Islam’s inability to maintain its early command of the high seas was also another key factor in its rapid decline after the twelfth century. In hindsight, the first mortal blow was its failure to defeat Constantinople in 718 and thus monopolize the Mediterranean as an Islamic Lake. This left the door open for European maritime states to build up their sea power. By the late eleventh century, they began to take over the key trade routes. Gradual expulsion from Mediterranean sea trade eliminated a major source of wealth and forced Islamic civilization to rely more extensively on its water-scarce, desert resources and propelled the abruptness of Islam’s reversal of fortune.
Yet Islam also failed to fully consolidate its greatest opportunity of all—its control of the rich, long-distance Indian Ocean trade. In the Indian Ocean, the Muslims proved to be timid, shore-hugging sailors. They ventured into the open seas only when absolutely necessary. Nor were they intrepid explorers of the unknown. In Africa they traveled south as far as the treacherous Mozambique Channel between the mainland and the large island of Madagascar, but no farther. Ironically, the channel became known in Arab history as “the passage of the Franks” through which the Europeans—whom the Muslims called “Franks”—sailed when they transformed history by rounding the cape of south Africa and bursting into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century. Why Muslim seamen already preeminent in those waters did not try to push on around the African cape into the Atlantic long before Europeans made the breakthrough voyage in the opposite direction may appear in hindsight to be one of world history’s great missed strategic opportunities. Yet, in fact, it was simple enough to understand. They had little economic incentive to do so—they already controlled the most profitable trade routes in the world.
Islam’s decline at sea more broadly was due to its failure to transform itself into a true maritime civilization. While it occupied the second frontier of its seas, it never genuinely absorbed it into a dynamic new synthesis with its original desert-borne civilization. Alexandria, despite all the advantages of its wonderful large harbor and its central location at the trade interstices of the Mediterranean and routes east, never became a Muslim Venice. Islam coped with its deficit of streams, good harbors, and dangerous coastlines, but it did not truly overcome it. Culturally, Islam remained fundamentally land-oriented. It thus left itself vulnerable to being outflanked when Christian infidels mounted their great challenge to Islam at sea.
One recurrent lesson of history is that societies that passively live too long off old water engineering accomplishments are routinely overtaken by states and civilizations that find innovative ways to exploit water’s ever-evolving balance of challenges and opportunities. Thus Muslims failed to meet the challenges posed, first by Chinese junks and then, after China’s voluntary withdrawal from the seas, by the spectacular entrance in early 1498 of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama into the Indian Ocean. As often is the case in hindsight, one civilization seems to surpass another, as Muslims did in displacing the Byzantines and Persians, with startling abruptness because advantages have been quietly building up for some time and then express themselves with full force all at once. Advances in navigation, shipbuilding, and sea weaponry had been steadily expanding the opportunities for cheaper, quicker, and safer sea transport and trade. But the ascendancy of sea power was not awesomely displayed until the moment da Gama’s fleet rounded Africa’s cape and crossed the Indian Ocean and pulled into the port at Calicut, India. In little more than a decade, sturdy Portuguese ocean vessels, armed with cannons that had an effective range of 200 yards, seized control of the Muslims’ richest sea routes across the Indian Ocean to the Spice Islands. Portugal’s opening of the all-water spice route to India also broke the long-standing Venice-Alexandria stranglehold on the trade of oriental goods throughout the Mediterranean. Venetian overtures to Egypt’s rulers to reopen Pharaoh Neko’s old Red-Sea-to-Nile “Suez” canal route as a countermeasure came to nought. As a result, the traditional overland camel and sea caravan routes that had yielded so much of Islam’s wealth went into accelerated, lasting decline.
Sea power also emerged as the weakest link of Islam’s militant revival under the Turks from the fifteenth century. The Turks were originally Far Eastern nomadic steppe cousins of the Mongols. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries, many Turkish tribes entered Islamic territories in the Middle East and converted to Islam, often serving as mercenary soldiers. Over time they became the military backbone, and then the political masters, of Islam. When the era of Mongol hegemony ended, the Ottoman Turks embarked on a military expansion into the Anatolian highlands of modern Turkey.
