In 1582, the world lost ten days! As strange as it may seem, you will be very difficult to find a calendar from 1582 that includes the days between October 5th and 14th. However, this phenomenon occurred only because society did not always use the calendar model we know today.
The Gregorian calendar, with 365 days, was a model created only in 1582. Before that, people used another date pattern to count days.
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Therefore, the month of October 1582 had only 21 days, as Pope Gregory XIII summoned a team of scientists to correct a serious problem that occurred in the calendar at the time.
However, to understand the changes in the marking of days, it is necessary to remember a little about the measurement of time in Antiquity.
Basically, the first calendar record was made in Mesopotamia 2,700 years before Christ. It was based on the cycles of the Moon, therefore, it was made up of 12 lunar months.
Then another calendar appeared in the Babylon with 354 days. Until, in 45 a. C., the Julian Calendar was established in Roman society.
Despite being a time stamp similar to what we know today, this calendar was responsible for a large discrepancy between dates and the solar year.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Adventures in History/Reproduction
A year in the Julian Calendar was made up of 12 months with 365 days and 6 hours. The month of February had 28 days and the other months were divided into 30 or 31 days. However, the year is not exactly 365 days and 6 hours, but rather 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds.
Thus, the old calendar was 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer, a different length from the time it takes the Earth to make one complete revolution around the Sun.
Over the years, this difference accumulated and, in 1582, it already exceeded ten days. But how did this issue of the day influence people's lives? Well, the dates of religious holidays are not fixed.
For example, Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon that rises shortly after the vernal equinox. In this way, some dates are determined according to the cycles of the Sun and Moon. Therefore, it was necessary to reorganize the calendar so that the celebrations took place on the correct dates.
Thus, Pope Gregory XIII brought together astronomers, mathematicians and other scientists to discover the correct calculation of the calendar.
After much analysis, the new calendar marking was made official in the papal bull Inter Gravissimas. This ordered the removal of days from the calendar, an event that became known as “days that never happened”.
Furthermore, the leap year was adopted to prevent the error from happening again. Therefore, the new calendar defined that years that were multiples of 100, that were not multiples of 400, would not have February 29th.
The change in calendars was not quickly accepted by people and authorities at the time. However, in the year of the pope's decision, October 4th was followed by October 15th, 1582.
