That people in medieval Europe thought the earth was flat. Even had a history prof in college repeat this (granted she was an American history prof, so 🤷♂️. Makes the modern flat Earth movement even more perplexing.
My favorite bit of evidence for this is in Dante’s Purgatorio. He opens several cantos by mentioning where the sun is in the sky at different points on the globe at a given time, in Rome, India, and the island of Purgatory, which he puts antipodal to Jerusalem, so halfway between Chile and New Zealand.
The whole bit about Columbus proving it was round is bogus. He thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, which is why he said he could hit the East Indies before dying of starvation by sailing west. Lucky for him there was a whole other continent in the way. Could you imagine traversing the Atlantic, the entire breadth of North America, and the Pacific?
That people in medieval Europe thought the earth was flat. Even had a history prof in college repeat this (granted she was an American history prof, so 🤷♂️. Makes the modern flat Earth movement even more perplexing.
My favorite bit of evidence for this is in Dante’s Purgatorio. He opens several cantos by mentioning where the sun is in the sky at different points on the globe at a given time, in Rome, India, and the island of Purgatory, which he puts antipodal to Jerusalem, so halfway between Chile and New Zealand.
The whole bit about Columbus proving it was round is bogus. He thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, which is why he said he could hit the East Indies before dying of starvation by sailing west. Lucky for him there was a whole other continent in the way. Could you imagine traversing the Atlantic, the entire breadth of North America, and the Pacific?