How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (33 page)

Europe’s Superior Technology

It should be noted that Marco Polo’s reports of the glories of China were concerned with such things as the splendor and wealth of Kublai Khan’s palaces, grand public works, and the fertility of Chinese fields and orchards. It was not an account of technological marvels.

And with good reason: the most remarkable technological progress in that era was occurring in Europe. From 1200 through 1500 European technology was rapidly improving in such critical areas as metallurgy,
ships, and armaments. These improvements allowed the West to greatly increase its lead over the rest of the world.

The Blast Furnace

Perhaps the single most important technological breakthrough of medieval times was the blast furnace, which made it possible to cheaply produce large amounts of superior iron and, therefore, better cannons, better firearms, better plowshares, and better tools of all sorts. Blast furnaces are so-called because they introduce blasts of air into the furnace box to increase the heat of the coals, which results in superior iron. Like so many other inventions, blast furnaces are said to have been first developed in China, but once again, being first had little lasting importance. Recall from chapter 1 how the Chinese court destroyed the iron industry that had briefly flourished during the eleventh century. In any event, the first blast furnaces in Europe seem to have appeared in Sweden in about 1150,
⁴¹
and there is no evidence to suggest that the Vikings learned the technique from the Chinese. The technology of blast furnaces spread rapidly from Sweden all across Europe, eventuating in a major industrial complex in England.
⁴²

Carracks and Galleons

The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne famously proposed that during the tenth and eleventh centuries Europe regained the capacity to sail the Mediterranean after having been driven to land by Islam. He wrote that the “Mediterranean had been a Roman lake” until late in the seventh century, when it became “a Moslem lake.”
⁴³
Pirenne based his conclusion on trade statistics showing a decline in the import of papyrus, silks, and spices, which he interpreted as a withering of trans-Mediterranean trade. But Pirenne should have consulted the historical record of naval engagements, which shows that during the time in question, the Mediterranean was a Byzantine lake. Many times Muslim leaders assembled navies, only to have them utterly destroyed in encounters with the Byzantines.
⁴⁴
And, as discussed in chapter 4, the decline in trade that concerned Pirenne reflected not naval capacities but rather a northward shift in trade routes and, as A. R. Bridbury observed, “the virtual extinction of European demand for” the items Pirenne focused on.
⁴⁵

Pirenne was correct, however, that by the tenth century the navies of various Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa were routinely
sinking any Muslim naval forces that challenged them.
⁴⁶
Indeed, during the Crusades, not only could the Italians sail wherever they wished, but also ships from France, Normandy, England, and Denmark routinely hauled knights and supplies to the Holy Land.
⁴⁷
The few times that Muslims attempted to challenge crusader fleets, they were quickly sunk.
⁴⁸
Of course, the “ships” on both sides were mostly galleys and could not venture far beyond the Strait of Gibraltar without hugging the coast. Meanwhile, Europeans living along the Atlantic developed a far superior vessel.

Chapter 4 discussed the invention of the cog sometime in the tenth century, the first round ship propelled entirely by sails. The cog was a huge step beyond the galleys that had dominated European seagoing vessels since ancient times, being far larger and much more seaworthy. But early in the fifteenth century came an even more dramatic naval breakthrough—the three- or four-masted carrack. A typical three-masted carrack flew six sails and was sufficiently large to weather severe storms at sea—often displacing more than a thousand tons and having multiple decks. The carrack, like the Viking ships, was clinker-built: the planks forming the hull were overlapped and fastened to one another, and then internal braces were added to increase strength. Clinker-built ships were very strong and their hulls were somewhat flexible.

Carracks could be very large. Possibly the largest was the
Grace Dieu
, built for King Henry V of England in 1416 at Southampton (archaeologists found its wreck in 1933).
⁴⁹
The
Grace Dieu
was 184 feet long, with a 50-foot beam and a forecastle that soared more than 50 feet above the water; her main mast was about 200 feet tall. With a deck load of large cannons, the carrack was a deadly warship, and its great holds made it ideal as a merchant cargo ship. Both Vasco da Gama and Columbus sailed in carracks, although two of the ships Columbus used on his first voyage were much smaller, being advanced versions of the cog known as caravels.

A century later came the galleon, a far more deadly fighting ship, the definitive model being built in the 1550s.
⁵⁰
The great drawback of the carrack as a fighting ship was that its guns were limited to the main deck, because to cut more than two or three gunports in the clinker-built hull weakened the ship. To make lower gun decks possible, the galleon was caravel-built: frames were attached to the keel to create a basic skeleton of the ship, and then the hull planks were attached to this frame butted
edge to edge, not overlapped, and caulked to be watertight. The galleon was also streamlined, with a lower superstructure to make the ship more stable in the water and much faster. The galleon’s gun decks could pack a huge punch: forty-eight cannons were typical, in addition to the guns on the main deck.
⁵¹
The major fighting ships in the Spanish Armada (1588) were galleons, as were the leading English ships that stood them off. Although the carrack continued to be preferred as a cargo ship, galleons were used to form the annual Spanish treasure fleets as protection against pirates and English privateers.

