Mata Hari Executed / Gregorian Calendar introduced - October 15

Mata Hari was executed for espionage on this day in 1917. / On this day in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar, which was created as a way to reform the Julian calendar.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all. Were rerunning two episodes today, which means that
you'll hear two hosts me and Tracy V. Wilson. Enjoy
the show. Welcome to this Day in History Class from
how Stuff Works dot com and from the desk of
Stuff You Missed in History Class. It's the show where
we explore the past one day at a time with
a quick look at what happened today in history. Hello,

(00:24):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and
it's October. Mata Harry was executed on this day in
nineteen She was not named Mata Harry from birth. She
was born Margaretta Gertrude Zella on August seven. She was
born into a very wealthy family, but when she was
still pretty young, her father went bankrupt and then her

(00:44):
mother died. She and her siblings were split up and
they were sent to live with other relatives. When she
got a little older, she answered an ad for a
man seeking a bride. The person who was advertising was
Rudolph McLeod, and she married him on July eleven. Their marriage, though,
was not happy and was sometimes abusive, and it lasted

(01:07):
for nine years. During that time, they had two children together,
one of whom died very young. There are rumors that
a member of the household staff poisoned the children, but
it's not clear whether that is true. After leaving her
husband and her daughter behind and fleeing France, Margareta supported
herself as a courtisan and an actress and a dancer.

(01:29):
She concocted a really elaborate backstory for herself and her dances,
saying that she was performing sacred dances from the Indies.
These famously involved removing veils from her body, one at
a time until there was very little left on her body.
The fact that she was presenting these as an exotic,
faraway sacred thing offered her a little bit of legal

(01:51):
protection for what she was doing. It was when working
as a dancer that she took the stage name Mata Harri,
and that came from a Malay term meaning son rise
or I of the day. During World War One, George
le dou hired her as a spy for France. She
really needed money at this point and that's probably why
she did it. She was getting older, she wasn't as

(02:13):
easily able to make a living in that line of
work that she'd been in. She was supposed to seduce
German officers and get information from them. One of these
was a German attache, who, apparently eager to get her
out of his life, sent a message in a code
that he already knew the French had already broken, identifying
her as a spy. She had also accepted twenty thousand

(02:36):
francs from an honorary German console. It had been offered
to her as payment if she would spy for Germany,
but when she took it, she was considering it repayment
for belongings that had been seized earlier on in the war.
Regardless though, Le dou cut her off and stopped paying her,
possibly because he believed that she was a double agent.

(02:57):
By January of nineteen seventeen, she was running out of money,
and she was arrested that February and put on trial
in a military court. This trial did not go well
for her at all. Her attorney had almost no experience
in military court, and then the jurors were all men
who were in the military. Most of them had heard
rumors about her, which they believed, even though there was

(03:18):
no substantiation for them. On July twenty, nineteen seventeen, she
was found guilty of espionage. This happened even though the
trial had not revealed any secrets that she had given
to the Germans. There was no concrete evidence that she
had done any any of the things that she was
accused of. She was executed by firing squad outside of

(03:38):
Paris on October fifteen, nineteen seventeen, at the age of
forty one. When she went to her execution, she refused
to be blindfolded, she refused to be tied to the stake,
and she stared her executioners down the whole time. Afterward,
her body was donated to the University of Paris Medical School.
Questions about her guilt persisted in the decades to her execution.

(04:01):
There were a lot of questions about whether that trial
and her execution were about using her as a scapegoat,
not about anything she had actually done, and interpretations of
her as a person have really varied over the years,
with some biographers suggesting that she was completely conniving and
definitely guilty of being in a double agent, and other
biographers suggesting that she was really mostly interested in men

(04:23):
and money and was just doing things as they came
along to try to get more money. The German government
exculpated her in nineteen thirty and documents that were declassified
in along with personal papers that were made available around
the same time, suggest that she was much more a
scapegoat than an actual double agent. There is just no

(04:45):
evidence that she disclosed any meaningful information to the Germans
before the French executed her for espionage. You can learn
more about this in the June episode of Stuff You
Missed in History Class, which is before those twenty seven
teen documents were classified. Thanks to Chary Harrison for all
of her audio work on this podcast, and you can
subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple podcast,

(05:07):
Google Podcasts, and where well to get your podcasts. You
can tune in tomorrow for an iconic image of protest.
Hi everyone, I'm Eves and welcome to This Day in
History Class, a podcast where we rip out a page

(05:29):
from the history books every day. The day was October two.
Pope Gregory introduced the Gregorian calendar as a way to
reform the Julian calendar. The previous day was October four

(05:51):
on the Julian calendar. Until the end of the twenty
one century, the Julian calendar is thirteen days behind the
Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is used in most of
the world today. There's a leap year every four years.
On the Julian calendar, an extra day is added to
the month of February, so that the year is three

(06:12):
hundred and sixty six days long. That means the Julian
solar year is about three hundred and sixty five and
one fourth days long, but the solar year is slightly
shorter than that. It comes in at approximately three hundred
and sixty five point two four two days. Broken down,
that's about three hundred and sixty five days, five hours,

(06:34):
forty eight minutes, and forty five seconds. Because the Julian
year was about eleven minutes longer than the mean solar year,
the date of the equinox, according to the Julian calendar
was many days off from the observed date of the equinox.
In reality, that in turn caused dates on the religious
calendar to be skewed, since the date of Easter was

(06:57):
based on the Northern Hemisphere spring an ox. People were
aware of this drift and that calendar reform was needed
for centuries before the Gregorian calendar was introduced, but previous
attempts to change the calendar filled through. Still the need
to update the calendar became more urgent. In its fifteen

(07:18):
sixty two to fifteen sixty three session, the Council of
Trent called for Pope Paul the Third to reform the calendar.
The plan was to change the date of the vernal
or spring equinox back to March one, which was the
date of the Equalnox that was fixed by the Church
at the time of the Council of Nacia, and it

(07:40):
took until fifty two for the change to happen, when
Pope Gregory a papal bull authorizing a reformed calendar. Gregory's
reforms were based on the research and suggestions of Italian
scientists Aloisious Lilius and German mathematician Christopher Claudius. October fourth,

(08:00):
eighty two on the Julian calendar was followed by October
fift on the Gregorian calendar, with no change in the
continuity of week days. The Church chose October so it
could avoid disrupting any major Christian celebrations On the Gregorian calendar,
no century year is a leap year unless it's divisible
by four hundred. This helps ensure the calendar year is

(08:24):
nearly the same length as the solar year. Much of
Roman Catholic Europe adopted the new calendar within a year,
but Protestant and Orthodox states were slow to follow. The
Protestant German states switched in sixte Britain and its territories
made the change in seventeen fifty two, and from there

(08:45):
more countries around the world adopted the Gregorian calendar until
its use was wide spread, though many countries in Eastern
Europe used the Julian calendar into the twentieth century. Though
the Gregorian calendar is the international standard, some countries use
other calendars, and people have proposed reforms to the Gregorian calendar.

(09:07):
I'm Eves Jeff Coote and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. Give us
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this Day at I heart media dot com. I truly

(09:29):
hope you enjoyed today's show. We'll be back tomorrow with
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(09:50):
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