In 1492, Christopher Columbus left Europe with his ships the Niña, the Pinta, and the
Santa Maria, on his way to plunder the riches of Asia. Instead of taking the obvious route
east, Columbus sailed west, thinking it would take less time. No one had ever tried it,
and for good reason: everybody thought the Earth was flat.
Columbus’s voyage, coming during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, shows
us just how far Europeans had come in the past few centuries.
I mean, in 2020 most people are aware that Columbus didn’t discover America, but his
journey was still essential for proving the Earth was round. His 15th century contemporaries
thought there was a distinct possibility that Columbus would reach the edge of the world
and just … fall off … into space, I guess … right?
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, and today we’re going to debunk a few widespread misconceptions
about the Middle Ages. Let's get started. And doth our quest begins! That's not how
they talked back then, ignore that.
It turns out that plenty of people in the Middle Ages knew that Earth was a sphere,
thanks in large part to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras and the Roman astronomer Ptolemy.
By around 600 BCE, Pythagoras had supposedly commented about Earth being round, and his
work was echoed by Aristotle and Euclid. Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 2nd
century CE, not only came up with a comprehensive theory of an Earth-centered universe—which
was later proven incorrect, of course—but also drew maps of the known world with the
latitude and longitude coordinates of thousands of locations. He figured out a way of showing,
on a flat surface, that the Earth was a sphere, which was a big deal in the cartography scene
back then.
Even after the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, some scholars continued
to study geography based on the Greek and Roman mathematical model. An English monk
known as the Venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century CE that the Earth was like an “orb,”
not “merely circular like a shield or spread out like a wheel, but resembles more a ball.”
Islamic scholars in the 9th century CE continued to interpret and improve the data.
Around 1300, scholars in Europe revisited this thinking and began reproducing manuscripts
of Ptolemy’s text and maps. In 1406, his Greek text was translated into Latin, making
it more accessible to many readers.
These developments had a huge impact on later medieval and Renaissance thinkers—including
Columbus. He owned a copy of Ptolemy’s book and used his map projections to chart his
unusual route west to the Indies.
Now, you might not be convinced and still think that people in the Spanish court thought
the world was flat. But what if I were to tell you that, far from being told by intellectuals
that his plan wouldn’t work because the world was flat, one 16th century source claims
Columbus was told his plan wouldn’t work because the world was *a sphere.* According
to The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son, Ferdinand, some authorities
argued “that if one were to set out and travel due west, as the Admiral proposed,
one would not be able to return to Spain because the world was round. These men were absolutely
certain that one who left the hemisphere known to Ptolemy would be going downhill and so
could not return; for that would be like sailing a ship to the top of a mountain: a thing that
ships could not do even with the aid of the strongest wind.” Beautiful.
So where did this misconception come from? A much more recent source than you might expect:
Washington Irving, the hugely popular 19th-century author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In
his fictionalized account of Columbus’s voyages, published in 1828, Irving wrote that
Columbus tried to convince his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that the Earth was round.
Annoyingly, parts of Irving’s tale are accurate, parts like the flat earth sprung from his
imagination. He wasn’t the first to make medievalists flat earthers—Thomas Jefferson
wrote “Galileo was sent to the inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere,”
for instance—but he’s credited with bringing in Columbus, and without access to primary
historical records, it created a misconception that people in the Middle Ages were ignorant
of geography, other cultures, science, the whole bit basically. Which brings us to our next misconception.
Some people think of the Middle Ages as the “Dark Ages” because they seem less progressive
than the Classical Era and Renaissance, two eras in which humanism and individualism were
highly prized. The Classical era did give us modern democracy and philosophy. And the
Renaissance gave us important art, literature, and really pretty ceilings.
In contrast, the Middle Ages in Europe was all about the Christian Church. Some historians
have put forth the idea that the Church crushed religious dissent and any actions by people
seeking to uplift humanity, but this is far from the whole story. The church actually
sponsored some of the most beautiful and radical art that emerged in the Middle Ages.
Monasteries across Europe flourished as centers of learning and philosophy. The Venerable
Bede—remember him?—lived at an important twin monastery called Wearmouth-Jarrow in
northeastern England, which was home to one of the country’s biggest libraries. Bede
wrote more than 60 works on nature, astronomy, mathematics, and religion. His best known
work is An Ecclesiastical History of the English People—the first book of its kind, for which
he’s known as the father of English history.
A lot of these monasteries had artist studios where monks made illuminated manuscripts.
The pages of these volumes were detailed with incredibly intricate paintings, with recurring
motifs like interlocking knots, animals, mythical beasts, and biblical scenes. You can see what
I’m talking about in the Book of Kells, one of the most spectacular examples. It was
created around 800 CE in a Scottish island monastery and is now preserved in Trinity
College Library in Dublin.
Monastery architecture was pretty basic in the early Middle Ages. Around the 10th century,
though, French architects developed a new style that demonstrated the Church’s increasing
influence and wealth. This look, called Romanesque, is identified by super-thick stone walls and
massive round arches that presented feats of artistry and engineering.
About 200 years later, a French priest named Abbot Suger blew the public’s mind when
he rebuilt an old church in the new Gothic style. The main innovation on the heavy Romanesque-style
Church of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, was large, pointy-arched windows that let
in abundant sunlight. Later French cathedrals added external supports called flying buttresses,
which transferred the building’s weight to the outside—allowing taller and taller
structures with light-filled, awe-inspiring interiors.
