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Claudius Ptolemy of Roman Alexandria and the three books that ruled for fourteen centuries: the Almagest's Earth-centered cosmos, the Geography's coordinate map of the world, and the Tetrabiblos of astrology...
Claudius Ptolemy of Roman Alexandria and the three books that ruled for fourteen centuries: the Almagest's Earth-centered cosmos, the Geography's coordinate map of the world, and the Tetrabiblos of astrology. His science passed through the Arab House of Wisdom back to Renaissance Europe and reigned until Copernicus overturned it in 1543.
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Claudius Ptolemy compiles the Almagest, a mathematical model of an Earth-centered universe with a catalogue of over a thousand stars, built on centuries of Babylonian and Greek observation. It would be the authoritative account of the heavens for fourteen hundred years.
Ptolemy's Geography lays out the known world by latitude and longitude with map projections, the foundation of scientific cartography. His underestimate of the Earth's size and overestimate of Asia's reach would later help convince Columbus he could sail west to the Indies.
Ptolemy's Earth-centered cosmos, with the sun, moon, and planets on circles and epicycles around a fixed Earth, becomes the accepted picture of the universe for scholars and, later, the Church. To question it was to question the order of creation.
Scholars at the Abbasid House of Wisdom translate Ptolemy into Arabic; the book's familiar name, Almagest, comes from the Arabic al-majisti, 'the greatest'. Islamic astronomers preserved, corrected, and extended his work for centuries.
A Latin translation of Ptolemy's Geography reaches Renaissance Europe, reviving scientific mapmaking and coordinate grids just as the great voyages were about to begin. Ptolemy became the starting point, and the error to be corrected, of the Age of Discovery.
Christopher Columbus, relying on a tradition that underestimated the size of the globe, part of it traceable to Ptolemy, judged Asia reachable by sailing west. He was wrong about the distance and found the Americas instead, an error with world-changing consequences.
Nicolaus Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placing the sun, not the Earth, at the center. It began the scientific revolution and ended the fourteen-century reign of the Ptolemaic universe.