Did Medieval People Really Think the Earth Was Flat?
How a novelist, a scientific controversy and a nineteenth-century illustration helped flatten the medieval world.
A room in a monastery in Salamanca, Spain. Scholars in black religious robes sit around a long table. Before them, a man argues passionately that the Earth is round and that sailing west will bring him to the Indies. The scholars open their Bibles and the writings of the Church Fathers, then shake their heads.
The man is Christopher Columbus (1451–1506). Ignorant medieval authority confronts courageous modern reason.
Nineteenth-century artists loved the scene. Twentieth-century textbooks loved reproducing it. Yet one of the writers most responsible for giving it life was neither a painter nor a professional historian.
He was the American author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
The Author of Sleepy Hollow Writes a Biography
Washington Irving (1783–1859) was in Madrid in 1826. Through his connections with the American diplomatic mission, he was offered the task of translating a newly published Spanish collection of documents about Columbus.
Instead of translating the collection, Irving decided to write a biography. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus appeared in 1828.
The book sold extremely well. Written by a storyteller, it was readable; presented as a biography, it was read as history.
The Salamanca episode appears in its pages. Irving’s Columbus faces examiners who invoke the writings of Lactantius, an early Christian author. Could anyone seriously believe that people on the other side of the Earth lived upside down, with their heels above their heads?
Columbus’s proposal was indeed examined by learned advisers. But that does not make Irving’s particular account a record of what they said. There is no surviving transcript establishing the scriptural flat-Earth confrontation he describes. Irving had allowed his novelist’s instincts a little room to work.
Even his version was more complicated than the story that followed. Some of his examiners accepted a spherical Earth but doubted the voyage. Later retellings tended to leave that distinction behind.
The Round Earth in Medieval Textbooks
De sphaera mundi. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (PD-Art).
Medieval scholars generally took a spherical Earth for granted.
In eighth-century England, the monk Bede, also known as Beda Venerabilis (c. 673–735), compared the Earth to a ball in his work on the reckoning of time. In the thirteenth century, Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De sphaera became a standard astronomical textbook in European universities and remained in use for centuries.
The sphere was there in the title.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the travellers pass through the centre of the Earth and emerge on the other side, beneath another sky.
The knowledge was much older than the Middle Ages. In the third century BC, Eratosthenes of Alexandria calculated the Earth’s circumference using the difference in the angle of sunlight at two locations. His result is often described as remarkably close to the modern figure, although its precise accuracy depends on how we convert the ancient unit of distance he used.
Medieval scholars inherited, copied and taught the Greek tradition of a spherical Earth. By Columbus’s time, the idea had been part of learned geography for more than seventeen centuries.
Kings held a round world in their hands, too.
The golden ball topped with a cross, familiar from medieval royal imagery, was the globus cruciger. The orb represented the world, the cross Christ’s authority over it. It was a symbol of rule, not a geography examination, but hardly an unfamiliar shape.
There were exceptions. Lactantius in the fourth century and Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century Byzantine merchant turned religious writer, are frequently cited as advocates of a flat Earth.
Their views, however, did not represent the mainstream of medieval geographical learning. Cosmas wrote in Greek and was scarcely read in medieval western Europe. Centuries later, Copernicus dismissed Lactantius’s treatment of the Earth’s shape as childish.
None of this tells us what every medieval farmer or merchant believed. It does tell us that Columbus did not have to introduce educated Europe to the globe.
Columbus Was the One Who Got It Wrong
What, then, did the scholars examining his proposal object to?
The size of the Earth.
The serious disagreement was not over whether the Earth was round. It was over how far a ship would have to sail west to reach Asia.
Columbus used an Arabic astronomer’s calculation but interpreted the distance using the considerably shorter Italian mile. He also extended Asia much too far east.
The result was an ocean conveniently reduced in size. His estimated voyage to Japan is often put at roughly 5,000 kilometres, against an actual distance commonly estimated at around 20,000 kilometres, depending on the points and route being compared.
The commission examining his project was headed by Hernando de Talavera (1428–1507), Queen Isabella’s confessor. After considering the proposal over several years, the advisers rejected it.
