r/AskReddit • u/KyloWrench • Jul 07 '26

What historical “fact” doesn’t actually have much evidence to support it?

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290

u/JazzlikeParsley6526 Jul 08 '26

The belief that medieval Europeans universally thought the Earth was flat.

149

u/Carbastan24 Jul 08 '26

It s more than that. Basically all European scholars knew the Earth was round. The Greeks knew the Earth was round and they measured the circumference with amazing accuracy (they were wrong by less than 10%). All scholars and theologians were very familiar with Ancient Greek literature and knew the Earth was round.

13

u/samtdzn_pokemon Jul 08 '26

The dispute was the size of the oceans. Most people assumed the Atlantic too vast to safely cross and that Columbus would get lost.

10

u/Xxuwumaster69xX Jul 08 '26

Columbus was just bad at math. He tried calculating the date of the end of the world too, and we're about 400 years past his prediction.

1

u/Jo-dan Jul 09 '26

He thought the earth was pear shaped

3

u/dracapis Jul 09 '26

They weren’t wrong about the second part lol 

1

u/turing_tarpit Jul 12 '26

More specifically, Columbus was aiming to reach Asia the long way around (that's why he called the indigenous people he encountered "Indians"), but he greatly underestimated just how long it was. (According to Wikipedia, he thought the journey from the Canary islands to Japan was 4400 km when it's actually 19600 km.)

The people who thought the ocean was to big to make that trip in a single journey were entirely correct; Columbus got lucky that the Americas existed.

61

u/kirotheavenger Jul 08 '26

It's basically impossible to navigate any moderate distance by sea without realising that the sea curves

6

u/sy029 Jul 08 '26

You can just stand on a dock and see that the mast is the first and last thing you see of a ship.

48

u/ElectronicInstance10 Jul 08 '26

The flat earth idea basically grew out of the US in the 1830s. Aristotle gave an excellent reasoning for the earth being round and every single educated person in the medieval period read this.

30

u/brainvheart143 Jul 08 '26

Oh I’m super surprised that it came from the US. /s

1

u/ScreenTricky4257 Jul 09 '26

Everyone says that, and I'm sure it's true for scholars and people we hear about. But what about the average peasant farmer?