In "Conquerors," Roger Crowley depicts the incompetent backwater Portuguese as having superior canons and military ships than some of the richest and most complex cultures in the world (Indian Ocean). How accurate is this? How did a peripheral kingdom late to the gunpowder age pull ahead?

by LibsAreGirondins

"Incompetent" is a joke--I just wanted to emphasize that he was not whitewashing them. 'Stubborn psycho-crusaders' is probably a more accurate description of Crowley's story. My current guess is that there was an equilibrium in the Indian Ocean where war was discouraged by the sheer profitability of peace, so that there was less state-subsidized military innovation than in Europe, where states invested heavily in military technology. Also, while not explaining why the Portuguese had like longer-ranged canons, the fact that they were not on home turf really did allow them much more military flexibility, so it is not like their success was completely tech-determined.

Jn_grit

Portugal had Caravels and Galleons.At sea they always won againt non-european adversaries.They only held ports protected by forts that were guarded by hundreds of men with guns.If sieges were already pretty difficult to do if you did not have enough artillery,imagine how hard they were if your enemy had guns with an high firing rate