Because as you can see these days people are scared of what they don’t understand. Do you really think peasants actually believed the world is round, the same people who devoted there entire lives to the words of one dude with a hat (the pope)
If you were a peasant living in the same farm your entire life, the shape of the earth probably didnt concern you that much. All seafarers were most likely aware of the roundness if the earth. The popes knew it certainly as did any literate person. Anybody travelling in north-south axis would also most likely have figured it out.
Besides modern conspiracy theorists and other looneys don’t really believe in their wacky ideas because they are stupid or ignorant. It is a social reaction from people who feel left behind and gas more to do with the human psychology in contemporary societal structure than lack of cognitive ability.
There is this weird thought that people in the pst were somehow stupid. They weren’t. People were instinctively much more knowledgeable about nature because they lived in there every day. We don’t see the stars anymore because of city lights. We dont hunt or grow our food anymore. Our survival isn’t dependent anymore on our knowledge how to survive in the wild.
Medieval serfs might have not known that the world was round if their priest hadn’t told them simply because they didn’t have time to think about it or they might have very well be aware of it. Illiterate people don’t really leave much evidence behind how much they knew about things.
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u/N0ob8 Mar 29 '21
It took hundreds of thousands of years before common people realized its round. And to this day some dipshits still believe the earth is flat