By Nancy Marie Brown

Sylvester II, pope from 999 to 1003, was a wizard. He had sold his soul to the devil.

So, at any rate, said the official Lives of the Popes written in the late 1200s by Martin the Pole, a Dominican friar, and referenced for hundreds of years.

Friar Martin wasn’t making this up. He had good sources.

Pope Sylvester was “the best necromancer in France, whom the demons of the air readily obeyed in all that he required of them by day and night,” wrote Michael the Scot earlier that century.

In the 1120s, William of Malmesbury claimed Pope Sylvester spent his time in Rome practicing “the black arts.” He owned a “forbidden” book stolen from a Saracen philosopher. After “close inspection of the heavenly bodies,” he made himself a talking statue that would answer any yes-or-no question.

Then in 1602, the papal librarian Cardinal Baronius came across a collection of Pope Sylvester’s letters and concluded he “was nothing but a learned man who was ahead of his time. Those who want to efface his name from the catalogue of popes are ignorant fools.”

What did the cardinal read in those letters? About Pope Sylvester II’s abacus, or counting board.

Pope Sylvester II was the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero, as a 10th-century manuscript found in 2001 reveals. His abacus introduced the place-value system of arithmetic and mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. It has been called the first counting device in Europe to function digitally – even the first computer. In a chronology of computer history, Gerbert’s abacus is one of only four innovations mentioned between 3000 B.C. and the invention of the slide rule in 1622.

Pope Sylvester II wasn’t a wizard. He was a geek.

About the author: Nancy Marie Brown writes about science, history, and sagas. She is the author, most recently, of THE ABACUS AND THE CROSS: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages (Basic Books; December 2010). Her previous books include The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman and Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist Looks at Genetically Modified Food, which was named one of the Best Sci-Tech Books for General Readers for 2004 by Library Journal. She lives in East Burke, Vermont.

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By Cole G

With the inception of global trade and the beginnings of European Imperialism in the 17th century, the Catholic Church also seized the opportunity to spread its faith across the world. Missionaries first arrived in Japan on Spanish and Portuguese ships, and it was the Portuguese who established and maintained a strong trading and Christian base in the Japanese archipelago.

Christianity spread rapidly through Japan in the 17th century and at one point Japan had the largest population of Christians outside of European rule. Although Christianity did reach the ruling class of Daimyo*, Japanese Christians consisted mostly of peasant farmers during that time. The shogunate was suspicious of the European missionaries, considering them precursors of military conquest, and persecuted the Japanese Christians, questioning their loyalty to their daimyos.

In 1637, more than 30,000 Japanese Catholic peasants and samurai retaliated against the persecution of the feudal government in what is known as the Shimabara rebellion. The Christians destroyed many Buddhist relics and ransacked temples during the rebellion, faced an army of 10,000 samurai dispatched from the capital of Edo (present day Tokyo), and was eventually crushed, but not without huge losses on the side of the shogunate. Immediately following the rebellion, the Edo Shogunate outlawed Christianity in Japan, and progressively tightened restrictions on foreigners in Japan into what eventually became Japan’s closed border’s policy （鎖国 Sakoku).

With Christianity having been made illegal in Japan, the Japanese Church was forced underground and came to be called Kakure Kirishitan (隠れ切支丹, Hidden Christians). Missionaries in Japan were forced to leave or to apostasize. Many Japanese Christians and foreign priests were tortured in an attempt to make them denounce their faith. As proof of their apostasy, Christians were forced to tread upon a fumie (踏み絵、lit. “stepping picture”). The fumie was an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary which Japanese Christians were made to spit and stamp upon in order to prove their abandonment of the Christian faith.

The book Silence by Shusaku Endo deals with the psychological and spiritual struggle of a missionary priest during this time period. The book was controversial when it was published in 1966, and has since been hailed in Japan’s literary circles as an essential part of the Japanese literary canon. Silence is an astonishing literary work that explores cultural differences between Europe and Asia and serves as a vivid portrait of what happens when meetings between the East and the West go awry. The title of the book comes from the faith struggle that the priest goes through as he tries to justify God’s silence during his persecution.

The Christians were almost completely purged from Japan, with only a few Kakure Kirishitans continuing to practice their faith in utmost secrecy, reciting prayers in tongues they could not understand (Latin and Portuguese) and performing their own version of communion, substituting rice balls for the bread of the Eucharist. However, these practitioners are few, and there are fewer Christians in Japan than in any other Eastern Asian nation (less than 1%). Christianity continued to be outlawed in Japan until the overthrow of the Shogunate and reassertion of the Emperor’s power with the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

*Daimyo (大名)—powerful land owning lords in Feudal Japan.

Cole G. is the Wonders and Marvels Editorial Assistant for East Asian History/Nonfiction and Historical Fiction. You can read more about him here.