10 Days Are Missing in October 1582 Calendar. Here's Why.
Church authorities deleted ten days from 1582 to correct a mistake that Roman general, Julius Caesar had committed while putting together his calendar. Caesar's calendar known as Julian Calendar, ran 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the actual time taken by the Earth to complete one revolution, UNILAD reported. This mistake over the years began impacting the celebration of important holidays like Easter. The Catholic Church decided to get involved in the situation and find ways to correct this folly. As a solution, the institution launched the Gregorian Calendar.
Church authorities at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, had decided that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox on March 21, IFL Science reported. Caesar's mistake slowly drifted the spring equinox from the decided date. By the 16th century, spring equinox was falling on March 11. To stop the issue from further escalating, church authorities asked the Pope to find a solution to this problem, UNILAD reported.
Pope Gregory XIII introduced the concept of the Gregorian Calendar, IFL Science reported. Gregorian Calendar was similar to the Julian Calendar in everything, except in how they handled their leap years. In the Julian Calendar, a day is added every February after four years, but in the case of the Gregorian Calendar, this phenomenon only happens if the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. The church adopted the calendar in 1582.
To make up for the miscalculation caused by the Julian Calendar, ten days were taken away from 1582 in the Gregorian Calendar, IFL Science reported. Church authorities decided on October as the month when this subtraction would take place.
The month of October was chosen by the church because no major event happened during the chosen period of time. People went to sleep on October 4th after the feast of St Francis of Assisi and woke up on October 15th, according to the Gregorian Calendar.
France though adopted the change in December, UNILAD reported. They skipped from December 9 to December 20 in 1582. No specific reason was recorded for the choice by French authorities.
Spain, Portugal, France, the Italian states, the Catholic Low Countries (what's now Belgium and the Netherlands), Luxembourg, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and their various colonies were the first countries to come on board with the Gregorian Calendar.
In 1584, the Kingdom of Bohemia and some parts of Switzerland authorized the use of the Gregorian calendar. In the 17th century Prussia, Alsace, and Strasbourg adopted the Gregorian Calendar.
The 10-day gap makes it difficult for historians to keep a record of various milestone events that happened in the 16th and 17th centuries, UNILAD reported. William Shakespeare and Don Quixote author Miguel Cervantes breathed their last on April 23, 1616. Spain had adopted the Gregorian Calendar at that time, but England hadn't, which meant that in reality, Shakespeare had died before Cervantes.
The shift to the Gregorian Calendar continued over the centuries, UNILAD reported. The most recent country to adopt this form of calendar was Saudi Arabia in 2016. Some countries use Gregorian Calendars along with their native calendars. In present times, Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran, and Afghanistan are the only countries where the Gregorian Calendar has not been applied.