Documents That Changed the Way We Live Read online

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  Gregorian Calendar/Gutenberg Indulgence

  a papal bull, known by the name Inter gravissimas

  issued by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome

  now housed in the Vatican Secret Archives

  1582

  an indulgence

  printed in Mainz, Germany, almost certainly in the

  print shop of Johannes Gutenberg

  now housed at the University of Manchester

  1454

  What day is it?

  That’s a simple and common enough question, with a simple enough answer. As I write this, it’s Wednesday; your mileage may vary. We all lose track of what day of the week it is from time to time, ditto with the day of the month. It’s much less common not to know what month it is, let alone the year—if somebody asks you that seriously, it’s a good sign they’ve just emerged from a coma or you’re in a time-travel movie.

  Here’s a trickier question, which you may not ever have considered: “Why is today’s date today’s date?” This also has a simple answer: “Because the calendar/my phone/my computer/everybody says so,” and for most purposes that’s sufficient. There’s a much deeper reason, though, which dictates why the calendar says so and who got to say what the calendar says and how.

  Today, we know that a year has 365 days, sort of. Thousands of years ago, though, knowing how long a year was, when the sun would rise over a particular hill, when a star would be in the right position, really mattered, so that you knew when it was time to plant or bundle up for the winter or carry out a particular ritual.

  The length of a modern month is a little trickier; some are 30 days, some are 31, February’s indecisive, but in ancient times, this was actually easier. Particularly with the degree of imprecision in all of the examples I’ve just described. You can see a month right up in the sky, as the moon waxes and wanes over the course of 29 days or so. In fact, there’s a prehistoric bone fragment etched with what might be a lunar cycle, potentially one of the earliest examples of purposeful writing we have. Days are simpler still; although the hours of sunlight vary in length over the course of a year and that effect is more pronounced the farther you get from the equator, the earth rotates on its axis regularly once every 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds. Give or take.

  The problem is, even though we can reckon the days and the months and the years independently from observation, trying to make them work together in a coordinated, structured way, is really hard. The year isn’t exactly 365 days; it’s more like 365¼—more precisely, 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. And the lunar cycle of 29 days, which is really closer to 29½ and changes over the course of the year, doesn’t divide evenly into either 365 or 365¼. The moon and the sun don’t play all that well together, calendrically speaking, which leads to some serious challenges if you’re trying to build a way of recording time that takes account of both the moon and the sun. Today, we take for granted that all this has been sorted out, but it’s a subtle, difficult, and important problem, potentially as important as your eternal soul, and the question is: Who gets to decide?

  Trying to figure out a way to make sense of the years and the months goes back to the dawn of human history. The Egyptians had a functioning calendar at least 6,000 years ago, and Ptolemy III added a leap day every four years in 238 BCE; the current Mayan calendar is at least 2,000 years old. Julius Caesar took a crack at solving the calendar problem and got it very nearly right, in the process giving us several month names that have persisted for two millennia, modestly naming July for himself.

  That calendar worked just fine for quite a while, though over the centuries, a growing sense emerged, among people who paid attention to such things, that something about it wasn’t quite right. There were a number of attempts to understand and fix this over the centuries in the West, but as learning and science faded during the Dark Ages, those got weaker and feebler, while others, particularly the Islamic world, continued to make progress.

  In Christian Europe, the primary motivator for fixing the calendar was figuring out the right date for Easter. Caesar’s calendar, good as it was, assumed a year that was just a shade too long, by about 11 minutes. That doesn’t sound like much, but as the decades march on, it adds up, to the tune of about a day every 130 years. Easter, ever since the Council of Nicaea in 325, has been celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which is complicated enough, but if your year is too long, eventually the vernal equinox starts to creep earlier and earlier. Get the equinox wrong and Easter is wrong, and celebrating Easter on the wrong day, as people were increasingly concerned could happen, could imperil your chances for salvation.

  The process by which this got resolved is a fascinating mélange of the medieval and the modern. Things were finally coming to a head in the late 16th century, as Pope Gregory XIII, who devoted much of his papacy to reforming the church, sending missionaries far and wide and furthering the Catholic faith, realized that something had to be done. The modern part, sounding very familiar to our ears, was the commission he convened in the 1570s to come up with a solution. They made a report with a series of recommendations to correct the drift that had accumulated over sixteen centuries and to prevent the calendar from going astray in the future. Those recommendations were sent to universities and the crowned heads of Europe for commentary. Which they got—dozens and dozens of responses came in, many simply signing off on the proposals, some suggesting revisions, and others thundering disapproval on grounds both scientific and religious.

  One idea that got some traction was a calendar that would simply count the consecutive days from a fixed historical point, eliminating any concern for months or years. Straightforward, if impractical for everyday life, this Julian date calendar has been adopted by astronomers and some computer operating systems for its ease of use, counting from noon on January 1, 4713 BCE. If you want to be ready in case this catches on popularly, the Julian date for January 1, 2020, will be 2458849.

