No spice trade

WI the European powers didn't have the spice trade to motivate their voyages of discovery from the Middle Ages onwards ? let's say, if somehow other methods of food preservation obviating the need for spices were discvoered earlier- such as freezing/freeze-drying- or were more popular- such as smoking or drying- or perhaps if some other latnertiave preservative substance had been found closer to home ? Without the spice trade, would Europe have still advanced as much as OTL or not ?
 
WI the European powers didn't have the spice trade to motivate their voyages of discovery from the Middle Ages onwards ? let's say, if somehow other methods of food preservation obviating the need for spices were discvoered earlier- such as freezing/freeze-drying- or were more popular- such as smoking or drying- or perhaps if some other latnertiave preservative substance had been found closer to home ? Without the spice trade, would Europe have still advanced as much as OTL or not ?
Err... Spices had little to do with food preservation. They had drying, they had pickling, they had various forms of fermentation (wine, sauerkraut), they had salt.

Spices are FAR more about taste. An apple pie is nice - but isn't it better with sugar and cinnamon? (yes I know fruit pies are late, this is just an example).

Spices also helped COVER the fact that food had started to go bad, they didn't much STOP them from going bad.
 
The only way to stop the spice trade is to have a disease cause all Europeans to lose the sense of taste. Which is just ASB.
 
I've read that a lot of spices were (re?)introduced into European society after the Crusades. If there are no successful crusades then maybe the economic demand would not be great enough to justify the expense of funding explorations, at least for some time?
 
What about if we cut out a few really very minor incidents? Say, the Romans never make contact with the Chinese so stories of the East are less established and are more liable to not be believed, Marco Polo never reaches the East, or dies before he can come back and regale his stories (or if you believe that he never went to the East...well, he just never spreads his stories). Maybe some disruption to the Silk Road. All in all, something(s) happens to make stories of the East less substantial, and therefore less likely to be believed by monarchs of the mediaeval era, thus making them unwilling to sponsor voyages overseas.
 
The spice trade is ancient. Really ancient. It's not going to be enough to take a single POD and run with it - Europe imported spices from sometime in the 1st millennium BC onwards, and the flow never stopped. Without the crusades, the spice routes would have been different (and quite possibly dominated by different cities). Without Roman-Chinese contact, spices would come through India. Without monsoon sailing, they would come through Mesopotamia. You can do a lot with differences - keep prices higher, keep spices extremely rare, introduce different types at different times - an earlier large-scale import of melegueta pepper could displace black pepper for centuries - but without a massive change sometime very early, you can't stop the spice trade. Spices were established as luxury items long before there was a culture inv Europe that could afford them.
 
What about if we cut out a few really very minor incidents? Say, the Romans never make contact with the Chinese so stories of the East are less established and are more liable to not be believed, Marco Polo never reaches the East, or dies before he can come back and regale his stories (or if you believe that he never went to the East...well, he just never spreads his stories). Maybe some disruption to the Silk Road. All in all, something(s) happens to make stories of the East less substantial, and therefore less likely to be believed by monarchs of the mediaeval era, thus making them unwilling to sponsor voyages overseas.

The problem is that by the 14th and 15th centuries, the body of knowledge about Asian gerography was already pretty substantial. People weren't sailing into the unknown, they had a pretty solid understanding of what to expect. You'll need an early and major POD to change that. Taking away Marco Polo is like the effect that the absence of Lewis and Clark would have on 19th century understanding of American geography.
 
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