COLUMBUS AND THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH: A HOLYWOOD STORY

Jess Zamora Bonilla

It is said that Washington Irvings biography of Christopher Columbus, published in

1828, was the work that started the legend that the discoverer of America was the person that

convinced the nearly medieval Europeans of his time of the sphericity of the earth, a legend

that has captured the popular imagination since then. Nothing could be, however, farther from

the truth, for all educated people during the Middle Ages knew perfectly that the earth was

round, especially after the cosmological works of Plato (Timaeus), Aristotle (De Caelo, Physics)

and Ptolemy (Almagest) were translated into Latin and commented by scholastic philosophers

after the 11th and 12th centuries. Actually, the roundness of the earth was such a trivial fact that

Thomas Aquinas, in is Summa Theologica (13th century) put it as an example of a fact that is

beyond any reasonable doubt, for there are many ways of proving it, the most important ones

being that mountains are seen before the cost from ships approaching land from the see, that

the shadow of the earth during moon eclipses is always round, and that, since the earth is the

most heavy element, tending naturally towards the centre of the universe, it would tend to

accumulate there from all directions with the same intensity. The two former arguments are

empirical, and equally valid in Aquinas time than now, whereas the third one is theoretical,

grounded in a theory (ancient Greek cosmology) in which we dont already believe, but that is

closely reminiscent of our own explanation of why planets are round due to the influence of

gravitation.

But, if the roundness of the earth was common knowledge within cultivated Europeans

of the time of Columbus, what was all the fuss about? It is well known that the great discoverer

grossly underestimated the size of the earth: whereas most of the astronomers of his time

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accepted a figure very close to the real one, and based on Eratostenes measures in the 3 rd

century BC, Columbus thought it was much smaller, so that the distance from Spain to Japan

crossing the Atlantic should be of around 3000 miles, instead of the approximately 12000 miles

really separating them. Of course, had no big mass of land existed in between, the travel would

have taken too much time for a ship to transport enough provisions. It is reasonable, hence,

that most of the governments of the time refused to finance such a crazy and suicidal

expedition... But what made the project really suicidal for Renaissance intellectuals was not

their (mostly right) assumption about the real distance between Europe and Asia through open

see, for after all, there could be some intermediate land between both continents, like the

Canary Islands of the Azores Archipelago, colonised by Spain and Portugal less than a century

before. Or couldnt they?

Well, the fact is that the learned people of the time had an argument, or believed in a

theory, according to which it was actually impossible that something like America, nor even a

set of small islands, could exist in the mid of the ocean, that is, in the mid of the ocean

assumed to extend from Western Europe to Easter Asia. The responsible of this theory was a

man of probably English ascent called John of Holywood (not to confuse with Hollywood),

better known by his Latinized name Johannes de Sacrobosco, the author of the most influential

treatise of astronomy during the late Middle Ages, and well into the 17 th century, De Sphera

(written approx. 1230 AD), and also one of the introducers of Arabic numerals in Europe.

Though the title of his book refers not to the sphere of the earth, but to the shape of

the whole universe, whose most external limit would be the sphere of the fixed stars, it also

clearly demonstrated the sphericity of the earth itself, by basically the same arguments we

have mentioned regarding Aquinas, and that date back at least to Aristotle in the 4 th century

BC. Actually, Sacroboscos schema of the world is basically that of Aristotles cosmos,

implemented with the planetary theory of Ptolomy (i.e., the theory of epycicles), of which De

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Sphera is a short popularisation, and the first systematic introduction in Western Europe to the

Almagest after its translation from Arabic to Latin in Toledo a few decades before.

As in the case of Aquinas, Sacrobosco, also a monk, attempted to combine in a

systematic exposition the known empirical facts (observations of the skies and of the earths

surface) and the theoretical understanding of the world, that came basically from Aristotles

Physics. It is known that, according to that cosmology, the universe is made out of five different

elements: ether, of which the celestial spheres are made, and the sub-lunar four classical

elements. These four elements are ordered in the world according to their density, the denser

ones occupying the closest positions to the centre of the cosmos, and hence earth is in the

most inferior position, then it is placed water, on top of which is air, and finally fire, that rises

till touching the orbit of the moon. Ether would be still lighter than fire, and this is the reason

why it occupies the most privileged, celestial position.