  In any event, the feedback was collected, tweaks were made, and here’s where the medieval part comes in. On February 24, 1582, Gregory XIII, Pontifex Maximus, one imagines in all his regal splendor, signed a bull—from the Latin bulla, the clay or lead seal attached to a document to authenticate it. Similar devices go back to the very beginnings of writing and recording. Papal bulls by tradition take their titles from the first two words in Latin, in this case “Inter gravissimas,” “among the most serious tasks of our pastoral office. . . .” It was posted on the doors of St. Peter’s on March 1, then around the city, with copies also sent to every Catholic country by papal ambassadors. Even more medievally, it prohibited unauthorized publication of the calendar or associated documents on pain of fine or excommunication.

  It established the system we still use today, now called the Gregorian calendar, with a year of 365 days, a leap year with an extra day every four years, except those years that are multiples of 100 not also divisible by 400, so 1900 wasn’t a leap year, and 2100 won’t be, but 2000 was. It realigned the calendar; established January 1 as the first day of the year (it had previously been the vernal equinox); and, most critically, corrected the overshoot of the previous calendar by decreeing that October 4, 1582, would be followed by October 15, eliminating, almost literally with the stroke of a pen, 10 days.

  Picture for a moment the kind of confusion that move would produce today. What would be done about deadlines, taxes, interest payments, shipping schedules? Birthdays? Prison sentences? Saints’ days? A riot erupted in Frankfurt, based on the belief that the pope was trying to steal days away from people’s lives.

  The new calendar was not an immediate, universal hit. To be blunt, the papacy wasn’t what it used to be, so what might have been accomplished by unquestioned fiat just a century or so previously now took some work to achieve. A few reliably Catholic countries—Spain, Portugal, Poland, Italy—went along more or less immediately. Others moved a little more deliberately; France and Hungary took
a few years longer. Then it started to lose momentum and languished; most of Germany didn’t adopt the Gregorian system until about 1700, England not until 1752, and other parts of the world much later, including Russia in 1917 and China not fully until Mao in 1949. For that matter, Judaism and Islam have never used solar calendars. The Jewish calendar employs 12 months of 29 or 30 days, adding a leap month when needed (such a year is called Shanah Me’uberet, literally “pregnant year”) to at least partially align with the solar year. The Islamic year is purely lunar, consisting of about 354 days, and thus continually floats against the Gregorian year, explaining why the holy month of Ramadan comes a few days earlier in the Gregorian system each year.

  Setting aside the rest of the world, this seems like a curiously long time for such a change to become established in Europe. To be sure, communication in those days was substantially slower than today, able to rely on nothing faster than the horse or carrier pigeons, so it’s not as though Gregory could just send this out as a PDF attachment by e-mail. And yes, this was a major change with ramifications for many aspects of everyday life for people, governments, and institutions of all kinds, which would require time and effort to implement. But still—why does it take over a century to make its way to places like England, Sweden, and Germany?

  To answer that, we need to consider another document from an even more well-known source, though not the most well-known document from that source. Let’s travel from 1582 Rome to Mainz, in the Rhine Valley, in 1452, when it is a free city of the Holy Roman Empire. More importantly for our story, at this time, it’s a place of second chances.

  _______

  I imagine we’ve all wanted a real get-out-of-jail-free card at one point or another after we’ve done something we regret or gotten ourselves into a situation we’d just as soon undo. (A document with its own history: the actual “Get Out of Jail Free” card comes from the board game Monopoly, first marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935, with roots back to The Landlord’s Game developed in 1903 by Elizabeth Magie as a teaching tool on the evils of monopolization. Centuries earlier, though, the first British lottery in 1567 offered all ticketholders “freedom from arrest for all crimes other than murder, felonies, piracy, or treason.”) People are often willing to forgive and sometimes to forget, but the idea of a magic ticket that could wipe the slate clean is very attractive indeed. In the right circumstances, in fact, this isn’t out of the question. You’ve got to mean it, you’ve got to do something to earn it, and you’ve got to be Catholic, but there is a way to get a redo, and for a long time a simple piece of paper, or parchment, would do the trick. Something like that not only can buy you out of a heap of sinning; in sufficient quantities it can also lead to the transformation of an entire continent. And here we introduce one of the great names of the last millennium: Johannes Gutenberg.

  Gutenberg. Bible. We’re so used to hearing those together, that many people likely haven’t thought much about what else he might have been up to. Yes, he invented printing using movable type in Europe, everybody knows that; maybe somewhat fewer know he pioneered oil-based inks or the wooden screw printing press.

  Gutenberg himself is, in large part, a cipher. There are large chunks of his life we know nothing about, leading some to wonder if it was really him at the wheel, so to speak. We know his father worked at a mint and he had experience as a goldsmith; we also know that he was either a terrible businessman or incredibly unlucky. Or both. He and others wanted to make money by selling mirrors for use in a holy festival, only to have it postponed by a year because of flood or perhaps plague. Whatever the reason, stuck with a bunch of unsellable mirrors, he now says he has a great idea—and it’s not clear to this day where that idea came from—that will turn around their fortunes. In effect, then, the development of printing using movable type in Europe, one of the most profound innovations in Western history, which still reverberates to this very day—was for all intents and purposes, Plan B.

