The Myth That Medieval People Believed in a Flat Earth
The story that people in the Middle Ages were trapped in blind belief and thought the earth was flat is one of the great historical distortions, invented by people in the 19th century.
Washington Irving: In his 1828 book, he invented a scene in which Columbus argued with ignorant clergy about whether the earth was flat or round. It was fiction.
The first president of Cornell University, he dressed up the false claim that Christianity forced a flat-earth belief on people as scholarship, to build his frame that religion had suppressed science.
An anti-clerical writer, he inflated the extreme views of a few fringe Church Fathers and quoted them as if they were the accepted view of the entire Middle Ages.
In medieval universities, students treated Aristotle as their teacher, and his work On the Heavens was required reading for any educated person.
Back in the 4th century BC, Aristotle had already proven the earth was a sphere, pointing to the curved shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse and to how the stars change as you travel north or south.
Medieval giants such as Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle's reasoning as a basic premise of theology. For medieval people, a spherical earth was settled common sense.
The cross-topped orb that medieval kings held as a symbol of authority represents the round earth. If they had believed the world was flat, kings would hardly have held a sphere to show off their rule.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, a work of 14th-century popular literature, gravity reverses as the hero passes through the center of the earth to the other side. That shows a spherical earth was taken for granted even among ordinary readers.
It's not that nobody in the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth. But they were a small fringe with almost no influence on scholarship.
In the end, the claim that the "dark" Middle Ages believed in a flat earth is an academic fraud. Modern writers deliberately erased a medieval civilization that had inherited ancient Greek learning, to make themselves look better.
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The 19th-century writers who painted medieval people as primitive
Washington Irving: In his 1828 book, he invented a scene in which Columbus argued with ignorant clergy about whether the earth was flat or round. It was fiction.
Andrew Dickson White
The first president of Cornell University, he dressed up the false claim that Christianity forced a flat-earth belief on people as scholarship, to build his frame that religion had suppressed science.
Jean-Antoine Letronne
An anti-clerical writer, he inflated the extreme views of a few fringe Church Fathers and quoted them as if they were the accepted view of the entire Middle Ages.
Aristotle's "round earth" was common knowledge in the Middle Ages
In medieval universities, students treated Aristotle as their teacher, and his work On the Heavens was required reading for any educated person.
Back in the 4th century BC, Aristotle had already proven the earth was a sphere, pointing to the curved shadow of the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse and to how the stars change as you travel north or south.
Medieval giants such as Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle's reasoning as a basic premise of theology. For medieval people, a spherical earth was settled common sense.
Evidence from artifacts and literature
The cross-topped orb that medieval kings held as a symbol of authority represents the round earth. If they had believed the world was flat, kings would hardly have held a sphere to show off their rule.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, a work of 14th-century popular literature, gravity reverses as the hero passes through the center of the earth to the other side. That shows a spherical earth was taken for granted even among ordinary readers.
It's not that nobody in the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth. But they were a small fringe with almost no influence on scholarship.
In the end, the claim that the "dark" Middle Ages believed in a flat earth is an academic fraud. Modern writers deliberately erased a medieval civilization that had inherited ancient Greek learning, to make themselves look better.
