The Year It Happened: A Timeline Run
Dates are slippery in a particular way. Most people know an event happened and can place it within about five years, which is fine for conversation and useless the moment somebody asks for the number.
Each question below has one right year and three wrong ones that are wrong for interesting reasons. They are the year before, the year after, or the date of the closely related event people mix it up with. If you find yourself thinking that all four look about right, that is the trap doing its work, and the way out is to anchor on something else you know happened alongside it.
See all the outcomes this quiz can land on, and what each one means →
The calendar moved under everyone's feet
Before you can argue about a year, somebody has to agree what the years are. The Julian calendar ran long by roughly three quarters of a day per century, which sounds trivial until a thousand years have gone by, so by the sixteenth century the date of the spring equinox had drifted about ten days from where the church had fixed it. The reform ordered by Pope Gregory in 1582 removed the surplus in one stroke: in the states that adopted it immediately, the fourth of October was followed by the fifteenth.
Protestant and Orthodox countries took their time. Britain and its colonies changed only in 1752, by which point eleven days had to go, and the same act moved the start of the legal year from the twenty-fifth of March to the first of January. That is why documents from the period carry double-dated years such as 1750 stroke 51, and why anyone reading English records from before 1752 has to check which convention a clerk was using. Sweden attempted a gradual transition and briefly created a thirtieth of February in 1712. Russia switched only in 1918, which is why the October Revolution of 1917 is commemorated in November.
There is no year zero, and no norm behind this quiz
The numbering itself came from a monk. Dionysius Exiguus, working in Rome in the sixth century, was drawing up tables for the date of Easter and chose to count from what he calculated as the incarnation. His sequence runs from 1 BC directly to AD 1 with nothing in between, which is why, to the irritation of everyone who celebrated early, the twenty-first century began in 2001. The BCE and CE labels now common in scholarship use identical numbers and simply drop the theological wording. Radiocarbon dates follow another convention entirely, counting backwards from 1950 as the present, because atmospheric nuclear testing after that year changed the carbon in the air and spoiled the baseline.
The score you got here follows no convention at all. It is seven questions long, has never been trialled on a group of readers, and produces no percentile, no ranking and no measure of historical knowledge. It tells you which of seven years you happened to have to hand.
