I remember reading in Umberto Eco’s essay collection *
Serendipities : Language and Lunacy * about the popular idea that Columbus was challenging a then-current belief in a flat earth. In fact, as he reports, it was Columbus who was in error. Those he was challenging knew roughly the size of the earth, and that travelling to India by going 'round the other way (as Columbus proposed) would not be any shorter than the current route. Columbus believed the earth to be much smaller than what they knew, and so serendipitously introduced Europeans to the New World (and vice versa).
Making rough estimates – it’s about 7000 mi. from Spain to the East Indies on a great circle. Assuming that there were only ocean between the two (going west, that it), that’s 17,000 mi. at a minimum to get there by going the other way. Sailing round the horn of Africa is probably less than 15,000 mi.
I don’t have the book handy to get the source (which I would presume he provides), but if anyone’s really interested I’ll try to find out more.
> I am sure I could probably adduce more evidence
> concerning the Church suppressing science.
Even if we were to accept that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed science in certain cases, that doesn’t mean that they suppressed science in every case. They didn’t suppress the fact that the Earth was round. That was known since the time of the ancient Greeks, before the Church even existed. It’s arguable to what extent the attack on Galileo and on those who disagreed with Galen was mostly because of the Church or if was because the intelligentsia in the Middle Ages tended to be slavishly devoted to certain ancient writers, particularly Aristotle. Let me recommend a book I mentioned once before: The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis. It’s an excellent introduction to the worldview of the Middle Ages. This idea that many people have today that people in the Middle Ages were ignorant, superstitious fools is just wrong. Basically, that’s accepting the stereotypes that were invented about the Middle Ages during the Renaissance. Certain intellectuals in the Renaissance decided that they had to make a thorough break with the Middle Ages, so they created a myth about how medieval people were stupid conpared with those of ancient and modern times.
Who discovered that the earth is a sphere?
That the earth is a sphere was one of the discoveries made by Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher who lived in the sixth century B.C. The researches of Anaximander had prepared the way for the discovery, and the doctrine of the spherical form of the earth was taught by Parmenides, who was associated with the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras himself clearly understood that the sun, moon and planets have motions of their own independent of the rotation of the earth. Plutarch attributed the discovery that the earth is a sphere to Thales of Miletus, who preceded Pythagoras by a generation, but it is now known that Thales, like his contemporaries, conceived the earth as a flat disk. In the time of Aristotle the arguments employed to demonstrate that the earth is a sphere were similar to those employed at the present time. The doctrine of the spherical form of the earth later became almost the exclusive property of the Italian schools, and it was not until long after the discovery of the New World by Columbus that it was accepted by people in general. A book entitled The Metrical Lives of the Saints, written by an English monk at the close of the thirteenth century, says: “As an appel the urthe is round, so that evermo half the urthe the sonne byschyneth, hou so hit evere go.” Since the time of the Pergamene school of sculpture, which flourished two centuries before Christ, Atlas has been portrayed as supporting the heavens or the terrestrial globe on his shoulders. According to one mythological story, Atlas, as leader of the Titans, tried to storm heaven, and as a punishment for this rebellion Zeus compelled him to bear the vault of the heavens on his head and hands. But even in ancient times the terrestrial globe was often substituted for the canopy of the skies in portrayals of Atlas. A Roman statue made before the time of Hadrian shows Atlas kneeling and sustaining the globe on his head and shoulders. Atlas was first applied to a volume of maps by Gerhard Mercator (1512-1594), the Flemish mathematician and geographer, because a figure of Atlas supporting the heavens had been commonly used as a frontispiece for such collections. The suggestion was that Mercator’s book contained all the knowledge of the world between its two covers. During the so-called Dark Ages the knowledge that the earth is a globe was suppressed, and many scholars who knew the truth about its shape discussed the subject only among themselves for fear of persecution. In Isaiah 40:22, reference is made to “the circle of the earth,” but this does not prove that the ancient Hebrew prophet conceived the earth as a globe. He might have used the same figure of speech if he had accepted the theory that the world is a flat disk.
–Book about a Thousand Things (1946), by George Stimpson; pp.463-464.
