The two areas of the most intense naval activity along the new pattern, and therefore of most intensive technological development, were China and western Europe. It is only with hindsight, oversimplification, and a large dose of anachronism that the two traditions can be said to have been engaged in a race for world naval dominance. Nevertheless, close comparison of their respective paths reveals much about naval warfare, maritime power more generally, and the structures of two very different civilizations.
Zheng He's Treasure Ships
This drawing shows the size and rigging plan of the largest Chinese ships. The smaller ship, for scale, is Columbus’s Santa Maria.
The first Ming emperor had little interest in overseas commerce, but private trade and traditions of Chinese shipbuilding continued during his reign. Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor (1402-24), however, viewed such trade as a source of both wealth and prestige, and sponsored the last and most famous period of Chinese seafaring, the voyages of the treasure fleets under the Chinese Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He.
Technology
The unprecedented scale of the ships and fleets assembled by Zhu Di (who seems to have equated size with grandeur) required the assembly of a vast workforce of shipwrights from all of coastal China. As a result, shipbuilding traditions from the northern Yellow Sea coasts and the southern South China Sea coasts seem to have come together and cross-fertilized. Sailors in the Yellow Sea had to deal with shallows and shifting sandbanks; ships there, called shachuan (sand boats), were maneuverable, with flat bottoms and shallow drafts. The South China Sea was rougher, and the danger was hidden reefs; pirates were also a more consistent problem. Southern ships, called fuchuan, had deep, V-shaped hulls on deep, strong keels. The prow was high and reinforced, which served both to protect the ship from reefs and to allow ramming of smaller, lower ships. A tall castle aft served as a fighting platform, as fuchuan were the standard design for Ming warships. The new ships of the treasure fleet combined features of both traditions, and the biggest of them did so on an unprecedented scale.
The best estimates of the size of the biggest treasure ships put them at almost 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, among the largest wooden ships ever built. They had up to seven or eight masts, fore-and-aft-rigged with efficient, bamboo-battened sails, and sternpost rudders. They had a massive cargo capacity and could carry many hundreds of sailors, soldiers, and officials; and they could be armed with siege engines throwing stones, bolts, and gunpowder bombs. (It is unclear how far the Chinese had progressed in designing gunpowder-powered projectile weapons—that is, guns.) The hulls featured numerous watertight bulkheads, massive internal beams, and multiple layers of external planking. While this created ships of tremendous strength and seaworthiness, it was also an expensive and labor-intensive process, especially on the largest ships.
Figure 15.1 The Voyages of Zheng He, 1405-33
As noted above, the Chinese had invented the floating magnetic compass in the Song era. By the time of the treasure fleets, they had charts of the main trade routes with headings calibrated to compass readings and careful descriptions of landmarks and harbor entrances. Chinese mariners had also worked out fairly good methods for measuring speed and latitude. But, despite these charts, navigation had not become a fully written tradition yet.
The Treasure Fleets
Seven great treasure fleet expeditions sailed under Zheng He from Ming China, the first six sponsored by Zhu Di between 1405 and 1421, the last by his grandson Zhu Zhanji in 1431 (Figure 15.1). Each lasted almost two years. The main route extended from Longjiang near the mouth of the Yangzi to Champa (southern Vietnam), thence through the Straits of Malacca and past Ceylon to Calicut, and finally to Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Parts of various expeditions also explored routes to Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, Timor, Siam, Bengal, and the ports of Arabia on the Red Sea, as well as the east coast of Africa as far south as Madagascar.
The mission of the fleets was multifaceted, with perhaps the most important facet being political. The size and magnificence of the fleets and the value of the goods they carried both for trade and as gifts to the various rulers along the route advertised the wealth and prestige of the Dragon Throne, while the military might of the fleets—the many thousands of troops— backed that prestige with real power. This political function was not just for show. The early expeditions actively cleared the straits of pirates, and Zheng He acted as an ambassador, managing relations among the small kingdoms of the region to China’s advantage. The fleets also supported an invasion and ongoing war in Annam (northern Vietnam).
