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and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties, or tribal unions.
    A Late Ascendancy?
    Others have argued that the rise of Western military power is relatively late and a quirk of either the spread of gunpowder (1300–1600), the discovery of the New World (1492–1600), or the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900), dismissing the possibility of cultural continuity from Greece and Rome that might explain
why
there was a military or industrial revolution in Europe and
not
in Egypt, China, or Brazil. As is true of any civilization, there have been wide swings in the influence of the West, from a Dark Ages from A.D. 500 to 800, to a relatively isolated and somewhat backward era between 800 and 1000, when Europeans fought off the invasions of northern and eastern nomads and Muslims. Yet two points need to be stressed about the notion of a rather late Western military dominance in arms that is characterized largely by technological superiority. First, for nearly a thousand years (479 B.C. to A.D. 500) the military dominance of the West was unquestioned, as the relatively tiny states in Greece and Italy exercised military supremacy over their far larger and more populous neighbors. The scientific, technological, political, and cultural foundations of classical culture were not entirely lost, but passed directly from the Roman Empire to European kingdoms or were rediscovered during the Carolingian period and later the Italian Renaissance.
    The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony, but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers in Western rather than in non-European countries—a fact that is ultimately explained by a long-standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity and is not specific to any particular period of European history. There is also something radically democratic about firearms that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West. Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant. It is no accident that feudal Japan eventually found firearms revolutionary and dangerous. The Islamic world never developed the proper tactics of shooting in massed volleys to accompany weapons that were so antithetical to the idea of personal bravery of the mounted warrior. The effective use of guns requires the marriage of rationalism and capitalism to ensure steady improvement in design, fabrication, and production, but in addition an egalitarian tradition that welcomes rather than fears the entrance of lethal newcomers on the battlefield.
    Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the West, purportedly now backward and far inferior to the cultures of China and the Islamic world, was militarily strong far beyond what its population and territory would otherwise indicate. During the so-called Dark Ages, the Byzantines mastered the use of “Greek fire” that allowed their fleets to overcome the numerical superiority of Islamic armadas—as, for example, the victory of Leo III in 717 over the far larger Islamic fleet of the caliph Sulaymān. The European discovery of the crossbow (ca. 850)—it could be fabricated more rapidly and at cheaper cost than more deadly composite bows—allowed thousands of relatively untrained soldiers the ready use of lethal weapons. From the sixth to the eleventh centuries the Byzantines maintained European influence in Asia, and no Islamic army after the early tenth century again ventured into western Europe. The
Reconquista
was slow, but steady and incremental. The fall of Rome in some sense meant the spread of the West much farther to the north as