[TVV]

Interesting arguments, but can you back them with factual evidence?

Originally Posted by ausjulius

this was the biginning.. one has to remember europe outpased the rest of the world very quickly... one only has to look in 1300 there odds were even.. by 1600 it was quite uneven....

We are discussing arms technology, right? I personally fail to see any gap between the Ottomans and their European enemies during the 17th century - do you have any examples? Ottoman defeats can be attributed to things such as outdated tactics, poor command and the logistical nightmare of raising, maintaining and transporting an army from one end of the Empire to another, further worsened by internal problems. However, I certainly would not blame the Ottoman arms and armor for lack of Ottoman military success towards the end of the 1600s. Also, one needs to remember that during the second siege of Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs was saved by Ian Sobieski and his hussars, whose arms and equipment was developed under heavy Eastern influence.

but these changes were from enternal conflict.. and didnt come about in the areas with conflict with non european oponants...... you didnt see huge advances in.. romania.. russia or serbia....
they stayed as they were in 10 centuary almost.... using the same weapons as their oponants..

If we are discussing the 13th and 14th centuries, prior to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, one needs to remember that in the early 13th century a Bulgarian army composed of Bulgarians, Vlachs and Cumans dealt a heavy and ultimately fatal defeat to the Latin Crusaders, who had just captured Constantinople. In Russia, Alexander Nevsky was also quite successfull against Western foes, such as the Teutonic Order and the Kingdom of Sweden. Of course, I would not attribute those victories to any superior arms and armor that Eastern Europeans had compared to Western Knights, but to better tactics, developped in centuries of fighting Eatsern Armies.

As for Serbia, it rose to prominence in the 14th century, and its heavy cavalry was perhaps the strongest in the world by the end of the 1400s, as evidenced by the battle of Nicopolis, where Stefan Lazarevic and his cavalrymen decided the outcome. Apparently, the Serbs had more than adequate arms and armor to allow them to outclass and defeat the assortment of Western knights at the battlefield. And those certainly were not the same arms and armor that the Serbs used a few centuries earlier - archaeological finds and pictorial evidence suggests that the Serbs were capable of adopting the best in arms technology from the East and the West.

So personally, I fail to see any great European advantage in technology prior to the Industrial Revolution, which certainly tipped the balance in favor of industrialized countries. After that I completely agree that Europe influenced the military technology in the world, but seeking the roots of this success in the Middle Ages might be a bit stretching it, and come across as very eurocentric.