In fact, Suger considered light a symbol of divinity, writing,
"For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright
and bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light."
So, light was actually a big part of the Dark Ages, metaphorically and literally.
Europeans might have jousted and feasted—some of them, at least—but those weren’t the
only things going on in the world between the 5th and 15th centuries. Across the globe,
civilizations expanded. Different religions drove new concepts in science, art, and philosophy.
Trade networks birthed a global economy and accelerated the worldwide exchange of ideas.
The term “The Middle Ages” is generally meant to apply specifically to Europe, but
let’s take a quick look at what was going on during the same time in other parts of
the world.
While Christianity was the foundation of European society in the Middle Ages, Islam emerged
in the Middle East in the 7th century. Islamic leaders called caliphs, along with trained
military commanders, conquered large swaths of what is now Turkey, the Middle East, and
Iran. That set the tone for the Islamic Golden Age: a period of Islamic expansion and advances
in medicine, astronomy, engineering, architecture, literature, and philosophy.
In China, the Song Dynasty propelled an early industrial revolution between the 10th and
13th centuries. Industrial manufacturing powered by coal boosted the economy, and Chinese rulers
increased their control over the Silk Road, the main east-west overland trade route. The
many innovations of the Song Dynasty include movable type, gunpowder, the cultivation of
crops like tea and cotton, and paper currency.
In the 13th century, Genghis Khan and the Mongols swept across Eurasia from Mongolia,
eventually expanding their empire from southern China to Eastern Europe. They put an end to
the Song Dynasty in China and transformed the rest of Eurasia, laying waste to any town
or city that resisted their takeover.
Meanwhile, Indigenous cultures in the Americas flourished. Just one of the many distinct
North American civilizations was the Mississippian Culture, centered around what is now the Midwest
and Southeast U.S. By the 11th century, Mississippian people had developed a huge river-based trade
network and a major city, Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis. The culture is known today for
its massive mounds—which still exist around the Cahokia site. And in Mesoamerica, civilizations
including the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec built massive cities and pyramid complexes for religious
purposes, alongside artistic and mathematical achievements—it’s said that the Maya calendar
is more precise than the modern Gregorian. Further south, the Inca connected their empire
with 25,000 miles of road, complete with staircases for their llamas. In parts of South America
these roads are still being used.
So we’ve discovered that people in the Middle Ages understood geography and made some great
art. But there’s no denying that Europeans knew very little about the world beyond their
own towns, right?
This misconception can be pretty easily dunked on. Many Europeans in the Middle Ages traveled
widely—they made religious pilgrimages to important shrines and churches, and they traveled
to the Holy Land a series of Crusades between 1095 and 1291. As thousands of people marched
from Western Europe to Jerusalem to fight Muslim forces for control of the city, they
encountered different cultures along the way and eventually brought knowledge of the Mediterranean
world back to their home countries (if they survived battle, that is.)
And about the same time as the Crusades began, sailors started venturing beyond European
waters in search of new trade routes and territories to claim. The Viking navigator Leif Erikson
made it all the way to coastal Canada. A couple hundred years later, the Venetian Polo family—Niccolo,
Maffeo, and Nicolo’s son Marco—traveled across Asia, taking notes and bringing new
information back to Europe (but not noodles. Marco Polo did not bring pasta to Italy from
China. Check out our video about the history of pasta for more on that, and to see the
unattended flame on my stove that made a lot of our audience, including my mom, uncomfortable).
Each trip increased Europe’s awareness of the world. And did I mention that European
universities were first founded in the Middle Ages, attracting scholars and philosophers
from all over the land? You got the University of Bologna in 1088; Oxford sometime around
1096, the University of Salamanca in 1134, Cambridge in 1209, and the University of Padua
in 1222, just to name a few. Dunked.
So folks in the Middle Ages were definitely not stupid, but … did they smell? Contrary
to popular belief, people took baths. And while they may not have been scrubbed to 21st-century
standards, personal hygiene was important. Most people knew to wash their hands and faces
regularly. Hygiene manuals, like the 14th-century Regimen sanitatis, told readers that baths
washed away “dirt left behind from exercise” and offered bathing advice for getting clean
while traveling, resting, or pregnant. Everyone was expected to wash up before important holidays.
And bathing was a regular part of monastery life, according to the Regularis Concordia,
written in the 10th century. Monks washed the hands and feet of people in the community
as part of their Christian rituals. Monks of the Benedictine Order were instructed to
bathe at least four times a year. They had a bath and a shave before Easter, at the end
of June, at the end of September, and at Christmas (and probably in between those dates, as well).
The monks at Westminster Abbey even employed a bathing attendant, who was paid two loaves
of bread per day plus an annual salary of one pound.
Once again, erroneous ideas about the Middle Ages’s supposed lack of hygiene were spread
around by later historians and philosophers, who wanted to draw a comparison between the
“great eras” like the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the supposedly crappy eras
like the Dark Ages.
Thanks for watching Misconceptions. The next time you’re eating a turkey leg at a Medieval
Times, I hope you think of me. What a romantic sentiment. I’ll see ya next time.