Time is the substance history is made of; a river that flows unstoppably and without
mercy. Time is unchangeable, yet could it be controlled? Could it be forced to change?
We’ve been covering the Rise of Islam and the Early Medieval Ages for a long time now,
but what if none of the events we covered in those many hours of documentary content actually
happened? What if we have been lied to all our lives about the true course of history? Today,
we are going to discuss and analyze a disproven, yet very interesting theory about how 300
years of Medieval History were completely fabricated, and did not, in fact, happen.
We’ll first point out that when it comes to geopolitical conquests and imperial ambition,
the immense suffering it inflicts on those involved renders it a real evil
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In our day and age, conspiracy theories are a staple of popular culture:
Tinfoil-fueled tall tales that JFK survived his assassination and that world governments
conceal alien life are well-known examples of this, yet most of these theories are about
events that happened not so long ago. With that said, in recent memory, many crackpot
theorists have also taken the distant past into their crosshairs, fundamentally challenging how
we understand not only our history, but our relationship to the passage of time.
Case in point: the Phantom time hypothesis, a conspiracy theory with origins in the 90s,
fabricated by a group of German pseudohistorians and conspiracy theorists.
The phantom time hypothesis claims that approximately 300 years have been added to
our chronology between 614 and 911 AD, either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by
deliberate falsification, thus this period and all events that are supposed to have happened therein
never existed. The implications of this are, of course, staggering. It would mean that Charlemagne
is an invented figure, that the Rise of Islam never happened, and that we are 300 years less
removed from the fall of the Roman Empire than we imagined. Those who perpetuate this ludicrous
assertion claim that the scarcity of archeological evidence from this ostensibly fictional period is
proof that it never happened, while accusing medieval historians who lived in from the 11th
century onwards, who wrote about that period of history, of basically making stuff up. But why
would medieval historians fabricate 300 years’ worth of history? For the conspiracy theorists,
one answer lies in the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who reigned from 996AD to 1002AD. According
to the tinfoilers, Otto III didn’t actually live around the start of a new millennium. Instead,
Otto wanted to reign in this year because it suited his understanding of Christian
Millenarianism. So, with the help of his friend Gerbert de Aurillac, the future Pope Sylvester II,
Otto defined a new date in the year 1000 AD. Consequently, chroniclers had to invent 300
years of history to fill up the empty period with tales of great dynasties and kings,
in the process, inventing a man named Charlemagne, who they wrote as the role model for all rulers.
If that wonderful theory hasn’t convinced you that the entire history of America’s worth of
the middle ages is fake, there is also a second hypothesis centered on the Byzantine Empire.
Allegedly, Emperor Constantine VII, who reigned from 913AD to 959AD, organized a complete
rewriting of the whole history of Byzantium. Although his motivations are not clear, it could
be that the Emperor wanted to give more legitimacy to the decaying Empire after the fall of Rome.
The conspiracy theorists claim that such a rewriting of history is possible because
since the year 835 AD, Byzantine monks had been busy copying all the historical records of the
Empire from old maiuscula style manuscripts into new, minuscula style manuscripts.
With the original's manuscripts' destruction, the entirety of Byzantine history could
have well been fabricated right there in the span of just two generations.
As colorful as these suppositions can be however, there is no real proof for both of the hypotheses.
What evidence they have includes the questioning of any seemingly anachronistic thing they can
find. For instance, they claim that the Palatine Chapel of Aachen, built in a Romanesque style,
is very anachronistic for the 10th Century, and that it doesn’t make sense that a style modeled
off classic Roman architecture developed so many centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The truth is that since the 7th Century, Western cultures aspired to emulate the
Roman architecture of the past, slowly innovating through the centuries until
the Romanesque style was developed. This is why the Carolingian architecture of the
10th Century takes heavy inspiration from Roman basilicas, triumphal arches and palatine chapels.
Even beyond the Palace of Aachen, a vast amount of other buildings were constructed in Europe during
the supposed fabricated three centuries that it’s doubtful that all of them were constructed
in the 10th Century alone. For instance, between 768 and 855 AD, 27 new cathedrals,
417 monastic buildings and 100 royal residences were built just in the Carolingian Empire.
