The myth of the flat Earth

The myth of the flat Earth

a belief about a belief

The Flammarion engraving, from L'Atmosphère: Météorologie populaire, 1888. It is reproduced everywhere as a medieval woodcut showing what people once took the sky to be. It is not medieval. It is sixty years younger than the myth it is used to illustrate, and was made in the same century, for the same readers.

The claim	That medieval Europe held the Earth flat
Status	False
Round since	The fifth century BC; no dissent from the third
The exceptions
Christian writers who denied it	At least two, at most five[1]
Christian writers who did not	Tens of thousands
Followers of the first group	None recorded
Where it came from
Invented by	Letronne, 1830s; Irving, 1828[2]
In schools by	The 1860s
Made respectable by	Draper, 1874; White, 1896
For use in	The quarrel over evolution
Columbus
Was arguing about	Distance, not shape
Was	Wrong
Salamanca was	Right

The myth of the flat Earth is the widely held belief that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was a disc, and were corrected by Columbus, or by Magellan, or by the general advance of reason. There was no such belief. Educated opinion in the West has held the Earth spherical continuously since at least the fifth century BC; from the third century BC onward, on Russell's stronger finding, essentially nobody educated believed otherwise. The medieval period is not an interruption in that record but a part of it. The figure of the Earth has been argued over in every century since, but its roundness has not.^[1]

What requires explaining is therefore not the Middle Ages but the nineteenth century, which assembled the story out of a novelist's invention and a French academic's error, put it into schoolbooks within a generation, and had a use for it. The century did the same thing to the map of Africa, and the Mountains of Kong were in the school atlases too. The use is the point of this article: the flat-Earth Middle Ages was manufactured during the quarrel over evolution, as ammunition.^[3]

What was actually held

The sphericity of the Earth was argued among the Greeks from the fifth century BC, settled among them, and never subsequently unsettled. Eratosthenes measured its circumference about 240 BC and was close. The Venerable Bede has it round in the eighth century. Sacrobosco's De sphaera, written about 1230, opens by demonstrating that the Earth is a globe and remained a standard university text for four hundred years, which means that essentially every educated person in later medieval Europe was taught the shape of the Earth out of a book whose title is On the Sphere.

The exceptions exist and are countable. Jeffrey Burton Russell, who took the myth apart, put the number of Christian writers who genuinely denied a spherical Earth at at least two and at most five, against tens of thousands who did not.^[1] Lactantius is the western one, and his objection was not to the shape as such but to the antipodes: he could not accept people on the underside, walking with their feet above their heads. He founded no school. Nobody followed him, and he was never counted among the Fathers.

The antipodes, and not the shape, are the genuine medieval controversy, and it is a good deal odder than the invented one. Virgilius of Salzburg was denounced to Rome by Boniface in 748 for teaching that there is another world beneath ours with people in it. The difficulty was never geometry. It was original sin: if there are people down there, are they descended from Adam, and were they redeemed? Virgilius cleared himself of the charge, was made bishop of Salzburg some twenty years later, and was canonised in 1233, four hundred and forty-four years after his death.^[5] The period's actual cosmological error, and it was a large one, was geocentrism, which is a mistake about motion and not about shape.

The council at Salamanca

The scene everybody knows is a novelist's.

Washington Irving published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828, and put into it a council at Salamanca at which Columbus argues for a round Earth against a bench of hooded churchmen who insist it is flat.^[2] There was a commission at Salamanca, in 1491. It did not discuss the shape of the Earth. Irving's account of what it did discuss is, in the assessment of the historians who have read the surviving records, an invention.

The real objection is much better, and it is the reason this section is here at all. The commission's difficulty was distance. Columbus had taken the smallest circumference of the Earth he could find in any book, and the greatest eastward extension of Asia he could find in any other, and had then pressed both further in his own favour. He was out by something like a quarter. The scholars told him Asia was too far to reach in the ships he had, and on the figures then available they were entirely correct. He was saved by a continent nobody knew was there.

So the tableau invented to show the experts benighted, and the navigator enlightened, depicts an occasion on which the experts had the better of the arithmetic and the navigator was wrong.

Draper and White

Irving supplied the picture. Two later works supplied the authority.

John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), advanced what is now called the conflict thesis: that religion and science have been at war throughout Western history, with religion losing ground as reason advanced. The flat Earth is one of its exhibits, and one of its best, because it is vivid and requires no technical knowledge to feel.

The thesis is no longer held by historians of science, who find the actual relationship to have been messier, more cooperative and less interesting to summarise. The exhibit has outlasted the case it was assembled for, which is usual.