But commerce was also an important aspect of the fleets’ mission, which sought to stimulate China’s trade with all the countries of south and southeast Asia. Sending out expensive gifts of Chinese manufactures, especially fine Ming porcelain, drew tribute gifts in return, including a number of giraffes sent from African kingdoms. It is difficult to arrive at a balance sheet for such political trade—that is, to decide whether the imperial treasury profited from such exchanges financially. They certainly added to the throne’s prestige. But the fleets also engaged in straightforward trading, exchanging Chinese manufactures for spices and medicinal goods. In this they probably did turn a profit, at least on the exchanges themselves. Did such profits cover the cost of building and manning the fleets? Probably not directly, but the commercial contacts renewed by the fleets also stimulated private merchant activity as well as tribute missions, and the customs and import duties derived from expanded trade may well have put the entire enterprise in the black. Also, it is important to recognize that any trade coming into China was viewed, officially, as a form of tribute that acknowledged the suzerainty of the Dragon Throne and the centrality of the Middle Kingdom in the world.
It is also possible to detect an enthusiasm for exploration for its own sake among some of the fleets’ supporters. Since interest in the world beyond China was not normally viewed favorably in official ideology, this interest was couched in terms of finding out what the emperor ruled and how the benefits of his policies could be extended to more of the world.
As military expeditions, the fleets were virtually unchallengeable at sea. The variety of ships in the fleets meant that they could deploy a range of tactics, from ramming, to the use of various missile weapons from bows to siege engines, to boarding. Given the number of soldiers the big ships carried, the latter threat would have presented no option to an enemy but flight. The fleets could not carry enough troops to be irresistible on land wherever they put into port. But they carried enough for defense against almost any threat, and since the fleets came in peace and not for conquest there was little problem with hostilities. In short, while the treasure fleets sailed, China dominated the waters of Asia from Persia to Korea. Had they stayed on the seas another seventy years after the last expedition returned home in 1433, they would surely have offered a virtually insurmountable obstacle to the Portuguese ships, small in both number and size, that then began to assert themselves in Indian waters.
Abdication
But the treasure fleets did not continue to sail. Zheng He died during the last expedition, and Zhu Zhanji died prematurely in 1435. No more treasure fleets sailed with Ming sponsorship. But the Chinese abandonment of the seas was far more complete than simply the ending of government- sponsored missions. Progressively, over the next century, private trade was more strictly regulated, and Chinese merchants were increasingly restricted in where they could sail. Foreign merchants coming to China also found themselves more restricted, and foreign populations living in Chinese cities faced growing xenophobia. Eventually, even the building of ocean-going junks by Chinese merchants was prohibited, and the once-thriving and technically superior Chinese shipbuilding industry contracted to local markets and lost many of the skills that had put it in the forefront of global maritime technology.
Why did this happen? This is a question scholars have debated for years—in part because of its relevance to the issue of the “rise of Europe.” The deeper patterns of possible answers, involving the relationship of politics and culture to socioeconomic structure, will be discussed below. But a number of immediate factors are fairly clear.
Zhu Qizhen, the new emperor, had none of his father’s or great-grandfather’s interest in the fleets, and imperial sponsorship had to originate with the emperor himself. Zhu Qizhen thus also tended to side with the traditional Confucian bureaucrats in an emerging court battle. Confucians traditionally frowned on merchants and mercantile activity, though revisionism under the Song showed that, in the right circumstances, theory could be made friendlier to practice. Ming Confucian bureaucrats deployed tradition against their rivals for court power, the eunuchs. The eunuchs had, for obscure reasons, become the court patrons of trade and merchant activity; and, thus, whatever the bureaucracy could do to limit commerce undercut the eunuchs’ source of wealth and power. But the eunuchs themselves contributed to the damage to commerce through corruption: Rather than fostering trade, they began to profiteer from customs and duties, further raising the cost of doing business. In short, structurally, the control the powerful central government of China could exercise over trade proved, in this climate, to be highly detrimental.
The complexities of measuring the balance sheets of the treasure fleets also contributed to their demise. The fleets were, in up-front costs, expensive to the government. A fiscal crisis or a shift in priorities for government spending could therefore make sending out a fleet an unaffordable luxury. Zhu Qizhen partly inherited such a shift: Zhu Di, who had sponsored the fleets, had also rebuilt an expensive new capital city in Beijing, which put a severe strain on government resources. Further, the fleets had sailed at a time when China’s population was recovering from severe outbreaks of the plague in the 1330s. But new outbreaks in the mid-fifteenth century again reduced government income from the land tax, its main source of wealth. High expenses met shrinking resources, and the fleets suffered. Finally, Zhu Qizhen created a crisis by being captured by the Mongols in 1449. His eight-year captivity and the succession struggle that followed his release helped paralyze central policy, deepen the divisions at court, and damage imperial prestige. The latter had a direct effect on trade by discouraging tribute missions from abroad.