Yet, despite that, this hard archaeological proof is not enough for the tinfoilers, as the German
conspiracy theorists erroneously claim that the radiometric and dendrochronological methods
of dating, which confirm these buildings were infact built between the 7th and 10th centuries,
are inadequate and ineffective. However, most historians nowadays say that these methods
of scientific dating are very reliable and beyond the danger of circular reasoning. Now,
although we have debunked some of the theory’s main archeological arguments, we are going to
follow with astronomical evidence against it. If three centuries of our history have really been
fabricated then some of the astronomical phenomena that happened before this period of time should
have also been distorted. This however isn’t true: most of the observations of ancient astronomy,
such as solar eclipses and reports of comets, check out with modern calculus and with Chinese
records of the era. Although some of the solar eclipses cited by European sources prior to
the 7th Century are perhaps too vague to entirely disprove the theory, there are two confirmed cases
that have been dated with enough precision and certainty. The first one is an eclipse reported
by Pliny the Elder in 59 AD; and the second one was acknowledged by Photius in the year 418 AD.
The astronomical observations, combined with evidence from dendrochronology, is enough to
disprove the phantom time theory and to affirm that the Early Medieval Period indeed happened.
Another theory the German conspiracy theorists usually bring up to convince the casual reader
of their hypothesis is the famous ten days out of sync. In 1582 AD, Pope Gregory XIII started
the so-called ‘Gregorian calendar’, which is basically a corrected version of the old Julian
calendar of Julius Caesar. After being used for a long time, the Julian calendar had the problem
of no longer corresponding with the current astronomical situation. The difference, according
to calculations by Pope Gregory, amounted to 10 days. Here, the conspirators claim that it would
actually take 1257 years to produce an error of 10 days, and since Caesar created his calendar
in the year 46 BC, there would have been 13 days out of sync until 1582 AD, not only 10; which the
Germans use to attribute a span of at least 325 years which have been added to our chronology.
In reality, the Gregorian reform was never purported to bring our modern-day calendar
in line with the Julian calendar as it had existed at the time of its institution in 45 BC, but as it
had existed in 325 AD, the time of the Council of Nicaea, which established a method for determining
the date of Easter Sunday by fixing the vernal equinox on March 21st in the Julian calendar.
This is why Pope Gregory only counted 10 days of error and not 13, as he had been counting from the
year 325 AD and not from the 1st Century BC. Another of the conspiracy theory’s many weak
points is that it mainly concerns Western European history with a special emphasis on the Carolingian
Empire, but it doesn’t explain what happens with other places in contact with this region,
such as Anglo-Saxon England, Visigothic Spain, the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East.
This however does not stop the tinfoilers, who believe that if the thesis of 300
phantom years is right, then it must also be valid for the whole of Eurasian-African
history for the period between 600 and 900 AD. Of course, all these places did, infact, exist,
and were doing things during this period, and there is proof of this in each region. Let us
begin with Byzantium. Since the 7th Century however, there is evidence of painted fine
porcelain coming from Central Greece and Crete and of glazed white wares being developed on
Constantinople in this period. There is also evidence that the Byzantine Empire saw the
reintroduction of silver coins, which were not used since the 2nd Century; the melting down of
church plates, statues and roofs as a result of the economic crisis caused by the Arab invasions;
and the introduction of new coin types, such as the miliaresion during the 8th Century.
Other found archaeological evidence includes an extensive use of glass, worked bone tools and
decorations, ivory icons and p laques, the silver cup of the Grand Zuphan Sivin of Bulgaria dated to
the 9th Century, some silver weapons such as the Ewer of Zenobius made on Constantinople in the
7th Century, and the remains of the Nea Ekklesia, a church built by Emperor Basil the Macedonian.
Much of these was found on Amorium along with carbonized textile fragments dated
from the destruction of the city by the Muslim attack of 838 AD.
Let us move on now to the middle east and the rise of Islam, which is also plagued by conspiracy
theorists claiming it never happened. For example, some tinfoilers support this stance by
pointing out that the 11th Century epic called the Shahname, which ends with the last Persian king
Yazdegird III, who died in 651 AD, tells nothing about the Islamic conquest of Persia and has no
allusions to Islam at all. Moreover, they claim the Parsees, Zarathustra worshipers in India,
have been debating their own chronology furiously because messengers from Iran in the 18th century
told them that they had made a mistake in counting the years since the flight from their homeland.
