The Convent of San Esteban

**No — and this is one of the most famous myths in the history of science. The dispute was arithmetical, and the objectors were right.** ⚠ **The myth**: **that Salamanca's scholars rejected Columbus because they thought the earth was flat** and he would fall off its edge. ✅ **The reality**: **the sphericity of the earth had been known and accepted in Europe since the Greeks** — **no educated person disputed it in the 15th century**; **the argument was about something else entirely**. ✅ **The real dispute — distance**: **the scholars estimated the earth's circumference close to correctly** (Eratosthenes had calculated it reasonably well in antiquity), ⚠ **and concluded that the westward distance from Spain to Asia was enormous** — **thousands of miles of open ocean**, **and no ship of the time could carry water and food enough**. ✅ **Columbus was using faulty estimates** that shrank the earth substantially and stretched Asia far to the east — **producing a comfortingly short distance**. ⚠ **The commission was right and Columbus was wrong.** ✅ **He survived only because a continent nobody knew about lay in the way.** ⚠ **The flat-earth myth spread in the 19th century** through popular writing, not from sources of the period.