When did the myth that medieval europe believed the earth was flat before Columbus originate?
Side note that there's no greater irony than the flat earth community believing a lie that was originally intended to denigrate medieval europe and the Catholic church as backward.
erry1 stoopid before dawkins invented atheism
A question I have is when was that Earth was a globe first thought of. I know it was way earlier than a lot of people believe. Some really early Greek philosophers believed the Earth was flat but even in ancient Greece, that the Earth was a globe was an idea that existed. But a question that goes along with it is why did nobody decide to sail west around the planet before Columbus did (or east, past Japan from China or Japan)? There's no way that nobody thought about that before Columbus. Especially since that the Earth was round was known for a long time.
Was it just that it would have been too difficult and they didn't think it was worth the risk because they didn't know if there was even anything there?
Everytime they tried going West the expeditions either died or returned to say "it's just endless water" (the atlantic ocean), so it wasn't deemed possible.
The only reason they tried with Columbus was because the Ottomans were restricting the spice trade with their monopoly to such an extent that they were desperate to find another way to India.
Well actually the vikings did reach America first. Is there any documentation about what they thought of America at the time? There's apparently not much evidence left of that kind of stuff from what I've seen. They were up north though and had Iceland and Greenland to stop over in so it's different than just pure ocean that you'd get from western Europe.
Yeah, that's what I figured. I can't imagine being on Columbus' voyage and just being in the middle of the ocean praying that there's land somewhere and that you won't just die in the middle of open ocean because there's nothing until you get to Asia.
>Well actually the vikings did reach America first. Is there any documentation about what they thought of America at the time?
No, I mean our only source for this until recently was a semi-legendary account of Leif Erikson's travels in the Icelandic Sagas. We weren't even sure that this journey had actually happened until we discovered Norse settlements on the North Atlantic coast.
they thought that you would be crossing over half a world of empty ocean, which is obviously a certain death sentence. columbus was the oddball in thinking that the world was much smaller than what everyone else thought.
Sailing and navigation weren’t advanced enough until the invention of the caravel and other similar innovations in the 15th century.
Greeks knew the earth was round and using the Lighthouse of Alexandria were able to calculate the circumference of the earth with surprising accuracy in 240 BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
The big thing about Columbus was that he was trying to reach India. Everyone at the time assumed there was just a giant expanse of ocean from Portugal to China. Based on incorrect calculations that he'd done, he thought the Earth was much smaller and that he could sail straight to India, which he could not, and everyone told him so. In essence, he lucked out in discovering America because if it wasn't there then he'd have died in the middle of a gigantic ocean. Columbus' biggest strength was that he knew about all the best trade winds and ocean currents. Without those he wouldn't even have reached America.
enlightenment larpers made up lies about the middle ages to try to make themselves look better, ie projecting their prima nostra cuck fantasies on their medieval ancestors. likewise, protestants attempted to demonize anything associated with catholicism. and protestantism didn't exist during the middle ages, so they needed to try to make it look worse than the early modern age from which protestantism emerged.
>protestantism didn't exist during the middle ages
The Reformation happened in the 1500s, and had remarkable similarities to the Hussites in the 1400s.
>the 1500s = Middle Ages
this is what every single pop history retard thinks. show them a picture from the 1500s or 1600s and their mind will immediately go to le dark ages. it’s like a litmus test for tards.
>hussites
similarities, but not the same. very far from it.
Something that modern writers often forget is that the Hussites were more about practice than actual doctrine. They practiced communion under both kinds and refused to pay indulgences to the church, but they didn't believe in double predestination or any of the other bullshit modern Prots believe in.
1500s is already early modern
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gib gf with big ass NOW
>When did the myth that medieval Europe believed the earth was flat before Columbus originate?
That'd be hard to pin down exactly, probably some time in the nineteenth century - they particularly enjoyed thinking that people who came before them were knuckle dragging barbarians because it made them look/feel better. Look into the claims that particularly Victorian Britain made about medieval Europe. They literally had museum exhibits of 'horrific medieval torture devices' that they had built themselves to look as nasty as possible.
>Black men use the asses of white chicks to explain their theories about how the world works
Fucking based. Whitoids seethe
The average idiot on the street thought the world was flat.
Most people back then didn't know shit
Nice projection