In early 1582, Pope Gregory XIII announced that the calendar date of the day following October 4th that year would not be October 5th, but October 15th. This was part of a packet of calendrical reforms we now call the Gregorian calendar, and which most of the world uses today.
But this reform came at a weird time. For 65 years, Europe had been roiled by the Protestant Reformation, which was about a lot of things, but one of them was whether the pope should be in charge of stuff. The calendar’s reforms were all pretty common-sense, but Protestants weren’t sure whether it was OK to implement common-sense reforms that originated with their enemies in Rome.
The issue was particularly dicey for the people of Augsburg, Germany. Though Germany in this period was riven with horrific wars between Protestants and Catholics, Augsburg was a religiously-mixed city where folks generally got along. Things got weird, and the way they got weird is an invitation to fantasy adventure that feels like something out of Troika!
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Fifty years earlier, the Lutheran movement (a Protestant faith) swept through Augsburg like a flood. Most of the city’s once-Catholic residents converted. What Catholics remained were well-placed, occupying important positions in the city government. With the Protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V reinstated Catholic worship in Augsburg. The Catholic minority grew in size as a result. While Charles V’s decrees stated that only Catholics could hold office in Augsburg, everyone ignored that rule. Lutherans and Catholics held public office in about equal numbers. (I’m not aware of whether there were any Calvinists, Anabaptists, or other officeholders from less-populous Protestant groups.) Everyone got along pretty well, and the Church of St. Ulrich even held both Catholic and Lutheran services in different parts of the building. Peace was good business. The two banking clans that held much of the power in Augsburg kept the city from declaring for one side or the other, which would alienate potential clients.
For centuries, scholars had been in agreement that the old Julian calendar needed reforming. The way it handled leap years wasn’t quite right. By the time of Pope Gregory’s reforms in 1582, the Julian calendar was ten days behind where the seasons and the stars said the calendar should be. This delay was a problem for Europe’s liturgical calendars, which sometimes had easter (a spring holiday) falling in what was, astronomically at least, winter. Hence the new Gregorian calendar and the time jump, with October 15th following October 4th in a year that had no days that carried the labels of the intervening dates. At first, this calendar was used only in the Italian lands the pope ruled directly, but Gregory pressed his allies, and the Catholic world soon adopted the new calendar.
The Protestant world was in a pickle. Sure, the new Gregorian system put the calendar back in line with the seasons. But adopting it risked implying that the pope still had authority over their calendars: not just which days were religious holidays, but things like which days were market days. Pretty soon, anti-papal sentiment solidified. Pious Protestants wouldn’t accept the new Gregorian calendar.
In Augsburg, the city’s rulers liked the new calendar and declared it law the following year. Many of the city’s Lutherans refused and stuck with the old calendar. Having two calendars in Augsburg caused serious problems. For one, no one was supposed to work on the sabbath (Sunday). Now there were two sabbaths: one for Catholics and the law-abiding, the other for pious Lutherans. Which sabbath did workers have off? Both Catholics and Lutherans celebrated the season of Lent and even agreed what calendar dates it fell on. But in 1584 when Catholics felt Lent and its prohibition on eating meat had ended, the city’s overwhelmingly Protestant butchers refused to slaughter their cattle, since as far as they were concerned Lent wouldn’t be over for another ten days. In a city that was keeping the peace between Catholics and Protestants, these sorts of disagreements were not helpful.
Things came to a head in June 1584. Lutheran minister Georg Müller was leading the calendar resistance. He even published a pamphlet arguing that citizens had the right to overthrow their governments. So the council tried to have Müller quietly arrested and banished, but word leaked. An angry mob descended on the council house, trapping the city’s rulers inside. There wasn’t actually any violence, and some other Lutheran ministers convinced the mob to disperse. Müller still had to leave.
In the council’s eyes, the riot changed the issue from one about calendars to one about rule of law. Anyone who followed the old Julian calendar was doing so in violation of municipal law. They were a criminal and were probably in league with would-be rebels. The council sent out agents to ensure that artisans were following the new Gregorian calendar: that butchers were stopping their work at the start of Gregorian Lent, for example, not continuing it ten more days until the start of Julian Lent. These agents made sure that labor on public works projects halted on Gregorian Sunday but proceeded on Julian Sunday with a minimum of malingering. The council even hired spies and informants to squeal on their neighbors. Work inside your own home on a day that was a Gregorian holiday but not a Julian holiday? You could be fined, and if you were caught multiple times you could be exiled.
While the absurdity of this calendar fiasco works in any genre, if you’re playing fantasy, the simultaneous use of two contradictory calendars screams out for an NPC to abuse it using time magic.
First, though, you need to get the players invested in the calendar dispute, probably by getting one calendar’s fan club angry at the party. On the day the PCs need to buy rations, arrows, potions, etc, have some seedy little weirdo approach them offering to pay if they’ll report which business were actually open and which turned the PCs away. It’s a Gregorian workday but the Julian sabbath, and this little guy wants the party to inform on shopkeepers who are only pretending to be open so they can keep the Julian sabbath. If the party refuses to rat out Julian shopkeepers, the PCs piss off the authorities. If the party accepts the offer—wouldn’t you know—a Julian sympathizer was eavesdropping, and now the saintly resistance to the tyrannical authorities is pissed off at the party.
Meanwhile, some grubby time-wizard has learned how to switch between calendars, thereby moving ten days forward or back. Naturally, she’s using this power to commit crimes. She can’t teleport through space, only through time. If she’s presently in the Julian calendar, she can hop ten days forward by switching to the Gregorian. If she’s in the Gregorian calendar, she can hop ten days back by switching to Julian. What she can’t do is go further back if she’s already using the Julian calendar, or go further forward if she’s already in the Gregorian.
While the PCs are running errands, this time-wizard robs them. While in the Gregorian calendar, she grabs something important from one PC and switches to the Julian calendar, instantly moving ten days back in time and vanishing before the party’s eyes. Reasonable attempts at inquiry reveal what the time-wizard is up to. Then, by talking to eyewitnesses who saw the time wizard over the past ten days, the party can track her down. It’s the same day the PCs were robbed, but the time wizard is ten days older, having just lived the past ten days a second time. When the party goes to grab her, naturally her instinct will be to switch to the Gregorian calendar, catapulting ten days into the future. If she succeeds in doing so, though, the party may have the upper hand—for they know exactly when and where she’ll appear. Unfortunately, that’s not for another ten days. And remember how the party pissed off either the tyrannical authorities or the saintly resistance? Whichever side is angry at the PCs will try to drive them out of town during those intervening ten days.
Naturally when the PCs do catch the grubby time-wizard, they recover their lost object (she wasn’t able to pawn it), plus some other treasures she’s stolen from other folks.
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Sources:
Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, chapter 4: Civic and Confessional Memory in Conflict: Augsburg in the Sixteenth Century by Sean F. Dunwoody (2013)
Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550-1750 by R. Po-Chia Hsia (1989)