The Calendar (14 page)

Soon after the elderly Cassiodorus published his textbook on
computus
in 562 the eastern emperor Justinian died, leaving his ambition to re-establish the Western empire unrealized. His efforts ultimately proved disastrous to the West, as he and his immediate successors found themselves overextended and unable to fend off fresh assaults by Lombards, Bavarians, Saxons and other Germanic tribes. Even worse, these previously obscure invaders were far less Romanized than the Germans Justinian had destroyed,
barbari
who had long associated with Rome on the border of the old empire. With homelands deep in the hinterlands of Europe, the newcomers were far more rapacious and thorough in their ravaging and in establishing tribal-style governments. The Byzantines retained a toehold in Ravenna and in other parts of Italy for several more decades, and remained a presence for centuries to come. But in the wake of Justinian’s juggernaut, most of the West collapsed again into near anarchy, with the only remnant of central authority residing in the Church.

Boethius’s execution in 524 had signalled the instability of an age that had little interest in intellectual pursuits. But the death of Cassiodorus sometime in the 580s--presumably safe behind his monastic walls--symbolized the final gasp of an ordered world where time had mattered and calendars framed how most people lived, worked and worshipped. With the West now a political and intellectual wasteland, people had little need for formal civil calendars, with most reverting back to a preliterate age when farmers, sailors and merchants measured time as the Greeks did in Hesiod’s days--in broad cycles where events were triggered by the bloom of a flower or the flight north or south of flocks of birds. For much of Rome’s illiterate population this had always been the way time was measured. But now, as Boethius lamented in his
Consolation,
the entire culture seemed to be sliding into an abyss:

For who gives in and turns his eye
Back to the darkness from the sky,
Loses while he looks below
All that up with him may go.

Time had finally come to a full stop. Or at least it seemed this way, though remarkably a few monks and scholars over the coming centuries would keep the mechanism of calendar time moving, if barely. Indeed, the story of the calendar now shifts to one of the greatest of these medieval lights, a man who lived not in Rome or some other ancient centre of culture, but on a shadowy island on the edge of what was to these Europeans the known world.

6 Monks Dream While Counting on Their Fingers

It is said that the confusion in those days was such that Easter was sometimes kept twice in one year.
Bede, AD 731

Under an ancient gnarled oak tree in south-west England the first Archbishop of Canterbury held a meeting sometime in the late 590s--about a decade after Cassiodorus died in Italy--to settle a local dispute over Easter.

The archbishop, a Greek named Augustine,* was trying to convince a delegation of Celts from the western side of the island to abandon their system of calculating the Easter date, which deviated from St Peter’s. Isolated since the last imperial legion abandoned the island in 410, these Celts had been Christianized late in the Roman era only to find themselves cut loose soon after from both the empire and the Church in Rome. Since then waves of invasion by Saxons and Angles had driven these ancient Britons into what is now Wales, where they had joined with other Christian Celts from Ireland to form an independent church, with its own ideas about dating the Resurrection.

*This is not Augustine of Hippo

Augustine, dispatched to Britain by the pope to evangelize the Saxons and to Romanize the Celts, insisted that God was on his side. To prove it he reportedly performed a miracle under that old oak tree--restoring sight to a blind man.

The Celts were impressed but unconvinced. ‘Whereupon Augustine ... is said to have answered with a threat that was also a prophecy,’ writes the British monk Bede (672-735), recounting the story a century later, ‘telling the Britons that their intransigence would one day cause their destruction.’

Sure enough, wrote Bede, a few years later a brutal Saxon king named Aethelfrith (d. 616) ‘raised a great army and made a great slaughter of the faithless Britons.’ The dead included 1200 unarmed monks massacred near their monastery at Bangor. That King Aethelfrith was a butcher intent on expanding his tiny kingdom at the expense of Celts; and that he was a pagan who cared nothing about Easter, hardly mattered to Bede and other Christians siding with Rome in this murky, little-known corner of Europe. For them the massacre was the fulfilment of Augustine’s prophecy against these ‘faithless Britons, who had rejected the offer of eternal salvation, would incur the punishment of temporal destruction’.

