Could the Romans have colonised the New World?

Question

The question of whether the Romans could have crossed the Atlantic in a storm has already been answered and the answer seems to be: yes but unlikely.

Could the Romans have crossed the Atlantic in a storm

Following on from this question I would like to ask if the Romans could have crossed the Atlantic deliberately rather than accidentally and if so could they have colonised the new world and subdued the locals (Maya or ancient Mexicans)?

Two key reasons why the Romans did not cross the Atlantic:

1. They didn’t know there was any land west of the Atlantic and assumed it was all ocean.
2. They would have had little reason to travel to such a remote location even if they had known of its existence. Especially as the journey there would have been very hazardous and the return journey even more so.

To counter these two issues assume that the Romans held a strong religious belief that all lands must be explored and conquered to increase the glory of Rome. Now assume one of the Emperors has a vision that there are more islands to be conquered west of the Canaries. The exact time frame is not critical but any time in the first two centuries CE. Perhaps one of the Romans military campaigns did not take place and the resources went into the Atlantic adventure instead.

Also assume the following:

• The emperor can devote considerable funds to his pet project for ten or twenty years.
• Studying the winds and currents gives them a very crude route to follow. South and west on the Canary current and trade winds until land was found, then north to find the north westerly winds on the return.
• Although the Romans did not have the compass they would have been able to navigate crudely by the position of the sun and stars.

They would not be using triremes but strengthened versions of their own merchant ships capable of carrying 400 tons or more such as this:

They might have also made use of the experience of the peoples who sailed the coastal waters of the Atlantic such as the Gaul’s who built very sturdy ships. As noted by Julius Caesar.

Answer 1

The Romans, or rather the Greeks, because in Roman times the vast majority of mariners were Greek, and possibly Phoenician, could have crossed the Atlantic. Technically. The classical world had extensive long distance maritime trade; ships went from Egypt to India and back routinely. They also had ships larger that the ships used by Columbus. They had lateen sails. But --

• They didn't know the Americas were there. As far as they knew, there was no land between Europe and Africa and Asia, and they knew perfectly well how big the Earth was. (This was the reason Columbus had so much trouble getting the funds for his expedition; he wanted to sail west to Asia and he insisted that the Earth was a lot smaller and Asia a lot bigger; all professional geographers knew that his numbers were wrong.)

• They didn't know how to navigate in open sea, or at least they didn't like it, not one bit; but that was a cultural and not a technical limitation. They could have learned quickly if they had a reason to; but they didn't, because in the Mediterranean they didn't have to.

• They also had no idea of the volta do mar, which makes returning from the Americas quite iffy. To learn this they would have needed to colonize the Canary Islands and the Azores, which they didn't although they knew perfectly well they were there.

Basically, the navigation was not a show-stopping problem.

The fundamental problem was that the Romans were simply not explorers; the genius of the Romans was in administration, in justice, in engineering, in matters military. Exploring was not in their world-view. All the great explorers of the Ancient world had been Greek or Phoenician -- Pytheas, Simmias, Megasthenes, Hanno, Himilco and so on. Not one Roman among them.

They also lacked any incentive to cross the ocean in search of land. There was land aplenty at hand, for example the vast plains of Ukraine, well within the Roman sphere of influence. When they didn't bother to colonize the Ukrainian plains, of which they knew, from where they imported wheat, it's useless to speculate about ocean-crossing exploration.

Answer 2

The Romans did not conquer all the lands that they could have. As regards Ireland, for example:

http://www.historyireland.com/pre-norman-history/hibernia-romana-ireland-the-roman-empire/

The evidence against an invasion is quite strong: no ancient source known specifically mentions one. But if there was no invasion or if there was an unsuccessful foray which was not followed up, why was this the case? Around this time there is a loss of impetus generally in the Roman conquest of Britain, possibly caused by military problems elsewhere in the empire, in the Rhine and Danube regions. The Roman army was not large enough to fight on many fronts, and thus soldiers may have been withdrawn from Britain to conflicts elsewhere. The drive to expand in Britain never really returned, which may explain why there was no subsequent invasion of Ireland. After the mid-second century, Roman frontiers were always under pressure from some direction. By this stage they certainly knew what Ireland was like and that it probably was not worth the trouble of invasion.

Ireland was a bunch of mean barbarians with a nice lawn, but what about Bactria? The Greco-Bactrian kingdom was

...highly urbanized and considered as one of the richest of the Orient (opulentissimum illud mille urbium Bactrianum imperium "The extremely prosperous Bactrian empire of the thousand cities") Justin, XLI,1

This empire was contemporaneous with that of Rome (250 BC to 10 AD). The Romans were great admirers of Greek culture and would not have considered the Bactrians barbarians. This empire had contacts both with the great civilizations of China and India. If Alexander can take an army into this part of the world, certainly the Romans could have.

