“They thought the earth was flat”
(midwest.social)
grumpy_cat
History MemesAlso Columbus didn't set out to prove the earth is a sphere but to prove it is much smaller than thought. He was wrong, the Americas saved his ass.
I thought it was just that he thought it was smaller than it is and he wanted to find another route to India by going west instead of east. Not that he wanted to prove that the earth is smaller.
Doesn't Aristotle predate medieval times?
Is this a real argument by flat-earthers?
“They got it wrong hundreds of years ago, so I want to get it wrong in the 21st century, too!”
Certain fanatics also thought the earth was flat from a biblical literalist position, largely derived from Christian scholars of Late Antiquity who considered a spherical earth to be a 'pagan' position. But it's true that no credible scholar in the high medieval period, secular or religious, would've been able to get away with pronouncing a belief in a flat earth.
Every sailor that ever sailed knew there was a curvature to the earth and the only possible explanation was it was round
Even in Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages, spherical Earth was the consensus among Christian scholars, even if the flat Earth idea did made a come back at these times.
Send a boat out to sea and the hull disappears from sight before the sails. At the very least they knew it was curved.
(A 16^th^ century illustration in a 13^th^ century book.)
Dome earth >:(
Then, just like now, the generally accepted view of anything isn't based on the absolute state of human knowledge, but on the state of mass education.
It's true, and we don't have a lot of sources to infer what the commoner knew. But when a scientific fact is a consensus among scholars, even if literacy is low, it finishes in the mind of the whole population. In the 13^th^ century, the roundness of Earth was a consensus for more than 1000 years... it's safe to assume that it was known by almost everyone. Moreover priests, even low profile priests, received at least a basic education, and they would know that the Earth was round, and they would spread that knowledge.
