All That:

Columbus, Geography, and Common Sense

by Kali Harlansson of Gotland

"Everybody knows" that Columbus proved the world was round. Well, first off, of course he proved no such thing: all he proved was that you could reach some land by sailing west. Since that land wasn't Asia, he certainly failed to prove his main point. But he wasn't even trying to prove the world was round. It is true that Columbus spent years in Spain and Portugal looking for a backer for his plan to reach the Indies (that is, East Asia) by sailing west, and had a hard time convincing anyone of its viability. It is true that he undertook debates with the academic/religious establishment (most famously at the University of Salamanca), and that the establishment always decided against him. But the debate wasn't over the shape of the Earth. Through all the Middle Ages, educated people knew the world was a sphere. Aristotle had proved it; the Venerable Bede, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Aquinas all affirmed it. The world-view of the Earth as the centermost sphere in a nested set - the "World as Onion" cosmology - permeated the academic disciplines of music, theology, grammar, and natural philosophy, as years of lectures at the University of Carolingia have illustrated. The myth that the medieval establishment believed the world was flat, that the Church taught it as dogma, was an invention of the 19th century - about as medieval as a steam engine. That wasn't what Columbus was arguing against. The argument was over the distance involved: how far west did you have to sail? This depended on three measurements: the distance (west to east) from Portugal to China, the number of degrees from Portugal to China (that is, proportionately how far around the globe), and the total circumference of the Earth. From these figures it would be simple to derive the crucial distance, that from Portugal westward to China. The first figure was roughly known at the time, from the writings of Marco Polo and other travellers, to be about 13,000 miles. But estimates for the other two measurements varied. Taking the extreme "worst-case" estimates, a total circumference of 24,000 miles (Fra Mauro, 1459) and an eastward extent of 116 degrees from Portugal to China (Catalan atlas, 1375), gives a westward distance of 14,000 miles - out of the question for sailing ships of the time, across open ocean without landfall or landmark. But Columbus argued a total circumference of only 18,000 miles (from the Florentine geographer Paolo Toscanelli, d. 1482), a whopping 225 degrees west-east (from the Imago Mundi of Pierre d'Ailly, c. 1410), plus a generous 1,500 miles from China east to Cipangu (i.e., Japan, from Toscanelli's reading of Marco Polo), for a result of only 3,500 miles west to Japan - difficult but not impossible.

Paolo Toscanelli's Map, 1474 (reconstruction, Hapgood)

For comparison, the modern figures are 25,000 miles, and 131 degrees, for a result of 12,000 miles - which was, in fact, the estimate of the experts at Salamanca. Columbus was wrong, wrong, wrong, and gets a national holiday in his honor. And what is the legacy of the establishment (in the words of Dr. Asimov) "for proving to be right in every last particular? Why, schoolchildren are taught to sneer at them" for being backward, ignorant, and narrow-minded. A similar story, or at least a story with a similar twist, comes from the earlier end of our period: King Canute and the tide. The historical Canute (Cnuth, Knud, etc.; the son of Svein Forkbeard, and king from 1016 to 1035) ruled lands all around the North Sea - Denmark, Norway, and England. According to the story, the king's courtiers flattered the monarch by saying he ruled the North Sea itself. To rebuke the sycophants and prove this was not so, Canute went down to the shore and commanded the tide to go out. Instead it came in - making the royal point, abashing the noble flatterers, and wetting the royal tootsies all at the same time. But that's not how the story has passed into common memory. All too often Canute is seen as the king who thought he could stop the tide, a figure of foolish pride if not outright hubris, the exact opposite of the original story. In the Current Middle Ages What lessons can we apply from these stories? For one thing: Ask questions, run and find out, get messy. "If 'everybody knows' such-and-such, then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one," (R.A. Heinlein) especially about the Middle Ages. Question stereotypes that assume people didn't even have common sense back then: that everyone thought the world was flat (didn't anybody notice that ships went hull-down at the horizon?); that medievals used lots of spices to mask the taste of rotten meat (wouldn't rotten meat be hazardous to their health?); that Vikings went into battle with mucking great horns on their helmets (wouldn't they tend to catch weapons, wrenching the wearer's neck?); that the 14th-century English saw the Channel as a defensive moat (when they were trying so hard to conquer and hold lands on the other side of it?). Our 20th century society has an inherent tendency to see history as the story of The March of Progress. For that reason, and because they didn't have our modern industrial technology, it's often too easy to assume medieval people were ignorant, superstitious, or just couldn't think straight. So here's the second, deeper lesson: it's important for us (us especially) to remember that people in the Middle Ages were intelligent and common-sensible within their own time and place. Some people like "doing persona" in the SCA as an exercise in role-playing: they like re-making themselves into someone different. And sure, that's part of the fun. But another part of the fun of persona is learning to see medieval people, not as different but as people. You know, human - prone to intelligence, boredom, bad jokes, and so on, just like us. And this part of the fun is what makes us more than just a costume party. Further Reading As a good, in-depth biography of Christopher Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison's Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942, 2 vols.; abridged in one volume as Christopher Columbus, Mariner, 1955) is still just about the best. It's fairly well balanced, in that it goes into Columbus' geographical errors, his greed and ambition, and the genocide and slavery he brought to the New World, but without demonizing him, and gives him the credit he is due for his real and masterly skills at practical seamanship and shiphandling. Also worth reading, if you're interested, is his The European Discovery of America: the southern voyages (1971), which tells Columbus' story in the context of subsequent exploration of the New World. Stephen Jay Gould's "The Late Birth of a Flat Earth," in his Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995) does a great job documenting just how the myth of medieval flat-earth dogma developed in the latter 19th century. There's also a discussion of the (possibly also mythical) end-of-the-world panic of A.D. 1000, in "Dousing Diminutive Dennis' Debate" in the same book. It's a very good book, and not just about dinosaurs and evolution (or haystacks). I got many of my hard numbers (and a pithy quote) from Isaac Asimov's essay "The Shape of Things," collected in his Adding a Dimension (1964). Others I got from Daniel J. Boorstin's The Discoverers (1983). This book has a truly great bibliography for further reading; the most interesting part of his text is probably that about the passages in d'Ailly's Imago Mundi which Columbus marked up, underlined, and annotated. King Canute? Maybe I'll save that for another essay.

text copyright 1997 by Caleb Hanson (e-mail) map illustration from Jim Siebold's magnificent Cartographic Images website

Links to Books
	Morison, Samuel Eliot Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (hardcover, May 1997, $12.98 at Amazon.com) Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (paperback, reissue, October 1991, $19.96 at Amazon.com)
	Morison, Samuel Eliot Christopher Columbus, Mariner (paperback, reissue, March 1992, $8.76 at Amazon.com)
	Morison, Samuel Eliot The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America (paperback, reprint, October 1986, $17.56 back-order at Amazon.com) The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages A.D. 1492-1616 (hardcover, December 1974, $39.95 back-order at Amazon.com)
	Gould, Stephen Jay Dinosaur in a Haystack (paperback, reprint, January 1997, $12.00 at Amazon.com)
	Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (paperback, February 1985, $12.80 at Amazon.com)
	Grossinger, Richard (ed.) Imago Mundi: Earth Geography Booklet Series No. 3 (out-of-print, search through Amazon.com)

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