Did the early medieval era ever really take place?

On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.

In the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire ‘fell’. Exactly what that means is a matter of some contention; but while plenty of eminent historians have argued that power simply transferred from a central emperor to locally administered kingdoms, or from civil authorities to the Church, no conspiracy theory has yet emerged arguing that the Empire never really fell at all, and that everywhere from Carlisle to Cairo is still secretly being run by an emperor hidden somewhere under Rome. Which is a pity, because that would be brilliant.

Anyway, what isn’t contested is that in the year 400, much of western Europe was under Roman control, and by the year 500 it wasn’t, and that for quite a while after that, things got a bit hairy. For the next couple of centuries, population declined, agricultural output fell, trade collapsed, and life generally became less about having urbane philosophical discussions in city tavernas, and more about subsistence farming and hoping that the tribe massing on the horizon wouldn’t slaughter your entire family when they showed up to take your land.

Or rather, that’s probably what it was like. Roughly. We don’t know for sure, because one side effect of the decline of central administration is that there were far fewer people writing stuff down. As a result, in sizeable chunks of Europe, we know less about these centuries than we do about either the Roman period that preceded them or the later Middle Ages that followed. This lack of records led some later scholars to give the years after the Roman collapse the now deeply unfashionable label ‘the Dark Ages’, to reflect the fact they literally couldn’t see what was going on. At any rate, one of the hallmarks of urban civilisations is that they leave a paper trail, and when they collapse, that paper trail tends to stop, because everyone has more important things to worry about. So one school of thought would have it that there’s nothing remotely surprising or suspicious about these gaps in the record. 

There is another school of thought, however, that has a rival explanation for the lack of written records from the centuries after Rome fell. It’s this: 

They never took place. 

Okay, sure, Rome fell, and there was a bit of a gap before medieval Europe got going, with its knights and its chivalry and its long, infuriating poems about how the most romantic thing to do here would actually be not to have sex. But, according to this theory, the year 1000 took place not a thousand years after the standard date for the birth of Christ, but after only 703 years later. Roughly 300 years of European history simply never happened.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis, as it’s known, was first published in 1694, according to its own calendar – or, as we generally know it, 1991. It was the work of Heribert Illig, a German writer and publisher who has spent much of his career producing or promoting works of revisionist history. But it does have other supporters, such as technologist Hans Ulrich Niemitz, who in 1995 published a paper under the heading ‘Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?’ – a classic example of what one might term the ‘Hey, I’m just asking questions’ approach to scholarship.

By way of evidence for their hypothesis, these guys cite the scarcity of archaeological evidence that can be reliably dated to this period, and the limits of other techniques involving radiometric dating or dendrochronology (that is, looking at the rings in wood). They note the strange gap in the history of Jewish communities, which seem to vanish from the record for several centuries in the Early Middle Ages before reappearing around the year 1000, and the way the development of everything from agricultural or military techniques to mosaic art and Christian doctrine seems to have ground to a halt for several centuries. They point to the fact that, over the same period, Constantinople stopped putting up great buildings, but that the Chapel at Aachen, which was built around the year 800 and involves all sorts of clever things like arches and vaulting, seems to have come around 200 years too early. 

And they note that much of what we do know about the history of this period comes from what was written about it later. This means that somebody, somewhere, might have fabricated it. Such as, for example, a coalition of rulers around the turn of the second millennium – Pope Sylvester II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Byzantine Emperor Constantine V, say – who conspired to fix the calendar because it would be much cooler and sexier to be ruling in the 1000th year since Christ rather than the 703rd, and who invented a load of history, including the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, in the process. 

The Phantom Time fans’ killer point, though, relates to how we measure time itself. The Julian calendar, proposed by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE and in use for the next 1,600 years or so, proposes a simple cycle of three regular years followed by one leap year, making the average year 365.25 days long. That, though, is slightly more than the 365.24219 days it actually takes the Earth to go around the sun – which means that the Julian calendar gains a day every 128 years. And so, by the late sixteenth century, it should have been out by thirteen days. But when astronomers working for Pope Gregory XIII came to reform that calendar, they found it was only out by ten days. A papal decree that Thursday 4 October 1582 was to be followed by Friday 15 October 1582 was enough to get the calendar back on track. 

You know what could explain this discrepancy? If it hadn’t been 1,582 years since the birth of Christ, but merely 1,285 years. In other words: if roughly three centuries of history had never happened. 

At first glance, then, the Phantom Time Hypothesis does seem to fit, both with that circumstantial evidence, and with the vague sense that it’s a bit weird that there are several centuries of history we just don’t know very much about. And can we really be sure that the time of the Caesars and Jesus Christ was really 2,000 years ago, and not 1,700? After all, the calendar we know today wasn’t even in use until around the year 800, roughly when those arches were going up in Aachen. All we have to go on is the word of long-dead authorities. 

What if those authorities were wrong? What if they were lying, even? Can we be sure? Can we ever truly know? 

Well: yes, we can. The Phantom Time Hypothesis is nonsense. It only works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the decline of Rome left a nasty gap in the records. Elsewhere – in Tang China, Abbasid Persia and in the rest of the Islamic world, which only developed in the seventh century – history continued apace. The same is true of the Byzantine Empire, the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, which continued right down to 1453, even if it wasn’t always building quite as many grand monuments in Constantinople as today’s more cynical observers believe it should have been. The hypothesis requires you to ignore astronomical evidence, too, such as the solar eclipse reported by Pliny the Elder in 59CE, which shows that events in antiquity are exactly as far into the past as you’d expect them to be.

As for the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, that was never intended to reset the calendar to how it stood when Julius Caesar came up with it in 45BCE, but to the status quo at the time of the Council of Nicea, when the Catholic Church officially adopted it, in 325. Gregory’s astronomers adjusted the calendar by ten days, not thirteen, because they were only trying to deal with twelve centuries of drift, not sixteen. There’s no problem that needs solving. 

It would be wrong to say that vast numbers of people subscribe to this conspiracy theory: few of the YouTubers poring over the JFK assassination or the latest pronouncements from Q seem concerned we’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by Emperor Otto III. But the Phantom Time Hypothesis tells us something about how conspiracy theories work, nonetheless. It takes a bunch of ‘facts’ – some of which are accurate but entirely explicable, some of which are just plain wrong – and knits them together into an ostensibly compelling narrative. If you’re an American or Western European, with a basic layman’s grasp of history, it feels true. The only problem is, it isn’t.

This is an extract from my new book, Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories and How Not to Fall For Them, co-written with the outstanding Tom Phillips. It’s published in hardback this Thursday, 7th July (£16.99, Headline). You can buy a copy from all good bookshops, and also a bad one. 

In case you want to have some fun guessing what’s in it, here’s the contents page.