Artillery and Firearms

There is a learned debate over whether gunpowder was brought to the West from China or invented independently in Europe.
⁵²
The great Scholastic scholar Roger Bacon published a formula for gunpowder in a cryptogram in 1242 and then openly in his
Opus Tertium
(1267), and Albertus Magnus, Bacon’s colleague at the University of Paris, included an effective recipe for gunpowder in a manuscript dated 1270. Whatever the origins of the West’s knowledge of gunpowder, the Chinese had gunpowder at about the same time or slightly before it appeared in Europe. But they made very little use of it; they built some cannons but soon seemed content to use gunpowder for fireworks, which were used primarily to scare away evil spirits.

In contrast, a few years after gunpowder became known in the West, church-bell makers all across Europe were busy casting cannons. Soon armies were using the technology on the battlefield. King Ferdinand IV of Castile used cannons against the Moors at Gibraltar in about 1306. In 1314 artillery was reportedly used in Flanders, and cannons were certainly used in the Siege of Metz in 1324 and by the English against the Scots in 1327. Edward III used five or six cannons against the French in the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and they are said to have “struck terror in the French army … it being the first time they had seen such thundering machines.”
⁵³
By 1350 the great Italian scholar Petrarch described cannons as being “as common and familiar as other kinds of arms.”
⁵⁴

The use of cannons only increased, especially as they became maneuverable. Early cannons were massive and lacked wheels; they were carted to the battlefield and unloaded where they were expected to be of the most use. But before the end of the fourteenth century smaller cannons mounted on wheeled carriages were widely in use in Europe: in 1377 the
Duke of Burgundy’s forces included 140 cannons, all of which were on wheels.

As Europeans learned to cast smaller, stronger cannons, the range and accuracy of the weapons improved. Whereas the earliest cannons fired stone projectiles, iron cannonballs were soon adopted. Being of uniform size and shape, iron cannonballs were much more accurate. At the end of the first century of the cannon’s existence, an anonymous chronicler wrote: “Hardly a man and bravery in matters of war are of use any longer.… The gruesome artillery pieces have taken over so much that fencing, fighting, hitting and armour, weapons, physical strength or courage are not of much use any more. Because it happens so often and frequently that a virile brave hero is killed by some forsaken knave with a gun.”
⁵⁵

The “gun” referred to here was a cannon—individual firearms took a bit longer to develop. The first individual firearms appeared early in the fifteenth century but were so heavy that they had to be supported by a metal rod (or stand) resting on the ground. By the start of the sixteenth century, however, individual firearms had been greatly streamlined. Called arquebuses, they were first used by the Spanish in 1503 to route a much larger French army. Their use quickly spread even though the weapon was difficult and dangerous to use. The arquebus was fired by detonating its powder charge through a touchhole using a burning slow match; carrying a burning match while also carrying a large amount of gunpowder was too often a fatal combination. Arquebuses also had a massive recoil and took a long time to reload.

When muskets appeared in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they were a significant improvement. They could be reloaded more quickly, and a slow match was no longer required: the musket was fired by a flintlock—when the trigger was pulled, a spring-loaded hammer was released that struck sparks from a piece of flint, thus igniting the powder change. Musketeers soon became the pride of European armies, often receiving double pay.
⁵⁶
For a few years, pike men were placed within the lines of musketeers to protect them from cavalry charges. Then the bayonet was invented, allowing musketeers to withstand cavalry on their own.

Forces lacking either artillery or musketeers had no chance against the new gunpowder armies of Europe. Moreover, as European cannons improved, they made Europe’s warships invincible. In 1509 eighteen Portuguese ships met a Muslim fleet of more than a hundred ships at the
port of Diu on the coast of India. The Muslim fleet seemed in an impregnable position, being supported by land-based artillery. But the great Portuguese cannons outranged even the land-based artillery, and soon no Muslim ship was afloat.
⁵⁷
As will be recounted in detail in chapter 13, this outcome was reenacted six decades later, at Lepanto in 1571, when a Spanish and Italian fleet destroyed the huge Ottoman fleet aiming to seize control of the Mediterranean.

The World Beckons

By this time Europeans were fully aware of the commercial opportunities available to enterprising travelers to the East. Indeed, as early as 1291, two Genoese brothers, Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi, secured financial backing for a voyage to the Indies. They loaded two large galleys with supplies and sailed out the Strait of Gibraltar. Whether they planned to sail west across the Atlantic or south around Africa is unknown—they were never heard from again.
⁵⁸
But the idea of such voyages was becoming increasingly popular, while the carrack made them seem far more feasible.

10

Discovering the World

O
ne of the most significant steps toward modernism came with the dawning of the Age of Discovery. Europeans had long wanted a secure sea route to Asia, but now they had the ships and the navigational technology equal to the task.

The era of European voyages of exploration began early in the fifteenth century when the Portuguese ventured into the Atlantic. By 1433 they had discovered the Azores, colonized Madeira, and begun exploring the West African coast, slowly progressing southward until rounding the tip, whereupon Vasco da Gama sailed all the way to India in 1497. This was an extremely long voyage, but it produced immense wealth for the Portuguese, who gained complete control over the Indian Ocean and established colonial trading enclaves on the subcontinent.

Meanwhile, Columbus anticipated a short passage to the Indies by sailing west. To his dying day Columbus refused to admit that he had discovered a New World and that the Indies were many thousands of miles further on. Still unaware that Columbus had not reached the Indies, the Italian Giovanni Caboto—remembered as John Cabot—convinced merchants in England to fund a voyage, which in 1497 reached the shores of North America, probably Newfoundland or Labrador. Then, in 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal. Soon thereafter, voyages to the New World became commonplace.