Consequently, Chinese seas were left to foreign merchants, Korean and Japanese pirates, and, from the 1530s, Europeans, with profound results for global commerce and naval warfare.
As in China, advances in European shipbuilding in this period resulted from the cross-breeding of northern and southern traditions. But whereas government policy encouraged the Chinese fusion, the European fusion evolved gradually. Europe’s long coastlines, many peninsulas and islands, and lack of major canal systems (no European government having the ability to build one) made the European economy heavily dependent on seaborne trade. As ship technology improved, the European economy became steadily more integrated. One result was that ship technology became more integrated as well. In the fifteenth century, this integration reached a critical stage, and there was a rapid evolution of ship design with significant consequences for trade and warfare at sea.
Technology
Since Mediterranean galleys continued to follow their own developmental path (see below), the fusion mainly affected sailing ships. Northern hull shapes based on the cog had proved their worth as cargo carriers. These ships were deep and round, with high freeboards, sternpost rudders, and built-up fore and aft castles, so they both sailed well and were fairly defensible by the small crews that made them economical. But northern ships had been clinker-built— built up as a shell from the keel, with internal framing added later. Southern carvel-building—frame first with planks added on—spread north because it required less skilled labor and was thus cheaper, and it also allowed larger hulls to be built.
Larger ships rapidly reached the limit of what could be driven by the single square sail of the northern tradition. The southern tradition had long included multimasted ships; now, northern ships began to add a foremast, also square-rigged but smaller than the mainmast, and then a mizzenmast with a Mediterranean lateen sail that aided maneuverability. At the same time, the large, square sails began to be divided for greater ease of handling. By 1500, the result was the full-rigged ship, known at the time as a carrack, a far better sailer than its ancestors and thus a more economical cargo vessel.
What allowed the potential of the full-rigged ship for transoceanic sailing to be tapped was advances in navigational technology. By 1400, Europeans had the compass, either by indirect borrowing from the Chinese or by later independent invention (see the Issues box “Navies and Technology”). They also adopted the astrolabe, which allowed accurate calculation of latitude, from Arab sailors. In addition, there was rapid development of the use, first, of portolans— detailed descriptions of coasts and ports—in the Mediterranean and, then, of compass-influenced maps, all of which increasingly freed ships from having to hug the coastline. Navigation more than any other area of marine technology also profited from the European invention of the printing press in 1453. Maps, tables for calculating latitude, and other guides for literate ship captains rapidly became widely available.
The final piece in the naval technology puzzle was borrowed from land warfare. Ships became platforms for gunpowder weapons from the early fifteenth century. At first, these were small antipersonnel weapons mounted on the upper decks and castles. By later in the century, larger cannon were being mounted on the lower decks of sailing ships, with gun ports cut in the hulls. Galleys, too, began mounting guns, mostly in the bows pointing forward, adding to their offensive capability. As long as big cannon were scarce and expensive, gunpowder galleys could hold their own against gunpowder sailing ships. But by the 1570s, economic development, including wealth from the Americas, and cast-iron cannon, invented in England, were making big guns more affordable and plentiful, and sailing ships with broadside armament gained a decisive advantage.
The final product of this evolution in terms of warships came with the Iberian galleon in the early sixteenth century. Its name gives away one final southern influence on its design. It was a full-rigged ship, but with lines and hull shape influenced by the great galleys and galleasses of the Mediterranean: longer in proportion to its width and lower in profile. This made it a faster, more maneuverable sailer than the rounder carrack. But a narrower ship held less cargo and used more wood in relation to its cargo area than a rounder ship, and so was less economical. The galleon thus pointed to a differentiation between sail- driven warships and merchant vessels that would increase over time as cannon became cheaper and warships carried more and more of them.
