Columbus's critics were right — about size, not shape.
Everyone agreed the Earth was round; they argued, correctly, that Asia lay far further west than he claimed. Without the Americas in the way, his crews would have starved.
The event
More amazing facts
- 1492 1492: Granada fell in January, Columbus reached the Americas in October, and in November the Ensisheim meteorite fell in Alsace — one of Europe's oldest witnessed falls.
- 1492 The oldest surviving globe was made in 1492, and America is not on it. Martin Behaim finished his "Erdapfel" in Nuremberg before Columbus returned; between Europe and Asia it shows only ocean and islands.
- 1492 Before 1492 Italy had no tomatoes, Ireland no potatoes, Switzerland no cocoa, and Thailand and India no chilli peppers.
- 1492 · 1828 The idea that medieval people believed in a flat Earth is a 19th-century invention, popularised among others by Washington Irving's romanticised 1828 biography of Columbus.
- 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.
- 1494 Leonardo da Vinci's maths teacher is the "father of accounting". In 1494 Luca Pacioli was the first to describe double-entry bookkeeping in a printed book — the debit-and-credit system still used today.