Political history of that period may after all be useful in this regard, and it does reveal some very interesting features. By the middle of the sixteenth century we witness, for the first time, a large-scale split of political power within the Islamic world. That split produced three great Muslim empires. They all came into existence around the same time, and with the exception of the Ottoman they all passed away around the middle of the eighteenth century.
With the Ottomans (c. 1453-1920), finally conquering Constantinople in 1453, they swept through the eastern Mediterranean in 1516, as far down as Egypt and large parts of North Africa, in order to consolidate their stronghold over that part of the Muslim world. The Safavids (1502-1736), farther east in what is modern-day Iran, came into power by the beginning of the sixteenth century, and with time established a new empire with Shī'ism as its official religion, thus perpetuating a rivalry with the Sunni Ottoman empire to the west and a friendlier but yet competitive relation with the Mughal empire to the south-east that lasted for centuries. The Mughals (c. 1520-mid eighteenth century) themselves, originally a Central Asian dynasty, spread southward to establish one of the long lasting empires in the Indian subcontinent.
Besides the disrupting effect of this internecine competition and warfare, other factors came into play, but all leading to a weakening of the cultural cohesion of the Islamic world. The religious sectarian competitiveness played an important role on its own, as it still does today. But then there was also the very important event that took place toward the end of the fifteenth century, and which shook the whole world order to its very foundations. The event in question was the discovery of the New World, which not only disrupted almost all of the well-established Euro-Asian trade routes that used to siphon commercial wealth into the Islamic lands for centuries, but it also brought new raw material into European countries just as those same materials were almost completely depleted in the Islamic lands. It is not accidental that all three Islamic empires came into being around the same time, during the early part of the sixteenth century, and disappeared around the same time, end of the nineteenth beginning of the twentieth centuries, as we just said. In order to understand this phenomenon better, we must examine it in terms of the socio-economical and political global shifts that were taking place around that time.
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the so-called "discovery" of the New World had just begun, and the westward orientation of European exploration, trade, and access to untapped natural resources as well as to human slave labor, both in the New World and (later) in Africa, created a major conflagration all around the world. Only to be followed by the "Age of Discovery" in the next century, which witnessed a dogged search for more lands to "discover", more resources to acquire, and more colonies and slave labor to entrap. All of these events of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries re-oriented wealth and trade around the Islamic world, or say circumvented the Islamic world, and mostly to its disadvantage. And while almost every European royal house and its dependencies, in one way or another, began to receive tons of gold and silver, as well as free slave labor and other natural resources from the colonies, the Islamic world found itself then blocked to the west by the rising powers of the European royal houses. Those royal and princely houses were now wealthy and well equipped with commercial and maritime navies.
Circumnavigating around Africa by the Portuguese helped them spread their trade in the south-eastern direction at first, and eventually to the east where Portuguese and later Dutch colonies began to sprout as far down as southern India, up north the Indian Ocean till the southern edges of the Arabian peninsula itself, and farther east by the Dutch till the eastern edge of the known world. Eventually, that colonial exploration that reached the South Asian and the Chinese theater in the Far East began to re-route even the trade of that eastern region around the Muslim world rather than through it.
Yes, there were some windfall profits that came to the Islamic world as a result of trade with the newly discovered wealth of Europe. But on the whole, Islamic lands lost the commercial initiative they once had, and became more and more dependent on whatever wealth the European merchants were willing to part with while trading with ports in the Islamic world. In essence the relationship began to shift from producing wealth to consuming wealth in return for whatever natural resources were still available. And these are the whole marks of an age of decline. Yes, there were Venetian merchants who brought some wealth to Damascus, for example, by commissioning household products and items of high culture to be produced there, but that meant that the Damascene worker began, even then, to enter into a relationship of dependency where he was working for a foreign master. The dependence and consumerism that was set then and later began to characterize the relationship between the Islamic world and Europe continues till this day.
I do not know of a good study that elaborates on the effects of the "discovery" of the New World on the intellectual life of European royal and princely houses. But it is not difficult to detect, in several European areas, and toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, the appearance of new institutions that had no medieval parallels per se, and their very creation may have had something to do with this new acquired wealth. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Europe witnessed the rise of scientific and royal academies, a phenomenon that was not known before as such, at least not to that extent where almost every royal or princely house had an academy of its own. The purpose of those academies seems to have been directed at assembling the most educated men of the time and to liberate those men from the financial worries and the like. In their very structure, the academies offered those intellectual elites an environment of scientific and intellectual competition. And as we have seen before, it is the healthy competition that is usually conducive to the production of science. But most importantly, this whole movement came about at almost no cost to the patronizing royal houses, for the capital and the slave labor associated with the investment usually came through many circuitous routes from the "discovered" colonies. In regard to those scientific institutions, we only note that the first of them was the Academia de Lincei, which was founded in Rome in 1603, only to be followed by the Royal Society of England in 1662, and the Academie des sciences of France in 1666.
The connection between those academies and the "discoveries" in the New World is not always readily apparent. But one should note that the oldest of them, the Academia de Lincei, soon enjoyed the membership of none other than Galileo ca. 1609, whose work for the Venetian commercial navy is well known.[392] And one of the earliest projects of the Academia de Lincei was the re-publication of the survey of the medical plants of the new colonies in Mexico, which was then called New Spain.[393] That survey was completed few years earlier by Dr. Francisco Hernandez (1515-1587), at the request of King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598). Instead of verifying the older herbs of Dioscorides that were well known in the "old world" and were obviously commercially fully exploited by then, the academy, and of course the earlier royal patrons before it, began to look to the New World for new sources of wealth, and the medical plants were apparently such well suited targets.
It is only natural that in such institutions as the academies, where men of science were financed to further their research, and to think out new ideas, in an environment of competition with other academies and royal houses, as well as competition among the scientists themselves, new scientific discoveries would eventually be produced. The situation was not too different from the conditions we described in early ninth-century Baghdad, minus the institution of the academies that quickly became the norm in Europe. If one scientist in a hundred produced something in those academies that had a commercial windfall, then the wealth accumulated from the new idea would be returned to fund other ideas, and, of course, allowing the patron to keep some of the profits aside.
392
I have already discussed these connections between the European academies and the discovery or the New World, as well as the connection of Galileo to all that activity in a relatively obscure journal in the context of a debate with the modern historian of science Toby Huff. See G. Saliba, "Flying Goats and Other Obsessions: A Response to Toby Huffs 'Reply'",
393
Now see the study of David Freedberg,