Capital. The lifeblood of agricultural civilization, the property that knows many shapes, the root of all the evils of mankind. For want of capital and the control over the means of its production, the elite-conglomerations, the states of the world would fight many wars, make marriages and alliances, and engage in trade, both officially and through the borderless mercantile classes that spanned the breadth of the Old World.
Ill-fated Vinland had not managed to produce a truly worldwide web of trade, leaving the two hemispheres to engage in trade with themselves. The Mongols had wreaked unholy havoc upon the breadth of Eurasia, disrupting the old elite-conglomerations and essentially destroying the classical Muslim world. But these conquerors had also allowed the brief flourishing of the Silk Road, contained almost entirely within their various borders. From the Bengal to the Tripolitanian desert, from the Carpathians to Korea, from the Deccan to the Danube, land-based trade and the Mongol state had connected peoples and places together in the pursuit of profit. The earlier maritime age of the Indian Ocean, that of the Cholas and Srivijaya and the Arabs, weakened in the face of Mongol arms and easy connections to the land trade.
But the Mongols and the Silk Road could not be permanent; their collapse occurred in tandem, once again leaving the Old World disconnected and riven by war. And so the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean saw middlemen, most of whom had developed their connections during the Mongol period, step into the breach.
The bourgeois merchant-states of Italy had, by the end of the Near Eastern Mongols, ended their wars, especially in the aftermath of the Mongol razing of Venice. Genoa was not without competition, however -- the city of Ragusa, masters of the Adriatic, and the Kingdom of Trinacria-Majorca became major players in the post-Mongol Eastern Mediterranean. The Roman Empire, reinvigorated by the destruction of their Turkish enemies and by the fruits of Mongol trade, had also managed to protect their realm from Italian depredations.
In the Indian Ocean, however, the Mongol and pre-Mongol trade networks had no such clear successors. A variety of mercantile castes existed but many, particularly the Muslim Gujaratis and Mappilas, had been crippled by the Buddhist zealotry of the Jagatayids/Golden Horde. Despite this, the needs of capital ensured the swift rebirth of the Indian maritime network.
The Western Indian Ocean remained weaker than in its heyday. The East African trade had been "starved" of capital during the Mongol period, and its merchants were geared more towards inland goods and trade with visitors than they were towards becoming a transnational merchant class. The vacuum, in the pre-European period, ended up being filled by an eclectic mix of Omanis, Iranians, Gujaratis and Mappilas, most of whom hewed to various Muslim denominations. Sunni Islam would lose ground as Twelver Shiism and Ibadism gained followers and converts among the Acehnese, the Somalis, and the Indian mercantile classes.
The Eastern Indian Ocean had an easier time recovering its former vibrance. The Chola dynasty had finally collapsed in the late 14th century, but Tamil traders still had a great deal of power in the eastern Indian Ocean, competing and interacting with Malays. This Tamil influence, along with the weakening of the Gujaratis, had largely retarded the advance of Islam in the region. Beyond Brunei and Aceh, Islam remained a mercantile faith, while Hinduism and Buddhism dominated the states.
The Tamils and Malays were also joined by Chinese merchants, many fleeing the turmoil in mainland China or embracing the freedom allowed by the southern Yuan successor states. The Chinese did not have as large of a presence as the other communities, but were growing in size and wealth faster than the older trade communities in the region.
The Western part of the Old World was not quite as affected by the collapse of the Mongols. Italians still dominated trade with the rest of Europe, both by land and by sea -- Italian communities existed in such cities as Lisbon, Paris, and the North Sea entrepots. North Africa and the Sahel had been enriched by the wave of Muslims fleeing Guyuk Khan and the Mongol conquests, but their greatest trade network, that of the Sahara, had been left untouched by both the great khans and their collapse.
