Christian Topography

Originally written in Greek with illustrations and maps, his view of the flatness of the world may have been influenced by some Jewish and Eastern contemporaries.

The author cites passages from the Christians' scriptures which he interprets originally in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical Earth by stigmatizing it as "pagan".

More recent authors tend to agree with Photius on the stylistic points, but to find the work generally reliable for geographical and historical references.

Edward Gibbon, for example, said "the nonsense of the Monk was, nevertheless, mingled with the practical knowledge of the traveller" and used it in writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Topography is often erroneously cited as evidence that Christianity introduced the idea of the flat-Earth into the world, and brought in the age of ignorance.

He repeatedly denounces "those reprobate Christians who, ..., prefer, through their perverse folly or downright wickedness, to adopt the miserable Pagan belief that earth and heaven are spherical, and that there are Antipodes on whom the rain must fall up."

The subtleties of Cosmas were left to the Greeks, for the most part; the western geographers who pursued his line of thought were usually content to stop short at the merely negative dogmas of the Latin Fathers; and no great support was given to the constructive tabernacle system of the Indian merchant.

[4] David C. Lindberg asserts: "Cosmas was not particularly influential in Byzantium, but he is important for us because he has been commonly used to buttress the claim that all (or most) medieval people believed they lived on a flat earth.