By the second decade of the sixteenth century, the principal components of the new naval technology were in place. Full-rigged ships carrying large cannon would prove effective tools for exploration, commerce, and warfare. They would also prove technologically capable of staying at sea for extended periods, making control of the sea possible in the modern sense for the first time. Given this capability, control of the sea- lanes along which traders traveled became far more valuable than any individual ship, and so the incentive for ship-killing tactics increased along with the gunpowder technology that made ship killing possible in a new way. Until the nineteenth century, changes in this technological package would consist of refinements in sail plans and hull shapes and, above all, the working out for warships of effective tactics for broadside batteries in the form of the line ahead (see Chapter 20). When European governments developed the financial and administrative resources to match the technological capabilities of their ships, the new capitalist model of naval power would also be fully in place.
Galleon
With leaner, galley-influenced lines married to a large, coglike hull capable of carrying broadside-mounted cannon and powered by three full-rigged masts, the galleon was the prototype for 300 years of warship design.
Naval Warfare
The English Channel remained the site of the most intense naval warfare in northern waters. Henry V of England, concerned about his lines of communication as he set out to conquer Normandy, built a fleet to clear the French and their Genoese allies from the Channel. The fleet included ships armed with guns. Victory at Honfleur in 1417 achieved his goal. A small royal naval establishment continued in existence from that time forward, but it would not assume a truly significant role in English defense until the reign of Edward VI in the early 1550s, when the Duke of Northumberland built it up in conjunction with encouraging overseas exploration and trade.
But northern naval warfare remained rudimentary compared to the sophisticated galley wars of the Mediterranean world. In the century after 1380, these wars tended to be localized: battles among Christian kingdoms in the western Mediterranean, Venetian battles against the rising Ottoman power in the east and against other Italian city-states in the central Mediterranean, and commerce and coastal raiding by North African Muslims against Spain and by the Knights of St. John on Rhodes against Muslim areas. The economics of naval power continued to tie warfare to piracy, with rowers predominantly skilled free men.
Northern round ships did begin to appear in the Mediterranean in increasing numbers, taking a larger share of the merchant trade. In some ways, a peculiar tactical standoff began to develop between round ships and galleys. The heavily built, highsided round ships could often hold off single galleys and even small squadrons, especially if they carried a large-enough crew. This made commerce somewhat safer but had little effect on patterns of naval warfare because round ships had little offensive capability and could never force a galley into a fight. More important, the ability of galleys to deliver men and supplies directly to ports and beaches made them ideal for besieging the fortified ports on which naval power was based and for relieving ports under siege. Sailing ships could not perform such tasks reliably. And, as long as artillery remained expensive and scarce, galleys were also more effective gun platforms than sailing ships, able to row into position as mobile siege batteries and to hold their own in naval gunfights against undergunned broadside batteries. In terms of galley-versus-galley fights, the addition of forward- mounted, centerline cannon simply reinforced the concentration of a galley’s offensive power in its bow. The guns were essentially antipersonnel weapons, discharged on impact as a prelude to boarding, though Venetian gunners in particular could aim to sink enemy ships from a distance. Thus, galley battles pitted lines of ships abreast meeting head-to-head (see the Highlights box).
In addition, the continuing spread of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Spanish kingdoms altered the political geography of Mediterranean warfare. Increasingly, the two major powers divided the sea between themselves, with Venice the only one of the lesser powers surviving as a significant player in the sixteenth century. Ottoman control of the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean also gave them control over the sea-lanes there, and when Mamluk Egypt fell to them, Venice was forced into avoiding war with the sultans as much as possible, since the Ottomans controlled the sources of Venetian trade wealth. Further, Christian outposts such as Rhodes became almost impossible to defend; in 1522, Rhodes fell and the Knights retreated to Malta.
The resources the great powers brought to galley warfare wrought changes of their own. The size of fleets grew steadily through the sixteenth century. The size of individual galleys and the numbers of soldiers each carried also grew as both sides looked to increase the tactical striking power of its ships: Bigger ships could carry more and heavier cannon as well as more soldiers. As marines, Spanish musketeers and Ottoman archers were evenly matched tactically. But the advantage of the musketeers was that a peasant could be turned into a good musketeer with a short period of training; a good archer was a lifetime product of a socioeconomic system that the Ottomans were struggling to maintain by the midsixteenth century.
