30: The Phantom Time Hypothesis -- The Middle Ages Never Happened
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

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In a fractured, divided world, it's nice to know there is one thing we can all agree on. The calendar. No matter your politics or your religion, we can all agree that the year is 2021. Right? Well, not so fast. According to a German historian, the year is actually 1724. He says our calendar is a lie and a big chunk of the Middle Ages never happened. Sounds crazy? Well, he says he can prove it. Let's find out why. ♪

In 1991, German historian Erobert Illig and a few colleagues proposed a radical idea. We aren't living in the 21st century. We're actually living in the 18th century. This is called the Phantom Time Hypothesis, which says that back in 1000 AD, there was a conspiracy between the church and the Holy Roman Emperor to change the calendar. The years 614 through 911 were completely made up. Those 300 years just didn't happen.

So all that history you learned about Charlemagne in the Middle Ages? Completely fabricated. In fact, Illig says that Charlemagne was specifically designed as propaganda to support the calendar change, to give the emperor and the pope more power. An elite group of people manipulating the entire world to gain power. What else is new? Oh, you believe this one, huh? Three words. Yeah. Pin. Foil. Hat. Yeah, I thought you'd say that. Okay, let's look at the calendar and see if we can figure out what the heck is going on with Phantom Time.

So why do we even use the calendar we do? Throughout most of human history, different cultures used different calendars. Some were based on seasons, some on the sun, some on the moon, some were just arbitrary. As the Romans gobbled up more territory, these different calendars made commerce complicated. So in 45 BCE, Julius Caesar proposed a standard calendar to be used by the empire. He proposed...

There you go. The Julian calendar was based on a tropical year, also known as a solar year or one earth orbit around the sun. And a year was 365.25 days with leap years. But a solar year is actually a little shorter than they thought. It's really 365.24219 days. That's a difference of 11 minutes. Now,

11 minutes isn't much, but the Julian calendar was losing a full day every 128 years. And after 1500 years, the slippage was noticeable. The church really liked Easter to land on March 21st, the spring equinox. But in the 1500s, Easter was landing around March 11th. This irritated Pope Gregory. An irritated pope isn't good for anybody. That's true.

The church announced the change. A year would be 365 days, with an extra day added to every year divisible by four, and a few other rules to keep things in sync. But that's the gist. So in 1582, the Gregorian calendar was adopted and 10 of the lost days were added back to the calendar. You went to bed on October 4th and woke up on October 15th. And that's where we've been ever since. But wait a minute.

Losing a day every 128 years means the old calendar was off by almost 13 days. But the Pope only removed 10 days. 10 days only accounts for about 1200 of the 1500 years that had passed since the old calendar. But 10 days did indeed bring the new calendar into sync with the equinox. That shouldn't have worked. That means the new calendar was adjusted 300 years earlier. And this is the big question. Was Pope Gregory aware that he made a mathematical error or

Or was there something more sinister happening? Herbert Illig believes Pope Gregory didn't make a mistake. He believes the pope intentionally covered up a conspiracy that happened centuries earlier. So Illig started looking for clues in the Middle Ages and eventually he found them.

Erebert Illig was convinced this three-day discrepancy wasn't a mistake. He suspected Pope Gregory was compensating for something that happened in the Catholic Church centuries earlier. Illig focused on the Dark Ages and noticed there was one specific period of time that had a noticeable lack of records and artifacts: 614 to 911. This was the time before Charlemagne's rule and right up until the start of the Ottonian dynasty. That led him to suspect number one.

Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. Illig believed that Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII had a secret plan to move themselves from the 7th century to the 10th century so Otto can rule in the new millennium. Illig noted that the Roman Empire kept detailed records right up until the year 610, when the Dark Ages supposedly began. But then written history basically vanishes for 300 years.

Also, the architecture of the year 476 was almost identical to that of the year 1000, with virtually no progress. Now, for perspective, this would be like us living in thatched roof dirt floor houses today. That technological advancements also seem to stop for these 300 years. The Roman Empire had aqueducts and indoor plumbing. The Renaissance gave us Da Vinci, Copernicus and the discovery of the New World.

But for the missing 300 years, there was virtually no scientific advancement.

