Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pierre d'Ailly.
No one of the ancient expressions of this belief seems to have clung more in the memory of Columbus than that in the Medea of Seneca; and it is an interesting confirmation that in a copy of the book which belonged to his son Ferdinand, and which is now preserved in Seville, the passage is scored by the son's hand, while in a marginal note he has attested the fact that its prophecy of a western passage had been made good by his father in 1492. Though the opinion was opposed by St. Chrysostom in the fourth century, it was taught by St. Augustine and Isidore in the fifth. Cosmas in the sixth century was unable to understand how, if the earth was a sphere, those at the antipodes could see Christ at his coming. That settled the question in his mind. The Venerable Bede, however, in the eighth century, was not constrained by any such arguments, and taught the spherical theory. Jourdain, a modern French authority, has found distinct evidence that all through the Middle Ages the belief in the western way was kept alive by the study of Aristotle; and we know how the Arabs perpetuated the teachings of that philosopher, which in turn were percolated through the Levant to Mediterranean peoples. It is a striking fact that at a time when Spain was bending all her energies to drive the Moor from the Iberian peninsula, that country was also engaged in pursuing those discoveries along the western way to India which were almost a direct result of the Arab preservation of the cosmographical learning of Aristotle and Ptolemy. A belief in an earth-ball had the testimony of Dante in the twelfth century, and it was the well-known faith of Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and the schoolmen, in the thirteenth. It continued to be held by the philosophers, who kept alive these more recent names, and came to Columbus because of the use of Bacon which Pierre d'Ailly had made.
The belief in the sphericity of the earth carried with it of necessity another,—that the east was to be found in the west. Superstition, ignorance, and fear might magnify the obstacles to a passage through that drear Sea of Darkness, but in Columbus's time, in some learned minds at least, there was no distrust as to the accomplishment of such a voyage beyond the chance of obstacles in the way.
ALBERTUS MAGNUS.
[From Reusner's Icones.]
The belief opposed by the Church.
It is true that in this interval of very many centuries there had been lapses into unbelief. There were long periods, indeed, when no one dared to teach the doctrine. Whenever and wherever the Epicureans supplanted the Pythagoreans, the belief fell with the disciples of Pythagoras. There had been, during the days of St. Chrysostom and other of the fathers, a decision of the Church against it. There were doubtless, as Humboldt says, conservers, during all this time, of the traditions of antiquity, since the monasteries and colleges—even in an age when to be unlearned was more pardonable than to be pagan—were of themselves quite a world apart from the dullness of the masses of the people.
Pierre D'Ailly's Imago Mundi.