How A Syriac Orthodox Patriarch
Helped to Create the Gregorian Calendar

By Father Dale A. Johnson

published in the November edition of Syriac Orthodox Digest (socdigest.org)

The following people were members of the original nine member commission to reform the Julian calendar under Pope Gregory XIII.
Christoph Clavius, German Jesuit
Cardinal Sirleto,
Vincentius Laureus Bishop of Mondovi
Antonio Lilius (Giglio) doctor of medicine
Petrus Ciaconus
Seraphinus Olivarius, Vatican jurist
Ignatius Dantes, Dominican friar (Ignazio Danti) and map maker
Teofilus Martius, Benedictine monk
and amazingly
Ignatius Nemet Allah I, Syrian Orthodox Patriarch
On the tomb of Pope Gregory XIII in Saint Peter's Basilica is a marble relief of the Pope with his commission of nine scholars who reformed the Julian calendar and created what became known as the Gregorian calendar. One of those scholars is a deposed Syrian Orthodox Patriarch. How did a Syriac speaking Patriarch become part of one of the greatest scientific achievements of the Renaissance?
The Gregorian calendar was created by a group of nine scholars formed in 1582. One of these scholars was a deposed Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church who fled to Rome after he resigned under pressure from Moslem over-lords and angry congregations in Mesopotamia. What seemed to be a humiliating fall from grace turned out to be a dramatic opportunity to participate in one of the great moments of European history. Ignatius Nemet Allah I served as Patriarch in Mardin (Turkey), seat of the Antiochian Patriarchate. He served for 19 years from 1557-1576 until he was forced to convert to Islam under threat of death. This conversion infuriated the Christian population and they demanded that their Patriarch resign. He did so and appointed his nephew to the position of Patriarch. He sailed to Venice. While aboard ship he read a small book on mathematics. He wrote in the the margin of the book the following note.
"With the aid of the inspiration from the Mighty Lord we were able to solve these problems on Sunday, after twenty days of October of the Greek year 1888 [=1577AD] have passed, when I the lost soul, by the name of Patriarch Ni‘meh, was on the ship tossed by the waves of the sea on my way to Venice."
This was not the only book he had on board ship. He brought with him a library that would become core material for the Medici Oriental Press, a short-lived but important press that contributed to the rise of the Renaissance and transfer to Europe of Arab science mediated through Syriac scholars.
His library is preserved today at the Laurenziana Library in Florence.
When Ignatius arrived in Venice he was accompanied by a Turkish translator who took him to Rome where he was introduced to Pope Gregory XIII. Gregory appointed the exiled Patriarch to the editorial board of the Medici Oriental Press on the condition that Ignatius commit to creating books to convert the people of Arab lands.
The patriarch was allowed the use of his library. The director of the Press was Giovan Battista Raimondi who had final authority over publications.. Although the purpose of the Press was to assist in the conversion to Christianity of the Arab populations the Press drifted from its mission.
Reviewing the records of that press one is amazed to learn that out of the first six books that were produced, four of them had to do with linguistic or demonstrative science rather than religious material. Even more amazing is the fact that the press printed more copies of Euclid's Elements than the Arabic Bible. There were print runs of 1500 copies of the Bible in Arabic, and 3000 copies of Euclid’s Elements. From the records of the unsold copies the Medici Press was a business failure. The Arabic Bible sold only 934 copies, while the recension of Euclid’s Elements sold a little better with 1033 copies. Raimondi bought the press in 1591. By this time Ignatius had died and the Medici family had withdrawn its financial support. Raimondi sent his books to the Frankfurt book fair where an unscrupulous employee sold a few books far below their value and pocketed the money.
In the 18th century, amazingly enough, many of the books printed by Raimondi were still in the Palazzo Vecchio stacked in warehouses. An inventory taken at the time shows that 1,039 copies of the Arabic-Latin Gospels, 566 of the Arabic Gospels, 810 of the Avicenna, 1,967 of the Euclid, 1,129 of the Idrisi, still remained unsold, along with several other titles. But early in the 19th century the government sold the remaining books for a tiny sum to a bookseller who destroyed the bulk of the books to increase the rarity of the remainder.
In the five years ex-Patriarch Ignatius worked as an editor for the Medici Oriental press he gained an outstanding reputation as a mathematician and expert on calendars. Pope Gregory took notice and appointed him to the Gregorian calendral commission in 1582. Pope Gregory XIII before he became Pope had attended the Council of Trent. It was in this Council that the future Pope would learn of
a plan in 1563 for correcting the calendrical errors, requiring that the date of the vernal equinox be restored to that which it held at the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and that an alteration to the calendar be designed to prevent future drift. This would allow for a more consistent and accurate scheduling of the feast of Easter.
To compute the date of Easter each year requires an exact determination of the vernal equinox when the center of the sun crosses over the equator drifting northward. The date of Easter also requires an exact knowledge of lunar cycles because Easter occurs the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. So to compute the date of Easter requires knowledge of solar and lunar time. But a lunar month is 29.53059 days from new moon to new moon. The solar year is 365.2422 days. From the time of Christ to the 16th century the lunar month was off by 4 days and the solar year was off by 10 days approximately.
Computing Easter according to the Julian calendar was an embarrassment. Jewish astronomers were still able to accurately compute Passover because they used only a lunar calendar. The Moslem calendar used a 33 year cycle to make adjustments and was superior to both the Julian calendar and even to the Gregorian calendar. Omar Kayyam in the 11th century as part of an eight member commission reformed the Islamic calendar. In 1073, the Seljuk dynastySultanSultan Jalal al-Din Malekshah Saljuqi (Malik-Shah I, 1072-92), invited Khayyám to build an observatory, along with various other distinguished scientists. Eventually, Khayyám and his colleagues measured the length of the solar year as 365.24219858156 days (correct to six decimal places). This calendric measurement has only an 1 hour error every 5,500 years,
