Phantom Time Hypothesis – the supposedly ‘missing’ fortnight in 1752

If you’re reading this on a Mac or UNIX computer, try this. Drop into a Terminal, and type the command: cal 1752. This will print a calendar for the year 1752 to the screen, and you should take a good look at September. It will look something like:

As I’m sure readers of this magazine will have realised, this is the switchover date from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian, which for the British Empire involved skipping out the 11 days between 2 September and 14 September, 1752.

Supposedly, the skipping of 11 days prompted the ‘calendar riots’, where the people took to the streets and demanded the crown return their 11 days. While historians these days believe the riots to be highly mythologised, appearing to be the Georgian equivalent of an urban legend, the removal of 11 days from the calendar did not pass without comment. There was genuine concern and confusion from some people, even just around practical matters like rents and wages. I imagine those whose birthdays fell in the gap were none too pleased either. People born on 29 February don’t realise how easy they have it.

The Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, and took effect the following year. It replaced the older Roman calendar and divided the year into 12 months, with a total of 365 days. To keep things roughly in sync with the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the calendar also added an extra day every four years, creating the familiar leap year system.

However, the Julian system was not perfectly accurate. Over time, the calendar drifted slowly out of alignment with the solar year. This proved to be a problem, especially for the Christians who depended on the calendar to determine the date of Easter. Easter is linked to the spring equinox, so as the equinox shifted so too did the date of Easter, leading to confusion and concern. If left unchecked, this drift would eventually have led to Christians marking both the birth and death of Jesus on the same day (though not until around the year 34,000).

To solve this, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582. The new system refined the leap year rules. Instead of simply adding a day every four years, years divisible by 100 would not be leap years. That is, unless the year was divisible by 400, in which case the leap day would be kept. This subtle change brought the calendar closer to the true length of a solar year. But the reform came with a drastic step; to bring the calendar back into alignment, 10 days were skipped. So the day after Thursday 4 October, 1582 was not Friday 5 October, but Friday 15 October. The 10 intervening days simply vanished.

The adoption of the Gregorian calendar was not uniform across Europe. The British Empire did not switch until 1752, by which time the drift had grown to 11 days. So, in the UK, Wednesday 2 September, 1752 was immediately followed by Thursday 14 September, 1752. This is the calendar system we continue to use today.

But there is a problem. If you count backward from the introduction of the Gregorian reforms of 1582 to the introduction of the Julian Calendar in 45 BC, and do your sums, it turns out that we should actually have been 13 days adrift from the solar year, not 10. So what happened to the missing three days?

And from this comes the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

Initially proposed in the 1980s and 1990s by German historian Heribert Illig, the Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that about three centuries of history – from 614 CE to 911 CE – never happened. According to Illig, these centuries were fabricated, and our calendar was simply advanced without the actual passage of time. Like a super-sized version of the 11 days in 1752.

If this were true, it would mean that much of what we consider the early Middle Ages never happened, the current year is closer to 1728 than 2025, and historical figures like Augustus Caesar lived 1,700 years ago rather than 2,000. Illig and his supporters have pointed to a lack of archaeological evidence from this period, the apparent stagnation in culture, art, and architecture, and gaps in historical records as supporting signs of this phantom time.

They argue that figures such as Charlemagne, the well-regarded European emperor who ruled from 800 to 814 AD, were fabricated to fill in this gap. The reason Charlemagne is presented as so well regarded and benevolent is because he is fictional. One might easily observe that King Arthur is held in similar regard.

It also excises from history Alfred the Great, King of Wessex from 849 to 899, along with 60 Popes and 18 Archbishops of Canterbury. Either they didn’t exist, or their reigns are misdated to cover up the change.

The theory further claims that this massive calendar alteration was orchestrated by Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who ruled from 966 to 1002. Because his reign coincided with the turn of the millennium, the theory suggests he had a vested interest in ‘creating’ a millennium to rule over, and so declared by royal fiat that it was 297 years later, to make it appear as though the year 1000 had arrived when it had not. And his scholars followed suit.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis, like many conspiracy theories, is superficially fascinating and perhaps even compelling, but faces numerous challenges when you get into the details.

Take Otto III’s supposed motive: wanting to rule over a landmark millennium. That reasoning applies equally to anyone in power at a round-numbered date – someone had to be emperor in 1,000 AD; it just happened to be Otto.

Without evidence that Otto had any special fascination with the end of the millennium, I would argue this is a textbook Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. This informal fallacy is derived from the story of a cowboy who shoots at the side of a barn and before locating the bullet hole, draws a bullseye around it, and claims to be a crack shot. Otto is conveniently framed as the mastermind only because the date fits, not because there’s solid evidence.

What about the absence of art, architecture, and literature from the period? Well, it turns out we already have an established historical model to explain that. It’s called the Dark Ages. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe experienced economic turmoil and cultural stagnation. This period was characterised by hardship, the breakdown of infrastructure, and general decline in artistic and architectural output. Crucially, the Dark Ages were primarily a Western European phenomenon, and elsewhere in the world time didn’t ‘stop’. There was the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam, which under the Phantom Time Hypothesis went from nothing to huge overnight. In China, the Tang dynasty continued to thrive. All three advanced in culture and science.

However, none of this actually addresses the missing three days in the Gregorian correction. That is the starting point from which Illig derives his entire hypothesis, and it turns out to be based on a misunderstanding of the intent of the Gregorian reform. It was never meant to reset the calendar year to its relative position from 45 BCE. It was meant to realign Easter with the date established by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. When Pope Gregory XIII introduced the new calendar, the drift since Nicaea was about 10 days, which explains why the correction involved skipping just 10 days, not 13.

Moreover, scientific dating methods contradict the idea of phantom centuries. Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, offers a continuous record going back thousands of years. Trees add one ring per year, and the patterns of thick and thin rings vary with environmental conditions, forming a unique ‘fingerprint’ for each period. By overlapping samples from different trees, scientists have created an unbroken chronological timeline extending over 11,000 years. Roman artifacts, dated using this method, fit perfectly within the established timeline.

Radiocarbon dating of artifacts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls also confirms the accepted historical chronology, dating these objects to around 2,000 years ago. Proponents of the Phantom Time Hypothesis argue that these methods are flawed or circularly calibrated against written records they claim are fabricated. This argument is reminiscent of claims made by Young Earth Creationists and lacks convincing evidence.

Astronomical observations provide yet more support for the accepted timeline. Halley’s Comet, visible approximately every 75 years, has been recorded in various cultures for centuries. If nearly three centuries were missing from history, the timing of these sightings would not align. However, records from Europe and China match the accepted chronology. When the phantom period is removed, the visitations no longer align with the known orbital period of the comet.

The Chinese calendar, independent of the European one, also records astronomical events such as eclipses and comets. These too correspond with the accepted historical dates in Western calendars further undermining the hypothesis.

Despite the weight of evidence against it, the Phantom Time Hypothesis has its adherents. Illig himself has remained defiant in the face of criticism, perceiving skepticism of his views as a personal attack rather than scholarly debate. This pattern is common in fringe theories, where proponents dismiss contradictory evidence as conspiracy or bias.

So, while it is tempting to imagine that entire centuries of human history could be a fabrication, the evidence tells us otherwise. History remains largely intact, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis remains just that – a hypothesis, without credible foundation.