How big a technological advanctage would 11th century Vikings have had over 11th century Native Americans?
Just a speculation but manpower may also have been a limiting factor. I’m guessing that 11th century Scandinavia did not have the population that 16th century Iberia had.
That’s also true of European colonists, though. The death rate in England’s early colonies made moving there roughly equal to playing Russian roulette with five rounds in the cylinder.
The difference is simply that the colonial powers in that era had lots and lots and lots of people, and they had considerable motivation to leave Europe. Their colonies were sustained early on by a constant influx of new colonists; without a steady supply of replacements, none of the colonies would have survived.
The Vikings didn’t have lots and lots of people.
[Hi-jack] What killed so many?[/Hi-jack]
Huh? Did the Vikings make a habit of sending photographs of their genitals to people?
Definitely less than Europeans had in later centuries. The biggest advantage Europeans had was dense-settlement farming: turning sparsely inhabited temperate forest into farms and fields, and European agriculture was much less advanced in the 11th century. And as mentioned upthread by the seventeenth century colonizing North America was an idea whose time had come. The Europeans simply wouldn’t have gone away or given up, not after one, or two, or even ten failed startups.
Not that much less than Spanish had when they arrived, with the exception of firearms. They would have had iron or steel weapons and some armor, crossbows, and potentially horses (although I am not certain the Greenland colony had any, they had cattle.) Firearms were not all that common and were not critical during the early Spanish conquests.
The Spanish conquered the huge Aztec and Inca empires with armies of a few hundred men. So a determined band could have made significant conquests, especially if they allied themselves with local tribes, as the Spanish did.
People who think that the Vikings lost interest in the Americas due to lack of plunder should bear in mind that Newfoundland was settled from Greenland which was settled from Iceland, and that neither Greenland nor Iceland had anything at all to plunder. Rather, they had pasture land.
That was all it took to attract Viking settlement. The Vikings would have been delighted to settle in Newfoundland, lack of plunder and all, except that the Skraelings kept bothering them and made it impossible.
I would add the magnetic compass and printing press as advantages that the Spaniards enjoyed that the Norse didn’t. Neither would have helped the first band of Viking pioneers to survive, but if printing had existed at the time, word of land in the Americas might have spread throughout Europe, and attracted more numerous and better-prepared follow-up expeditions.
The Spanish may have originally conquered lands with a handful of men but they always had thousands more waiting to move into the conquered lands and set up colonial administrations.
Some, but not much. They’d have had iron weapons, but not of great quality and those very difficult to replace. See the references upthread about the shortage of iron knives in Greenland. Archery technology wasn’t that much better in 11th century Scandinavia than in America; maybe the Vikings would have had crossbows but nothing like the crossbows used by the later professional armies in southern Europe (and by the Spaniards in the Americas). The Skraelings might have been at a slight disadvantage, but clearly not a tremendous one; the Vinland Sagas record that the Skraelings found archery an effective way to attack the Vikings. The Vikings would have had horses, but maybe large ponies or small horses, not well-bred war chargers like later European knights. The Vikings would, I think, have had chain mail, but not much and not of high quality. Maybe for the leaders, but ye average Viking warrior might not have been able to afford it. Remember, these weren’t armies with equipment issued, but warrior bands with each warrior equipping himself.
They would not have enjoyed the large technological gap that the Spainards were able to exploit.
The main reason is that they weren’t interested in conquering America. The Vinland settlement was a tiny group of people at the end of a long voyage who were there mostly because of the trees. Greenland had a constant need for timber, and this was the closest location where they could stay year-round and cut timber to trade to Greenland. More of a permanent lumbering camp than a settlement or colony. When the whole thing, Skraelings, distance and all, turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, they abandoned it.
Viking shipbuilding technology was far better than that of Native Americans in the 11th Century. Even at the turn of the 16th century when Iberians were exploring the Americas natives of the New World had little more than large outriggers. They had nothing that could be considered a “ship,” that is a vessel that is independent of land for an extended period. The watercraft that Native Americans had, canoes, kayaks, were dependent on regular resupply from land, in other words, they were not much more than boats. Native Americans were incapable of transatlantic seafaring.
