Chinese Food and Salt-Licks

I was thinking about the Incas yesterday and. I kept coming to this roadblock about their development, mostly that there's a time limit on just how fast they can grow without either coming into contact with Europeans and offsetting their unchallenged power over the region or it becoming too implausible.

The natural thought was to take Europe out of the equation and extend the Inca's Golden Age, so I ask just how bad could the Black Death have become to cripple Europe to the point of containing it within the continent?
 
I think it would have to be very bad indeed. It killed somewhere between half and 2/3 of everyone in Europe and the Middle East without having a significant impact on European trade or technology. In fact there are several arguments that the Plague actually increased the wealth and development of Europe long term.
 
Instead of dousing Europe, you could instead focus on a failed invasion of the American mainland. Without Mexico City as a base, expanding further becomes more and more impractical for the Spanish and they will have no material on which to base further conquests on (other than what they know about the Old World).
 
Instead of dousing Europe, you could instead focus on a failed invasion of the American mainland. Without Mexico City as a base, expanding further becomes more and more impractical for the Spanish and they will have no material on which to base further conquests on (other than what they know about the Old World).

The goal is to have them isolated from the outside world beyond the Americas, even if the Spanish don't have a hold on Mexico, they'll eventually find their way south to the Incas.
 
The goal is to have them isolated from the outside world beyond the Americas, even if the Spanish don't have a hold on Mexico, they'll eventually find their way south to the Incas.

That's cool. I've been preparing a TL with a similar premise, still in the brain-formulation stage. LOT of work and big implications for a PoD like this.

If you're just concerned about keeping Tawantinsuyu alive and pristine-ish, that's why I recommended a failed invasion. See, the Spanish officially never intended to invade Mexico. That was all Cortez and he risked a lot. The original plan was to just scout it out and initiate trading operations and peaceful religious missions. If the illegal invasion fails, the survivors would attempt to retreat and possibly find some way to reach Havana. If they don't, Narvaez is still going to hunt them down and he will discover the truth. Either way Mexico's going to be seen as treacherous hostile territory, with armies capable of vanquishing the Spanish. They'll try to keep away for a while.

This buys enough time for 1) the Incas to re-stabilize after their civil war (assuming Huayna Capac still dies of smallpox) 2) legend to spread about shiny stinky hairy people trying to kill everyone, 3) slight immunity to smallpox and some knowledge in fighting it, even if it is scant and 4) you, the author, to work your magic in making them an even stronger nation. Then when the Spanish do get around to arriving in Tawantinsuyu, which would be much, much later than OTL, the Incas would have that much more of a fighting chance and the Spanish would be restricted to trade missions. If you like, they need not even transfer a great deal of culture and technology, just trading commodities and luxuries. They may indeed try to trade for firearms, but whether or not this gets accepted by the Inca army is another thing. For example, bows were known of in South America at the time, but the Inca army preferred to use slings as their primary ranged weapon because of their simplicity. Like the Zulu, firearms could be seen as inferior due to their long loading time and general inaccuracy. If they do get adopted they may only be seen in use by farmers and other civilian laborers.


As for your original plan trying to take Europe out of the equation, that's something I'm still trying to figure out. You may have more success making the Black Death less bad than OTL, actually. The plagues introduced a lot of change in Europe. But on another note, Columbus' journey itself was a long shot among long shots and stood a very good chance of not happening it all. The very fact that it did happen can be attributed to a LOT of luck and some swindling, and even as he set out he stood a good chance of not surviving the return trip and based it off of a few educated guesses. The fact of the matter is it's unlikely there would have been someone to substitute for Columbus anywhere near his relative time period, as the consensus was that the Pacific and Atlantic were one and the same, and traveling it and making it out alive would be a mere logistical impossibility. Nobody else would be stupid or desperate enough to believe the Earth was smaller than it actually was, and even if they were they wouldn't have the level of ambition Columbus had in trying to pitch his idea (and on that note, he very nearly gave up completely until Ferdinand managed to change Isabella's mind). By that time, the Portuguese were already ironing out a route to the East Indies via the circumnavigation of Africa, so Europe may wind up doing that.
 
The problem with getting rid of Columbus is that that just means the Portuguese come along somewhat later (Cabral "discovered" Brazil more or less by accident a few years later, and that sort of thing is more or less inevitable). Now, the Portuguese will be less expansionistic in the Americas (there are only so many Portuguese, and they are likely to focus on the route East), but other European nations will still come around.

It's also not the case that a quick exposure to smallpox will end the epidemics; OTL smallpox was still regularly devastating native populations into the 19th century, and the population will still be falling. You didn't have the population mostly wiped out in one epidemic and then start to recover; rather you had series of devastating epidemics.
 
The problem with getting rid of Columbus is that that just means the Portuguese come along somewhat later (Cabral "discovered" Brazil more or less by accident a few years later, and that sort of thing is more or less inevitable). Now, the Portuguese will be less expansionistic in the Americas (there are only so many Portuguese, and they are likely to focus on the route East), but other European nations will still come around.

It's also not the case that a quick exposure to smallpox will end the epidemics; OTL smallpox was still regularly devastating native populations into the 19th century, and the population will still be falling. You didn't have the population mostly wiped out in one epidemic and then start to recover; rather you had series of devastating epidemics.

I read somewhere that the Native Americans were still dieing from epidemics when the US was around and that was almost three centuries after the first contact. So it was just not the first wave of disease it was repeated and continuous disease for centuries.
 
I read somewhere that the Native Americans were still dieing from epidemics when the US was around and that was almost three centuries after the first contact. So it was just not the first wave of disease it was repeated and continuous disease for centuries.

I thought (totally willing to be corrected here) the problem for natives by late colonial/ US times was that none of their populations were dense enough for smallpox to become endemic, but because of their relative proximity to/ interaction with the white populations serving as a host for smallpox, they were pretty much doomed to be routinely afflicted with outbreaks.

If my understanding is correct, might the Inca be sufficiently urban and interconnected that smallpox never actually dies out? And if so, by hanging around for several consecutive generations, impart some immunity by virtue of cold hard selection of smallpox resistance factors? If nothing else, assuming the epidemic isn't enough to end Incan civilization by itself, future generations should at least be less shocked by it and more capable of understanding how to curb it's devastation to one degree or another.
 
The problem with getting rid of Columbus is that that just means the Portuguese come along somewhat later (Cabral "discovered" Brazil more or less by accident a few years later, and that sort of thing is more or less inevitable). Now, the Portuguese will be less expansionistic in the Americas (there are only so many Portuguese, and they are likely to focus on the route East), but other European nations will still come around.

It's also not the case that a quick exposure to smallpox will end the epidemics; OTL smallpox was still regularly devastating native populations into the 19th century, and the population will still be falling. You didn't have the population mostly wiped out in one epidemic and then start to recover; rather you had series of devastating epidemics.

True, but it's debated that Cabral's discovery may also have been more or less intentional, and fueled by knowledge and rumors from prior expeditions, such as that of Columbus. It makes sense, too -- as we've learned from other trans-Atlantic expeditions, it takes a lot of resources, money and sweat to fund an exploratory expedition, but Cabral managed to have all that 'for free' in the form of a diplomatic mission. If I wanted to check out a new land, and didn't want to risk most of my own resources in the process, I'd do it like Pedro and not tell anyone.


Well, I never said it would totally end the epidemics. But with each wave, comes with just a little bit more knowledge of how it might work and contribute a little bit in figuring out how to prevent it. A high-population place like Tawantinsuyu would be the perfect laboratory.
 
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