Hmm. European castles were also a problem. Ilig found plenty of castles built right up until the year 600 and plenty built after the year 1000. But there's no trace of anything built in between. Ilig had found a document that claimed that almost 1700 structures were built during the missing years. But when he traced those structures, he noticed 97 percent of them were gone. No evidence they ever existed. The list was a

was a forgery, a fake that intended to rewrite history. But certainly there would be archaeology that would prove these years happened, right? Evidence of human settlements, actual human remains. Yeah. No, no.

In 1986, archaeologists noticed there was very little evidence of medieval towns during a certain period. There was a gap that lasted from 650 to 910. Specifically in Germany, not a single discovery was attributed to this time. Not a single one. The only luminous figure to come out of this time was Charles the Great, more widely known as Charlemagne. But according to the Phantom Time hypothesis, Emperor Charlemagne never existed.

Supporters of the Phantom Time Hypothesis note that nothing has been preserved from the missing 300 years. No streets, homes, no artifacts, and maybe no Charlemagne. Illig and others believe that Otto III created Charlemagne in his own image. And there are plenty of problems with the history of Charlemagne. For

For instance, he seemed to have accomplished too much for one guy. Charlemagne was an astronomer, agriculturalist, an architect. But of his 46 year reign, he was at war all over the world for 44 of those years. Yet he still found time to create a jury system and over 100 new laws. He reformed the education system. He updated scripture. Some say it would take four or five lifetimes to accomplish all of this. Yet.

Charlemagne was somehow able to do it. Illig and others conclude that the only logical reason for this is that Charlemagne was made up and Otto had plenty of motive to give Charlemagne such a juicy resume. Since the Ottonians manipulated their way into the Holy Roman Empire, they needed to give themselves a backstory because of their association with Charlemagne. The Ottonians would be seen as heroes and their rule would be legitimized.

But if Charlemagne and those 300 years were a lie, Otto III needed the rest of the world, including the Middle East and Asia, to corroborate the lie. And maybe he did. Illigant others claim that Islamic record keepers added events and hundreds of years to their own historical documents, which is why the Christians, Jews, and Byzantines all introduced new calendars around the same time, the 10th century, all for the sake of one holy Roman emperor's glory and fame.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis. What a great conspiracy. But is it true? Did Charlemagne exist? Well, he almost certainly did. But was his resume exaggerated?

Well, it almost certainly was. He was great at two things: winning wars and fathering children. He was a supporter of science, the arts, the rule of law, and certainly the church. But all of his non-military accomplishments could be attributed to the talented people he kept around him. Still, that's not a scientific rebuttal of the Phantom Time hypothesis. But how about this? Halley's Comet.

Halley's Comet is visible on Earth every 75 or 76 years, and records exist of it being seen as far back as 475 BC and all the way through the missing centuries. Now, there aren't a lot of records of it in European history during this time, but there are records of the comet in Chinese history. As to why there aren't a lot of records from the Dark Ages, the answer is more obvious than ill considered.

After the Roman Empire fell, the entire world was thrown into chaos and war. Society's infrastructure pretty much collapsed. And in the Middle Ages, almost 95% of the world's population was living in poverty. And less than 5% of people even knew how to read. There isn't a lot of opportunity for art and science to advance if the entire world is struggling to not die of starvation. But what about Pope Gregory?

He really did move the calendar by 10 days, not 13. So how do we account for the Pope's mathematical error? Turns out that Illich didn't have all the information. When historians looked into the date change, they learned that the 10-day adjustment wasn't based on the start of the Julian calendar in 45 BC. Actually, the Pope brought Easter back into sync after it had already been moved three days by the Council of Nicaea in 325.

So 10 days was all that was needed. Three days from Nicaea, 10 days from Gregory. That's your 13 days. Now, the vast majority of historians consider this conspiracy to be debunked, but ill again, others are sticking to their story. You gotta respect it. I do. And I'll keep an eye on this. And if anything changes, we'll do another video. But in the meanwhile, I'm going to consider the Phantom Time hypothesis while a fantastic story debunked.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been the Y-Files. And if you had fun or learned anything today, hit like and subscribe and share and comment on all those things that are good for the channel. He told me to tell you just then. All that stuff helps us out so much. And until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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