The Vikings by the 11th Century had solved some of the issues with long-distance sailing, but not all. They had no sternrudder and shipborne powder artillery was unheard of. The boats that could make the voyages from Britain to Iceland to Greenland to Vinland were large enough to support small crews but not big enough to transport a sufficient number of domesticated animals to support the colony. The decline of the Greenland colony (where sheep had been taken) as a result of the end of the Medieval Warm Period (previously mentioned by glowacks) exacerbated this problem.
And it is in the area of domestication that Europeans, Vikings included, were far ahead of Native Americans by the 11th Century. While Europeans had numerous domesticated sources for meat protein, North American natives didn’t. The only widely domesticated animal was the dog (camelids were domesticated in parts of South America by the time of European contact). Without domesticated animals, a self-sustaining shipyard is virtually impossible. Wood and iron are important, but animal and vegetable fibers are necessary for rope and fabric. Some Viking ships may have used leather sails, but the most certain source for leather is domesticated animals.
Some have speculated also, that disease resistance that Old Worlders had to derived from the close contact between large populations of humans and their herds of domesticated animals. The cities and towns of Europe, Asia and Africa, teeming with people, their animals and their collective shit was a bacteriological carnival that only the strong survived, 2- or 4-legged. It became a question of developing immunity or dying. The New World may have had some large communities – Tenochtitlan, by the 16th C. – but from a microbiological standpoint it was relatively pristine. (Most of this, IIRC, comes from Ecological Imperialism, Alfred Crosby, 1986, but Jared Diamond is more recent and Hans Zinsser and William McNeill are also both good.)
So even if Vikings had arrived in the New World in greater numbers, had more significant contact with Native Americans, it seems unlikely that disease resistance would have spread within N.A. communities without the transfer of the technologies of animal domestication. And while we don’t know what the native population of the Americas was in the 15th C. before “Discovery,” let alone in the 11th C., we do know that it was much less sparsely settled than Europe or Africa. And I don’t know what Native Americans would have done with domesticated animals. I doubt that that technology alone would have substantially improved their lives. But it’s just my speculation.
I agree with this, and suggest the end of the Medieval Warm Period might be an explanation for why the Vikings had at one point enough spare people to send settlers to Greenland and then loggers to Vinland, but never followed up later on with a real colony in Vinland.
On the contrary, the Vikings were very interested in “conquering” and settling America. Why wouldn’t they be? For the previous two centuries they had been settling any land that looked remotely promising, including Iceland, Greenland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands, and the Orkneys.
The sagas make it clear that the voyages to America were scouting potential farm sites. In the Greenlanders Saga, Leif notes that '“the nature of the country was . . . so good that cattle would not require house feeding in winter, for there came no frost in winter, and little did the grass wither there.”
In the end, Newfoundland never became more than a temporary camp, because of Skraeling harassment, and because the distance from the mother country made it difficult to raise settlement parties of sufficient size to fight off the Skraelings. But it wasn’t due to any lack of interest on the Vikings’ part.
I think this has a lot to do with why they didn’t infect and kill off the Skraelings (although probably doesn’t explain the whole failure to colonize). Very small isolated populations cannot support epidemic diseases, as a rule.
I think the Greenlanders and Icelanders made as serious an effort to colonize America as can be expected from them. They were really not that many. As far as I know, the sagas usually tell either about people who hit other people in the head with an axe domestically or alternatively about people who went really far and came back. This leaves out people who went far and never came back. So if the Greenlanders sent some ships who either had to join the way of life of the locals or were killed by them, we are unlikely to find any trace of them. Later, the forests of Iceland got chopped down. The nature of the colonies changed when they became less and less maritime in nature and connections between continental Europe and Iceland were provided by Danes.
As for Norwegians and Danes, there was any great effort to colonize America. I wonder if Greenland was the biggest problem in itself. They named it Green land and it turns out it can’t sustain forests. Now they tell there’s a Vinland with wine and everything? Yeah, sure… The alternatives were to become a succesfull merchant in Novgorod or Belfast and becoming a farmer in a place supposedly better than Greenland.