Effect of no gunpowder development on European conquest of Americas?
- Thread starter Dspoh001
- Start date
Yes.
Even before that....the lack of cannon would change a lot. Castles would remain very difficult to take and you wouldn't get nations beginning to blob. Feudalism would remain strong and centralised nations a joke.
Anaxagoras
Banned
If we were to list the advantages that the Europeans vis-à-vis Native Americans during the conquest of the New World, I'm not sure I'd place gunpowder in the top five. Off the top of my head, disease, iron weapons and armor, and horses were each a more important advantage.
Actually about the armour, I read/heard a couple times that conquistadores often replaced their armour with the woven armours of the americans because the lack of protection was completely overbalanced by the ease of use.
Canons were a good shock weapons in the early stages, it does make noise.
BUt yeah, diseases and horses (kinda linked as well). Hard to resist cavalry charges when 80% of your line is dead of smallpox and other nasty things
If you read Bernal Diaz's primary account, who was himself was a conquistador under Cortes during the conquest of Mexico, this is correct.
I would list disease, native allies and political enviroment inside the Aztec and Inca Empires as my Top 3.
The Aztecs did not; while there are certainly mountains throughout Central Mexico, the cities of Mesoamerica were typically in the lowlands, and, in the case of the Aztecs, clustered in the Valley of Mexico, around the (now-drained) Lake Texcoco the Inca did, but the Inca had already developed one of the most impressive road systems in the world.
Someone else would have discovered it; gunpowder is one of those things that is'nt just going to go undiscovered, indeed it may end-up being discovered later in Asia as well as in Europe, which could lead to a more dominant Europe (the Chinese did'nt use gunpowder in warfare very much for centuries).
I'd beg to differ, at least in regards to military uses. Gun powder is something that can and likely was, invented and reinvented at various points in history. All you need is three ingredients, something curious enough to put them together and set the somebitch on fire.
That being said, it's hard to get people to figure out that they can actually use this volatile concoction for more than a party trick, if they ever use it at all. When the Chinese made black powder, they were looking for gold, and obviously boom boom dust isn't gold so that'd probably be just another check off the list. Gunpowder is random, fairly simple to make and twice as easy to overlook, ignore and forget. It's not obviously revolutionary, just like a steam engine isn't and a whole menagerie of things that I and we don't know about. I honestly think we could have gotten to this point in history we're living in and not discover black powder, just the same as I think we could have discovered it in Egypt when civilization hadn't left the fertile crescent.
History is random, don't assume anything is a given. We can have a colony on the moon by 1980 and we can have a Proto-Communist revolution in 1730. The events that did happen depend on the events that came before, but every second that passes is a 10 sided die being thrown.
I'd add teamwork as a multiplier, too. The Aztecs got status (their goal) through individually capturing prisoners to feed the gods. The Spanish goal was to kill their opponents, and they'd gang up on the individual warriors while the Aztecs were trying to drag a Spaniard away as captive.
Well it only seems to have been discovered once and by accident, so I'd disagree with you here.
Not really; the Portuguese had been sending expeditions down the coast of Africa since 1415, several decades before the fall of Constantinople.
Besides which, Constantinope was by this time surrounded by Turkish territory and in a state of major decline population- and money-wise. Sooner or later the Turks would have been able to take the city anyway, even if only by sitting outside it till the inhabitants are starved into surrender.
I don't know if that statement is correct but given the low number of spaniards compared to their native allies, that can't have had that much weight
To get those initial allies the Spanish had to first fight them to a standstill while vastly outnumbered. It was because the Spanish impressed the natives as so deadly that the Indians allied with them.
I think this is the biggest deal for colonizing the new world. Galleys would remain supreme and there would be very little difference in combat between a caravel and say a dhow.