Lecture 5 – European Expansion
Medieval Europe
Agriculture and Empire
- Rainfall and agriculture
- Heavy plough, oxen, peasant farming collectives, horse and horse
collar, population increases
Technology, Warfare and Labor
- Trade increase, horse for transportation of goods and people
- Waterwheels and windmills, labor shortages
- Mechanical technology applied to weaponry (trebuchet’s, catapults)
- Stirrup, armored knights, decentralized Feudal warlords
- Landless knights, religious crusades
- 13th century gunpowder, cannons and guns, large centralized empires
- Muskets in the 1500’s, knights slowly disappeared
- Europe many nation states, not one centralized empire
Universities and Knowledge
- Universities, 11th - 13th century, guild model
- 12th and 13th cent., Fedualism and mercantile capitalism
- Merchants, lawyers, doctors, filled universities, demand for books
- First universities in Italy (Bologna), merchant city
- 11th century military conquest of Spain, translation of Arabic texts
into Latin, Greek natural philosophy in European universities
- Aristotle and Christianity, university curriculum
- Criticism, abstract questions about nature encouraged
Printing
- Johan Gutenberg (1400-1468), workable system of printing with
movable type in 1450’s, Prague and Holland
- Cluster of innovations:
o Copper molds, ridge and groove design
o Presses modeled on wine presses
o New kinds of ink were needed (oil based)
o Paper rather than parchment (animal skin)
- Standardization of languages and knowledge, greater amount of
critical input into knowledge
- Impact of printing:
o 50 years following printing press, 10 million copies of 40,000
titles printed
o 16th century, over 200 million books printed in Europe
- Improvements in maps and navigational tables
- Printing and universities, Aristotelianism, vernacular translations
- Credit and criticism, recording and dissemination of observations
Legal Changes and Authority
- 12th and 13th century Europe, legal revolution, corporations,
communities, cities, towns universities and guilds
- Separation of church from state
- Collectives to pursue science, debate of fundamental ideas and
challenges to orthodoxy
Part II – Europe in the New World
- European powers, capitalism and international trade, colonialism
- Trade, conquest and colonization of new world, population shifts
- 11,000 BC New World was colonized by Asian natives
- Norse in Greenland from the 10th to the 16th century
- By 1492, Christopher Columbus and Spanish expedition
“discovered” America (the Caribbean)
- Francisco Pizzaro, for Charles 1st of Spain, Cajamarca, Peru
- Inca Emperor Atahuallpa ransomed, killed, Incan Empire in disarray
- Pizarro had force of 168 men, 80,000 or so Incans
- Standard explanation European success in colonization: superior
firearms technology, psychological impact, allies
- 4-1/2 million sq km (Peru + Chile + Mexico + Ecuador) to 504,782
sq km for Spain
- Diamond argues that the Europeans had several advantages:
o Horses (combat, speed, endurance)
o Steel (weapons and armor)
o Infectious diseases (decimating populations)
o Centralized states (resources for colonization)
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o Writing + printing to gain information
Few guns initially, inaccurate, psychological impact wore off
Natives mastered the horse and acquired guns,
Combat advantages of horses: vantage point, defense of height,
speed, maneuverability, armor, European experience with cavalry
Steel weapons and Incan armor, steel European armor
Smallpox, influenza, typhus and bubonic plague devastated 95% of
pre 1492 Meso-American populations, disease and a divided empire
Centralized nation states, finance, build, equip and staff ships
Slow improvements in shipbuilding, astronomy and navigation
Power of the Incan empire in monarch
Writing and knowledge of victories, maps, printing press
Incans and bad information, Spanish motives