In 1828, Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a book of fiction that many later took as historical fact. Among the book’s chapters, Irving gave readers a scene they could not forget: Columbus sitting before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s learned men, facing down monks, theologians, and scholastics who supposedly clung to Scripture while he alone saw the truth of a round world.
In this version of alternate history, Columbus set sail on his epic voyage to the Americas to prove to the world that the Earth was not flat.
It’s an appealing myth that even made its way into some school textbooks. But it’s false.
Educated Europeans during the Renaissance and before that in the Medieval Age already knew the world was round. Aristotle had argued for that nearly 1,800 years earlier. Eratosthenes had measured the planet’s circumference in the third century BCE. Medieval scholars such as Bede, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Johannes de Sacrobosco all worked within a spherical-Earth tradition, and used it to explain eclipses, daylight, climate and the motion of stars.
The myth that “medieval people thought the world was flat” says less about the Middle Ages than about the modern world that invented the Middle Ages as a foil: dirty, dark, ignorant, credulous and waiting to be rescued by 19th-century science.
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