But it would be the West, specifically Iberia, that would birth a new order of world trade -- an age of colonization. The peninsula had its own long Muslim heritage, extending into the language, the culture, the institutions and the history of its two major states. On the heritage of Arab sailing, with the help of Italians and in Portugal's case Sephardim, the Iberian powers would take a huge gamble.
Little expeditions tenatively floated out into the oceanic void, to the Azores and Madeira and the Canaries, down past Cape Bojador and into the South Atlantic. Europe had never had more information about Asia, thanks to the safety of the Silk Road and various European travelers. Europe had also never had less access to Asia, thanks to the collapse of the Mongols and the further empowerment of Muslim and Italian middlemen. In the name of capital and profit, armed with the knowledge of Asian trade gained by the overland expedition of Gonzalo da Gama, the Portuguese set out to discover India, surfing the web of Atlantic and Indian trade even as they themselves created it. The Castillians, despite their own focus on Granada, were never too far behind.
The year is 1420. The Senegambia and the Kongo have already been revolutionized by the advent of Iberian trade, accepting missionaries and the nascent trade in chattel for the sugar plantations of the Atlantic islands. The expedition of Rui Zarco, following in the footsteps of over 60 years of explorers and coming in the name of the King of Portugal, is about to set foot in the Nestorian-ruled city of Cochin. The world, molded by Capital, will never be the same.
Oceans. The global frontier. These are the voyages of European enterprise. Their defining mission: to seek spices and Christians, to discover India and China, to find gold and silver and control their sources, to explore strange New Worlds and civilizations, to thwart the Eternal Muslim, and to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. They boldly go where few Europeans have gone before.
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Because I never learn my lessons, I'm back at the whole "let's write an exploration TL" game. The POD is, in keeping with my lazy traditions, off-screen and before the TL begins. This time, however, I've done more research and sketched out a general idea of what came before -- the specific POD is ta Roman victory at Philomelion (rather than Myriokephalon) and the retaking of Konya. Later, when Manuel I dies, things play out differently as well. The Empress Dowager Maria overreaches, and kills Maria Porphyrogenita and Ranier of Montferrat for conspiracies, leading to anti-Latin pogroms and the assassination of both her and Alexios II. Andronikos then comes to the throne, untainted by rumors about poisoning Maria Porphyrogenita, and succeeds in his purges of the dynatoi, including Isaac Angelos. From there, the world changes as well.
In upcoming posts, I will give you all an idea of what the world is like in the year 1420, when Portugal first "discovers" India. I put that word in scare quotes for a reason. Few people know that the maritime expeditions IOTL were only made possible by the overland expeditions of Pero da Covilha, who went to the east and learned the basic navigational routes from the Arabs. This knowledge was sent back to Lisbon in letters, sent via a proxy in Cairo; da Covilha would eventually make an embassy to Ethiopia and be detained there until his death. Here, he is paralleled by Gonzalo da Gama, who, spoilers, does not die in Ethiopia.
As you might have been able to tell from the blurb above, I am also taking a new historiographical approach with this TL. I am, in history as in politics, a fan of dialectical materialism; this TL will take a Marxian bent in trying to examine how colonization played out both in our world and in this one. I will interject in footnotes or elsewhere to explain OTL precedents for ITTL happenings or trends.
Colonialism will be presented, I hope, without chauvinism -- both the white supremacist narratives of glory and pure heroism and Christian triumph and Orientalized decadence/weakness, and narratives that present the Europeans as the sole and primary actors, erasing the significant native involvement that was required to facilitate early colonialism. Few of these actors or states are truly heroic, or even all that good; finding evil in the period, from the conquest of the New World to transatlantic slavery to less-known acts in Asia, like the genocide of the Bandanese, is much, much easier.
I have also compiled a great deal of research on the period, mainly on the Portuguese imperium of the time; I am hoping that, with more knowledge and more accessible details, I will be able to commit to this idea at long last, rather than just producing another dead thread that I am unable to delete.
Thank you for any interest you have -- and I hope you enjoy reading.