Either of these views might be correct, and no one will dispute a poet’s right to arrange his skies as he thinks fit, if he is consistent with them, as Dante was. But how did these positions, if they are purely imaginary, come to coincide exactly with the real positions of 1301? If we examine the positions of 1301, and accept nothing that is doubtful in Dante’s own words, what does the coincidence amount to? Saturn was near Regulus, but he was also in the forepart of Leo in 1300, and we are not sure that Dante means more than this; Mars was in Leo, but we are not sure that Dante wanted him there;[560] the moon was full on the morning of March 25, but we are not sure whether Dante means March 25 or Good Friday. Venus was a morning star in Pisces, and this till very lately was the one astronomical fact incontestably in favour of 1301 and against 1300. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [560] See p. 407. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ But in 1908 there was printed in Florence, for the first time, a mediæval Almanach, which suggests so simple an explanation of this most striking coincidence that it seems to leave nothing more to be said for the 1301 hypothesis. This Almanach, which has been published under a title which perhaps takes things a little too much for granted—_Almanach Dantis Aligherii_—was compiled by a learned Jew, Jacob ben Machir ben Tibbon, who was born in Marseilles about 1236, and died at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Using the Toledan Tables, he constructed this so-called perpetual almanach, which gives the positions of sun, moon, and planets, at intervals of a few days for whole cycles of years. Each has a cycle of a different length, that of Venus for instance being 8 years, as on the Babylonian tablets of ephemerides; and at the end of each cycle nearly the same positions come over again. It was written in Hebrew, and translated into Latin by an unknown author, and must have been popular, since there were an immense number of Latin MSS. in the fourteenth century. In the original, all the cycles begin in 1301, but in the Latin they begin in 1300, _except the cycles of Venus and the sun, which begin in 1301_. Yet 1301 is not written over the first column for Venus, but merely 1, or nothing at all, or even in some copies 1300, and in both the Hebrew and Latin prefaces the beginning of all the cycles is stated to be 1300.[561] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [561] Preface to _Almanach Dantis Aligherii_, Boffito and Melzi d’ Eril. ------------------------------------------------------------------------