Bede saw, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier by a monk from the Black Sea, he fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, for the first time, were measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord.