I conclude the Romans realized they could only administer an empire of a certain size. The world was big then and travel was slow. Far flung provinces are difficult to keep. Armies at a distance are difficult to resupply. This is no doubt the explanation for Ireland and Bactria. It would be even more true for the Americas.

Answer 3

A contrafactual means of getting the Romans to the new world would involve going not south across the Atlantic, but rather the same northern route the Vikings took centuries later.

If the Romans had either conquered Britannia or Germania, then they would have had knowledge of the Faroe islands. Traders would have incentive to sail there to purchase the fish catch and the harvest of walrus ivory, seal blubber and oil and the occasional whale. Large Roman "Roundships" would have been able to make the voyages with little difficulty, and eventually evolved the sorts of sailing rigs that later European ships developed for the same purposes.

From the Faroes, it would be a short step to head out to Iceland (known in the Middle ages as "Tilley"). Mariners would be aware that there was an island or some land in that direction with clues like weather, migrations of birds and so on. From Iceland, mariners would be able to deduce the existence of Greenland, and sailing around Greenland eventually discover the Canadian arctic, and sail south to Newfoundland and Labrador (Vineland for the Vikings).

Crossing the Atlantic in a series of steps is easy

All along the way, mariners would discover rich new resources to harvest or trade, from whales to walrus ivory to the immense harvest of cod off the Grand Banks, which would entice people to settle to become part of the rich new economy, and also distant from the various tax collectors and petty bureaucrats of Rome. Rome itself could solve the problem of awarding land for time expired legionnaires by encouraging emigration.

So we have a reasonable means of getting there, an economic incentive to create and maintain the bridgehead (of course in Roman times, the European Warm Period had not started yet, so farming in Greenland would not be possible, much like today). Roman military forces would not be overly taxed so long as they maintained defensive positions in a series of forts in the New World ports, since the natives had Neolithic levels of technology and organization. Marching out into the dense forests would invite the same sort of cutting off and defeat in detail as the Romans suffered in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, but the Romans were generally adept enough not to be lured into traps like that (barring the occasional glory hunting Tribunes).

Typical Roman Fort (Castrum) by the water. Erecting a series of fortified positions at suitable ports would be a way of starting Roman settlements

Answer 4

If you want Romans in the Americas, why not send them east?

About a thousand years or so after Julius Caesar, the Vikings did sail west to Iceland, Greenland, and Canada. But they didn't conquer and didn't try to sail back east. And they had comparatively advanced navigation techniques. They'd sail out of sight of land. The Romans did not have that.

Rather than send them on a trip that might rarely work and where it would be even rarer for them to be able to return, it would make more sense to have them finish exploring Europe, Africa, and Asia. The linked question's answers suggest that most who would attempt it would fail. So they might send such an expedition, but most of the time it wouldn't reach the Americas. The few times it did reach the Americas, it probably wouldn't be able to make it back, especially if it tried to conquer first.

To counter these two issues assume that the Romans held a strong religious belief that all lands must be explored and conquered to increase the glory of Rome.

This incentive to explore and conquer the Americas would apply even better to Europe, Africa, and Asia. So why wouldn't they conquer those places first? And once they did that, the Americas can be reached by exploring land that can be seen across the sea. They wouldn't have needed to make a long sea voyage.

All that assumes that these Romans would be better conquerors. In the real world, Rome was unable to conquer all of Great Britain and never reached Scandinavia. It doesn't appear to have gone for sub-Saharan Africa nor that far into Asia. It never attempted any long range sea expeditions because it didn't need to do so. It reached its maximum extent with just the Mediterranean and some trips by land.

This is conceivable, but it is such an unlikely series of events. First, they have to send an expedition across an ocean despite it being well known that sailing out of sight of land was often deadly. Then they'd have to actually succeed in the journey. Then they'd have to stay alive and resupply in the Americas. Then they'd have to make their way back, which is harder. The currents and trade winds make it easier to go west than east. All those things are less likely than not.

Or they could just explore in more normal ways. They knew about Europe, Africa, and Asia. Why not conquer those places? Even if you gave them some explore and conquer imperative, why would that send them west across the ocean rather than south, north, and east? Even a religious imperative wouldn't explain why they wouldn't do the easier, incremental explorations first.

Answer 5

The Americas was so remote and hard to reach in those times that even if they would have been able to colonize it, the Romans in the Americas would immediately consider themselves a seperate civilization since they would have to be completely self reliant and could not possibly count on any support from Rome. Just dispatching a message would have taken months.

Food supplies would have been expired on arrival. Many of the reinforcement troops would die along the way.