In 1453, Turks under the command of the young Mehmet II, thereafter “the Conqueror,” sent a shudder through all European Christendom by finally taking Constantinople and making it their new capital. The final assault against the historic city was won with the help of a gigantic cannon built by a Hungarian engineer and by Mehmet’s own master stroke against the nearly impregnable Golden Horn. His forces dragged 70 galleys overland and launched them behind the Byzantine imperial squadron guarding the Horn’s entrance. For the next 200 years, the Turks spearheaded a new Islamic jihad against Christian Europe. In the sixteenth century formidable Turkish Islamic armies stormed through Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary and in 1529 laid siege to Vienna on the Danube in central Europe. During the peak of their power under Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, even Rome itself felt threatened. As late as 1683 Turkish armies were capable of besieging Vienna a second time.
Europe had reacted to the first Arab-led Islamic expansion by launching the Crusades to retake the Holy Land; its response to the Turkish-led second clash of civilizations included a series of sea battles for control of the Mediterranean. Although the Turks’ new fleets had reestablished Muslim sea power and had captured the strategic eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus in 1570–1571, the Turkmen were no match for European vessels, sailing skills, and naval tactics developed in rough gales and currents of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1541, Lufti Pasha, a former grand vizier to Süleyman, became concerned that while the Ottomans were powerful on land, they were vulnerable to their Christian enemies at sea. His assessment was proven correct in the climactic sea battle between the combined fleets of Christendom and the Turks on October 7, 1571, off the Greek coast at Lepanto, not far from the site of the Battle of Actium that had ended Rome’s civil wars. The bloody, four hour Battle of Lepanto is celebrated not just for signaling Christian Europe’s decisive triumph over resurgent Islam at sea, but also for marking a turning point in the history of naval warfare—it was the first major sea battle in which gunpowder was important. The Turkmen fought mainly the way most major sea battles had been fought since antiquity—they tried to re-create the conditions of a land battle aboard ship. Their soldiers were armed mainly with bows and arrows and swords for close combat; their pilots and oarsmen tried to ram their galleys into enemy vessels or maneuver them alongside close enough for grappling hooks to draw them together to permit boarding and hand-to-hand fighting. The Christian fleets, by contrast, fought with weapons that presaged the dawning new era of naval warfare. Their galleys had cannons mounted on their bows and their soldiers were armed with muskets or arquebuses that could fire at and hit the enemy from a distance. The Venetians also unveiled an entirely new class of warship, a galleass, that was much bigger than traditional galleys, with 50-foot oars manned by half a dozen men, and large swivel guns. History’s next great sea battle, the British defeat of the Spanish Armada seventeen years later in 1588, would complete the transformation to modern artillery-based sea warfare from a distance. At Lepanto, a total of 30,000 men died in the Christians’ bloody victory over Islam. Among the Christian wounded was Miguel Cervantes, the author of the novel Don Quixote, who through his life proudly displayed his maimed left hand as proof of his role in the battle. Lepanto crippled the expansionist ambitions of the Turkish Empire by curtailing its mobility at sea and its access to the vital resources that
moved along the world’s sea-lanes.
The sea battle with Europe illustrated that Islam’s demise from international preeminence was only partly due to its own absolute response to its internal water resource fragilities. What its neighbors were doing with their water resources determined outcomes too. Civilizations’ responses to their water challenges throughout history were variable and always in flux. Some civilizations rose sooner because water conditions in their habitat were more favorable to being exploited by available technologies and forms of organization. Hydraulic civilizations, for instance, arose earliest because semiarid, flooding river valleys offered opportunities for irrigation they had the ready means to exploit. The development of Islam’s trade, using camels to carry goods through its harsher desert habitat, took much longer. Still other regions with even more inauspicious water resource endowments faced challenges so daunting as to all but relegate their native societies to subordinated starting positions in the ongoing competition among societies.
