Did people in the Middle Ages think the Earth was flat?

Medieval Europeans did not, in general, believe the Earth was flat. Among the educated, a spherical Earth was the accepted view, and this knowledge reached back to the ancient Greeks. The idea that the Middle Ages were a flat-Earth era is a myth. One caveat applies: we cannot know what ordinary farmers or craftspeople privately thought, since the evidence comes mostly from educated writers. [1] [2]

The Greeks understood the Earth to be spherical from about 500 BC, according to a list of Middle Ages myths maintained at the University of New South Wales, which adds that all but a tiny number of educated people have known it ever since. Thomas Aquinas used the roundness of the Earth as a standard example of a scientific truth. The Venerable Bede in the seventh century and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth also described a spherical Earth. [3] [4]

The ninth-century astronomer Ahmad al-Farghani pointed out that ships do not vanish suddenly at the horizon but sink gradually from view. Medieval culture also carried the image: orbs appeared in royal regalia and in pictures of Christ as Salvator Mundi, and Hildegard von Bingen drew a round Earth in the twelfth century. Philosopher Kate Rogers notes that by the ninth century, among the educated, it was generally known that the Earth is round, and that scholars had calculated its circumference to within about two miles. [4] [2]

The familiar tale says Columbus's critics feared he would sail off the edge of the world. The sources describe a different objection: that he had underestimated the size of the globe and would run out of supplies before reaching Asia. In Rogers's words, the warning was that the Earth is big and he would not make it to China. The critics were in fact right about the distance, and Columbus was fortunate that a continent lay in the way. [5] [2]

Medievalist Jeffrey Burton Russell, in his 1991 book Inventing the Flat Earth, traced the myth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A major source was Washington Irving's 1828 Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which claimed that theologians opposed the voyage because they thought the Earth was flat. One account describes the book as effectively a novel. Russell argues that critics of the medieval church then seized on the claim, and that no one before the 1830s believed medieval people had thought the Earth flat. Other commentators add that the myth flatters a modern sense of progress. Even respected historians, such as Daniel Boorstin, have repeated the Columbus story. [5] [4] [6]

Medieval people did hold other beliefs we now reject. They placed the Earth at the center of the universe, following Aristotle and Ptolemy, and the church embraced that view. The sources say this reflected how the heavens appear from the ground. [4] [2]