“The question of dates was so controversial that every ecumenical council held a commission to match up the calendar,” says Carabias. “It’s perhaps Salamanca’s most important mathematical contribution, because no one had ever proposed such a precise measurement before.” A 1578 copy of the calendar change proposal made by Salamanca University in 1515. “A refined and unusual astronomical calculation,” says Carabias. With a view to the future, the University of Salamanca also proposed a new system, which would omit one leap day every 152 years. The equinox would return to March 21, and serve as reference for setting the dates of the major Christian feasts, while Christ’s resurrection would always be celebrated in early spring. Another proposal involved eliminating leap days over a period of 44 years, which would mean a more gradual adjustment without any sudden jump in dates. The Salamanca scholars calculated that the difference between the calendar and real time was a little more than 10 days, and proposed to remove 11 days from a month. In 1515, Pope Leo X and King Ferdinand the Catholic asked the University of Salamanca, as well as other universities and scholars, for a report on how to adjust the calendar. But none of them came up with a convincing solution that would reconcile human time with the year as defined by the skies. The Salamanca solutionįor centuries, the experts racked their brains and devised calendars that would best suit the solar year, as described in the book Salamanca y la medida del tiempo (or, Salamanca and the Measuring of Time) by Ana María Carabias Torres, a lecturer of modern history at the University of Salamanca. It was believed that Christ’s resurrection coincided with the beginning of spring’s lighter, warmer days and the idea of nature coming back to life, but the celebrations were being pushed further and further into the cold winter. “That same council established that the equinox be moved to March 21, the date to which the astronomical equinox had been brought forward from the traditional Roman world’s March 25, although the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months before Christmas, continued to be celebrated on the 25th,” explains Juan Antonio Belmonte, a research professor at the Canaries Astrophysics Institute and an expert in archeoastronomy, which explores how ancient people studied the skies.Īs the gap in the Julian calendar increased over the years, the spring equinox came increasingly early, and the date for Easter stopped making sense. If it coincided with the Jewish Passover, the Christian celebration would be on the following Sunday. The Church agreed that it should always be celebrated on the Sunday following the full moon after the spring equinox. An idealized representation of 'The sphere of the fixed stars' by Petrus Apianus (1540). Until then, the shifting date of Easter for Christians had been a source of amusement to both pagan peoples and the Jewish, who were experts at measuring time. The Julian calendar, proposed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC, took this into consideration and calculated that each year lasted 365 days plus a quarter of a day, which was fixed by establishing a leap year every four years.Įven so, the Julian calendar remained out of sync by approximately 11 minutes and 14 seconds a year, which accumulated over a period of 128 years made up an entire day, so that over time the calendar was becoming increasingly out of date.Īt the meeting of the First Council of Nicaea (in modern-day Turkey) in the year 325, the Church of Rome established that Easter should be celebrated separately from the Jewish Passover. The Earth does not take exactly 365 days to go around the Sun. And it happened that Salamanca University played a leading role in the adjustment, which meant 10 days being knocked out of existence. Instead, the missing days were due to the fact that Catholic Europe had decided to end a mismatch between the real year – the one measured by a full orbit of the Earth around the Sun – and the one measured by the calendars of the period. In the year 325, the Church of Rome established that Easter should be celebrated separately from the Jewish Passover
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