"It would be fun to have Irving around to point out to him that
the "obscurantist" universitarians of Spain who debated and
rejected the geography of Columbus's project not only assumed
the earth was spherical, they were disturbed about Columbus's
use of Pierre D'Ailly's 14th-century estimate of the sphere's
circumference. They said it was much too small, that the old
figure of about 24,000 miles was better-founded -- and of
course they were quite right."
The idea that Columbus was opposed by people who maintained that
the earth was about 25,000 miles in diameter occurs frequently in the
secondary literature, but I have never seen any serious evidence for it.
It seems to be merely people's idea of what should have happened.
The relevant accounts in the biography by Columbus's son Ferdinand
and in Las Casas agree that the opponents arguing about the size
of the earth said either
(1) that the world was infinitely large and so it was impossible
to reach Asia ("que el mundo era de infinita grandeza, y por tanto
no seri'a posible en muchos an~os navegando se pudiese llegar al fin
de Oriente") -- Las Casas , Chapter 29; or
(2) that to reach the edge of Asia would take more than three
years,... [and] many learned men were in disagreement on the question
whether the ocean was infinite (Life of Columbus, Chapter 14).
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State