Understanding European Prosperity

 For as long as humanity remembers, people of European origin have dominated history. However, it was not due to any kind of racial or ethnic reason that the Europeans conquered, but more due to a domino effect of sheer luck. The list of reasons for European prosperity is long and various so this article will attempt to talk about the three largest ones; the Crusades, the Plague, and Europe's geography.
   First off is the Crusades. The term Crusades itself has to be explained a little because it was a term used for many different wars. There were, of course, the Crusades fought to retake the Holy Land I described in a previous post. There were the Spanish Crusades, or Reconquista as they are more known as, where the Spanish, over a serious of conflicts, pushed the Moores out of Iberia. Of course we can not forget the Northern Crusades, when Europeans marched into the Baltics and Scandinavia to spread Christianity. However, it is this author's firm belief that the Crusades into the Middle East held the greatest impact upon Europe and the world over.
   While the impact of the Crusades upon the Islamic people of the Middle East could generate an extremely interesting conversation, this article is here to discuss the effect of the Crusades upon the European peoples. What many others seem to gloss over is the fact that the Crusades opened up the East to Europe.
   Before the Crusades the Middle East was a closed off wall to Europe. For two hundred years before the First Crusade, the tide of Islam generated by the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate created much aggression towards the Christian kingdoms of Europe. Many are familiar with the Muslim invasion through Iberia into Europe (eventually halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Toulouse) however the Muslims also attacked the Europeans in so many other ways, including pirating the Mediterranean, imposing persecution upon native Christians in Muslim lands, and taking swaths of territory from the Byzantine Empire. In fact, by the time the Byzantine Emperor Alexius called on the Papacy to help them, the Empire had already lost a massive amount of its territory to the Seljuk Turks. So while the morality of the Crusades themselves can still be debated today, to say that the Muslim nations were not aggressive toward the Christian Europeans is an absolutely ridiculous statement. In fact, I am surprised it took the Christians over 200 years just to respond.
   However, I digress. When the Christians finally did invade and establish their Crusader kingdoms, they had done more than just taken land; they had opened up a new frontier. You see, with war comes communication, and where there's communication there is chances to make money. That was the driving power here; merchants discovering new routes to the east along the Silk Road and such. The Crusades opened up discussion and sharing of trades routes and with those traders came other things; new ideas, philosophies, technologies and, perhaps most importantly, avenues for disease.
   Now, that might sound strange when talking about prosperity, but hear me out dear reader. With increased communication between the East and West generated by the Crusades, disease was able to quickly hitch a ride on these trade routes and go from region to region.
   Historians believe that the Black Death originated in east Asia. The first recorded instances of it come from the Siege of Kaffa, when Mongolian invaders catapulted their own diseased dead into the Crimean city. While smaller cases of the disease likely also sprung up in other places and spread, Kaffa erupted with death and ships leaving the port city carried the disease all over the Mediterranean. Europe itself was a perfect petri dish for the disease; with over population, over crowded cities, and a generally unsanitary life style, the average European peasant did not stand a chance. The Black Death rolled through Europe and decimated the population, killing upwards of 25 million people were killed throughout Europe, roughly a third of the total population.
   While the death toll was terrible for the people at the time, it proved prosperous for future generations. Before the advent of the Black Death, Feudalism ruled Europe. Lords and Kings held power with an iron fist and mass amounts of peasants worked in near slave conditions just to increase the wealth of the monarchies. However, when the Black Death came, so many peasants died that working people became more scarce. Suddenly, craftsmen and artisans of Europe realized they were valuable and they had ground to argue for things such as better wages, benefits, etc. While monarchies would still hold sway for hundreds of years, this began to give the people a little more power and possibly owed to philosophies and ideas of democracy and republicanism rising in Europe years down the road.
   So right there we have discussed two extremely important points that helped lead to European prosperity in the future. The Crusades opened up the East to Europe and encouraged things such as trade, exploration, and communication and ultimately led to the Plague which indirectly gave power to the people and would, indirectly, lead to the Renaissance and future Enlightenment movement. However, there is one more factor in European success, one that the other factors could not have possibly happened without it and is so subtle it is often missed by people studying this topic; geography.
   You see, dear Reader, Europe possesses the greatest possible geographic location on Earth. Just look at a map of the world. Notice how open Eurasia is? Notice how Eurasia runs from East to West? This is where the geographic advantage lies. This advantage can not be underestimated, dear Reader, for it is where Europe finds its greatest advantage over other areas like East Asia, Oceania, or the Americas. For one thing, the Earth's ecosystems work on a system where they change little along latitudinal lines. This means that as one moves from East to West, the atmosphere and weather are fairly similar. What this means for Europe is that the pre historic people that migrated into Europe had an easier time doing it because farming in modern day Romania is not that much different from farming in France. And there, dear Reader, is the key to this European prosperity; farming.
   Farming is essential to European success because the European peoples were able to farm large amounts of food that could feed large masses of people such as wheat and barley. Not only do these plants grow well in the European ecosystem, but Europe has such a predictable ecosystem that a lot of the risks involved in farming are taken away. In Europe, farmers knew for a fact that Spring and Summer were going to be warm seasons with lots of plant growth, and as Fall and Winter came around the crop was going to wither and die. Not only this, but Europe does not get hit by nearly as many serious storms and natural disasters as other areas like India and Oceania. This allows European farmers to properly plan and prepare their crops for a relatively reliable schedule and led to more food being available to the European people. Also indirectly, having more food means the people have to spend less time looking for food, which means they have more time for improvments; whether that be technological, philosophical, medical, etc. However, the amount of food was not the only thing provided by Europe's geography.
   As stated before, Europe's layout provided the early pre-historic peoples an easy migration from East to West. However, the easy migration and the stable climate also meant animals were easily able to be raised and domesticated in the environment. With this domestication, Europe not only had another food source, but they had two more advantages; workforce and disease. Europe was able to have a serious animal workforce to help in labor which allowed the Europeans to take on bigger and tougher projects. Europeans were able to farm more, build grander buildings, and even travel farther and faster. However the Europeans also had access to disease.
   Though diseases like the Black Death killed large amounts of people, humans are able to build up immunity to other diseases like small pox and measles. They do this by not only being around the animals, who carry the disease on their bodies, but they eat the meat of the animals carrying the disease which gives the Europeans a light exposure to the disease that helps them build their immune system. Though at first this would not change much in the people, it would become crucial to European success in conquering the Americas.
   It should be noted that a few other regions of the world, like East Asia or the Middle East, also had these kind of geographic advantages. East Asia was able to grow rice and domesticate animals that helped them build their societies and advance themselves. In the Middle East, the so called "Fertile Crescent", they also grew grains there and had domesticated animals. However, Europe still held several smaller advantages that allowed the Europeans to be a step ahead of these other civilizations.
   The America's and other regions of the world had none of these geographic advantages and because of that they were unable to build strong immune systems or gain large amounts of food or greatly advance their societies. This is the reason even the most advanced American tribes were primitive compared to the Europeans. This is why the America's and Oceania and other regions did not have nearly as many grand structures as Europe. This is why they did not have the same advancements in ideas and philosophy as Europe. It is not because of any racial reasons but because Europe just happened to be at the right place, at the right time, and have the right things happen to it in the right order.