Did medieval people really huddle around in their castles, terrified that ships might sail right off the edge of the world? It’s one of those “facts” that almost everyone seems to know — people in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat, and then Columbus came along and bravely proved them all wrong. Sounds like a great story, right? There’s just one tiny problem. The flat Earth Middle Ages myth is exactly that — a myth. And the real story behind how it became so widely believed is, honestly, a lot more interesting.
Let’s start with what medieval people actually thought. If you picked up the works of pretty much any educated European thinker from the medieval period — we’re talking roughly the 5th to the 15th century — you’d find that the spherical Earth was common knowledge. And I don’t mean cutting-edge, controversial, whispered-in-dark-corners knowledge. I mean textbook-level, taught-in-schools, everyone-agrees-on-this knowledge.
The Venerable Bede, an English monk writing in the early 700s, described the Earth as a sphere. Thomas Aquinas, the towering intellectual figure of the 13th century, took it as a given. Dante Alighieri literally structured his entire Divine Comedy around a spherical Earth — his hell is a cone inside the globe, purgatory is a mountain on the opposite side, and the whole thing only makes sense if the Earth is round. These weren’t obscure thinkers on the fringes of society. These were the rock stars of medieval scholarship.
And they weren’t pulling this idea out of thin air, either. They inherited it from the ancient Greeks. Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference in the 3rd century BCE with remarkable accuracy — he was off by maybe a few percent, using sticks and shadows. Aristotle laid out multiple arguments for a spherical Earth, including the shape of Earth’s shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses. By the time the Roman Empire became Christian and Europe entered the medieval period, the spherical Earth was well-established intellectual property.
So if medieval people knew the Earth was round, where did this myth come from?
Buckle up, because this is where it gets good. The flat Earth myth is largely a 19th-century invention, and you can trace a huge chunk of it back to one man: Washington Irving. Yes, that Washington Irving — the guy who wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” In 1828, Irving published a biography of Christopher Columbus that was, let’s say, creatively enhanced. In his telling, Columbus had to fight against ignorant flat-Earth-believing churchmen who thought his voyage was doomed. It was a fantastic dramatic setup — the lone genius versus the forces of superstition.
The problem? Irving made it up. Or rather, he dramatically exaggerated and distorted what actually happened. The real debate before Columbus’s voyage wasn’t about the shape of the Earth. It was about the size of it. Columbus’s critics — who were educated people, not flat-Earth cranks — correctly argued that the distance from Europe to Asia going west was far too great for the ships of the day to survive. Columbus, ironically, was the one who was wrong. He drastically underestimated the size of the Earth. He only survived because there happened to be two entire continents in the way that nobody in Europe knew about.
So the medieval scholars were right, and Columbus was wrong. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irving’s myth got a massive boost in 1896 when Andrew Dickson White, the co-founder of Cornell University, published a hugely influential book called “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.” White painted a broad picture of religion as the perpetual enemy of scientific progress, and the flat Earth myth fit perfectly into his narrative. It was too useful not to use, and so it got repeated. And repeated. And repeated. Until it hardened into one of those “facts” that everybody knows, even though it was never true.
Now here’s where I want you to put on your critical thinking cap, because this myth isn’t just a fun piece of trivia. It tells us something really important about how misinformation works.
First, notice the narrative structure. The flat Earth myth gives us a simple, satisfying story: brave hero versus ignorant masses. We love that story. It flatters our sense of progress — we’re smarter than those people, we’ve moved beyond their foolishness. It feels good to believe it. And that emotional satisfaction makes us less likely to question it.
Second, notice how authority figures propagated it. Irving was a celebrated author. White was a university president. When people with credentials say something confidently, we tend to believe them. How many things do you believe right now simply because someone with an impressive title said so?
Third, notice how long it’s persisted. Despite decades of historians debunking this myth, it still shows up in textbooks, casual conversations, and online discussions. Once a false idea gets embedded in a culture, it’s incredibly difficult to dig out. It becomes part of the mental furniture — it’s just “there,” unexamined, accepted.
And this is the real lesson here. The flat Earth myth isn’t really about the Middle Ages at all. It’s about us. It’s about how easily we accept stories that confirm what we want to believe, how reluctant we are to question widely held assumptions, and how a good narrative can beat the truth in the marketplace of ideas if nobody’s paying close enough attention.
So the next time someone tells you something that sounds like common knowledge — something “everybody knows” — take a beat. Ask where it came from. Ask who benefits from the story being told that way. Ask whether the people in the story are being fairly represented or turned into cartoons to make someone else’s point.
And with that in mind, here’s my question for you: what’s another “fact” you’ve always believed that turned out to be completely wrong? I bet there’s at least one. Share it in the comments below — let’s bust some myths together.