They thought his calculations were wrong. The crossing was too long. A ship could not carry provisions for the voyage he was actually proposing.
On that central point, the sceptics were right.
Without the Americas inconveniently — or, for Columbus, very conveniently — occupying the space in between, reaching land would have been a far more serious problem. As the voyage lengthened, his men worried about provisions and whether they could ever return.
Bad arithmetic helped produce one of history’s luckiest voyages.
The People Who Fed the Myth
The seed Irving planted flourished throughout the nineteenth century.
In 1834, the French scholar Antoine-Jean Letronne published an essay that emphasised flat-Earth views among early Christian writers. In 1874, John William Draper (1811–1882) published History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. In 1896, Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.
The titles announce the argument.
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Science and religion had been fighting for centuries. Religious authority had repeatedly obstructed scientific knowledge. An ignorant Middle Ages made a useful setting, and a flat Earth was an exceptionally effective prop.
The later books appeared amid the arguments over Darwin and evolution. The past supplied precedents for a struggle their readers already recognised.
What these accounts needed was not necessarily a flat Earth in itself. They needed a picture of the Middle Ages trapped in superstition and ignorant of science.
A flat Earth fitted that picture beautifully.
Once the framework was established, almost any story about medieval foolishness could begin to look like further evidence for it.
Pictures helped, too.
One famous engraving shows a traveller pushing his head beneath the edge of a star-filled sky to inspect the universe beyond. It still appears in books and articles as an illustration of the medieval worldview.
Yet its first documented appearance is in an 1888 book by the French science writer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925).
Flammarion placed it alongside an account of a supposedly naïve medieval missionary who claimed to have found the point where heaven and Earth met. The target of the passage was not principally the Earth’s shape, but the idea of the sky as a solid vault.
That is a different question.
Nevertheless, an apparently endless plain meeting the sky at its edge readily suggests a flat Earth to a modern viewer. The image could fit the familiar story of medieval ignorance even when the particular belief it illustrated concerned the heavens rather than the globe.
It looks medieval. Its first documented publication is nineteenth-century. The artist is unknown.
In Inventing the Flat Earth (1991), the American historian Jeffrey Burton Russell traced the development of the misconception. He identified the period from roughly 1870 to 1920 as especially important in its spread.
An American school reader published in 1919 put the lesson plainly:
“When Columbus lived, people thought that the earth was flat.”
A complicated history had become a sentence simple enough to memorise.
/Image: Anonymous, engraving in Camille Flammarion,
L’Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire (1888), p. 163.
Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A Round Earth and a Flattened Past
The myth remains in excellent health.
Studies of late-twentieth-century German and Austrian history textbooks found versions of it still in circulation. So did the familiar story of Columbus’s sailors trembling at the prospect of falling over the edge of the world.
The voyage records do not establish that fear. What the sailors had reason to fear was not a precipice but a dwindling supply of provisions and an ever-longer journey home.
Columbus is said to have kept a lower reckoning of the distance travelled for his men, so that they would not become alarmed.
There is a further twist. According to one interpretation, associated with the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the figures he gave the crew were closer to the actual distance than the higher figures he kept for himself. His own estimates had been too large.
Other scholars interpret the two reckonings differently. But on Morison’s reading, even the deception contains a joke: Columbus’s reassuring numbers were more accurate than the ones he believed.
Some people seem determined to remain lucky.
Modern people firmly believed that medieval people believed in a flat Earth.
The medieval books describing a round one were there all along.
Perhaps few things make us quite so careless about our own knowledge as the pleasure of laughing at somebody else’s ignorance.
References
- Irving, Washington. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. 1828.
- Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Praeger, 1991.
- Cormack, Lesley B. “That Medieval Christians Taught That the Earth Was Flat.” In Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, edited by Ronald L. Numbers, 28–34. Harvard University Press, 2009.
- Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. University of California Press, 1986.
- Sacrobosco, Johannes de. De sphaera mundi. Thirteenth century.
- Flammarion, Camille. L’Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire. 1888.
- Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. 1942.
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