Europe surpassed Asia technologically by the year 1500. At that time, western Europe had already modernized its armies, navies, factories, banks, and universities to a level that notably surpassed anything available in Asia, and those advantages were starting to yield results in terms of European military victories and a re-organization of global trade routes in Europe’s favor. Below is the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, which by 1500 had educated Dante, Petrarch, Copernicus, and Albrecht Durer.

Militarily, early modern Europe’s main advantages were plate armor, muskets, crossbows, and heavy cannon. Some Asian empires had some ability to make use of some of these weapons, but all of these weapons were standard for Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Swiss, Czech, and Venetian armies. Compared to Asian armies, European armies of 1500 typically had more of these ‘modern’ weapons per soldier, and each of those weapons would be higher quality. Below is the classic “tercios” formation invented by the Spanish in the 1400s, which made use of pikemen in full plate armor protecting squadrons of musketeers. Around 1500, the tercios drove the Muslims out of Spain and even conquered parts of Morocco and Libya. At about the same time, Russians equipped with muskets stood their ground on the Ugra River against the remnants of the Mongol hordes, shooting bullets further than the Mongols could fire their arrows and forcing the Mongols to turn around and go home empty-handed.

By contrast, a typical Asian army of the period, even in developed urban areas, might be made up mostly of archers on horseback wearing lighter, looser jackets of chain mail that used much less iron and did not cover the soldier’s entire body:

One of the major reasons why Europe had better weapons is that they were constantly fighting wars against each other, because Europe was uniquely divided against itself by its geography. The Vikings briefly ruled over much of northern Europe, but England and Norway and Denmark are separated by the North Sea, and the various Viking princedoms grew apart from each other into separate nations. The Franks briefly ruled over much of central Europe, but France and Italy are separated by the tall snowy peaks of the Alps, and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire quickly split up into warring city-states. The Muslims briefly ruled over much of Southern Europe, but the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of the Pyrenees and the deserts of Libya split off Spain and Morocco from Egypt and Turkey, all of which quickly became different countries. There was never any real possibility of one culture or one empire coming to rule over all of Europe; it just has too many seas and mountains in the way to be effectively bridged with medieval technologies. This spurred military competition: no matter how many wars you won, there was always another powerful, densely populated enemy on your border. Europeans were never exactly safe; there was always another war to fight, and having a few more weapons or slightly better weapons could mean the difference between being safe and being slaughtered.

This was simply not the case in most of Asia, where fertile river valleys supported huge populations that were separated from each other by thousands of miles. The Mughal Empire, which ruled all of south Asia in a unified government, had no pressing reason to expand — if they owned five provinces of frosty Afghani mountains or thick Bengali jungles instead of four provinces, it wouldn’t make much practical difference to the Emperor, let alone to a common craftsman. The population was all centered in the core of the empire, and the empire could be pretty darn sure of successfully protecting that core against any outside intruders. Nobody was going to invade the Mughals: literally nobody in the world had the logistical ability to supply an army across the Himalayas or across the entire Indian Ocean. Same thing with China: all they had to do was have an army that was powerful enough to put down low-tech peasant riots and low-tech barbarian raids. Once the urban Chinese core successfully co-opted the horse archery techniques of the Mongols, barbarians like the Mongols simply didn’t have any advantages that could be used to seriously threaten the Chinese state. The Chinese had better numbers, better organization, better training, and better equipment. As a result, the Chinese government could put out a lukewarm, stale effort at military defense and still utterly crush all of its local opponents. No European power ever had it so easy.

Another reason why Europe had better weapons is that Europe was uniquely blessed with high-quality deposits of iron ore right next to moderately fertile farmlands: one major deposit in Flanders, and another major deposit in Silesia. These areas are hilly, forested, and slightly chilly; they weren’t suitable for Stone Age agriculture. But after a few millennia of civilization, when the plow and the yoke and the shovel and the wheelbarrow and the saw mill and crop rotation had all been invented and popularized — i.e., right around 1200 C.E. — these regions suddenly became very nice places for farming and were able to support quite large populations.

There are better seams of iron ore if all you care about is the raw metal: the world’s richest deposits are in northern Sweden, central Siberia, northern Quebec, the Gobi Desert, the Australian Outback, and the western Sahara. However, all of these places were agriculturally hopeless, even with medieval technology. There was no way to grow enough food nearby to feed the workers in a large-scale mining operation, and there was no way to ship in food that had been grown elsewhere — horses and rowboats are *slow*, and you have to feed the drivers or sailors every day that they’re trudging through the wilderness. As a result, the cost of getting iron out of the ground in Asia was enormous compared to the cost of iron in Europe.