And what was the difference between the two churches’ dates for Easter?

A single day.

You see, the Celts placed the date of Christ’s crucifixion on a Thursday instead of a Friday. This meant their Easter had to fall (according to the Jewish calendar) between 14 and 20 Nisan, while Rome said the date must fall between 15 and 21 Nisan--a difference so minor that it is hard to imagine anyone quibbling to the point of bloodshed. Especially given the fact that Bede himself, one of the most brilliant time reckoners in the Middle Ages, knew something that almost no one else did in this murky era: that Rome’s official dating of Easter was itself in error, because the Julian calendar it was based on was flawed.

Bede was almost sixty years old in 731 when he published his account of the prophecy and slaughter in his
Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
A monk, teacher and choirmaster at the Saxon-era monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow in Northumbria, he lived far away from the centres of culture and learning (such as they were) in his age--which makes his accomplishments all the more astonishing. For without ever leaving the neighbourhood of his twin monasteries, Bede wrote some sixty books on subjects ranging from commentaries on the Bible to works on geography, history, mathematics and the calendar. He penned detailed letters describing the concept of the leap year, his calculations about the supposed motion of the sun around the earth, and his measurements of equinoxes. He even came up with the name
calculator
to describe a time reckoner, and later
catholicus calculator--
’Catholic calculator’.

‘I was born on the lands of this monastery,’ Bede wrote in his
History.
‘I have spent all the remainder of my life in this monastery and devoted myself entirely to the study of Scriptures. And while I have observed the regular discipline and sung the choir offices daily in church, my chief delight has always been in study, teaching and writing.’ Handed over to the abbot of the monastery by his apparently upper-class family at the age of 7, he was educated by the monks, became a church deacon at 19, and was ordained a priest at 30--all at Wearmouth and Jarrow.

Built in the latter part of the seventh century, Wearmouth was founded shortly after Bede’s birth in 672 on the coast of England near where the River Wear pours into the North Sea--a country of rolling hills, limestone and sandstone outcrops, low mountains, and ruined Roman walls and towns. The monks built a companion monastery nine or ten years later at Jarrow, a few miles away on the mudflats at the confluence of the Don and Tyne Rivers. Both began as Saxon structures of timber and straw until one of the project’s sponsors, a monk of noble birth named Benedict Biscop (c. 628-690), decided the buildings should look like the stone churches he had seen during his travels in Gaul. With Hadrian’s ruined wall and an old Roman fort nearby, stone was readily available for pilfering, though Benedict Biscop had to bring over skilled labour from Gaul because Britain lacked master builders and stone masons. He also brought across the channel glassmakers who glazed the windows and made glass receptacles.

Benedict filled his buildings with a rich assortment of imported altar vessels, paintings and carvings--and with a library. Taking five trips to Rome, Benedict brought back ‘a great mass of . . . books’, including calendars--among them almost certainly Dionysius Exiguus’s charts and calculations, and the latest martyrologies (lists of saints’ days and other holy dates). The exact contents of Benedict’s library is unknown, though it seems to have included a copy of a Bible used and illustrated by Cassiodorus, known as the
Codex Grandior
,; as well as theological works, a smattering of Greek philosophy and mathematics, and Cassiodorus’s encyclopaedias of ancient knowledge.

It was an impressive library for its day, though at best it contained some four to five hundred works.* This compares to perhaps two to three
thousand
volumes Cassiodorus had access to a century and a half earlier in his library, which itself was profoundly diminished from the vast collections of antiquity, including Alexandria’s library and its four hundred thousand manuscripts. Imagine what this meant to the inquiries of the second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who had a mountain of information at his disposal, compared to Bede. Working six hundred years later in his cold monastic cell at Jarrow, Bede had to make do with just a few treasured vellum scrolls tucked into wooden boxes to keep them from rotting in the dampness common to Northumbria.

*Bede cites about 175 sources in his writings.

