2 – People in the Middle Ages Believed the World was Flat
This is a myth you may even have heard in school and suggests that the majority of people in the Middle Ages were backwards enough to believe the Earth was flat. During the Age of Exploration, the story goes that the public were against the idea of explorers trying to travel around the world in the belief they would sail right off the edge.
This is of course complete nonsense and is an unfair representation of people during the Middle Ages. According to historian Jeffrey Burton: “With extraordinary few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.” He goes on to say that all educated Greeks and Romans accepted the sphericity of the Earth by the first century A.D. It should be noted that a handful of the early Popes at the beginning of Christianity opposed the idea but in general, practically no educated person in the world believed the Earth was flat long before the Middle Ages.
Indeed, the fact that the Earth was a sphere was probably known since the 6th century B.C. with Pythagoras often credited as the first person to make the suggestion. In the 4th century B.C., Aristotle came to the same conclusion and used evidence such as the southern constellations rising higher in the sky when you travelled south to support the theory. In the 3rd century B.C., Eratosthenes calculated that the Earth was approximately 252,000 stadia in diameter. Scholars don’t agree on the exact measurement he used although it has been assumed he used the Egyptian stadion which would be 157.5 meters. If this is the case, his estimate was just 1% away from the actual diameter of the Earth which is truly remarkable.
In terms of how the myth got started; it can be traced to the 16th century when secular scientists tried to claim that a number of religious groups believed the Earth was flat during Medieval times. They did this as a means of painting such groups as ignorant. In the 19th century, a range of texts including History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (by Andrew Dickson White) helped to give the myth quite a lot of traction.
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving added further fuel to the fire. In it, Irving claims it was Columbus who first discovered the Earth was spherical. He tried to suggest his work was based on scholarly findings when in reality, it was pure fiction. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and a range of books and articles tackled this myth in the early part of the 20th century.