I have no doubt that Ignatius Nemet Allah I studied the mathematical and astronomical systems of the Islamic world influenced in large part by Omar Kayyam.
The formula designed by Aloysius Lilius and presented by his brother Antonius to Pope Gregory XIII was ultimately successful. It proposed a 10-day correction to revert the drift since Nicaea. An arrangement of this description is visible in the old Vatican Observatory, called the Tower of the Winds. It was on this line that the error of ten days was demonstrated in the presence of Gregory XIII. October 4 would leap to October 15. Ten days were eliminated from the month of October in 1582 to achomplish the Gregorian Reform.
A second adjustment was needed to complete the reform: a system of leap years. To implement the model, it was provided that years divisible by 100 would be leap years only if they were divisible by 400 as well. So, in the last millennium, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. In this millennium, 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500 will not be leap years, but 2400 will be. This theory was expanded upon by Christopher Clavius, a fellow member of the commission, in a closely argued, 800 page volume. He would later defend his and Lilius's work against detractors.
Unfortunately, this was the second best idea. Ex-Patriarch Ignatius brought a better idea to the table, a solution that was more elegant.
The long suppressed solution set forth by ex- Patriarch Nemet Allah I used a 33-year cycle of leap-days. It elegantly grounds the calendar in the 33-year life of Jesus. It would also keep the spring equinox truly confined to the 21st. of March, the official calendar date of the spring or vernal equinox by the traditions of the Church, ever since the Nicene council. With the 10 day correction, implemented in 1582 A.D. by Pope Gregory, Clavius and the other commissioners, the 33-year leap-day cycle could have kept the equinox on March 20th., but, with an 11 day correction Ignatius Nemet Allah's proposal could have restored and restricted the equinox to March 21st. The simplest implementation of the 33-year cycle, would continuously repeat, every 33 years, the first 8 leap-years, in the years 1 to 33 A.D, (nominally the years 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 and 32 A.D.). Long division would have been unnecessary to determine whether it is leap-year, since there is a short-cut using addition. Just add the century number to the number of years passed in the century. For example: for the year 2012 A.D., we add 20 to 12, and get 32 A.D. which is nominally a leap year in the traditional life of Jesus.
Ignatius Nemet Allah proposed a 33-year (with repeating "8-leap-year") cycle. Clavius' system spread the Equinox out over a 53-hour range, but there was nowhere on Earth that could have a true midnight-to-midnight Equinox. The Spring Equinox under the Gregorian system drifts over a four day period from March 19-March 22.
Under Allah's system the Equinox would always fall between midnight and midnight, but only within a narrow band of specific longitude. Along this strip of longitude the Equinox would always have occurred on March 21st. Therefore, this specific band of longitude would be the only one on Earth within which the Nicene edict could stay -- for literally thousands of years -- astronomically correct. This has come to be seen as "God's Meridian,"Unfortunately this band of longitude would have cut through Protestant lands in North America. The Roman Catholic council preferred a political solution and less accurate calendar that favored Catholic control of God's Meridian.
The proposals of Gregory's Syrian commissioner were not revealed untilrecently (see A. Ziggelaar S.J. in Coyne. Hoskin and Pedersen's "Gregorian Reform of the Calendar", 1983) “
The genius of Ignatius Nemet Allah was recognized not only by Pope Gregory XIII but also by some of the greatest minds of the Rennaisance. One of them was Joseph Justus Scaliger.
Joseph Justus Scaliger was a protestant scholar in Europe. He consulted Ignatius Nemet Allah I. Two letters surfaced in 1983 on the 400th anniversary of the Gregorian commission that revealed the correspondence between these two men. The stories which are told of Scaliger seem almost legendary. By some accounts, he was the most brilliant man of his age. He is said to have read the entire Iliad and Odyssey in twenty-one days, and to have run through the Greek dramatists and lyric poets in four months. He was but seventeen years old when he produced his Oedipus. He learned 13 languages.
After a brilliant career at Paris, he was invited to occupy the chair of Belles Lettres at Leyden, where the best part of his life was spent. Like most eminent linguists, Scaliger possessed the faculty of memory in an extraordinary degree. He could repeat eighty couplets of poetry after a single reading : He knew by heart every line of his own compositions, and it was said of him that he never forgot anything which he had learned once.
But with all his gifts and all his accomplishments, he contrived to render himself an object of general dislike and scorn. His vanity was insufferable ; and it was of that peculiarly offensive kind because it was only gratified at the depreciation of others. His life was a series of literary quarrels; and in the whole annals of literary polemics, there are none with which, for acrimony, virulence, and ferocity of vituperation. What is so extraordinary is what he writes about Ignatius Nemet Allah I.
Joseph Scaliger described Ignatius as “that most perfect man, for I can describe him in no other way, since he is the most complete imaginable example of learning and all the virtures wrote to me last year. He told methat the year of our Lord 1581 is the 6th of a 12 year cycle and is called the year of the Serpent.” Ignatius wrote to him in Arabic so eloquent that Scaliger refused to try to translate them into Latin for want of damaging the beauty of his words.
From Scalier we get an insight into the genius of Ignatius Nemet Allah I. He was the right man at the right time to influence one of the most important revisions of the calendar in human history. This Syriac scholar and leader is immortalized in the most unlikely of places: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.Unlikely because except for the dramatic and shameful events in his home country, he would have died a noble and uneventful death at Dier Zaferon in Mardin. But because of tragic circumstances he became a refugee and renown reformer.