So on the one hand, you have an easy supply of iron in Europe, because there’s all this metal in the ground right next to some booming farming towns that are growing a nice surplus that can be sent to feed the miners. On the other hand, you have a huge demand for iron in Europe, because every government is constantly at war with every other government, most of which are roughly even in power level with each other, and so if they can get slightly better iron armor or slightly better iron cannons, then that could be the margin of victory and survival.

Every century, the European weapons got a little better: the craftsmen were paid well to find a way to forge a larger, more solid piece of metal, or roll the metal into a flatter, more uniform sheet, or improve the metal with convenient gadgets, like a wheellock match instead of a smoldering piece of rope.

And so now instead of a dinky little tube shooting irregular little marbles:

You’ve got an impressive tunnel of explosive might throwing huge cannonballs:

These strictly military achievements were paired with a series of commercial, naval, and navigational advantages that allowed Europeans to project their power all over the world. At the Battle of Diu, off the coast of India in 1509, a small fleet of 18 Portugese warships out-fought a much larger fleet of 180 Mamluk warships, sinking or capturing every single enemy vessel. Part of that victory was the result of the larger, more accurate, safer cannons carried by the Europeans. But part of it was due to a remarkable series of advances in sailing technology — the astonishing thing is not just that the Portuguese won, but that they were able to reach the coast of India in the first place. Using new configurations of sails together with the compass, the sextant, the hourglass, and a detailed understanding of geometry and geography that had worked its way out of the royal courts and into the middle classes, Europeans were able to sail into the rough seas of the Atlantic, around the cape of South Africa, and thousands of miles north to the coasts of India — and arrive not just alive but with the resources and desire to set up successful trading outposts and fiefdoms.

Again, part of these advances were due to simple geography: compared to the Persians, the Indians, or the Chinese, the Europeans had always had more miles of coastline and a more urgent need to cross medium-sized bodies of water; the Roman rowboats had a natural incentive to progress through the Viking longship and Venetian brigantines to the Portuguese caravels, because each advance opened up new trade routes that brought categorical increases in wealth and safety. By contrast, Zhang He’s football-field-sized treasure ships may have been visually impressive, but there was little they could bring back from Java or even from Madagascar that was not already for sale in Nanjing: China already controlled most of the people and wealth that could be reached by sailing out of Chinese ports.

The other part of the advances were fueled by an cascading cycle of improvements in finance, mechanization, and urbanization: a positive feedback loop that ultimately became known as the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution is usually thought of as something that started in the 1800s, with smoke and coal and enormous assembly lines, but the seeds of that revolution were laid in the 1400s, when Europe erected tens of thousands of windmillsand waterwheels that largely replaced slave labor as the major source of physical energy in the European economy.

It’s astonishing how much these new machines were used for as early as 1500: they didn’t just grind barely into flour and crush flax seeds into linen cloth, although that was incredibly important. They also provided the power to swing hammers, saw through wood, squeeze oil out of olives, hoist cargo out of ships, and a thousand other conveniences and necessities. The whole economy ran on renewable energy. It’s fashionable today to remind people that European cities were small compared to Asian cities in the 1500s, and that’s true: Paris had only 185,000 people and Milan had only 110,000 residents at a time when Nanjing had a full 1,000,000. What those figures don’t tell you is that each mechanic in Paris did the work of a dozen Chinese laborers: it’s just easier to get stuff done when you’re using machines to harness vast natural forces instead of literally moving everything by hand.

All of this newfound motive power was directed with new levels of efficiency using banks, guilds, insurance contracts (1347), the printing press (1440), double-entry accounting (1458), and independent republics such as the Hanseatic League, the Swiss Confederacy, and the Free Cities of the Holy Roman Empire, where decisions were made by a vote of local merchants, rather than by generals or kings. Although many of these developments were inspired by earlier Chinese inventions (e.g., paper currency, authorized by the Song dynasty in 1024), by 1500 much of the Chinese economy had returned to near-subsistence levels, with trade conducted by casual peddlers.

The painting below, dated to 1495, quietly but forcefully sums up many of the trends mentioned above: it shows a portrait of Luca Pacioli, a mathematician and Franciscan monk from Florence who is credited (heh) with inventing double-entry accounting and teaching math to Leonardo da Vinci. His left hand rests on a typeset, bound book explaining his financial systems. His right hand is tracing a geometric proof, which would have been useful for understanding the proportions in the metal dodecahedron on the right-hand side of the painting…because there is so much iron laying around that it can be used to amuse mathematicians, instead of being hoarded for industry or weapons. The portrait casually displays a variety of finely made glass, furs, silks, linens, felt, and a large sturdy table, all of which were available to the growing middle classes as well as to noble lords. The painting demonstrates a mastery of anatomy, perspective, and optics. Perhaps most strikingly, all of these achievements were celebrated: the painting flaunts the accumulation of knowledge and thought at least as much as the accumulation of wealth or power. I am not aware of any city in Asia that could have produced anything like this painting in 1500, or, for that matter, in 1700.