“People in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat”

The idea that people in the Middle (Review) Ages believed the Earth was flat is a persistent misconception that largely originated in the 17th century. It gained significant traction in the 19th century through popular, though often inaccurate, historical accounts. Authors like Washington Irving, in his 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus, popularized the dramatic but false narrative that Columbus struggled to convince flat-Earth-believing churchmen of his spherical world view. In reality, the debate surrounding Columbus's voyage centered on the Earth's size and the feasibility of his proposed route, not its shape.

In truth, educated individuals throughout medieval Europe were well aware that the Earth was spherical. This knowledge was a direct inheritance from ancient Greek scholarship, with figures like Aristotle providing compelling evidence in the 4th century BCE, noting how ships disappear hull-first over the horizon and the Earth casts a round shadow during lunar eclipses. Eratosthenes had even calculated the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy around 240 BCE. This understanding was maintained and propagated by medieval scholars, with texts from the Venerable Bede in the 8th century explicitly describing a spherical Earth. By the 13th century, the Earth's roundness was an undisputed scientific fact among scholars.

The widespread belief in this myth today stems largely from these 19th-century efforts to portray the Middle Ages as a period of ignorance and religious dogma, in stark contrast (Review) to the enlightenment of modern science. Such historical misrepresentations served to highlight a supposed perpetual conflict between religion and scientific progress. However, the historical record clearly shows that the concept of a spherical Earth was a cornerstone of learned understanding long before the modern era.