Isegoria

Before 1400, Peter Zeihan explains in The Accidental Superpower, true ocean transport was a rare thing:

In this era nearly all of the major, durable powers fell into one of two categories. The first were powers with navigable rivers that could easily extend their cultural reach up and down the river valley, enrich themselves with local trade, and use the resources of their larger footprint to protect themselves from — or force themselves upon — rivals. The second were powers that lived on seas sufficiently enclosed that they were difficult to get lost within. These seas didn’t work quite as well as rivers, but they certainly blunted the dangers of the open ocean and allowed for regional transport and trade. France, Poland, Russia, and a few of the Chinese empires fell into the first category, while the Swedes, Danes, Phoenicians, and Japanese fell into the second.

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The Ottoman Empire originated on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, a nearly enclosed sea small enough that it functioned as a river in terms of facilitating cultural unification, but large enough that it allowed for a reasonable volume of regional trade. And Marmara didn’t exist in isolation. To its northeast was the Black Sea, while to its southeast lay the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean — all three enclosed bodies of water that the Ottomans were able to use their naval acumen to dominate. Emptying into the western Black Sea was the Danube, by far Europe’s largest river, which allowed the Ottomans to expand as far north into Europe as Vienna. By the measures of the day, the Ottomans had within easy reach more useful land, river, and sea than any other power — and nearly more than all of their European rivals combined.

And then there was trade. From their home base at the supremely well-positioned Istanbul, the Ottomans dominated all land and sea trade between Europe and Asia and from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

The largest and most lucrative of those trade routes was the famous Silk Road, the source of all spices that made it to Europe. Pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cumin, and saffron might seem like minor luxuries today, but their only sources were in South and Southeast Asia. Between the unreliable nature of ocean transport and the yet-to-be-mapped African continent, there was no reliable all-water route. The only way to access Asian spices was for the Silk Road to traverse China, Central Asia, Persia, and ultimately Ottoman-controlled lands. Between the hundreds of middlemen, the sheer distances involved, and the hefty tax the Islamic Ottomans placed on spice transfers to Christian Europe, upper-class Europeans often spent as much on spices as they did on food.

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In 1529, they laid siege to Vienna at the head of the Danube valley. Had they won they would have been able to pour an empire’s worth of resources through the gap between the Alps and Carpathians onto the North European Plain, a wide highway within which the Turks would have faced no barriers to conquest.

But they failed — because the world had changed.

A handful of key technologies made all the difference:

• Compass
• Cross-staff
• Carvel
• Gunport

Nearly all of these technologies, Zeihan notes, were developed, refined, and operationalized by two countries that had almost nothing to do with the Ottomans:

Europe’s westernmost peninsula is Iberia. At the time of the Ottoman rise, the peoples of Iberia, the Portuguese and Spanish, had very little going for them. Nearly alone among the major European regions, Iberia has no rivers of meaningful length and only very narrow coastal strips, forcing most of its people to live in a series of elevated valleys. Unsurprisingly, in the 1300s Iberia was Europe’s poorest region. It also didn’t help that the two had borne the brunt of the Arab invasion, being occupied by the Moors for nearly seven centuries.

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The Turks found themselves forced to divert massive resources from their Danube campaigns to an increasingly failed effort to defend their Mediterranean assets (most notably the Egyptian breadbasket).

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Until Portugal’s arrival in South Asia, local oceanic shipping — including the maritime arms of the spice trade that the Ottomans controlled — was purely coastal, sailing with the monsoonal winds: east in May–June and west in August. Winds offshore may have blown year round, but they were erratic and local ships couldn’t reliably navigate or survive the turbulence. The Portuguese deepwater craft, in contrast, found navigating the Indian Ocean to be child’s play. Portuguese vessels were able to eviscerate the Ottoman connections to the Asian spice world, and then directly occupy key spice production locations, via its ships redirecting the trade in its entirety to Lisbon. Even with the military cost of maintaining a transcontinental empire and the twenty-two-thousand-mile round trips factored in, the price of spices in Portugal dropped by 90 percent. The Silk Road and its Ottoman terminus lost cohesion, and the robust income stream that had helped make the Ottoman Empire the big kid on the block simply stopped, all because of the ambitions of a country less than one-twelfth its size.

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