Did everyone attend a meeting and just agree “today is (certain date), and we’ll go forward from there”?
In: 1
Kind of.
Pope Gregory XIII proposed the calendar in 1582. In October the countries that accepted the pope’s authority basically agreed to skip 10 days so holidays like Easter would line up better with the times of year they occurred at in ancient times.
Countries that didn’t respect the pope’s authority took significantly longer. It took until 1752 for the US colonies to use the Gregorian calendar and it took Russia until 1918 to begin using it!
Edit: got my Roman numerals wrong 🙁
Religion, colonialism and globalization.
Different European countries used the Julian calendar thanks to the major influence of the Roman empire. Then, a few centuries ago, they slowly began to adopt the Gregorian calendar, introduced by the pope Gregory XIII.
Then colonialism came and Europe controlled significant parts of the world, so the colonies used the Gregorian calendar as well.
Now, thanks to globalization, countries are practically forced to use the Gregorian calendar in order to deal with the majority of the countries in the industrial world.
Muslim countries do not use the same calendar. All the dates indicate AD (Anno Domini, set up by the Roman Catholic church) and AH (Anno Higri, from the start of Mohamed departure of Mecca to go to Medina). So both calendars exist together
There’s also an orthodox church calendar, and a special one of the Coptic orthodox church in Egypt, and I’m sure several more in Asia, which I don’t know about.
Most people use the Roman Catholic calendar for reference because of globalization (it’s the one used in people active on main financial platforms) and colonization (used by many colonisers of the past).
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