Such was the destiny of much of sub-Saharan Africa, where geography presented formidable hurdles. Its equatorial rain forest regions, like tropical lowlands everywhere, were ecologically precarious habitats particularly inimical to the development of large, advanced civilizations. Its soils were permanently saturated sponges, extremely difficult to clear for farming and unhealthy for human settlement. Travel was hard, except by river. Nonetheless, impressive civilizations did develop in the surrounding drier, more hospitable tropical forests and transitional savanna lands, such as the successive empires that flourished around the Niger River and the headwaters of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. But for a long time these civilizations developed in isolation behind the barrier of large deserts and the impenetrable ocean that limited their ability to engage on equal terms with other societies in the cultural and economic exchange that has stimulated civilization in every age. It was not surprising that the external barriers of sub-Saharan African empires were breeched first by neighboring civilizations propelled by superior competitive advantages in water technology—camel caravans by Arab traders and later by the oceangoing vessels of the Europeans. Following international history’s inexorable progression from trade to raid and domination, the Muslims and Europeans pressed their advantages by imposing exploitative relationships upon Africans through trade, conquest, and colonization. The ultimate symbol of this inequity was the large slave trade in black human beings. For centuries this was a monopoly of the Arabs. But when European ships appeared on the Atlantic coast of Africa and offered cheaper and safer sea routes, as well as new markets in the New World, domination of the slave trade shifted from the Arabs to the Europeans.
The Europeans on the ocean-bounded, cold, and wet northwestern edge of the civilized Old World had also inherited water resources that were extremely challenging to tap and harness. For millennia non-Mediterranean northern Europe remained an impoverished backwater. But when its inhabitants finally broke out of the ocean-bound confines of their peninsula-shaped continent with the innovation of open sea sailing, they gained command over one of the most dynamic water advantages in all world history. For much of previous history, sea power mainly had helped small states survive defensively against much larger land-based states with powerful armies; naval prowess equalized the balance of power by enlisting the formidable difficulty of navigating the sea itself into the battlefield, and by stretching and harassing enemy supply lines. But with the advent of open sea sailing, control of the oceanic highways of the entire world suddenly was transformed into an overwhelming offensive advantage. With China’s voluntary turn inward and propelled by their leadership at sea, Europeans were able to exert an extraordinary, global dominance that was to last half a millennium.
PART II
Water and the Ascendancy of the West
CHAPTER SEVEN
Waterwheel, Plow, Cargo Ship, and the Awakening of Europe
While the glory of Chinese and Islamic civilizations waned during late medieval times, another civilization was starting to flourish on the European edge of the Old World. Invigorated culturally by its synthesis of Christian religion with its rediscovered Hellenic-Roman roots, and economically by the fusion of the disparate resources of its precocious, semiarid Mediterranean south and its slower rising, colder, temperate north, Western civilization would consolidate an unprecedented 500-year supremacy over the world’s wealth and political order. An ongoing series of water challenges and responses marked the path of Europe’s historical ascent. Time and again, water’s inherent, latent potency as a transforming agent was unleashed by the conversion of a formidable water obstacle into a vehicle of productive expansion. Most dramatically, the West was propelled by two key turning points in history—the advent of transoceanic sailing with long-range cannonry in the European Voyages of Discovery in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the gradual harnessing of waterpower for industry, first with waterwheels and, in the late eighteenth century, with the invention of the modern steam engine. Also driving the West’s rise was the distinctive political economic order that arose in its most dynamic centers, featuring self-expansive, flourishing free markets and representative liberal democracies that sprung from the seeds originally planted by ancient Greece’s seafaring city-states.
