 731, wrote Antonia Gransden, who was a reader in history at the University of Nottingham, in her book "Historical Writing in England: c. 500 to c. 1307" (Routledge, 1997). The work brought the A.D. system to the attention of more people and expanded it to include years before A.D. 1. Prior years were numbered to count backward to indicate the number of years an event had occurred "before Christ" or "B.C. The B.C./A.D. system became more popular in the ninth century after Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the system for dating acts of government throughout Europe." https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html Before the adoption of this system dating was rather chaotic, with dates usually being recorded as "year X of the reign of so-and-so". To line dates up and synchronize them on a timeline was difficult, and synchronization of European, Islamic, Greek and Roman history wasn't even attempted until the 16th century (Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum).
    - mcguire 4y ago
      Mistakes, yes. 300 years? No. 300 years, including the Carolingian Dynasty, the expansion of Islam (i.e. The Battle of Tours), the Norse expansion (eventually leading to the domination of Europe by a bunch of guys named Norman)? Nope, no so much. And that's before you start looking at Islamic, Indian, and Asian data. And then there's radiometric dating and dendrochronology, which are chaotic in their own right, but 300 years? Nah. Weirdly, I was just reading Lynn White's Medieval technology and social change (1966), discussing the introduction of the stirrup and the heavy plow (as opposed to the scratch plow), both of which happened in this period. There's little in the way of good dates, but some very big changes such as the move from individual family subsistence farms to large, ridge-and-furrow strips and Charles Martel's redistribution of church lands to his followers, introducing true heavy cavalry and the feudal system. (Note: may be a bit out of date with modern research.)
    - TechBro8615 4y ago