What if Constantinople had never fallen to the Turks?

[al Roumi]

Second: The overland trade route was not cheaper/Italians funded the voyages of discovery.

In this, I agree with 'khaan. Cheaper is a relative term and it depends on who we're talking about. Yes, it was much cheaper for the Italians, but it was not cheaper for France, Spain, England, Portugal, etc. I very much agree with that. There is no doubt whatsoever that the western powers were going to eventually discover the sea routes to Asia and the Americas, and when that happened the land route would have been less attractive (though shipping through Egypt via portage to the Red Sea would have remained cost-effective if it had not been taken over by the Ottomans).

However, I do believe that the western powers would not have made these discoveries when they did if the same level of profit had been maintained through Constantinople via Italy. Italian money and trade skills became very much focused on finding a way around the Ottoman obstacles after 1453. It was their initiative that resulted in the first voyages of exploration that awakened the rest of Europe. The Spanish money that funded Columbus would have been irrelevant if the Genoese weren't trying to find another route to Asia.

I agree that eventually the western powers would have accomplished this on their own, but not on the same time frame. Before the discoveries of the first explorers, there was very little interest in funding those journeys because the route was thought to be too long and too difficult... it just wasn't worth it for the less prosperous western powers to invest in it. Even after the fall of Constantinople it took 50 years before the new economic situation was sufficiently bad to warrant the first attempts. If the Constantinople route had remained prosperous, the cost-benefit analysis would have been such that it would have taken much longer for it to be a worthwhile investment to take the risk of funding explorations for new sea routes.

I had been going to say that the one sticking point in this for me is Portugal, which had the greatest and earliest drive to find an alternate route to the Indies. I thought (until a minute ago) that the Portugese had aspirations of usurping the Italian east/west mediterranean trading hegemony -irrespective of rising commodity costs.

What I'd say now (having checked up on Henry the Navigator) is that Portugal was primarily interested in bypassing Saharan overland trade -to the eventual detriment of Moroccan trade. I guess, as Fragony says, that Portugese aspirations expanded eastwards later, closer to a date which is harder to disaggregate from Ottoman tarif increases.

So in essence I agree with Signore TinCow

How much long? I have no idea. Any number I pick will be arbitrary... but just imagine how much different the world would be if the Americas had been colonized only 50 years later. Just think of US history. How different would this country be today if the American Revolution hadn't occurred until 1826? By that time, the slave trade had been completely abolished in the British Empire. If the US had not had slavery at the time of its independence, would the Civil War have still occurred? Just thinking about all the ramifications of a delay in colonization makes my head spin.

:) For one, there may never have been a war of independance in the US! You could still have Queeny's head on your money...