  He started work on the Bible in 1452, amid a series of loans from one Johann Fust (who later sued him, claiming no interest was paid and the money misused), who bankrolled the scheme. Within three years, the time it would take to produce one Bible by hand, the work is done. A total of 180 were printed, of which 48 complete examples are known to have survived. They’re trophies for collectors and institutions; even having a single page, or “leaf,” is a point of pride. (Word to the wise: This sort of collection envy can be quite serious. According to a census of locations of Gutenberg Bibles, while there are four on the island of Manhattan, there are none in Canada, and some Canadian bibliophiles and antiquarians can get a bit cranky about that, as I learned once the hard way. Best not to bring it up.)

  It appears that two presses were used in Gutenberg’s workshop, with different sets of type, as many as 100,000 separate pieces in all, along with paper and the skins of 3,200 animals for the 40 vellum copies. They were even customizable; if you bought one, you could have your own decoration added in spaces intentionally left blank for just that purpose.

  Except there’s more to the story. The Bible is universally known as his masterwork, but while that was in the works, there was badly needed cash to be made in the meantime to help keep the place going, producing schoolbooks, calendars, and especially, in the lucrative business of printing indulgences. These had been around for centuries in manuscript form, an opportunity for the faithful to atone and have their sins remitted by, say, good works, making a pilgrimage, fasting, going on Crusade . . . or a little gold. The indulgence itself is just a form, boilerplate we’d say today, with spaces for the name, date, and seller. Take that to your confessor, in a state of grace, and you’ve gotten yourself or a loved one out of Purgatory. This was big business for everybody involved, for the printers certainly, but mainly for the church; print runs ran into the thousands. In one case at least 190,000 were printed.

  There is some evidence that Gutenberg produced indulgences as early as 1452, though the earliest one to survive is from a series printed in 1454—the earliest Western printed document with a date. That one was created to raise money for the defense of Cyprus from the Turks, who had just taken Constantinople the previous year. Gutenberg’s legacy is obvious and well rehearsed—the printing processes he pioneered spread across the continent within decades, helping to nourish the emerging Renaissance and Enlightenment that led Europe out of the Middle Ages.

  Both the indulgence and the Bible were printed with type that make them look very much like their handwritten, manuscript predecessors; today, it’s referred to as blackletter printing, connoting its weight and density. That decision makes sense; if you want something new to be adopted, making it look familiar, as much like an old and established version or product as possible, can be very helpful. This is an example of a “skeumorph,” and they’re still around. That’s why word processors still use “cut” and “paste” metaphors, and why cell phone cameras often make a clicking sound like a shutter when there’s no mechanism at work at all. Or why electronic books, so far, try so hard to resemble their print counterparts.

  It wasn’t long before new type styles and formats and illustrations made an appearance. Those first Bibles also have no page numbers, indentations, or paragraphs; these devices we take so for granted in books today were yet to be widely adopted. Books printed in the 15th century are called incunabula, from the Latin for “cradle,” which is most apt. Gutenberg and the other early printers were responsible for more than the birth of a new way of making copies faster. They were at the very beginning of a long road of figuring out what a printed book or a printed anything would be and what it would look like, and over the centuries, those have developed in ways that medieval copyists couldn’t have imagined. Printing also led to higher levels of education and literacy, movements to censor uncomfortable works, and the development of national literatures and cultures.

  Some 60 years later, though, and about 300 miles to the northeast in Wittenberg, a German priest and theologian got fed up with the l
atest abuses of the indulgence system, now made so easy by the new technology. This time it was to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s. He was fed up enough to compose a letter outlining his points, all 95 of them, to his bishop. Those “theses,” we think intended for private discussion, went viral. They quickly got printed and disseminated, though we don’t know how or by whom. So were later demands for change in sermons and broadsides—a format that helped to lead to the development of newspapers—as well as Bibles in German, which helped to coalesce the evolving language. Oh, yeah, and it kick-started the Reformation, making Martin Luther another central figure of the previous millennium.

  So by 1582, another 65 years later, as Gregory tries to get his calendar reform edict on track, the Counter-Reformation is moving into high gear less than 20 years after the Council of Trent condemned Protestantism as heresy. This didn’t help matters in trying to get, say, Lutheran Germany to go along with anything the pope wanted, much less slicing days away from people’s lives. As a result, this became a highly political and politicized document, not well taken in Protestant Europe. That first sentence, from which Inter gravissimas comes, in particular, was a problem, since those “most serious duties” it refers to are explicitly following up on the dictates of the Council of Trent.

  In thinking about all this, one muses, who could accomplish this today? There are proposals out there, earnest and well meaning, that would give us, say, thirteen months of 28 days each, with an extra holiday day to make 365. Or the World Calendar, four quarters of 91 days, each one starting on a Sunday, with additional days as necessary that aren’t days of a week (“Worldsday” for one, a yearend holiday that follows Saturday, December 30, and is followed by Sunday, January 1.)