WI: The Knights of St. John discover America

What exactly are the ramifications of the Knight of St. John discovering the Americas in 1472?

Lets say a ship belonging to the Order on a trip to Northern Europe is caught in a storm and thrown off course far from land. Sailing in what they assume is the right direction home they end up on one of the Caribbean Islands. After encountering natives, repairing their vessel and gathering supplies, they make it back to Europe and inform the Grand Master of their discovery.

What happens next?
 
In 1472... most likely the order will spread the word. There are established networks of scholarly and diplomatic communication in place, and there is nothing to be gained for ther order by keeping silent. This will create a considerable stir in Humanistic circles, but take a little longer to become common knowledge than it did IOTL (printing was around, but 1472 is still the infancy of the handbill-and-broadsheet industry).

The order itself is unlikely to do anything with the knowledge. They are singularly ill-placed to do so, facing a powerful enemy across the narrow sea to Anatolia and being dedicated to their version of Holy Piracy. I can't see the Grand Master just deciding to pull a Teutonic Order stunt, up stakes and move the operation to Cuba. (It would be ever so cool, but realistically, no way). So there is no primary contender for possession. The Portuguese will be best placed to exploit the new lands, though Castile, France, England, and possibly Aragon, Burgundy and Genoa will want a foot in the door, too. If you can marshal the butterflies, a surviving Burgundy would be very well placed to challenge French and English claims with its access to the Rhine and Rhone systems for inland trade and the Dutch ports as a maritime base. Some Burgundian cities are also Hanseatic. But that's just being silly, now. My guess is, the Portuguiese try to hog the trade routes, but are unsuccessful. The papacy may try to enforce some sort of monopoly, but that is not going to work, either. Nonetheless it is likely that the first sustained settlements and conquests will indeed be Portuguese.
 
While the Papacy probably won't be able to "monopolize" the new lands, I can definitely imagine that there'd be a more significant Papal influence, so to speak.
 
How exactly is the Church going to have any more sway or influence than OTL because a random ship from the Knights of St. John ends up in America?

I mean, what is the Pope going to do to actually gain control of that land?
 
How exactly is the Church going to have any more sway or influence than OTL because a random ship from the Knights of St. John ends up in America?

I mean, what is the Pope going to do to actually gain control of that land?

Especially since religious orders are fairly autonomous - even if they take orders from Rome spiritually, temporally they have quite a bit of power on their own.
 
Is there any chance of a crusade of Holy pilgrimage taking place because of it?

One of things that came to mind was the Garden of Eden. If the Knights discover a land so different from theirs but full of strange wonderful things could they decide that that this is the Garden of Eden?

Actually I wonder if I've set the PoD too late. Would a better date be 1310 after the last of the crusader kingdoms were pushed out of the Holy Land? If they discovered it then could the order see it as a sign?
 
Not sure if anyone would be capable of colonizing in 1310, other than that it seems like a pretty good moment for it to happen. I like the thing about the Garden of Eden, too. "Hey guys, we found the Garden of Eden! And god didn't kick us out! AND THERE'S PAGANS THERE!". I can kinda see that happening.

As for said crusaders being pushed out, then seeing the discovery as a sign - maybe God is giving them another chance, to redeem themselves for failing to hold the Holy Land?
 
I have to say that while this might be an interesting topic, it doesn't strike me as very...realistic...that this could happen at all. The crossing from Europe to the Americas is not a quick or easy one. A squall might blow you off course but no ship would be blown an entire 3 month journey off course. On top of this, the Knights rarely had long journeys to make - a trip to northern Europe, for instance, would take at most maybe two weeks. Ships making these kinds of journey just don't stock enough food to survive being "accidentally" blown all the way to America - they would be dead half-way across the Atlantic. That's not to mention that any sailors being blown out into the blue yonder in a time before the discovery of the Americas would be petrified of getting hopelessly lost and never returning to Europe, and thus would be making all attempts to fight the weather conditions, which would only double their journey time to the New World, assuming a 6-month storm persistently blows them due west, which is never going to happen.

And then, of course, if they made it there there's the question of how they plan on getting back.

Sorry to be a spoilsport and all, but this is pretty heavily ASB...
 
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Not really. As we now know, the Grand Banks of New Foundland were often used by portuguese and basque cod fisher long before Columbus reached the New World. That gave the island the name Terra Nova do Bacalhau (New Land of the Codfish). Corte Real and Pining discovered
[*] the island for the Danish crown in 1473 on their mission to reestablish contact with Greenland.
If portuguese and basque fisher could reach New Foundland, so it should be no problem to reach other part of the Americas.


[*]This can be reconstructed from letters but not from the official log of that voyage.
 
Not to forget the minor factoid that the Norsemen (and women) had been farting about in the area for something like 400 years...
 
Yes, but why would the Knights of St. John ever sail even remotely near to the fishing lanes off the North-West corner of Europe? And I'm pretty sure that the way in which the currents of the Atlantic work mean that going that far north, any squalls would be more likely to blow an off-course ship back towards Europe again...

That's not to mention that a Europe-to-Newfoundland trip is still at least two months at sea, which is still far longer than any Knights ship could feasibly be at sea without the crew either starving, or correcting their course. It's a bit like saying "what if Napoleon's army in 1812 got lost in their manoeuvring, couldn't find Kutuzov (or some other General, I'm name-plucking here)'s army to engage them, and eventually realised they'd mistakenly marched all the way to Italy?" Somewhere along the way they are going to correct their error.
 
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