We celebrate New Year on January 1st, as most Europeans have done for half a millennium or more.
So, too, did most Venetians, but the Republic of Venice — that is, the state as opposed to the people — celebrated the New Year on March 1st, and did so officially until the fall of the republic in 1797.
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Episode 22 — Happy New Year
The official New Year of the Republic of Venice was on March 1st.
This tradition goes as far back in time as we can see. In the earliest surviving Venetian medieval documents, the year starts on March 1st.
Early Venice was culturally Byzantine, but the Eastern Roman Empire didn’t have a well-defined calendar at the time, when Venice started coming into its own, in the 600s and 700s. The Byzantines still mostly used the Julian calendar.
However, to find the origins of March 1st as the start of the year, we need to go back even further, to the Roman calenders of the republican period.
Roman calendars
The earliest Roman calendars were a bit of a mess.
There were elements of a lunar calendar, with many adaptations for the solar year, which is not a simple multiple of lunar months.
Politics played a part as well, as the Roman consuls both regulated the calendar and had their terms defined by that same calendar.
Control of time has always been political, and in the Roman Republic there was ample space for manipulation and abuse of the calendar. Unsurprisingly, such manipulation and abuse was commonplace.
The first known Roman calendar had ten months of thirty or thirty-one days, and an unnamed winter period of variable length. The months were Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. They’re named after Mars, Aphrodite, Maia and Juno, followed by numbered months, from five to ten.
So the names and the numbers matched. September was the seventh month, and December was the tenth month of the year, unlike today.
Later, the unnamed winter period was split into the months Januarius, Februarius and occasionally a thirteenth intercalary (leap) month to align the calendar with the solar year.
January is named after the god Janus (god of doorways, transitions and change), while February gets its name from the februa, an instrument used for the Lupercalia feasts, which were celebrated in that month. The intercalary month didn’t have a proper name.
When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, creating the Julian Calendar, the start of the year mostly moved from March to January, but the leap day remained in February.
It was still somehow considered the last month of the year, where such an adjustment could be made.
March or January
Just because somebody powerful, like Julius Caesar, decides to change things, doesn’t mean everybody meekly follows along. Old habits die hard, and many people cling on to traditions and old ways of doing things.
Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight.
In agricultural societies, it is natural for the year to start with the growing season, in spring. The early Roman calendar probably started in spring because the original need for time keeping — and therefore a calendar — was agricultural.
That most likely also explains why the earliest calendar omitted the winter period. It wasn’t relevant for agriculture.
Christianity
The main driver of change wasn’t as much the Julian calendar reform, as Christianity.
The Bible doesn’t specify what time of year Jesus was born.
The Christian Church took the decision to place Christmas so it overlapped with the Roman Saturnalia and with the winter solstice. That way, people couldn’t celebrate both.
Once the date of Christmas was established, it was natural that the birth of a Saviour became the start of an epoch, and the starting point of the annual cycle.
Just as most Christian cultures count the years from the birth of Jesus, it makes equally sense to make the year start with the established date of birth of Christ.
Due to the imprecision of the Julian calendar, and the adoption at different times of the Gregorian calendar, the date of Christmas varies between cultures, countries and churches. However, celebrating the New Year on December 25th or January 1st became quite common, especially in Western Europe.
The importance of December 25th was obviously the birth of Christ, while January 1st became associated with his circumcision.
Obstinate Venice
Yet, the change was slow, and Venice officially never changed.
While most of Western Europe gradually accepted January 1st at the start of the year, the Republic of Venice kept March 1st, rather obstinately.
Venice wasn’t alone in this, even though most chose other dates.
Other countries, like the Duchy of Florence, later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, opted for March 25th, which is both near the spring equinox, and, according to some traditions, the date of the creation of the world. It is also the Feast of the Annunciation, nine months exactly before the birth of Christ.
As far as I know, the Venetian Republic didn’t have any official celebration of the New Year. The importance of the date seems to have been mostly legal and administrative.
In fact, the main feast in the spring was, besides Easter, on March 25th, as in Florence.
That date had many meanings. It was the spring equinox, the Annunciation, and the creation of the world, but also the feast day for St Mark, the patron saint of Venice, and the date of the mythical foundation of the city in the year 421.
More Veneto
However, Venice having another convention for the start of a new year, caused all sorts of problems.
Venice was in international place, a trading hub, and one of the riches countries in Europe. Consequently, there were many relationships and interactions with people from other places, east and west, both commercially, diplomatically and privately.