But larger ships and fleets stretched the resources of skilled rowers, while labor costs were rising in the wake of the depopulation resulting from the plague. After 1450, there was an escalating shift toward the use of galley slaves placed five to an oar in place of three rowers on a bench, each with his own oar. This decreased the demand for skilled oarsmen but increased power only marginally while adding to the larger manpower complement of each ship. Since galleys had limited storage space, larger crews critically shortened the already restrictive logistical leash that tied fleets to friendly ports. Larger fleets added to the problem, as did ammunition for cannon. By midcentury, the strategic mobility and striking range of large galley fleets, within the restrictive parameters of the Mediterranean sailing season, had shrunk enough that strategic stalemate was setting in. The expense of raising large fleets, by 1550 almost unbearable even for the great powers, compounded the problem. The lengthy, costly, and ultimately unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 signaled the end of large-scale amphibious offensives. Lepanto, six years later, was the swan song of big galley fleets (see the Highlights box “The Battle of Lepanto, 1571”). When English and Dutch privateers armed with plentiful cast-iron cannon entered the Mediterranean in the 1580s, even the guerre de course that was the lifeblood of the galley system became untenable, and the era of oared fighting ships that stretched back into antiquity finally came to an end.
Toward Expansion
Portugal led the way in the development of the full-rigged ship and broadside gunnery. Henry the Navigator sent such ships down the coast of Africa from the 1450s and was rewarded with gold and slaves, often obtained by trading guns. By 1488, a fleet under Vasco da Gama had reached the Cape and ten years after that reached Indian ports visited by the Chinese treasure fleets sixty-six years earlier. Unlike the treasure fleets, the European fleets were there to stay.
The Portuguese fleets were far smaller than those of the Chinese. But they were also, from the start, paying propositions of a government and merchant class with a large stake in their success. The Spanish too invested in exploration, with unexpectedly spectacular results in 1492. Soon the Dutch, English, and French would join the race. The merchant capitalists of Europe went looking for profits with the approval and support of their governments; those governments supported their merchants because they were involved
in ongoing political and military competition among themselves. The kings of a divided Europe could not afford not to seek new sources of income. Merchants and kings looked beyond the traditional routes to the east through the Mediterranean out of a desire to bypass the Venetian monopoly over those routes and to avoid the growing power of the Ottomans. In fact, the Portuguese aimed to control trade in the Indian Ocean as a direct blow against the Ottomans, an ambitious and crusadelike strategy.
The cannon-bearing, full-rigged ship was the key tool of this expansion. The initial victories of the Portuguese captains da Gama, Almeida, and Albuquerque over larger Indian fleets, especially Almeida’s victory over a combined Egyptian-Gujerati fleet off Diu in February 1509, demonstrated the potential of the Europeans’ heavy-timbered ships, flexible sail plans, and superior heavy gunnery. But the socioeconomic system—the whole complex model of naval power—that produced these ships was, as much as the ships themselves, the sign of new directions in naval warfare, for the Chinese had demonstrated similar technological potential decades earlier. Ships were simply tools, a means to an end. It is to an examination of motives that we must turn in comparing the differing outcomes of Chinese and European maritime expansion.
A complex set of factors contributed to the different trajectories of Chinese and European naval history. No one factor was decisive by itself, and many were interrelated—each civilization was an organic whole, and its naval history a product of that whole. Counterfactual history—playing “what if ” with single factors—is therefore an unproductive exercise. We should also avoid judging the Chinese trajectory by European standards, especially in terms of the outcome. Europe did not win, because there was no competition being waged between Europe and China. In each case, the results, though different, make sense, and if China had stayed active at sea (to use a counterfactual), the result is unlikely to have been a European-style industrial revolution in China.
The Role of Government
China was ruled by a strong, centralized, and bureaucratic government. Though dynasties changed, the Ming rulers rightly considered themselves part of a ruling tradition that stretched back over 2000 years. The bureaucracy of scholar-gentry was recruited by examination based on the Confucian classics, which gave the government ideological coherence. That ideology saw the role of government as fostering the “good of the kingdom”: the emperor and his ministers were responsible for the welfare of the empire. Thus, the imperial government had both the means and the motivation to control and regulate trade. Commerce was important to government finances through taxation, especially from the Song period on, but that importance was underacknowledged ideologically. Revenues from agricultural and land taxes were the most important source of government income, and the only true source of government wealth to most Confucians. Thus, in China, market forces were limited by and subordinate to political forces, a common situation in most preindustrial societies.
