It’s a little late to throw a fit about the whole “purist” argument about the first day of the millenium, but wouldn’t the millenium be celebrate 2,000 years to the day from the first day of the first millenium? Then wouldn’t the first day technically be March 25th? So the first day of the millenium was March 25th, right? We just changed our date of drunken celebration to the first of January.
Now this has nothing to do with the ten day discrepancy, but rather the original “first” day of the first year of the first millenium (March 25th, 1). 2000 years later would have been March 25th, 2001 (that was when the world was technically “supposed to” have ended, right?). Any insight?
Quick summary: when Jesus was born, New Year’s was on January 1st, just as it is today. During the Middle Ages, various Western European countries switched to using March 25 as New Year’s instead, but eventually they all switched back to the Roman January 1st. So the whole March 25th thing was a wash-out, millenniarly speaking.
Apart from the simple fact that the calendar has been manipulated so often throughout the last millennia (reform, this theory about three hundred years completely fictitious with Charlemagne never having exitsed, and so on) you can not fix this or that day as the “real” beginning of the millennium.
I really don’t know what to say about some parts of Schnitte’s post. But as to the more comprehensible part…
January 1st, Year 1 in the Gregorian calendar is a completely specified and unambigous date. While this calendar was not proposed until centuries after that date, that is completely immaterial.
January 1st, Year 1 in the Gregorian calendar is obviously not the same as January 1st, Year 1 in the Julian calendar (or any of its Eastern rites variations) and on and on.
No amount of real or imaginary calendar monkeying prior to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar has any effect whatsoever on when January 1st, Year 1 (Greg.) was. It was and will always be the exact same date. Hence the beginning dates of millenia under this calendar have always been and will always be the same.
And since I can trace my lineage to Charlemagne, does this make me non-existent?
In Christ’s time the Romans used a calendar in which the year started on the vernal equinox, the day which is traditionally regarded in the United States as the first day of spring. The early Christians thereafter nudged the start of the new year up a few days to March 25th. This was because Christmas is celebrated on December 25th, and so The Annunciation–which resulted in the conception of Christ–would have taken place nine months earlier.
Interestingly, it was not considered important that the start of the new year did not coincide with the start of a month. Thus, one would write, say “March 24, 1600” and, the next day, “March 25, 1601”.
Great Britain and some other Protestant countries were very slow in adjusting to the innovation of the Gregorian Calendar, which arbitrarily set New Year’s on January 1st. This accounts for an old riddle: George Washington was born in February and Martha Washington was born in November of the same year. Who was older? Martha: with New Year’s Day in March, November came before February.
Another Gregorian/Julian oddity: The former USSR’s Red October celebration was actually held in November because czarist Russia didn’t observe the Gregorian Calendar; i.e., it was still October in Russia when the rest of the world was in November.
Another bit of trivia - there is a financial calendar in Britain whose first day is April 6! When GB converted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, they had had 1700 as a leap year in the Julian calendar. Therefore they needed to adjust by an additional day. So March 26 + 12 = April 6.
You mean the Charlemagne-never-existed part?
It’s a heavily disputed theory one historian named Heribert Illig came up with. Many consider him mad and I don’t know what to really think about what he says; it’s mainly based on architectural anachronisms he claims to have found in biulings from that period.
Check the web, or (if you’re willing to invest some money) get one of the several books he published.