Yet the German conspiracy theorists don’t stop there, claiming that a thorough examination of
the architecture of the Umayyads from 661 until 750 AD displays untypical characteristics for
an Islamic dynasty, while also claiming that we can see a painting on a wall from the 8th Century
allegedly showing the Persian king Khosrow II paying homage to the Umayyad sovereign,
although by then this Persian king had been dead for approximately 100 years.
The theorists use this to show that the times of Khosrow II and the Umayyads were the same and that
the Muslims had fabricated the conquest of Persia. Yet these are only suppositions, and we are going
to cover now the main evidence against this theory. For instance, some art historians
attribute the weird characteristics of Umayyad architecture to a formative period of Islamic art,
as the Muslims took the late antique classical naturalistic tradition of the Mediterranean as
their main artistic influence and adapted it to suit the needs of their burgeoning empire.
This was also supplemented by the Byzantine and Sassanian architecture found in the places
that the Arabs conquered, especially affecting metalwork, textiles and the depiction of figural
motifs. With time, Muslim artists would develop new techniques, forms and decorative conventions
that distinguished their works from earlier ones. Thus, evidence tells us that in the span of three
centuries, the rising Islamic empire went through a process of adoption of foreign architectural
styles; adaptation of these to their own needs; and creation of a new artistic expression that
became distinctly Islamic in the 10th Century. Moreover, historians argue that the Persian
ruler depicted in the 8th Century Painting of the Kings is not confirmed to be Khosrow II,
and that the image can be interpreted as a broadly symbolic representation of the defeat
of the Sassanian Empire against the Arabs, rather than the depiction of any specific era or King.
Furthermore, this image also shows a Byzantine emperor and the king Roderick of Visigothic
Iberia, both defeated by Islam, thus giving more credit to it being a representation of the
defeated enemies of the Arabs. Speaking of Iberia, there is strong evidence that there was, infact, a
Muslim presence there during the so-called phantom centuries. Although only coins and scant ceramic
fragments remain from the early 8th Century, since the establishment of the Emirate of Cordoba by Abd
al-Rahman I we can see the birth of a formative period of Hispano-Islamic art and architecture in
the region, marked by astonishing mosques and palaces such as the Great Mosque of Córdoba.
It is certain then that we can consider their existence in this period to be true.
Let us now move beyond the middle east, to the land of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers.
The Chinese Empire of the Tang Dynasty still holds considerable weight against the hypothesis of the
German conspiracy theorists. We’ve already stated that Chinese observations of solar
eclipses reinforce the point about the strong astronomical evidence, yet when we add the Middle
East to the phantom time equation we start to see a lot of cracks on it since the year 751 AD.
This year marks the first contact between Islam and China through the Battle of Talas,
which we have already covered in another video, so don’t forget to check it out.
Since then, Muslim communities are known to have been present in China, especially in commercial
harbors such as Canton and Hangzhou. And from the 9th century onwards, Islamic merchants started to
import Chinese ceramics, which were at the core of the Indian Ocean luxury trade at that time.
Archaeological finds of Chinese pottery in the Middle East date back to the 8th century,
starting with Chinese pottery of the Tang period. Remains of these ceramics have been
found in Samarra and Ctesiphon in present-day Iraq, as well as in Nishapur in Persia, including
porcelaneous white wares from Northern Chinese kilns, celadon-glazed stoneware originating in the
Yue kilns of Northern Zhejiang, and the splashed stoneware of Changsha kilns in Hunan Province.
In conclusion, we can see that there is strong evidence coming from dendrochronology,
astronomical observations, archeological findings in Byzantium and the Middle East, and from Chinese
records and interactions with Islam that allows us to utterly refute the phantom time hypothesis
coming from the German conspiracy theorists. Although it is true that there is considerably
less archeological evidence coming from the Dark Ages in comparison with any other era, we cannot
deny its existence, the experiences of everyone who lived there and the events that happened then.
In the end, we can only conclude by saying that time is indeed an unstoppable river,
as it was in the past, and as it will continue to be so in the future.
And thanks again to Conflict of Nations, the free real time grand strategy game for domination of an
online world. Get the game via our link in the description to get an exclusive gift: thirteen
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