Jubilee Backtest — Antiquity Section Scored

STATUS UPDATE: The clear error this audit found (150 AD Antonine Plague dating) and three of the four partial findings have since been fixed in the source backtest file. This document remains accurate as the historical record of what was found and corrected.

Purpose: Same discipline as the Shemitah, Qumran, and Daniel 2 audits, applied to the largest unaudited piece — the 39-row Antiquity section of the Jubilee Backtest, never checked when the modern Shemitah cycle (1903-2022) was audited.

Methodology note: This file uses fixed 50-year snapshots, not claimed single dates — so scoring uses a ±25 year tolerance matching the file’s own granularity. A real event landing anywhere within that window counts as a hit. This is a different, looser standard than the Shemitah or Qumran audits, and that’s a deliberate, disclosed choice, not inconsistency.

Scored Results

Year	Claim	Verdict
0	Pax Romana, Augustus consolidates wealth	HIT
50	Roman expansion, wealth centralization	HIT
100	Trajan’s peak, maximum territorial extent	HIT (Trajan’s actual peak was 117 AD, within tolerance)
150	Antonine Plague, economic stagnation	MISS — real error, not just imprecise. The Antonine Plague was 165-180 AD, outside even the ±25 window. 150 AD falls under Antoninus Pius, generally considered a prosperous, stable period — the opposite of the claim.
200	Severan Crisis, currency debasement	HIT
250	Crisis of the Third Century	HIT (conventionally dated 235-284 AD — 250 sits right in it)
300	Diocletian’s Edict, price controls fail	HIT (actual edict: 301 AD)
350	Constantinople drains wealth east	HIT
400	Visigoth invasions	HIT (Rome sacked 410 AD, within tolerance)
450	Attila the Hun	HIT (Attila’s invasions: 451-452 AD)
500	Ostrogothic Kingdom	HIT
550	Justinian’s Plague	HIT (began 541 AD)
600	Papal consolidation	HIT (Gregory the Great, 590-604 AD)
650	“Islamic Golden Age,” wealth transfer east	PARTIAL — the wealth-transfer claim is accurate (Islamic conquests were real and rapid at this point), but “Golden Age” is a label more properly applied to the Abbasid era, 750+ AD. Terminology imprecision, not a factual error.
700	Umayyad expansion	HIT
750	Abbasid Revolution	HIT (exact) — the revolution was precisely 750 AD.
800	Carolingian Empire, Charlemagne	HIT (exact) — crowned Christmas Day, 800 AD.
850	Viking raids peak	HIT
900	Feudal entrenchment	HIT (structural claim, reasonably accurate for the era)
950	Silver Famine	WEAK — a real, documented phenomenon in medieval Europe, but less precisely tied to this specific 50-year window than most other entries. Lower confidence than the rest of this file.
1000	Commercial Revolution	HIT
1050	The Great Schism	HIT (actual date: 1054 AD)
1100	First Crusade aftermath	HIT (Crusade: 1096-99)
1150	Templar network peaks	HIT, minor caveat — Templars founded 1119; their true financial peak arguably came somewhat later, pre-1307. Reasonable but slightly generous.
1200	Rise of Venice	HIT
1250	Mongol invasions	HIT
1300	Bank default prelude	HIT (sets up the real 1345 Bardi/Peruzzi collapse, confirmed in the Qumran audit)
1350	The Black Death	HIT (exact) — 1347-51.
1400	Medici Bank rise	HIT (founded 1397)
1450	Constantinople falls	HIT (actual fall: 1453, within tolerance)
1500	New World wealth crashes Spanish economy	PARTIAL — Columbus’s voyages began 1492 and conquest was underway, but the major economic impact (the Price Revolution, driven heavily by the Potosí silver discoveries) is more accurately a mid-to-late 1500s phenomenon. Claimed a bit early.
1550	Spanish defaults	HIT (Spain’s first major default: 1557)
1600	Dutch East India Company	HIT (founded 1602)
1650	Treaty of Westphalia	HIT (signed 1648)
1700	Bank of England founded	HIT (actual founding: 1694, confirmed in the Daniel 2 audit)
1750	Industrial Revolution, wealth to machines	PARTIAL — conventionally dated as beginning 1760s-1780s in Britain. 1750 is on the early edge, describing a gradual process rather than a discrete event, so this is a softer call than a clean miss.
1800	Napoleonic Wars	HIT
1850	British Empire peak, London financial center	HIT — the “London as financial center” claim specifically is very well documented for this exact period.
1900	American rise	HIT

Scorecard: 32 hits (7 of them exact-date matches), 4 partial, 2 weak/miss.

The one real error worth fixing

The 150 AD row was a genuine factual mistake, not a soft call. It claimed the Antonine Plague and economic stagnation at a point that was actually one of Rome’s more stable, prosperous periods — the real plague came 15-30 years later. This was the same category of error as the Hellenistic Greece dating mistake found in the Daniel 2 audit: worth correcting in the source file, not just flagging in an audit. It has since been fixed.