Europe, on the other hand, was fragmented politically. Further, individual governments were underdeveloped by Chinese standards. Their bureaucracies were rudimentary, and they exercised limited ability to control or regulate trade. In fact, most governments’ limited authority to collect taxes meant that commerce was usually crucial to government finances, especially as kings looked for sources of revenue with which to wage war. They could not afford to risk killing off trade and, in fact, often looked to stimulate it. This also reflected long-standing attitudes to practical governance. Kings and princes ruled, in theory, for the good of the people, as in China, but in practice acted much more like business owners maximizing the returns on their private property, an attitude fostered by localism and weak powers of taxation. In such a political atmosphere, market forces were given much more leeway and influence over both public and private policy decisions.
The Role of Social Structure
These government attitudes toward commerce were in some ways simply an outgrowth of deeper social structures and attitudes. In China, merchants were numerous and successful but had a subordinate role socially and in terms of influence. Confucian social theory assigned merchants to the lowest social strata, below peasants, and though rich merchants certainly had more influence and a better lifestyle than peasants, the ideology had an effect. Rich merchants aspired for their sons to become scholars and bureaucrats, reflecting both the monopoly of prestige that government service exercised in society and the openness of the meritocratic exam system to new entrants.
European merchants, on the other hand, though less rich and numerous in absolute terms than their Chinese counterparts, were probably more numerous in relative terms, as well as more influential. To the extent that there was a social theory—the medieval Three Orders, consisting of those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed—merchants fell outside it rather than at its base. Faced with a somewhat hostile church and a somewhat closed aristocracy, merchants had no choice but to use their wealth in pursuit of more wealth and, in some places, such as Renaissance Italy, to glorify the pursuit. As urban burgesses, merchants had a greater measure of self-rule than in China (another sign of weak central authority); indeed, some Italian city-states were ruled by merchant oligarchies.
A subtler aspect of social structure is that in China, social relationships were mediated by the idea of the Confucian hierarchy. Everyone had a place between superiors and inferiors, with the emperor at the top, tying social hierarchy to government hierarchy. In Europe, even outside the merchant class, social relationships had long been mediated by contract. Contracts, implicit or explicit, governed lord and vassal, landlord and peasant, and even king and consultative body (parliaments). Arguably, Europe’s contract- mediated society was more open to merchant practices and influence than was China’s Confucian hierarchy.
The Role of Economics
Economically, China was in a powerful position in the pre-1500 world system of trade. It was a central producer of valuable manufactured goods from laquerware and porcelain to jade jewelry and silks. It was a vast, rich consumer market for spices, medicines, and exotic foods. As a result, trade gravitated toward China whether Chinese merchants pursued it or not, and it usually produced a surplus balance of payments. Europe, on the other hand, lay at the far western end of the major Afro- Eurasian trade routes and had much less to offer in the way of raw or finished products for the world market: wool cloth and weapons (first swords, then guns) were its most valuable exports. European merchants thus had to pursue trade actively to meet the demand for Eastern luxury goods, and a negative balance of payments motivated a search for new sources of gold and silver. But in another way, Europe was in a fortuitous position geographically: closest of the Afro-Eurasian civilizations to the Americas and their potential for mineral extraction and slave-based agricultural wealth. Similar exploitation of the Americas from China was probably feasible technologically but would have proved at best marginally profitable given the greater distances and the proximity of the rich Southeast Asian trade.
Geography also shaped the methods of internal trade. For China, the seas were not crucial. China’s was a large, land-based empire with decent rivers, canals, and roads. Europe’s coasts and seas were relatively longer and far more significant as connectors of the regions whose differentiation was at the base of European economic growth. Naval traditions were thus more widespread and intrinsic to European trade than in China.
Finally, the political structures outlined above shaped the economics of technology. Chinese technological innovation was significant and world leading but was often sponsored by and dependent on central investment and direction, or at least approval and fostering of private initiatives. Particular areas of technology such as warships were thus often subject to the whims of central policy. In Europe, governments had neither the influence nor the resources to direct technological innovation, except perhaps as purchasers of weapons. Technological innovation was thus more bottom up than top down and tended to follow market forces more closely.