(a few comments: in Isaiah 40:22 the Hebrew word translated as “circle” is khug. This word can mean either “sphere” or “circle.” In Aristotle’s day, of course, the argument concerning the shadow the earth casts on the moon during a partial lunar eclipse was commonly used.)
To Wendell Wagner and others: I am not acting in lack of response to your most recent postings. Rather, one of the Dopers who commented on my mention of Stimpson’s book claimed I referred to an old reference volume I had read many years before and remembered imperfectly. So I felt that the only proper this for me to do was to cite the article in Book about a Thousand Things, that I had adduced, and to cite it verbatim.
> During the so-called Dark Ages the knowledge that the
> earth is a globe was suppressed, and many scholars who
> knew the truth about its shape discussed the subject only
> among themselves for fear of persecution.
Stimpson gives no examples for this, nor any references. Furthermore, it seems to contradict the rest of the portion quoted.
I agree, Wendell. But the fact that the earth was a sphere was known in the time of Pythagoras does not necessarily mean that it would have been known generally in the Western world in the decades soon before Columbus’ voyages; Stimpson’s mention of “The Dark Ages” is crucial here. Much of the knowledge Western civilization had gathered–the Greeks, the Romans when the empire flourished, and the Arabs–to whom we owe a considerable debt in the realms of medicine and mathematics–had been forgotten or suppressed. (It had been known in most parts of the world, for example, that cats ate mice, making them invaluable to farmers; in the Dark Ages this had been forgotten and cats were slaughtered because everybody knew they were witches. This blew up in the face of those who propounded this belief, when fleas, carried by rodents cats didn’t kill, carried bubonic plague, and this plague killed off 67 million people–one quarter of the population of Europe–at that time.) During the Dark Ages all but the elite were illiterate–even monarchs–and books were kept in monasteries and such.
Note Stimpson’s comment near the end of his Preface: I would like to include a list of acknowledgments of assistance here, but to cite all the sources of information and to name all the persons who have helped me in preparing this book would be impracticable. Their name is legion and even a mere list of them would require as much space as the book itself…–Stimpson, pp. ix-x.
Hmm. That seems like a cop out to me. Not that I expected to see citations in such a book, but to even mention it almost seems like a coverup. Where do you suppose he was November 22, 1963?
> Much of the knowledge Western civilization had gathered
> the Greeks, the Romans when the empire flourished, and
> the Arabs–to whom we owe a considerable debt in the
> realms of medicine and mathematics–had been forgotten or
> suppressed.
Forgotten, perhaps. Suppressed, not really. The whole notion that the Middle Ages were “Dark Ages,” in which ancient wisdom was deliberately concealed, is largely modern mythology. It’s a piece of propaganda first invented in the Renaissance. Read some history of the Middle Ages. Start with the Lewis book I recommended, for instance.
I question that: Is “The Dark Ages” same as “the Middle Ages”? In the Time-Life Science Library book The Body, there are illustrations from an Arab anatomy volume. Crude sketches, to be sure; the captions noted that Galen (to give him his due) stressed the importance of the liver, and this was absent from the Arabic volume. The Arabic anatomists were not in thrall to Galen in any way; but could such a concept have lasted at all in Europe at this time? And I am not making up the matter about cats, fleas, and the Black Plague. Besides, whose idea was it to keep the general population illiterate? I understand that at the time of the Magna Charta (1215), King John himself was illiterate–he “sealed” the document rather than “signing” it. Who brought this situation about?
Yes, the term “Dark Ages” usually refers to just the first third of the Middle Ages (approximately 476 to 800 A.D.). But my point was that it’s an exaggeration to refer to any part of the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. So King John was illiterate. So what? Literacy was never standard in Europe until the nineteenth century. I don’t think that anybody “brought about” the illiteracy of most of the population. Are you claiming that literacy was more common in ancient Rome, say, than during the Middle Ages? Do you have statistics to prove that? Do you have quotes from any book other than Stimpson’s showing that literacy was deliberately suppressed during the Middle Ages? My impression is that during all times and all places up until the eighteenth century literacy was a minority thing. In every community there were a few literate people to do the necessary reading and writing, but it just wasn’t necessary to have the majority of the population literate until the past two or three centuries.