This vision of the cosmos also implied that (for what we would now call reasons of

symmetry) of every element there would be an equivalent amount (i.e, mass, or simply

weight): this is why the size of the celestial orbits is so incredibly bigger than the sub-lunar

world (i.e., the space comprised between the moon and the earth): because ether weights

very, very little. Analogously, fire weights much less than air, and air much less than water, and

this is why the moon is relatively so far from the surface of the earth (far in a human scale,

but, as we have just seen, very close as compared to the total size of the universe, or as

compared to the distance from the moons orbit to the fixed stars), for the space between the

surface of the earth and the orbit of the moon has to contain a incredibly large volume of air

and fire.

And, what happens with the two remaining elements, water and earth. The same

reasons of symmetry still rule here, and hence, since water is less dense than earth (by

between one fifth or one tenth, more or less, depending on what kind of nature we assumed

pure earth has, i.e., more earthy, more rocky, or more metallic), there should exist a much

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bigger volume of water than of earth in the world, so that the total weight of both elements

remain the same. Hence, the complete picture of the Aristotle-Holywood cosmos would be

roughly the following: a tiny sphere of earth in the middle, surrounded by a sphere of water of

about ten times the size of the former, this surrounded by a sphere of air still much bigger, this

one surrounded by a sphere of fire much, much, much bigger, and this one surrounded by an

astonishingly (astronomically) big system of spheres made of ether (those of the Moon,

Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars, in order of distance from

the centre of the world). This is a nice picture, but one that has a major problem of empirical

adequacy: if it were true, we would be drowned by a few thousands of kilometres of water,

which obviously is not the case. The question is, hence: if earth weights more than water, why

it is that there is some earth over the surface of water? Why is not all earth just sunk?

The monkish mind of Sacrobosco had an expedient answer: when creating the world,

God displaced a little bit the sphere of earth from the centre of the universe, so that a tiny

fraction of earth emerged out of the surface of the sphere of water, a part big enough to

contain the continents known by the time (Europe, Asia and Africa, i.e., the old world), a

portion of dry land of which it could be easily assumed it had an approximately circular shape.

A clear and obvious consequence of this image of the world is that no other masses of dry land

can exist, apart of the old world, for, as we started to navigate on a ship from, say, Lisbon

towards the west, the surface of the earth sphere is progressively more and more deeply

submerged under the surface of the sea (the water sphere), exactly till the middle of the trip,

when we the distance between the surfaces of both spheres starts to decrease again.

Since this idea of the cosmological distribution of the four elements was the prevailing

one in Columbus times, it was clear for the minds of most intellectuals that nothing like

America could exist. And this was why its discovery started not only to change the societies of

both sides of the Atlantic ocean (especially those of the west side), but also to break into

pieces the idea that Aristotle and Ptolemy were people in which could trust enough when

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trying to understand the structure of the cosmos. By the way, this also would lead to the

modern idea of the earth globe, i.e., a planet basically made out of solid rock, with just a tiny

amount of water scattered on its surface, and also a tiny layer of air surrounding it, something

that, in its turn, started to discredit the theory of the four elements.

Images:

Image 1. Image of the spheres of the four elements in a printed edition of De Sphera,

Venice, 1485 (earth: zigzag; water: wavy; air: clouds; fire: flames; air and fire not to scale).

Image 2. Reproduction of the scheme of Sacroboscos earth and water sphere in Jean

Bodins Universae Naturae Theatrum, 1596.

Image 3. Scheme of the cosmos in a printed edition of De Sphera, Venice, 1537,

showing an earth that can only contain Europe, Asia and Africa... four decades after Americas

discovery!

References

Sacrobosco, J., De Sphera, translation of L. Thorndyke, online:

http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sphere.htm

Wootton, D., 2015, The invention of science, London, Harper Collins.