so in medieval 2 total war there is a "the world is round event" and in the notification it said that there were people that supported this theory but were burned at the stake as heretics, im curious if this was true, btw yes i know people have been saying the world is round since ancient greece im just wondering how many people believed it in the medieval ages
The educated of Europe knew the Earth was round, and the church didn't hunt down the "round earthers" to burn at the stake as that event suggests.
The Earth's roundness was known to the Greeks by the 400 BCE, it was even mentioned in Plato's Phaedo, although there is debate about who exactly made the discovery. The astromer and mathematician Ptolemy wrote about the spherical Earth in his book, the Almagest, in particular noting that ship's masts are visible first. He gave the world some strikingly accurate calculation to the Earth's size considering both the time and the limited set of tools he had at his disposal.
The Round Earth theory wasn't lost or forgotten by Western Europe after the fall of Rome. Quite the opposite, it became part of what was closest thing to a standard knowledge textbook of the middle ages, Saint Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. It was originally published sometime around 610 C.E., it contained knowledge on food, language, religion, the ancient philosphers, the natural world, theology, and spherical Earth Geography. Isidore was an Archbishop, considered the single most knowledgable man of his age. It was copied and reprinted again and again. As I stated, the Church gave Isidore a sainthood, so clearly they did not regard him as a heretic.
Also, the old story that Christopher Columbus went around trying to convince flat Earther Kings that the world was round is completely false. The Kings court mathematicians and knowledgable men all knew the Earth was round. However, they were using Ptolemy's calculations that suggested the distance between Portugal and China/Japan by sea was about 10,000 miles. No ship in the world back then could hold enough supplies for a 10,000 mile voyage, so everyone dismissed the idea of reaching Asia by going west as pure insanity. Columbus, however, thought the Earth was about ten thousand miles shorter due to a unit misunderstanding. He also knew about the ancient greek calculations, but read a source that was using the longer Arabic mile (about 1.8 km) but thought it was using the shorter Roman mile (about 1.4 km). So he thought A. the distance was much shorter and B. there were islands East of Japan he could land on instead. He was wrong about A. but far more right than B. then he ever dreamed.