2. People in the Middle Ages did not believe the world was flat, having been determined centuries earlier it was, in fact, spherical in nature.
A common misconception repeated still today is the belief that people in the Middle Ages thought that the Earth was flat. Even in 2012, President Obama compared “Flat Earthers” in the time of Columbus to climate change deniers in the 21st century. In contrast to this modern understanding, there is no serious recorded belief in a flat Earth during the Middle Ages. As early as the 6th century BCE, Greek scientists had successfully determined the shape of our planet, as well as almost exactly calculating the circumference of the Earth long before the start of the Common Era. By the Middle Ages, this was common knowledge, with even the Church teaching that the Earth was round.
The myth of Middle Age belief in a flat Earth, originating during the 19th century, has two individuals to blame, acting almost concurrently yet independently. Frenchman Antoine-Jean Letronne sought to disparage the Catholic Church in his 1834 study “On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers“, seeking to depict the clergy as anti-science and ignorant. Meanwhile, American essayist Washington Irving, in an effort to embolden the myth of Columbus, introduced to the United States the erroneous concept that Europeans thought the folk figure was acting in defiance of popular opinion; Irving’s work has become a staple of the American education system, even after it has been widely debunked as incorrect.