The Gregorian Calendar
—Chrissie
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It is often said that time is a human construct, and this is not untrue. Certainly the division of a day into 24 hours, an hour into sixty minutes, and a minute into sixty seconds is not found in nature. Having said that, day and night, the lunar month, and the solar year are natural divisions of time, reflected in the life cycles of plants, animals, and even we humans. And, when humans did finally set out to construct time, these cycles in nature led to how it was organized: lunar calendars, based on the phases of the Moon, solar calendars, based on the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and luni-solar calendars, which try to reconcile the two.
In the modern world, there are six calendars in wide use: two solar—the Julian and Gregorian; one lunar—the Islamic, and three luni-solar—the Jewish, Chinese, and the state calendar of India. Because it was the one used by Europeans as they colonized across the globe, the Gregorian Calendar is now used worldwide as the civil calendar, though many other calendars stand alongside for cultural and religious purposes. The Gregorian Calendar is a variation of the Julian Calendar, which is based on the calendar of the Roman Republic.
In Regal Rome, a lunar calendar was followed. It had ten months of thirty or 31 days and was broken into eight-day weeks. This created a 304-day year that began on 1 March and ended on the last day of December, the tenth month (this is why the numeric root words of the months don’t match up to their modern position in the calendar). The winter was a sort of non-time, with a variable number of days while life was suspended until the return of Spring; they were told by priests when March and the new year began. By the time of the institution of the Roman Republic in 510 BCE, though, winter had been split into January and February, though the year still began on 1 March, it now ended on the last day of February. Because it did not match with the solar year, it required intercalenary days to be added on occasion, but this was done irregularly. By the time Julius Caesar came to power, the calendar date was almost one hundred days off from where it should be to accord with the season.
Using his power as Dictator, Caesar reformed the calendar to a purely solar one, using the Egyptian solar calendar (to which he had been introduced while in Alexandria) with the twelve Roman months. The Greek calculation of the solar year as 365 ¼ days was used to show an additional day needed to be added every four years. This created a consistency which could be easily applied, as opposed to the old intercalenary days added at the whim of the priests. This calendar also moved the start of the year to 1 January. To enact this realignment, ninety days were added to the year we refer to as 46 BCE. The new dating system began on the Kalends of January, in the fourth year of the Dictatorship of Gaius Julius Caesar, 708 years since the founding of Rome by Romulus, and 465 years since the Republic was established or, as we know it, 1 January 46 BCE.
Rome’s authority over the Mediterranean and most of what would come to be called Europe, combined with the Romanization of Christianity and its success in this geographic area, meant that the Julian Calendar was the standard in Europe and much of the rest of the Western[1] world for the next fifteen centuries. There was a problem, however: the Julian Calendar did not quite match the solar year. It was closer than earlier calendars had been, but by the sixteenth century it had drifted about ten days behind. This was seen by the shift of the spring equinox away from its calendar date of 21 March. By the time Pope Gregory XIII made the change in 1582, the spring equinox was on 11 March. Why, one might ask, was it the Pope who forced this change, rather than a secular ruler? The reason is Easter. Unlike many other holidays that always happen on the same day, Easter is a movable feast. It can fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April; the date is calculated as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. So, if the date of the equinox is incorrect, Easter cannot be correctly calculated and celebrated.
By the time of Pope Gregory XII, discussions about shifting the calendar had been going on for centuries, but no one seemed to want to be the one responsible for the upheaval that would accompany a date jump and there wasn’t a secular ruler who had the power to force it to happen across borders. The Pope, however, had the force of Church law, and Catholics were required to follow this law, meaning that the change would take place in many countries all at the same time, with no secular policies needed. It was decided the shift would take place in October, because it had the least number of ecclesiastical holidays, causing the least disruption to Church activities. And so, in most Catholic countries, 4 October 1582 was followed by the 15 October. Most of the places that did not make the change immediately did so by the end of the year, with a bit of delay for the American colonies and other places to which communication took a very long time. The calendar was fixed, but not for everyone.
This was an era of great conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Even though the need for calendar reform was recognized across religious borders, the fact that it was organized by the Pope caused suspicion. If the Catholics wanted it, it must be bad and must be opposed. The Eastern and Russian Orthodox Churches also refused to implement the change. Russia, in fact, did not realign their calendar until the Revolution in 1917. In the rest of the world, who didn’t follow the Julian calendar in the first place, it wasn’t an issue. It didn’t take long, however, for the practicalities of business and government to force the issue. Over the next two centuries, the Protestant countries made the shift. Great Britain was one of the last Western European countries to make this change, with it going into effect in September 1752. Because of the inconsistency of dates across borders for those two centuries, it is common to see two dates on documents, both the Old-Style Julian calendar (marked OS) and the New-Style Gregorian calendar (marked NS).
If there was any doubt about the worldwide adoption of the Gregorian calendar, it ended when Britian made the shift. With their colonial possessions, they governed nearly a quarter of the entire globe; doing business with Britain meant following their calendar. It was not until after World War I that the Gregorian calendar became the standard civic calendar worldwide; they had no choice: the new way of the world depended on it.
[1] The West is a term that is out of date, but I haven’t come up with a better way to explain it.