Here is a sentence:
For in those days, most people thought that if you sailed far enough out into the ocean you would come to the end of the world. They still thought that the earth was flat as a platter. They laughed at the learned men who said that the world was not small and flat but a huge ball that spun around in space.
P. 7 of Columbus, by Edgar Parin D'Aulaire, Ingri D'Aulaire
Now, I cannot say that it can be disproven, all of it, with breezy ease.
If you speak of "most people" you are for back then speaking of unknown, undocumented people. We only know of very few people back then, not of "most".
However, unless there is a direct indication, like in Columbus diary, on how he and his men were talking on ship, I'd not consider it likely that most people thought the earth was flat.
They would have known learned men in general thought it round and they might have typically respected that.
However, one thing is impossible, namely that learned men in general thought it "spun around in space" - this theory was very uncommon among learned men in 1492 - or earlier, since we talk of Columbus' childhood or youth on this page.
When did Copernicus live, the man who invented its spinning around in space for Earth?
Nicolaus Copernicus (Polish: Mikołaj Kopernik;[5] German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Niklas Koppernigk; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe, likely independently of Aristarchus of Samos, who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
At what date did he formulate his theory and when was it published?
Copernicus cited Aristarchus of Samos in an early (unpublished) manuscript of De Revolutionibus (which still survives), though he removed the reference from his final published manuscript.
The article doesn't state when it is from.
In Copernicus' dedication of On the Revolutions to Pope Paul III—which Copernicus hoped would dampen criticism of his heliocentric theory by "babblers... completely ignorant of [astronomy]"—the book's author wrote that, in rereading all of philosophy, in the pages of Cicero and Plutarch he had found references to those few thinkers who dared to move the Earth "against the traditional opinion of astronomers and almost against common sense."
So, let's get to the publication date on that article, instead:
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of the Renaissance astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The book, first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.
1543 - and Columbus had already died in 1506.
Copernicus initially outlined his system in a short, untitled, anonymous manuscript that he distributed to several friends, referred to as the Commentariolus. A physician's library list dating to 1514 includes a manuscript whose description matches the Commentariolus, so Copernicus must have begun work on his new system by that time.[1] Most historians believe that he wrote the Commentariolus after his return from Italy, possibly only after 1510.
And 1510 was 4, 1514 was 8 years after Columbus died.
What predecessors did Copernicus? His article cites mostly Islamic ones.
Hard to say how well known they were in Europe, but Copernicus was able to use some of them.
Anyway, the major astronomic system in Europe was still the Ptolemaic one, and some of the Islamic ones agreed with the later Tychonic one. Back when Columbus was sth like 14 in 1455. This is what most people would have known about insofar as they knew anything of learned men, and this involved really and truly no spinning of earth at all.
To return to the devious part : it is equally devious to dismiss what we know with very exact precision about diverse known men, like them dying around 60 - 65 if they survived childhood and early youth and suppose a spooky "most men" dying at 35. We would not normally judge the unknown as opposite of the known, we would normally judge the unknown from the known. Therefore, if known men are shown to believe Earth was round and still, and no indication is given for unlearned men (South of Iceland and Scotland) thinking it was flat, and nearly certainly no learned people calling Earth spinning around were available, we would conclude the unleared men, that is most, tended to agree Earth was round and still. As in Ptolemy, and, a man who died about a century after Columbus, Tycho.
So, while D'Aulaire are popular and probably enjoyable to read (unless you have a horrible cold and an axe to grind in the issue, as I here), they are not perhaps always accurate. They may have contributed in the meantime (it's from 1996) to the subconscious belief that round Earth and spinning Earth go together.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
All Souls' Day
2.XI.2018
PS, wait, the book is even older, first edition is not from 1996, but 1955 (and Edgar died in 1986, his wife had already died in 1980)./HGL
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