News flash: The Bible said the Earth is spherical prior to Aristotle confirming the work of Eratosthenes.
News flash: Columbus was warned of the danger of circumnavigating a flat Earth and falling off the side to be eaten by demons.
News flash: There was no church and state separation in the medieval period into the Renaissance and ALL the academicians were theologians, and like many skeptics, untutored in the Bible or they'd KNOW the Earth is a spheroid!
Your belief about Columbus is mythology. You really think people with any experience sailing the world actually thought that the Earth was flat? Maybe if they were incredibly stupid, I guess.
Busting a myth about Columbus and a flat Earth
By
Valerie Strauss
October 10, 2011
If you learned in school that Christopher Columbus
sailed from Spain in 1492 and crossed the Atlantic Ocean, disproving a common belief in those days that the Earth was flat, then the lesson was wrong.
Historians say there is no doubt that the educated in Columbus’s day knew quite well that the Earth was not flat but round. In fact, this was known many centuries earlier.
As early as the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras — and later Aristotle and Euclid — wrote about the Earth as a sphere. Ptolemy wrote “Geography” at the height of the Roman Empire, 1,300 years before
Columbus sailed, and considered the idea of a round planet as fact.
“Geography” became a standard reference, and
Columbus himself owned a copy. For him, the big question was not the shape of the Earth but the size of the ocean he wanted to cross.
During the early Middle Ages, it is true that many Europeans succumbed to rumor and started believing that they lived on a flat Earth.
But Islamic countries knew better and preserved the Greek learning. By the late Middle Ages, Europe had caught up and in some cases surpassed the knowledge of ancient Greece and medieval Islam.
Several books published in Europe between 1200 and 1500 discussed the Earth’s shape, including “The Sphere,” written in the early 1200s, which was required reading in European universities in the 1300s and beyond. It was still in use 500 years after it was penned.
So how did it become common thought in the 20th century that people in the 15th century believed the Earth was flat?
In a 1991 book,
“Inventing the Flat Earth,” retired University of California professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explains how the myth was perpetuated in the 1800s by writers including Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...-a-flat-earth/2011/10/10/gIQAXszQaL_blog.html
https://www.history.com/news/christopher-columbus-never-set-out-to-prove-the-earth-was-round