Likewise, Bede and his countrymen were only vaguely aware of events beyond the frigid, turbulent waters of the
Mare Germanicum
, now known as the North Sea. It probably took several years, for instance, for Northumbrians to find out that the mother church in Rome had finally broken off its titular allegiance to Constantinople, which had claimed authority over the former imperial provinces of the West as the inheritor to Rome--a claim that had become increasingly unrealistic after the failed attempt of Justinian to reconquer the West. In part this break came about because of another seismic event happening far from the British Isles--the sudden appearance of Islam in the mid-seventh century, which eventually forced the Byzantines to recall their legions from central Italy. Following Mohammed’s teaching and his founding of the first mosque at Medina in 622--year 1 in the Moslem calendar--the armies of Islam had swept like a firestorm to seize Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt by 651; North Africa by 702; and Spain and parts of Asia Minor by 711, when Bede was about 38 years old. By then the stunned Byzantines had lost nearly their entire empire, and were fortunate to have held on to their heartland in western Asia Minor, coastal Greece and Sicily.

Meanwhile the politics in the West remained confused, with shifting tribes battling, conquering and being conquered. Lombards reigned for the moment in northern Italy. East of the Danube lived pagan Slavs, who had gradually enveloped much of the former provinces of Rome in northern Greece and in the Balkans. Closer to Britain, the Franks had dominated what is now France and Germany for over a century; in 732, a year after Bede published his
History,
the Merovingian kings of France decisively beat back the Moslem invaders of Spain as they attempted to roll into southern France.

In faraway Britain this was at best a distant rumble, though it’s likely that Bede himself felt far more isolated intellectually than geographically. Indeed, he lived in a time when even monks in monasteries were turning away from all but a crude understanding of basic scholarship, either because they lacked manuscripts and teachers or because they had no use for knowledge they considered ungodly and profane. Most aspired to follow Cassiodorus’s admonition to learn, though few succeeded beyond a clumsy understanding of basic concepts. In France one senior cleric complained that many monks and churchmen were completely illiterate. At Jarrow Bede himself had to translate the Lord’s Prayer from Latin to the local vernacular so that his brothers could understand the Latin words they spoke when they prayed.

Scholarship in many places was reduced to learning a few key subjects by rote and devoting one’s life to copying ancient manuscripts, which most monks held in awe as artefacts of a glorious past, but few understood. A number of monks lost their eyesight scratching out copies in the semi-darkness of their stone cells, since candles were not allowed for fear fire would consume the ancient parchments. ‘He who does not turn up the earth with the plough,’ a sixth-century monk admonished his brothers, ‘ought to write parchments with his fingers.’ Many monks did not stop with mere writing, but also adorned their manuscripts with stunningly beautiful ornaments, calligraphy and illustrations: glittering gold-leafed letters and painted flowers and vines; masterly images of winged angels, fiery demons, tortured saints and Christ enthroned in heaven. Some of the most dazzling illuminations appear on medieval calendars, which typically list month-by-month dates and saints’ days, and are lavishly illustrated with scenes of peasants gathering hay in June, nobles hunting and drinking wine in August and peasants huddling beside hearth fires as snow blankets the out-of-doors in February.

If few of these monks thought deeply about the knowledge in these lovely books, fewer still came up with their own interpretations about time reckoning or anything else in the scientific realm. This makes a genuine scholar such as Bede all the rarer. In fact, the only other truly notable time reckoner in these dark days of the early Middle Ages was Isidore of Seville (560-636), a Roman ecclesiastic and scholar living in another distant outpost of the former empire: Visigoth Spain. The Archbishop of Seville, Isidore is known for eradicating Arianism among the Visigoths and stifling other so-called heresies in Spain--and for compiling a great encyclopaedia along the lines of Cassiodorus’s, a
summa
of universal knowledge as it existed in this sunny, hot corner of Europe. Preserving numerous fragments of classical works that otherwise would have been lost, he described the fundamentals of general astronomy and mathematics, including a section on time reckoning and the Easter cycle that would be used by Bede and other time reckoners over the next few centuries.