Hit & Myth 1 – The Flat Earth Theory

One of the questions I got asked when I started writing Warrior’s Surrender is why Medieval? Weren’t they just a bunch of ignorant, superstitious peasants who lost their way between the glories of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance?

Each Thursday I’ll be talking about a common place myth about the medieval period and we’ll start with my favourite:

In Medieval times, people thought the world was flat

Actually that was the myth that had me researching this period in history in depth.

People in the medieval period didn’t think the earth was Flat. In fact no educated person after 200BC believed the Earth was flat. That was plainly evident in the fact that standing on a mountain with a good panorama, you can see the curve of the planet.

Furthermore those waiting for ships to arrive would be able to see them emerge over the horizon. And this is not to forget solar and lunar eclipses where the shadow of the Earth or the Moon in its circular shape obscure the heavenly bodies, although such events were considered by all cultures around the world as being inauspicious.

Take a look at these two medieval paintings on the right hand side. You’ll notice King Richard II is holding an orb with a cross on it. It is symbolic of Christ’s dominion over the Earth, which is not only round – it’s spherical.

The second picture is one that I just love. It is called God the Geometer and it’s author is unknown although the illustration shows up in the Bible moralisse a set of illuminated Bibles commissioned by the French Crown.

It depicts God as creator and more than that God the mathematician, the master architect and, what do you notice in the round universe he is holding, there’s the Earth and the Sun and they are… well, spherical.

Medieval people not only understand the shape of Earth; some of them came extremely close to estimating its circumference. One school worked on refining Eratosthenes’ figure of 250,000 stades, which was within 15% of the modern figure of 40,074 kilometers. The other school worked on refining Ptolemy’s figure of 180,000 stades. Eratosthenes’ view dominated.

So where did the myth come from – well you can thank two people for that. A very dogmatic anti-Catholic French academic, Antoinne-Jean Letronne and an American popular fiction writer, Washington Irving – you might know him as the author of the Legend of Sleep Hollow and the story of Rip Van Winkle.

In a 1991 book, “Inventing the Flat Earth,” retired University of California professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explains how the myth was perpetuated in the 1800s by writers including Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne.

In 1828, Irving wrote “The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” which sounds like a biography but is mostly fiction. It says that Europeans learned from Columbus’s trips to the New World that the planet was round.

Letronne insisted that early Christian writers thought the Earth was flat. Though they did not, he was widely quoted for many years.

Others, too, helped perpetuate the myth.

And perpetuated it was, with the myth being taught as fact in children’s text books for over 100 years.

So, flat Earth?