As everybody else started using January 1st, more and more of the people living in Venice and within the Venetian dominions adapted the same conventional. It was simply more practical in day-to-day life to be in line with neighbours and business contacts.
The republic didn’t change, though.
The discrepancy created problems around dates in January and February, as the other ten months would always fall in the same year in both systems.
To which year did a January or February date belong?
It could depend on up who had made the documents, for which purpose they had made them, and for whom they were destined.
All public documents, including everything drawn up by notaries, like last wills and testaments, continued to use March 1st as the divide.
One such document is the testament of Marco Polo. In it, we read:
In the year from the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ 1323, on the 9th day of the month of January, in the first half of the 7th Indiction, at Rialto.
Marco Polo died within a few days of having dictated his testament to the notary, in January 1324.
In the Venetian calendar, he died in January 1323, as the document states, but in our calendar he died in 1324 because we count the year from January, not from March.
Private documents, local administration on the mainland, the church with all its parts, and official documents destined for other countries, used January 1st as the divide.
To somehow alleviate the confusion, many started marking dates written according to the Venetian style, with the letters M.V., to make it explicit.
The letters are shorthand for more veneto — in the Venetian style — as opposed to the common style, as it became known.
While this method can resolve some ambiguities in specific cases, it still leaves room for doubt and misunderstandings when a date in January or February isn’t marked as more veneto.
It can still be either.
Rule by the grace of God
Why didn’t Venice follow the other European nations?
The primary driver in the movement towards having the start of the year on January 1st was the Catholic Church in Rome, as the Byzantine Church had opted for September 1st for New Year.
The Republic of Venice, however, had a different relationship than most other Catholic states in Europe to the church in Rome.
Most other early European states evolved in the early Middle Ages out of the many migrations into the territory of the Western Roman Empire. The only entity that could provide these new states a link to the legitimacy of the empire was the church.
The Roman church was the only institution to survive those tumultuous centuries, and hence the only one that could provide that continuity.
It is not a coincidence that the Roman church picked up many of the vestiges of the Roman Empire.
For example, the cardinals dress in purple while meeting in a curia, just like the Roman senators.
Symbolically, the church claimed the guardianship of the legitimacy of the power of the Roman Empire, and that it was up to the church to bestow (or not) that legitimacy on secular rulers.
This led to the concept of rule by the grace of God.
Starting with the crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas day in the year 800 — something French school children are supposedly still thankful for — the Pope lent legitimacy to secular rulers, be it emperors, kings, princes or dukes, who in return could claim to rule in God’s name.
Such an exchange served both parties. If kings ruled in God’s name, any rebellion or insurrection against the king was also a rebellion against God, so the rebellious would go straight to hell. Likewise, if the Pope bestowed legitimacy, he could also retract it, which gave the Pope leverage over secular rulers.
Not in Venice, though
The Republic of Venice didn’t fit that pattern.
For starters, there was no ruling dynasty in Venice. It was a republic, not a monarchy.
Who exactly would rule by the grace of God if the individuals exercising power kept changing.
Furthermore, Venice claimed to be a direct descendant from Ancient Rome, through Byzantium. The republic didn’t claim the inheritance of imperial Rome, but rather of provincial Rome.
The Venetian Republic came from a Byzantine ducatus, which in turn came from a Roman province.
Venice had, from that point of view, been there before the Pope.
The ruling elite of Venice didn’t need the Pope to claim legitimacy. They saw themselves as direct descendants of Rome, and as such, they didn’t need the Pope to bridge any gap between themselves and the past empire. For Venice, there was no gap. There was a continuum.
In fact, quite a few Venetian noble families of the case vecchie — the most ancient families — claimed to be descendants of dynasties of the senatorial elite of ancient Rome, or of Byzantine Ravenna.
Now, this is a much wider discussion than just the date of the start of a new year.
What it meant in practise — and what we can see happening repeatedly throughout the history of Venice — is that the Republic of Venice saw impositions from the Pope more as something optional than something obligatory.
Consequently, they abided by the Pope’s orders or requests if it suited them, and didn’t otherwise.
Evidently, Venice saw no reason to follow the others when they gradually started considering January 1st as the start of the year.
Consequently, we’re still today struggling with determining something as basic as the exact date of ancient documents.
Chronology is the mother of all history, so this is no trifling matter.
Any ways, the Republic of Venice is long gone — we’re closing in on the 230th anniversary of the end — and we do celebrate New Year, and we do it on January 1st, so Happy New Year!
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