I think it was a relatively small, isolated group who believed that. Artifactual evidence indicates that the Atlantic was crossed numerous times before Columbus. The Pacific as well.
Great link! It's hard to believe that he really thought the Earth was flat. Then again the Flat Earth Society is alive and well today with about 400+ members. I thought it was a joke. theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
Key word being scholars. Yes the majority didn't think it was flat, but books were rare until the printing press and even then many were illiterate. The general populace, if I remember correctly, still thought the earth was flat.
You could be right. I have no idea and would be interested to know. Below, I argued that I think the Christian church believedthe Earth to be round, so they could have learned it from church. Also, I would guess that people would know from sailing:
I've seem a few xkcd comics before but definitely need to check it out more. I just saw the ghost one about proper use of "literally". Is that what you meant?
Probably not, even today many simple facts of the universe such as the sun is a star, or the earth revolves around it, is unknown to a considerable part of the population.
Right. According to a recent NSF poll, 26% of Americans think the Sun goes around the Earth. That's people who live in the internet age with widely available public education!
I don't know the answer, but would bet that most people (>51%) in the Middle Ages knew Earth was a sphere, because the Christian church supported that view (AFAIK), and a spherical world makes more sense than a flat one to sailors. Good question!
The official church position was built on Aristotle and Ptolemy. The earth is spherical but at the center of the solar system. Most common people were illiterate, so we don't know, but drawings of a flat earth and sailors fearing to fall off existed.
Actually it was Columbus who was wrong in his dispute with the university of Salamanca, he estimated the circumference far too small and packed provisions accordingly. Without land between Europe and Asia, they'd have perished.
To be fair, it's a very understandable misunderstanding. The flat earth myth makes Columbus' voyage a great story. Even if it's not in textbooks anymore, it's a powerful myth that I'm sure many are told .
Lol, no. A number of people figured that one out centuries before Columbus. I believe scholars/mathematicians in the Middle East were the first. By Columbus' time most educated Europeans would have at least heard of the idea.
Actually the Bible makes reference to the 'circle of the Earth' in Isaiah 40:22. It's reasonable to surmise that man has always known about the circular/spherical nature of the planet.
Correct! "no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat" - Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell (1997).
Funny, we were just talking about that study in the comments above. To say "no educated person believed ..." is an overstatement - there's always that fringe group. However, I think conformity ruled back then so the fringe group was probably small.
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