The European continent’s geographic shape as a peninsula bounded on three sides by high seas—the warm, lakelike Mediterranean Sea to the south; the cold, rough, semienclosed North and Baltic seas in the lonely north; and in the west, the vast, stormy, tide-tossed Atlantic Ocean, for most of history at once the West’s great impenetrable frontier and its protective barrier—fostered a natural maritime orientation central to its history. The continent’s absence of a unifying, arterial inland waterway like Egypt’s Nile or China’s Grand Canal further pushed Europe’s inhabitants toward its seascapes to communicate and trade among themselves. The Danube and Rhine rivers, which might have served as some part of that unifying backbone, flowed respectively east to the Black Sea and north toward the North Sea, both away from the main direction of early civilized European society in the Mediterranean; in fact the two great rivers had provided Rome’s primary defensive barrier against incursions from the nomadic barbarians who lived beyond it in the northeast—they were Rome’s Great Wall of China. Indeed, just as centralized, large hydraulic civilizations emerged along the arterial, irrigable rivers of some of antiquity’s semiarid habitats, Europe’s greater reliance on wide seas, rain-fed farming, and many small, navigable rivers helped foster its own distinctive political history of small, competing states linked by markets and friendly to the gradual development of liberal democracies.
Backward northern Europe originally sprang to life during the so-called Dark Ages from about AD 600 to 1000 from a sparsely populated, barbarian hinterland of the old Roman Empire into a settled, autonomously growing region of Christian civilization with critical impetus from a combination of water engineering including new plow technology, land drainage that expanded its rain-fed cropland, and exploitation of its small rivers for navigation and waterpower. Following the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s failed bid in the sixth century to reconquer the Roman heartland, northern Europe on both sides of the Rhine and Danube underwent tumultuous centuries of power struggles among barbarians and settled societies from which ultimately emerged a decentralized feudal political system and manorial economy linked by independent walled towns and unregulated trade. The most important barbarian kingdom was that of the Franks, whose conversion to Christianity at the end of the fifth century and political alliance with the Roman papacy was crucial to the survival and spread of the Latin church. At their zenith under Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day 800 by Pope Leo III at St. Peter’s, the Rhine Valley–centered Frankish kingdoms controlled almost all of modern France and modern Germany, the upper Danube, and northern Italy.
Europe & Selected Medieval Sea Trade Routes
Yet in the ninth and tenth centuries, the stability of the Frankish
and other consolidated administrations eroded under pressure from a new wave of barbarian raiders, including the terrifying Scandinavian Norsemen, or Vikings, who earned a living sailing up and down Europe’s rivers and coasts in their long, shallow ships by raiding and exacting tribute from settlements situated along the shores. Ultimately repelled by walled citadels and castles defended by mounted, armor-clad knights, these barbarians, too, settled down to civilized life, adopted Christianity and, like converted barbarians throughout history, invigorated their new religion with fresh zeal. The Norsemen who settled in Normandy became the Normans that conquered England in 1066 and soon thereafter provided the knights who seized Sicily from Muslim control and then led the first crusaders from 1096 to 1099 in taking Jerusalem and the Holy Land for Christendom. By about AD 1000 most of northern Europe had been Christianized, and market forces had gained enough momentum to help launch the early stages of the commercial revolution from 950 to 1350 that propelled the West’s early economic takeoff.
Northern Europe had always possessed promising physical attributes for development. Thanks to the blessing of the warm, Atlantic Ocean Gulf Stream current from the Caribbean, its northwest was a temperate climate zone suitable for nearly year-round farming despite its subarctic latitudes. It was rich in freshwater and other natural resources, had copious rainfall, and almost endless, indented sea coastlines with many good, natural harbors for shipping and trade. It had the potential backbone of an extensive waterway transport network in its many long, navigable rivers, mostly flowing north, that reached much farther inland than the rivers of Mediterranean Europe.
Yet throughout Roman times the region faced one insuperable water obstacle to agricultural expansion—excessive precipitation and poor natural drainage of its heavy, clay soils. Thick forest and swamps covered most of its flat, often-waterlogged plains. Tillage methods applied in the lighter, drier soils of the Mediterranean and Middle East, notably including the simple wooden, shallow, scratch plow pulled by an ox or pair of asses, were all but useless in the northern terrain. As a result, northern Europe’s rain-fed cropland was limited to the slash and burn methods of hillside patches where drainage was adequate and in the few other locations where soils were naturally more permeable and could be worked by laborious, small-scale farming methods. With agriculture perennially hovering around near-starvation levels, population in the region was low and life spans short.
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