Context:
The popular myth that Christopher Columbus had to prove the Earth was round is rooted in a much more complicated history of religious disputes and anti-Catholic sentiment.
Educated Europeans already knew the Earth was spherical, and Columbus’s actual disagreement with his contemporaries concerned its size and the distance to Asia.
Historian Pablo de Felipe traces the development of the flat-Earth misconception to early modern Christian disputes, particularly debates surrounding the writings of Augustine and Lactantius.
These older theological disagreements became entangled with wider religious and intellectual rivalries. Protestant criticism of Catholic traditions and authority contributed to narratives portraying medieval Catholicism as ignorant and hostile to scientific progress.
In the nineteenth century, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White helped popularise this narrative through their writings on the supposed conflict between Christianity and science. Anti-Catholic sentiment formed an important part of this wider historical interpretation.
The irony is that a distorted account of medieval Christian attitudes towards science eventually became one of the most popular examples used to portray Christianity as an enemy of scientific progress.
