Everyone knows that historical chronology began in 1583. In that year Joseph Scaliger published his Opus novum de emendatione temporum—a famously innovative, interdisciplinary work. In it he cut across languages and traditions with ease, working in Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic, and Arabic sources as well as Greek and Latin ones. More important, he wielded the newest techniques of both philology and astronomy to reconstruct the calendars used across the ancient and modern worlds and establish the dates of dozens of events in ancient, medieval, and modern history. In fact, many scholars before Scaliger did research in chronology, and they devised some of the techniques that were central to his work. This article examines the chronological scholarship of Jean Bodin and others, clarifying what it had in common with Scaliger’s work and identifying the main differences.