The French academic Antoine-Jean Letronne had meanwhile produced, in the 1830s, a scholarly account of patristic and medieval cosmography that credited the Fathers with a flat Earth on very little evidence. Russell's finding is that the two lines merged: Letronne's error gave Irving's picture a footnote, and the compound was in schoolbooks by the 1860s.^[3]

Cosmas Indicopleustes

The single most-cited example of medieval Christian flat-earthism has a difficulty, which is that the Europe in question had never heard of him.

The world as Cosmas drew it, from a sixth-century manuscript: flat, with a mountain, under a vaulted lid. It is a genuine flat-Earth diagram by a genuine Christian writer, and nobody in the Latin West saw it until 1706.

Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote a Christian Topography in Greek in the sixth century, describing the world as flat and lying beneath a vaulted arch. It is genuinely a flat-Earth text and it is genuinely Christian, and it was genuinely read: copied in Byzantium from the eighth century, and translated into Slavonic, where it had a long life and survives in some ninety-nine witnesses. What it had was no readership at all in the Latin West, which is the Europe the myth is about. The manuscript reached western scholars only in 1706, and English readers only in 1897.

His reputation as the representative cosmographer of the Dark Ages therefore begins in the year after White's Warfare.^[4] A book unknown to the period it is used to characterise became the proof of what that period believed, within a year of the argument that needed it.

Why it took

A story is not adopted because it is true, and this one had several things going for it.

It flattered the century telling it, which liked a narrative in which the present was the sunlit end of a long climb out of superstition. It was usefully vivid. It required no expertise, so it could be taught to children and repeated by anybody. And it arrived exactly when it was wanted: the fight over evolution needed a clean prior instance of the Church having been ruinously and demonstrably wrong about the natural world, and here was one, ready-made, requiring nothing of the arguer but the assertion.^[3]

The irony is not lost on this encyclopedia. A parody wiki devoted to a modern flat-Earth doctrine has occasion to record that the doctrine's supposed pedigree was itself fabricated, by people who were on the other side, for a reason that had nothing to do with the shape of anything. The flat Earth as an organised position dates from the 1830s, begins in earnest with Samuel Rowbotham, and owes the Middle Ages nothing at all.

See also

• Flat Earth – the doctrine itself, which is modern and has no medieval ancestry
• Samuel Rowbotham – where the organised modern version actually starts
• Eratosthenes – who settled the question about two thousand years before it was supposed to have been open
• The figure of the Earth – the shape as actually measured, and by whom
• Geocentrism – the position the Middle Ages did hold, and which is a different error entirely
• Mountweazel – a falsehood planted on purpose, as against one that was merely convenient
• The Mountains of Kong – the same century inventing the map of Africa, and the same schoolbooks

References

1. ^ J. B. Russell (1934–2023), Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991), and his own 1997 summary of it. He was best known for five volumes on the history of the Devil and is reported to have preferred this one, which is a smaller book about a larger mistake. From the summary: "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." The count of dissenting Christian writers is his: "A few – at least two and at most five – early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth", against "tens of thousands" who did not.
2. ^ W. Irving, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). Irving was writing a life, not a monograph, and the Salamanca council is the most durable thing in it. The commission of 1491 was real; the debate Irving gives it was not.
3. ^ Russell's account of the transmission: the false accounts of Letronne and Irving "became melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools", and the resulting falsehood "became ammunition against the creationists" in service of the larger story of an "eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad)".
4. ^ Boniface's charge, as the sources give it, turns on the universality of redemption rather than on the shape of anything: he appears to have taken it for granted that antipodeans could not be descended from Adam. Virgilius died on 27 November 789 and was canonised by Gregory IX in 1233. The man denounced over the antipodes is a saint, and the man who denounced him is a saint too.
5. ^ Cosmas was unknown to the Latin West throughout the medieval period; the text was brought to western attention in 1706 and published in English translation in 1897. White's Warfare appeared in 1896. The sequence is not evidence of bad faith and is worth setting down anyway.

External links

• Inventing the Flat Earth – Russell's 1991 book, its argument and its reception
• The Myth of the Flat Earth – Russell's own summary, delivered to the American Scientific Affiliation in 1997
• Myth of the flat Earth – the general article, with the medieval sources set out
• The Flammarion engraving – the plate reproduced above, from Flammarion's L'Atmosphère (1888), via Wikimedia Commons
• Cosmas Indicopleustes, the universe – the diagram reproduced above, from the Christian Topography, via Wikimedia Commons