abella's confessor and, following defeat of 

 the Moors, Archbishop of Granada. This 

 commission, composed of both clerical 

 and lay advisors, did meet at Salamanca, 

 among other places. They did pose some 

 sharp intellectual objections to Columbus, 

 but all assumed the earth's roundness. As a 

 major critique, they argued that Columbus 

 could not reach the Indies in his own allot- 

 ted time because the earth's circumference 

 was too great. Moreover, his critics were 

 entirely right. Columbus had "cooked" his 

 figures to favor a much smaller earth and 

 an attainable Indies. Needless to say, he 

 did not and could not reach Asia, and our 

 Native Americans are still called Indians 

 as a legacy of his error. 



Virtually all major medieval scholars 

 affirmed the earth's roundness. I intro- 

 duced this essay with the eighth-century 

 view of the Venerable Bede. The twelfth- 

 century translations into Latin of many 

 Greek and Arabic works greatly expanded 

 general appreciation of natural sciences, 

 particularly astronomy, among scholars — 

 and convictions about the earth's spheric- 

 ity both spread and strengthened. Roger 

 Bacon (1214-1292) and Thomas Aquinas 

 (1225-1274) affirmed roundness via Aris- 

 totle and his Arabic commentators, as did 

 the greatest scientists of later medieval 

 times, including Jean Buriden (1300- 

 1358) and Nichole Oresme (1320-1382). 



So who, then, was arguing for a flat 

 earth if all the chief honchos believed in 

 roundness? Villains must be found for any 

 malfeasance, and Russell shows that the 

 great English philosopher of science 

 William Whewell first identified major 

 culprits in his Histoiy of the Inductive Sci- 

 ences, published in 1837 — two otherwise 

 entirely insignificant characters named 

 Lactantius (245-325) and Cosmas Indi- 

 copleustes, who wrote his Christian 

 Topography in 547-549. Russell com- 

 ments: "Whewell pointed to the cul- 

 prits. . .as evidence of a medieval belief in 

 a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent 

 historian imitated him — they could find 

 few other examples." 



Lactantius did raise the old saw of ab- 

 surdity in believing that people at the an- 

 tipodes might walk with their feet above 

 their heads in a land where crops grow 

 down and rain falls up. And Cosmas did 

 champion a literal view of a biblical 

 metaphor — that the earth is a flat floor for 

 the rectangular, vaulted arch of the heav- 

 ens above. But both men were minor and 

 largely ignored figures in medieval schol- 

 arship. Only three reasonably complete 

 medieval manuscripts of Cosmas are 



known (with five or six additional frag- 

 ments), and all in Greek. The first Latin 

 translation dates from 1706 — so Cosmas 

 was invisible to medieval readers in their 

 own lingua franca. 



Purveyors of the flat earth myth could 

 never deny this plain testimony of Bede, 

 Bacon, Aquinas, and others — so they ar- 

 gued that these men were rare beacons of 

 brave light in pervasive darkness. But con- 

 sider the absurdity of such a position. Who 

 formed the orthodoxy representing this 

 consensus of ignorance? Two pipsqueaks 

 named Lactantius and Cosmas Idi- 

 copleustes, known to practically nobody? 

 Bede, Bacon, Aquinas, and theu^ ilk were 

 not brave iconoclasts. They were the es- 

 tablishment, and their convictions about 

 the earth's roundness were canonical, 

 while Lactantius and his colleagues re- 



mained entirely marginal. To call Aquinas 

 a courageous revolutionary because he 

 promoted a spherical earth would be akin 

 to labeling Fisher, Haldane, Wright, 

 Dobzhansky, Mayr, Simpson, and all the 

 other great twentieth-century evolutionists 

 as radical reformers because a peripheral 

 creationist named Duane Gish wrote a 

 pitiful book during the same years called 

 Evolution: The Fossils Say No. 



Where, then, and why, did the myth of 

 medieval belief in a flat earth arise? Rus- 

 sell's historiographic work gives us a good 

 fix on both times and people. None of the 

 great eighteenth-century anticlerical ra- 

 tionalists — not Condillac, Condorcet, 

 Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, or our own Ben- 

 jamin Franklin — accused the scholastics 

 of believing in a flat earth, although these 

 men were all unsparing in their contempt 



FLOWERS COUIAIMTTHE 



15 



