Conspiracy theories are fun sometimes. They give the reader a thrill, explaining as they do how the world is actually fundamentally different than what it seems. And that thrill, that feeling that you have discovered a secret truth that all of the smart people in the world have seemingly never realized, can be addicting. Too bad most of them are bumpkis.
For example, there’s the wonderfully named Phantom Time Hypothesis (PTH from here on out). A theory primarily proposed by German Heribert Illig, it postulates that we aren’t really living in the year 2011 at all. Instead, it is actually 1711.
Cue the Twilight zone theme.
According to Illig the entirety of the Early Middle Ages (614-911 AD) was completely fabricated and the history books altered to support that fabrication. On the surface, like all conspiracy theories, the PTH seems alluring. There isn’t a lot of archeological evidence from that time period in Europe that can be reliably dated, especially when Illig calls into account several known forgeries and casts aspersions on the rest of the histological record.
He further develops his theory by bringing up other historical gaps that occur within that Early Middle Ages period, like a strange gap in the doctrine of the faith in the evolution of theory and the meaning of purgatory, a gap in the building of Constantinople and the development of farming and war techniques among others.
One of the keystones of his theory, though, revolves around the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 AD. Illig explains that the earlier Julian calendar had a known discrepancy which caused the calendar to be off from the “real” astronomical solar year by either 11.23 minutes or 10.94 minutes. While this doesn’t seem to be all that much, it does mean that over many many years the date of known astrological phenomenon like equinoxes was no longer occurring on the date that it should have.
So in 1582 when the Gregorian calendar was introduced the astronomers and mathematicians working for Pope Gregory were tasked with figuring out exactly how many days the civilian calendar needed to be adjusted by in order to bring it in line with the true solar year. When they reported back they announced that the calendar was off by 10 days and it was changed accordingly.
But wait, says Illig. How many years does it take to produce an error of 10 days? 1257. But the year the calendar was implemented was not 1257… it was 1582. That’s a difference of about 325 years that appear on the calendar out of nowhere. Combined with the other historical gaps and the dearth of physical evidence Illig’s theory starts to look very compelling indeed.
Unfortunately, once you start looking for whys and wherefores the theory falls apart. Illig suggests a couple different options about why someone would want to pretend that 300 years had passed that happened. One was that Otto the III, a known fan of Christian milleniarism, didn’t just happen to luckily live around 1000 AD. He made it happen with the help of his good pal Gerbert de Aurillac who would later become Pope Sylvester II. They picked a year that they decided was 1000 AD and then everyone else had to simply date forward from there, later filling in the details so that their chronicles made more sense.
Another option is that Constantine VII of Byzantium (905-959 AD) added the years in when he organized the complete rewriting of all of Byzantine history. Now, the fact that this rewriting occurred is not really contested. Starting in 835 AD all texts written in Greek Maiuscula were rewritten by the monks in a new form called minuscula and the old texts were destroyed. Over about two generations all of the official documents of the time were rewritten. Could history have been changed in the process? It’s quite possible.
But why? And how would all of Europe get roped into the conspiracy in the process? If the PTH was correct Charlemagne, a major figure of the phantom period, was a myth. And Alfred the Great and his son Edward were also fabricated, as well as something like sixty popes (and several antipopes). How do you get an entire, disjointed continent to go along with something like that?
You don’t, and that becomes all the more apparent when you take a step back and look at the historical timeline outside of Europe. The most obvious problem of the PTH involves the growth of Islam which took place almost entirely in that period. If the 300 years of the PTH were really a myth then the spread of Mohammed’s ideas from the time he was a trader in Arabia (614) to the time the religion has spread from Asia to the Atlantic (911) is reduced to mere days. Not to mention the entirety of the Tang Dynasty in China occurs within that period, and the Chinese scholars religiously recorded every appearance of Halley’s comet, all eclipses, and several other astronomical phenomenon which can be reliably dated to modern times.
As for the lack of archeological items from the period? It helps to remember that this was, after all, a dark age. The reason that there isn’t much historical documents and artifacts may very well be because not much of lasting value was being created. It’s a shame, and many of us look back at the time wasted during this period with regret as we mourn the fact that we aren’t colonizing the universe like we very well could be. That doesn’t mean that those years didn’t happen.
And the crux of the problem with Illig’s theory lies in his assumption about the discrepancies in the Julian calendar. In truth the Gregorian reform was not designed to synch the civilian calendar to the Julian calendar in 1 AD. Not at all. It’s important to remember that the Gregorian reform was a Catholic reform, and thus revolved around the most important holiday in the Catholic year: Easter. The changes of the reform were designed to bring the calendar in line with the year that the Council of Niceaea fixed the date of Easter Sunday to the vernal equinox, or March 20th in the Julian calendar. That year? 325.
So there we have it. Despite how interesting the theory seems on the surface, it breaks down under continued scrunity. It’s a shame, really. Otherwise I could start selling books about how it’s really 1711 and how the world is going to end horribly in 2300. Ah well.