Although Cosmas Indicopleustes is far from a household name, he enjoys an outsized reputation (at least in the abstract) as a representative of the benighted medieval belief that the earth was flat. To be sure, in his “Topographia Christiana” he says the earth is a parallelogram surrounded by oceans. Moreover, this parallelogram-shaped earth was stuffed inside a tabernacle-shaped cosmos. He thought the cosmos must be shaped like a tabernacle because its shape had inspired Moses to construct the Biblical tabernacle. Cosmas was not, however, a geographer nor was his “Topographia Christiana” clearly meant to represent physical reality. Moreover, there’s little evidence that anybody before the late 17th or early 18th century cared about Cosmas’s ideas. This didn’t stop people like Andrew White from making up stories about Cosmas having influenced medieval ideas about the construction of the earth. Alas.[1]