[Editor's note: Teo returns today for more calendar blogging. For more of his superb writing, check out his blogs: here and here.]
On this day in 1582, nothing happened in Spain, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania, or most of Italy. It’s not that this was an uneventful time in those places; far from it. This date, however, was right in the middle of the block of days eliminated from the calendar by the papal bull Inter gravissimas, issued a few months earlier, which recalibrated the civil calendar to bring the date of celebration of Easter back in line with where it had been at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 by declaring that the day after October 4 would be October 15. Since the bull was issued by Pope Gregory XIII,the resulting calendar is known as the Gregorian Calendar.
This is the calendar we still use today, of course, but it took a while for that to happen. The papal decree only took effect immediately in the parts of Italy where he was also the secular ruler, and the only other rulers to adopt the change on the intended date were Philip II of Spain and Portugal, Stefan Bathory of Poland-Lithuania, and the leaders of various small Italian states, all of them staunch Catholics. Other Catholic rulers, such as Henry III of France and the Austrian Habsburgs, adopted the new calendar within the next couple of years, while most Protestant countries resisted the change for more than a century. In the countries that did not accept the change originally, October 9 occurred as scheduled, and things happened on it. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland-Lithuania, however, October 19 occurred instead, and things happened then.
7 comments
October 9, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Vance Maverick
Are there any contemporary accounts of the lacuna — this or one of the later transitions to the modern calendar? Did anyone write, “How strange it feels never to have had an Oct. 9!”?
October 9, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Colin
How do medieval and early-mod european historians deal with this, if you’re trying to follow anything that’s geographically dispersed? Is there some standard guide to help line up dating in different archives? One could imagine even two people in the same place using different dates.
October 9, 2008 at 3:39 pm
teofilo
The usual convention is to describe Julian dates as “Old Style” or “OS”; you can see an example of this in the post titles of my 1692 blog. Other than that, dating generally just follows the conventions of the country that is the major focus of the research. People in the same place would be unlikely to use different dates, since when the change would come it was generally pretty abrupt and final.
October 9, 2008 at 4:19 pm
dana
I read once as a kid that people rioted because they thought the Pope was stealing the days from their lives. Older me suspects that that isn’t true, but younger me really hoped it was.
October 9, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Ryan F
There’s a great bit in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon in which a bunch of people “colonize” the missing 11 days when England changes over (1752).
October 10, 2008 at 5:27 am
chris y
I read once as a kid that people rioted because they thought the Pope was stealing the days from their lives.
There were apparently riots in England, when they finally got around to changing in 1752, under the slogan “Give us back our eleven days!” (The calendars had diverged a bit more by then.) But I believe this was more about being charged a full quarter’s rent for 81 days’ use than supposing that the dastardly authorities had actually stolen the time.
October 16, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Imaginary Days « Sunlit Water
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