The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 99conquerors. Only Japan remained ethnically homogeneous. Hence it
is not surprising that the Japanese could call on a sense of national
emergency to justify drastic political, technological, and social reforms
in the nineteenth century, whereas a pervasive distrust between rulers
and ruled hampered other Asian regimes in their efforts to react ef
fectively to the threat of European power.
That threat was not recognized in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen
turies by the more powerful Asian rulers, since, when Europeans first
appeared off their coasts, they conformed to already familiar roles as
traders and missionaries. Asian governments had long had to cope
with the unruliness of merchants and ships’ crews from foreign parts.
Even if European ships were more formidable than those which had
preceded them in Asian waters, their number was at first so small that
established ways of dealing with seafaring strangers seemed to suffice.
To be sure, small trading states were immediately threatened by the
naval superiority the newcomers enjoyed. Some of these endangered
states appealed for help to the mightiest Moslem ruler of the age: the
Ottoman sultan. Turkish authorities responded by building a fleet in
the Red Sea to protect the Moslem holy places in the first instance,
and secondly to operate in the Indian Ocean, as opportunity might
dictate. The Turks also sent artillery experts to distant Sumatra, where
they reinforced the resistance capabilities of local Moslem govern
ments. But the Ottoman effort in the Indian Ocean met with only
local and limited success because the Mediterranean style of naval
warfare, of which they were masters, was becoming obsolescent
thanks to the rapid development of cannon.
This calls for a little explanation. Mediterranean naval fighting, from
antiquity, turned upon ramming and boarding. This required light,
fast, maneuverable war galleys with large crews for rowing and for
hand-to-hand combat at sea. Such a force also constituted an army on
land whenever the ships were beached and their crews went ashore to
besiege a fortress, raid the countryside, or merely to seek fresh water
and a good night’s sleep. Then, in the thirteenth century, the inven
tion of all-weather sailing vessels injected a new element into
Mediterranean fighting. The new ships, using crossbows in hitherto
unprecedented numbers, relied on missiles to keep their foes at a
distance. Merchant vessels needed nothing more.
Matters changed far more radically with the development of efficient
cannon in the last decades of the fifteenth century. European seamen
quickly grasped the idea that the guns which were dramatically revolu
tionizing land warfare could do the same at sea. Stoutly built all-weather