flat earth misconception Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

What Did People Really Think Was Causing the Black Death?

The name “Black Death” usually applies to a particular outbreak of the bubonic plague that seems to have begun in around 1338 in Central Asia. The outbreak arrived in Europe in 1346. The main outbreak in Europe lasted until 1353. Altogether, the Black Death is estimated to have killed somewhere between seventy-five million and two hundred million people across the Eurasian continent, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in all of human history.

Unfortunately, it has become fashionable for people to write articles making fun of how stupid and ignorant people who lived during the time of the Black Death supposedly were. There are people online making fun of how people supposedly did all sorts of dumb things that actually made the plague even worse and resulted in more people dying—because apparently that’s something that people these days find amusing.

In reality, many of the things that modern people claim medieval people did that supposedly just made the plague even worse are either things that never really happened at all or things that have been taken out of context and misrepresented to make medieval people look as stupid as possible.

Debunking the So-Called “Dark Ages”

There is no period in all of human history that gets quite so much bad press as the Middle Ages. Popularly known as the “Dark Ages,” most people imagine that this was the worst possible time to be alive—a thousand years of poverty, backwardness, stagnation, superstition, and obscurantism.

It is popularly believed that, during this era, obscurantist Christians deliberately rounded up classical texts to destroy them, people burned witches, no one ever bathed, everyone thought the world was flat, people were constantly slaughtering and torturing each other for no reason, all people were fanatically orthodox Catholics, scientific and technological advancement was virtually nonexistent, doctors knew less about medicine than doctors in all other eras, and everyone was always miserable.

There is very little truth to any of these notions, however. The real Middle Ages are very different from the barbarous caricature that most people are familiar with. Although some historians do use the term “Dark Ages,” they use this term to refer to a specific period in medieval western European history lasting a little over three hundred years from the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD until the rise of the Carolinian Empire in the late eighth century AD.

In this article, I will debunk some of the most popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Then, at the end, I will explain why I, like many historians, believe that the term “Dark Ages” should be retired altogether.

Debunking the Misconception of the Flat Earth

Hardly anyone nowadays believes the earth is flat. Many people, however, wrongly believe that people during the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. In reality, however, the sphericity of the earth was common knowledge throughout the entire Middle Ages. The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat is a canard invented in the Early Modern Period by authors who wanted to portray the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness and superstitious regression.

No, Atlas Did Not Hold the Earth on His Shoulders

The image of the Titan Atlas holding the Earth on his shoulders is an iconic one that has inspired countless writers, thinkers, and artists. It is also a modern notion with no basis whatsoever in any ancient Greek texts. In actual ancient Greek mythology, Atlas does not, in fact, hold the Earth on his shoulders, but rather the sky. The misconception that the ancient Greeks imagined Atlas as holding the Earth on his shoulders arose as a result of the misinterpretation of classical representations of Atlas. In this article, I intend to set the record straight by examining how the ancient Greeks really envisioned Atlas and explaining how the misconception about him holding up the Earth arose.