These political, social, and economic differences show up in the effects of the plague on the two civilizations’ naval activity. In China, plagues reduced agricultural output, causing a decline in government revenue and a consequent decline in investment in fleets and in the skilled labor that built them. The population decline in Europe affected levels of trade but also caused shifts in the type of trade and stimulated a search for efficiencies, including better ships, which, like the printing press and the arquebus, can be seen as savers of expensive labor. Labor was expensive because, in a contract society with weak powers of coercion, labor shortages meant expensive labor. The Chinese reaction was thus essentially politically governed, where the European reaction was market driven.
The Role of Culture
We have already outlined the social ideologies that differentiated the two civilizations in terms of merchant activity: Confucian hostility to merchant activity and the ability of the exam system to co-opt merchant success into the established system, in contrast to the corresponding benign neglect of merchants in European theory and the inability of the warrior and religious hierarchies to co-opt or control merchant activity. Another significant cultural difference concerns what might be called attitudes toward colonialism.
China’s view of itself as the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world, encouraged an ideology of self-sufficiency that saw all trade as tribute honoring the emperor, not as a necessary activity. Similarly, a Middle Kingdom officially had little reason to conquer or directly control parts of the world that were nominally already subject to the Dragon Throne. Thus, especially during the voyages of the treasure fleets, the Chinese aimed to spread the benefits of Chinese civilization through indirect political management and encouragement of recognition of the emperor’s prestige. Similarly, Chinese religion had little militant or missionary impulse. But in Europe, crusading ideals pervaded the culture, and militant missionary religion had long been entangled with a culture of conquest and colonization (see Chapter 12). This powerful mixture colored the European view of trade as a tool of dominance and aggression, and proved far more addictive than the benevolent Chinese attitude.
The Result
Thus, despite (or indeed, because of ) European backwardness and an initial deficit in naval technology, European naval power—above all, its warships—emerged from the fabric of its socioeconomic structure, a potent genie barely controlled by the warring kingdoms that helped release it. European naval power was woven into the pattern of European commerce, expansion, and war. China’s naval power and activity were much more at the whim of a central government for which such power and activity were at best a secondary concern for any number of reasons. The government firmly mediated naval warfare’s connection to commerce and society as part of its overall management of Chinese civilization. It therefore had not only the ability to let the genie out of the bottle between 1405 and 1433 but the ability and motivation thereafter to stuff it back in.
Turkish Gunpowder Galley
This drawing shows a Turkish galley of the sort used at Lepanto. Small guns could fire in different directions, but the main firepower came from the bow.
Having failed to take Malta in 1565, the Ottomans turned their attention to a closer target, Venetian- held Cyprus. Selim II dispatched a fleet of 116 galleys and 50,000 troops, which rapidly took the inland fortress of Nicosia in September. The port city of Famagusta was then blockaded for a spring assault.
Ably defended and reinforced by a small and daring relief contingent in January 1571, Famagusta held against bombardment, mining, and assault until August. The Venetians appealed to Spain for help, but divisions among the Christian powers and Spanish preoccupation with a Morisco revolt prevented relief from arriving in time. The Holy League of Spain, Venice, and the papacy was not formalized until May, and the fleet did not sail from Messina in Sicily until after Famagusta surrendered. The Ottoman fleet had sailed west from Cyprus via Crete toward the Adriatic, rendezvousing with a North African flotilla, but on learning the position of the Christian fleet retreated slightly to the base at Lepanto.
There, on October 7, 1571, it met the advancing Christian fleet.
Both sides seem to have underestimated their opponent’s strength and thus sought battle. The Christians had about 208 galleys and 6 large, heavily gunned Venetian galleasses. The Turks deployed about 230 galleys and perhaps 70 lighter galliots. The Turkish galleys were lighter and more maneuverable than the Christian (especially the Spanish) galleys but carried somewhat fewer cannon. Each fleet carried over 50,000 rowers and marines, and each fleet formed into three divisions and a reserve. Don Juan of Austria, the Christian commander, planned to use his heavier ships to crush the Muslim center; Muezzinzade Ali Pasha, the Ottoman commander, hoped to hold out in the center while his seaward left wing under Uluj Ali Pasha used superior numbers to flank the Christian line and bring about a general melee.
