The correct answer to this open question is the following.
Although there are no options attached we can say the following.
It took that much time because people were focused first on overcoming the terrible black death plague and had not much time to learn and reason. It was a time for survival.
The other reason is that people had lived so many years believing the religious explanations that characterized the Middle Ages. People had so ingrained those religious systems from the church and it was not easy for them to have the open mind and criteria to accept different or new knowledge. If we add the fact that if people questioned the religious beliefs they were killed by the inquisition, we can understand how difficult was for people to be open to new knowledge.
So it is true that until Copernicus spent years gathering data on the idea that the solar system operated in a spherical manner, and we lived in a heliocentric world, even though the Eastern Hemisphere knew that for 2000 years: So it took the Black Plague and the Renaissance to move things forward.
