In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail amidst disputes involving the shape of the earth. Most people, especially Christians in the Medieval Ages, used to believe the earth was flat, not round. We’re all familiar with this story. We’ve heard it related in classrooms and textbooks since childhood.
Yet this story simply isn’t true. In fact, most people at that time believed the earth to be round. Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell shares,
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. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere.
The ancient Greeks and Romans accepted that the earth is a globe. According to Aristotle’s cosmology (which dominated medieval European curriculum), for example, the natural motion of the element earth (which the planet Earth was thought to be composed of), is toward the center of the universe, and since earth is always stiving toward the center from every side, the natural result of this motion is a spherical shape.
Another argument familiar to the ancient and medieval world involves lunar eclipses. During lunar eclipses, Earth’s shadow appears on the moon, and from any standpoint on the earth—north, south, east, west—Earth’s shadow always appears curved. The conclusion? The earth is a sphere.
Perhaps this understanding of Earth’s shape changed with the onset of Christianity, then? Again, Russell provides insight:
A few—at least two and at most five—early Christian fathers denied the [sphericity] of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2–3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.
Early church father Augustine (354–430), for example, accepted a round earth, and medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) employed ancient Greek arguments for a spherical earth. Even the classic work of literature Dante’s Inferno, written in the 14th century, assumes a round earth.
Now, if the majority of people in the Medieval Ages (and earlier) believed the earth to be round, how did we come to the popular understanding today that most believed it to be flat? It seems this modern tale was initiated by two individuals in the 19th century: Antoine-Jean Letronne and Washington Irving. They each reported this narrative in their written works—Letronne in On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834) and Irving in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828).
This tale was then perpetuated by historian John William Draper and some of his followers, like Cornell University president Andrew Dickson White. By the 1860s, it was being related as truth in schools and texts. According to Russell, “The falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history.”
So, if the argument regarding the funding of Columbus’s voyage wasn’t about the earth’s shape, what was it about? The earth’s size—especially the parts of Earth’s surface covered by sea. Columbus argued that Earth was smaller than was commonly believed. The shape of the earth wasn’t in question. We know that by looking at the ancient and medieval sources. History often sheds light on modern misconceptions concerning the interaction of science and Christianity.