In effect, both plans worked. The heavily Venetian left wing of the Christian fleet used its skill to prevent a shoreward flank attack by the Muslim right and eventually crushed it against the shore. The center, preceded by two of the galleasses, which disordered the Muslim line, got into a long, hard fight that swung back and forth before bigger ships, more cannon, and the fighting qualities of the Spanish arquebusiers (matchlock gunners) slowly carried the day against the dogged Turkish Janissaries and archers. The seaward wings, with the farthest to sail to deploy, engaged last. In attempting to prevent a flanking move, the Christian right lost contact with the center, into which gap Uluj Ali Pasha attacked skillfully—but too late. By the time the Turkish left entered the battle, the right was lost and the center was losing, and Uluj was able to extricate only himself and under twenty galleys. The rest were either sunk or captured, with a massive loss of life—over 30,000 men, more than twice the Christian toll. At least half were skilled archers, sailors, and Janissaries, a loss especially among the archers that the Ottomans probably never made good.
It was this loss of life that made Lepanto decisive. They rebuilt a fleet the next year, but it was inexperienced, and the momentum of Ottoman naval conquest was halted for good. The divided and distracted Christian forces did not follow up the victory in any way; but, psychologically, it was a major victory. It was also the tactical apex and finale of Mediterranean galley warfare. The future belonged to sailing ships.
Modern naval history, in which technological innovations from steam and steel to airplanes and radar play a crucial role in deciding warfare at sea, has tended to have a technological bias. Because of this, and perhaps because maritime enterprises are so clearly and obviously dependent on a whole set of technologies called ships, naval historians have long argued over the issues raised by the spread of technology.
This debate takes on added significance in the period after 1400 because of the connection of naval technology to a Big Question (or set of questions): how to account for the rise of Europe and the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Some older explanations for this phenomenon attributed to Europeans some special facility for technology that distinguished them from other, less inventive, peoples and focused on the naval and gunpowder technology that carried Europeans around the world after 1500.
Not surprisingly, attacks on this position stressed the non-European origins of many of the crucial inventions—gunpowder, the astrolabe, the compass—and the superiority of, say, Chinese ships over European ships. This line of attack may have undermined the European bias of the old position, but it sometimes simply replaced Eurocentric racist assumptions with other equally untenable centrisms in explaining the origins of technologies. And it kept technology at the center of the debate and so fostered a different form of Eurocentrism. In this formulation, since other people had, without revolutionary results, developed technologies that proved revolutionary in Europe, they must have been blocked somehow from being the birthplace of the modern world. There are two related problems with this argument: It assumes that Europe was the model for development, and it assumes that technology was the driving force in development.
More recent naval history has helped undermine many of these assumptions. Maritime history clearly shows the centrality of uncentered diffusion in the development of naval technology. Subtraditions within a region such as China crossbred, and the traditions of different regions and civilizations traded ideas and techniques along with goods. Thus, the pattern of maritime technology also applies to the spread and development of culture generally.
Just as important is that recent naval history emphasizes the crucial role of the economic, social, and political contexts of technology in determining its uses and effects. In some ways, this is not surprising since ships are not just technologies but also societies, as anyone who has seen Master and Commander knows. The close connection of naval warfare with piracy and commerce also leads naturally to such a view. Thus, for example, John Guilmartin’s Gunpowder and Galleys explores the relationship between Mediterranean galley warfare and the climate, geography, economics, and politics of the region. He shows that the coming of gunpowder weapons and broadside tactics did not immediately spell the end of galley warfare. Rather, cannon enhanced the offensive and amphibious role of galleys in the attack and defense of fortified ports. The new technology did play a role in causing the galley system to collapse under its own weight, as logistical and manpower problems increasingly limited the strategic range of galley fleets, but it was the economics of the technology that was crucial. Thus, there was no straight line from a new technology (cannon) to a new and superior method of naval warfare (broadside tactics). Another example, the complex comparison of Chinese and European maritime exploration, is examined at length in this chapter.
Indeed, another Mediterranean naval technology demonstrates that there is no guarantee of continually improving technology—another expectation fostered by the modern world. Greek Fire (see Chapter 10) was an effective offensive weapon for Byzantine and Arab navies for centuries. But with changes in Byzantine culture and politics in the course of the twelfth century, the formula was lost, never to be recovered and destined to be argued about by naval historians ever since. There is no better example of the dependence of technology on its contexts.