Conscious Choice: Y1K

January 1999

Y1K

by Victoria Lord

On January 1st the ball fell in Times Square (I presume, since I’m writing this article in December); the year turned over, and the Y2K problem crept a little closer to our lives. Across the country old calendars were torn down and replaced with 1999 models. Computers, microwaves, VCRs, and watches ticked over a single digit to register the change in year. Although we often find it hard to make the mental leap into a new year, consistently misdating our checks, we have only to glance around us to confirm the date.

A thousand years ago the year’s change was almost invisible to the average person. Most people alive in the year 999 A.D. were illiterate. They could not have read a calendar if they had had one. Only a few scholars and court officials might be aware of the year and even they would disagree with each other over the true date. How could such confusion reign?

Actually, the wonder is how we ever reached a consensus on the modern calendar. Of course, without such a consensus our lives, governed almost wholly by the clock, would not be possible. The modern world of international commerce depends upon a common calendar.

A thousand years ago life was dominated by agriculture. Years were virtually irrelevant; what mattered was the season. Peasants needed only to know when it was time to till the soil, when to plant, and when to reap. For this they did not need a calendar; the natural cycle of the seasons provided the year’s structure. While we see time as linear, with one year progressing toward the next, the average peasant would have seen time as cyclical, a series of four seasons (three, in parts of southern Europe) endlessly repeating itself.

Years might be distinguished from each other only by discrete events. One village might refer to the year the church burned while another might remember the same year as the time the barley crop failed. Other than these distinctive events, there was no real reason for the average person to differentiate between years.

A few people, however, did mark the progress of years. Rabbis, priests, monks, and some court officials used dates on documents such as letters, annals, and contracts. Yet even these educated people would have used different calendars and methods of calculating the year.

The ancient Jewish calendar was used throughout the Middle Ages not only by rabbis but also by Jewish scholars and merchants. The Jewish calendar is lunar, meaning it relies on the moon to calculate the time of year. Unfortunately, the lunar year is slightly shorter than the solar year (approximately 10 days shorter). To correct this problem, the Jewish calendar inserts extra months every few years.

Because it is one of the oldest calendars in the world, the Jewish calendar experienced the year 999 almost 5,000 years ago. By the time the year we consider 999 rolled around, the Jewish calendar was up to the year 4759. In other words, the millennium would not really have been a millennium for medieval Jews. In addition, the Jewish New Year falls, not on January 1st, but during the early autumn, on Rosh Hashana. This year, Jews celebrated the advent of the year 5759 on Rosh Hashana.

The Muslim world also used a lunar calendar. Still in use throughout the Arabic world, this calendar, like its Jewish counterpart, inserts extra months to correct for the discrepancy between the lunar and solar year. Since the Muslim world dates time from the migration of the prophet Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, the current year appears as 1419 in Muslim calendars. For the Arabic world of the Middle Ages, the year 999 was actually the year 419, not a particularly significant number at all.

Even in Christian Europe, viewing the year 999 as a watershed year is problematic. The dominant calendar in Christian Europe was the old Roman calendar, usually referred to as the Julian calendar. Formulated by Julius Caesar in about 46 B.C., this solar calendar employed a year of 365 days and six hours.

By the 16th century, the year had slid so that the spring equinox occurred on March 11th instead of the 21st. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decided that ten days needed to be dropped from the calendar. Catholic Europe adopted this Gregorian calendar almost immediately. Protestant England, however, did not accept the new calendar until the mid-18th century. Greek and Russian Orthodox churches used the Julian calendar until 1923.

Not only did Christians disagree about which calendar to use, the first date of the new year varied widely from region to region. Christmas, Easter, or even the Annunciation were used as the first day of the year. At any given time, the actual numerical year might not be clear. Sometimes, scribes found it easier to identify the year by the regnant pope, king, or emperor. In other words, the chronicler would write, "the third year of Pope Gregory" or "the second year of King Louis." While this appears confusing, it might actually have been clearer to contemporaries than using the idiosyncratic number associated with a given year.

What all this confusion means is that a thousand years ago, when the year turned from 998 to 999, almost no one noticed. Few, if any, people anticipated the year 1000 with its millennarian associations. For the Arabic and Jewish worlds, the next millennium was a long way off. Even Christians, trained to believe in the return of Christ and the approaching end of the world, would have seen little or no reason to worry. For the most part, they were not even aware of the change in year.

The popular image of a European peasantry mad with fear at the approach of the millennium grew out of a romantic, wrongheaded view of the medieval world. It’s important to remember that much of Europe was not, in fact, Christian at this time. Spain was still dominated by its Muslim and Jewish population; Christians there were greatly outnumbered. In Northern Europe the Vikings of Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark had yet to relinquish their belief in the Norse Gods. Large portions of nominally Christian areas such as Germany, France, and even Italy retained innumerable pagan practices and beliefs. While it would be fun to think that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the end of the world was near in 999 A.D., it’s just not true.

It is true, however, that throughout the Middle Ages — not just at the millennium — some small groups, often called millennarian or chiliastic, believed the world would soon end. It is these groups, with their dramatic pronouncements of the end of the world, that attract attention. Believers claimed the world would soon be destroyed by famine, plague, and war. Advocating repentance, they urged people to abandon their lives of commerce and agriculture to wander the countryside, flagellating themselves. Such groups cropped up in different regions at different times; indeed they still exist.

Every few years reporters uncover sects or individuals who sincerely believe that the world will end soon. Many give an actual date and time when the end will come. Interest in these groups usually wanes once the predicted date has come and gone without anything happening.

As we enter 1999 and begin to anticipate the 21st century, we should remember that all these doomsayers have been mistaken. The world did not end a thousand years ago, and is unlikely to end anytime soon. Y2K will come and go, time will pass, and the world will turn.

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