As a Roman general during that time it wouldn't take too long to realize that if you stop sending ships filled with gold you don't really have to expect Rome to dispatch a vast army by ship to reprimand you. It would definitely be nicer to just keep all that stuff for yourself and run your own empire.

Answer 6

To think about why the Romans did not colonize the New World (and conversely whether they could have), it is better to return to the (obvious) economic reason why the Spaniards and the Portuguese started long distance ventures along the oceans in the first place. That should clarify immediately the key reason why the Romans did not sail west.

The biggest source of trade both in Ancient Times and the Middle Ages was Central and Far Asia, particularly the Silk Road. The value of goods traveling from east (China) to west (Roman Empire) vastly exceeded the value of goods traveling in the opposite direction -- hence the focus on imports (the tradition of Made in China is pretty old). This was big money, so Western merchants vied to act as intermediaries as far east as possible, so that they could buy the goods as cheap as possible and make the highest possible profits from those imports. Conversely, the precious metals paid by Westerners to buy those precious goods were piling up in China and the West never had enough precious metals left to buy more (hence the crave for them).

The normal outlet in Roman times was the Eastern Mediterranean, which the Romans already controlled. Furthemore, the Romans did have free access to sea trade with India.

The problem of the Franks (to use the name of the Western Europeans used by other peoples) was that they did not have free access to this traffic, since the Eastern Mediterranean and Arabia were controlled by the Turks while the rest of Asia was in the hands of the Mongols. At some point, only Genoa had access to the Silk Route, through the Black Sea. It meant in particular that Spain and Portugal were cut off from the lucrative trade with Asia. That is why they started circumnavigating Africa -- and indeed why Columbus gathered capital to sail West. The incentive was initially not America but China and India.

The Romans did not have that incentive: in order to get to India, they simply had to hop the Red Sea and navigate the busy routes along the coast of the Indian Ocean (see Wikipedia article on the subject). The economic incentive was to have emporia and trade partnerships in India and likely in Central Asia.

So the key incentive why Columbus sailed West was simply missing in Roman times. It is only later, when the Spaniard and Portuguese discovered the silver and gold deposits in the Americas, that they realized their "good luck"... which wasn't because (as Montesquieu already explained in the 18th century), increasing the amount of precious metals without producing more goods only created inflation, while making the foreign countries that sold manufactured goods (now the Netherlands and England) immensely rich. And the latter became so powerful that they challenged and then defeated Spain and Portugal on the seas.

The bottom line is that the Romans didn't discover (and colonize) the Americas because they already had access to India. And perhaps it is lucky for them that they didn't, because they would have only made the Indians and Chinese exporters fabulously rich and powerful with all those precious metals, while "buying themselves out of existence"... who knows, the whole world might have become a Chinese empire?

Answer 7

YES

Three things allowed Spain to take over most of the american continent, and contrarily to the common belief, gunpowder was not one of them.

• Steel: the native americans didn't know steel. The incas had copper, silver, gold and even some bronze, but no steel. A spanish soldier with a steel brestplate, morrión (helmet) and sword was nearly unkillable, and extremely lethal. Spaniards knew this, and so they forbade selling steel tools or weapons to natives.
• Horses: if a steel covered soldier was a nearly unkillable threat, a mounted one was god-like. He could outrun any warrior, either fleeing or chasing, and its blows were three times as mighty.
• Germs: only one advantage the natives had, its numbers, and they were going to loose it quickly due to the old world diseases. After some number of europeans arrived to America, diseases spread killing natives and thus making big cities unhabitable. Only small communities could survive, small and isolated, and there was no way to organize any kind of armed resistance from those.

Remember, most of America was conquered by less than 5,000 spaniards. That's about a roman legion. And mostly using the same technology. As some other comments have pointed in other comments, it is only a matter of will, not lack of capabilities.

Answer 8

Depends on what you mean by Romans. I would put my money on the Greeks, link. They had the motive, the know-how, the ships and technology, and the drive.

And you have to go much further north, to Nova Scotia, for the evidence.

A Mi’kmaq legend spoke of blue-eyed people arriving from the east and disrupting their lives which contributed to the initial, relative acceptance of the arrival of the Europeans - unlike the interaction of the Beothuks and Europeans, which led ultimately to the extinction of the Beothuk People.

from link

The fact that SOME pre-1400 European contact with the aboriginals of Nova Scotia occurred is now widely accepted in Nova Scotia, supported by the archaeological record and the similarity of traditional pre-European-contact aboriginal iconography to European iconography. WHO they were is subject to debate.

Historical licence gives you permission to posit that it was the Romans.

Mind you, you have to go beyond American-centric references to find this. I mean, Americans still teach in their school system that Columbus set sail to prove the earth wasn't flat!! Absolutely absurd. There were already globes representing the world in the courts of Europe at the time.