Macrobius and Martianus Capella were also well aware that the earth was round. As for the church fathers, they had to cope with the biblical text that mentioned the damned tabernacle shape, but Augustine, even though he did not hold strong opinions on the matter, knew the views of the ancients, and agreed that sacred scripture spoke in metaphors. His position is rather a different one, one quite common in Patristic thought: since it is not by knowing the shape of the earth that one’s soul is saved, the question appeared to him to be of little interest. At a certain point Isidore of Seville (who was no model of scientific accuracy) calculates that the length of the equator was eighty thousand stadia. Could he have thought the earth was flat?
Even a first-year high-school student can easily deduce that if Dante enters the cone of Hell and comes out the other side to see unfamiliar stars at the foot of Mount Purgatory, this means that he knew perfectly well that the earth was round. But let’s forget about Dante, since we tend to think he can do no wrong. The fact is that the same opinion was held by Origen and Ambrose, and in the Scholastic period many writers—such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John of Holy-rood, Pierre d’Ailly, Giles of Rome, Nicole d’Oresme, and John Buridan, to name but a few—spoke and thought of the earth as spherical.
What, then, was the question at issue in Columbus’s time? It was that the learned men of Salamanca had made more precise calculations than his, and believed that the totally spherical earth was bigger than our Genoese mariner thought, and therefore that he was mad to try to circumnavigate the globe and arrive in the East by sailing West. Columbus, though, inspired by sacred fire, and a good sailor, if a hopeless astronomer, thought the earth was smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the wise men of Salamanca suspected that another continent lay between Europe and Asia. So you see how complicated the question is, and how narrow are the bounds between truth and error, right and wrong. The doctors of Salamanca, though they were right, made a mistake; and Columbus, though wrong, pursued his error with determination and was right—through serendipity.
Yet have a look at Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.* It is true that in these two thick volumes he aims to list all the cases where religious thought retarded the development of science, but since he is an informed man, he cannot conceal the fact that Augustine, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas knew very well that the earth was round. Nevertheless, he claims that in order to maintain this they had to fight against the dominant theological view. But the dominant theological view was represented precisely by Augustine, Albertus, and Aquinas, who consequently did not have to fight against anyone.
Once more it is Russell who reminds us that a serious work like that by F. S. Marvin, which appeared in 1921 in Studies in the History and in the Method of the Sciences, repeats that “[t]he maps of Ptolemy … were forgotten in the West for a thousand years,” * and that in a manual written in 1988 (A. Holt-Jensen, Geography: History and Concepts) it is claimed that the medieval church taught that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem at the center; and even Daniel Boorstin, in his popular Discoverers of 1983, states that from the fourth to the fourteenth century Christianity suppressed the notion that the earth was round.
How did the idea spread that the Middle Ages considered the earth a flat disk? We saw that Isidore of Seville calculated the length of the equator, yet in the actual manuscripts of his work there is a diagram that inspired many representations of our planet, the so-called T-map.
The structure of the T-map is very simple: Given that the circle represents the planet earth, three lines forming a T separate an upper semicircle from two lower quarter circles. The upper portion represents Asia, upper because according to legend the earthly paradise was in Asia; the horizontal bar represents on one side the Black Sea, on the other the Nile, while the vertical line represents the Mediterranean, so the quarter circle on the left is Europe, and the one on the right is Africa. All around is the large circle of the ocean.
Could it have been that these maps signified that the earth was a flat circle?
In a manuscript from the Liber Floridus by Lambert of Saint-Omer, from the twelfth century, the emperor holds a circle in his hand, on which is drawn a T-map. It is not by accident that this map appears as a regal symbol in the hands of an emperor. It has a symbolic rather than a geographical value. With a little bit of goodwill one could interpret it not as a circle but as the schematic representation of a terrestrial globe, as happens in other images.
However, the impression of a circle is given by the maps illustrating the commentaries on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, a text written in the eighth century but which, illustrated by Mozarabic miniaturists in subsequent centuries, had a wide influence on the art in Romanesque abbeys and Gothic cathedrals, and T-maps are found in countless illuminated manuscripts.
How was it possible that people who believed that the earth was round made maps where what one saw was a flat earth? The first answer is that this is just what we also do. Criticizing the flatness of these maps would be like criticizing the flatness of one of today’s atlases. This was simply a naive and conventional form of cartographic projection. However, there are other factors we have to bear in mind.
The Middle Ages was a period of great travels, but with the roads in disrepair, forests to traverse, and stretches of sea to cross relying on any sailor who was around, there was no chance of drawing adequate maps. They were purely schematic, like the Instructions for Pilgrims at Santiago de Compostela, and they said more or less: “If you want to go from Rome to Jerusalem proceed southward and then ask as you go along.” Let us try to think of a railway map as found in any railway timetable that you buy from a newsstand. Nobody could extrapolate from that series of crisscrosses, which in themselves are clear enough if you want to take a train from Milan to Livorno (and realize that you have to go via Genoa), the exact shape of Italy. The exact shape of Italy is not of any interest to someone who has to go to the station.
The Romans had charted a series of roads connecting every city in the known world; these roads were represented in what is called Peutinger’s map (named after the person who rediscovered it in the fifteenth century). The map shows with great precision every road of the time, but it places them roughly along two stretches of land, the upper one representing Europe and the lower one Africa, so that the Mediterranean appears as a little stream. We are in exactly the same position as with the railway timetable map. The shape of the continents is not of any interest, only the information that there is a road that allows you to go from Marseille to Genoa. And yet the Romans, from the Punic wars onward, had crisscrossed the Mediterranean and knew very well that it was not the little stream that was shown on the map.
For the rest, medieval journeys were imaginary. The Middle Ages produced encyclopedias, called Imagines Mundi, that tried more to satisfy the taste for marvels, telling of distant and inaccessible countries, and these were all from books written by people who had never seen the places they wrote about, since the force of tradition counted more than actual experience. Various maps of the world of the time aim not to represent the shape of the earth but to list the cities and peoples that could be seen there. Furthermore, symbolic representation counted more than empirical representation, and often what preoccupied the illuminator was putting Jerusalem at the center of the earth, not how to get to Jerusalem.
Last point: medieval maps did not have any scientific function but met the demand for marvels that came from the public, I mean in the same way that today glossy magazines show us the existence of flying saucers and on TV they tell us that the Pyramids were built by an extraterrestrial civilization. Even in the Nuremberg Chronicle, which was actually written in 1493, or in Orteliuss atlases in the next century, maps represented mysterious monsters that were thought to inhabit those countries the maps themselves already showed in acceptable cartographic terms.
Perhaps the Middle Ages were cartographically naive, but many modern historians have been even more naive and have not known how to interpret their criteria for mapmaking.
Another fake that changed the history of the world? The Donation of Constantine. Nowadays, thanks to Lorenzo Valla, we know that the Constitutum was not authentic. And yet without the
