While visiting the city, Irving was tempted by a giganticarchive of documents about Columbus and decided to write the explorer’s biography. His inspiration came after his friend, Alexander Hill Everett, the United States’ minister to Spain, invited Irving to stay with him in Madrid. Irving, a master storyteller, was already famous for tales like “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” when he tackled the life of Columbus. Rather, it was invented in 1828, when Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. The legend doesn’t even date from Columbus’ own lifetime. The myth of Columbus’ supposed flat earth theory is tempting: It casts the explorer’s intrepid journey in an even more daring light. After years of negotiation and argument over the actual length of the proposed journey, he finally convinced Ferdinand II of Spain and his wife Isabella to finance the expedition.Ī map of the four voyages of the Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus He mistakenly believed that the circumference of Earth was very small and that by traveling west toward what he thought was China, he’d open up new trade routes. However, Columbus ran into resistance when he tried to get funding for his landmark journey for a different reason. Thus, it’s nearly impossible-and completely implausible-that rich Spaniards of the late 15th century thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the map. Using calculations based on the sun’s rise and fall, shadows and other physical properties of the planet, Greek scholars like Pythagoras and Aristotle determined that the planet is actually a sphere.ĭuring Columbus’ time, educated people carefully studied knowledge passed down by the ancient Greeks. That was thanks to scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who, as early as around 600 B.C., made observations that Earth was round. onward believed that the Earth was flat.” According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. There’s just one problem: It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat.
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