is nothing to record different from the past. But among civilized peoples who are either progressing or declining, one has to turn back but a generation or two to find great changes. The life of some one old man still living today goes back to the days before our Civil War. His grandfather could, perhaps, tell him stories of the period before railroads and factories had come into existence. Three more such lives would take us back to the first permanent settlements made by white men in this country, and but two more would land us on the verge of the Middle Ages.
Different peoples have had different calendars and systems of chronology. For instance, in the Middle Ages the Mohammedan lunar year was over eleven days shorter than the Christian Chronology
solar year, so that thirty-three and a half years elapsed in Arabia and North Africa and southern Spain while thirty-two and a half were passing in France and Germany. Even the Christians in the Middle Ages had leap-years a little oftener than we do, so that their reckoning was ten days ahead of time by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Another difficulty in dealing with medieval dates is the varying usage as to when the year shall begin. Certain medieval annals say that Charlenagne was crowned emperor in 801 instead of 800 because they reckon Christmas Day as the first of the new year. On the other hand, his death is put in 813 instead of 814 by those who do not begin the new year until Easter. This book will follow the customary Christian chronology introduced by the monk, Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, by which events are dated so many years before or after the year set for the birth of Christ. But various other eras were in use here and there in the Middle Ages. The Mohammedans began their era with the Hegira of Mohammed (622 a.d.); the Greeks and Russians employed the era of Constantinople which assumes to date its years from the creation of the world; and in Aragon and Castile until the fourteenth century Christians used the era of Spain or of the Caesars which made the initial year what we call 39 b.c.
The present volume will trace the history of Europe and
