Is it possible to have the Dark Ages and the Age of Sail in the same setting?

Is it possible to have the Dark Ages and the Age of Sail in the same setting?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages
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>Is it possible to have the Dark Ages and the Age of Sail in the same setting?
No.
The moment you have an Age of Sail the power shifts from feudal aristocrats to daring merchants or enterprising absolutists.

Mind.
I could show you how to mix the two up but this isn't going to look remotely like what you might've had in mind.

If you can imagine it, why not?

Who were the Vikings?

>Exploring unknown shores: check
>Sea battles: check
>Piracy: check
>Dark Ages: They put the 'Dark' in there

>What is Viking Period

I'll bite.

30 years ago, a madness swept the land. Those whose trade involved the seas were possessed to go into it, and even trained guards in full gear were powerless to stop them. They took every ship and every map they could find, but making sure to destroy the rest and everything around them.

Now, the council has decided that they must begin anew. Are you a brave enough person to rediscover the seas and what has happened to the world?

Not necessarily. If your "age of sail" starts at a point where aristocrats still have all the power and money, they're the ones who're gonna take the lead of the exploring and adventuring.
In the real world, the age of exploration started during the decline of european aristocracy. Power was more and more concentrated in the hands of kings and emperors, and they didn't allow other nobles to finance expeditions because it would have threatened their power. That's why merchants were the one lending money to explorers, rulers thought they were less threatening to their power.

I mean, that's pretty much what happened. The native Anerican population were pretty much dark ages esque, just without metal working.

Did the vikings have gunpowder?

It was feudal aristocrats and merchants at odds or at war with each other, like governors against the EIC.

...

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages

Tbqh the Renaissance was closer to the Dark Ages than the Dark Ages so

I want a setting where the Age of Sail coexists with the Age of Manure.

Does an age of sail absolutely need gunpowder?

If you want gunpowder, do gunpowder vikings.

Pisa, Genoa, Venice and Amalfi all was wealthy and powerfull marittime republic

Play up the literal dimming of the stars that happened during that time, The seas become more threatening when stars go dark and charts change.

>Dark Ages
Nigga, they a millennium apart

Sure, and in fact that's what happened. The europeans got gunpowder and a centuries-long religious schism just in time to do the world tour and bump into empires that were teetering on the brink of their own dark ages. The euros were happy to help. Great Zimbabwe, the mesoamerican empires, china, all were going through tough times when the age of sail arrived.

The Scandinavian crusaders probably ran into gunpowder, but this is far after the viking age. Though actual vikings like Bjorn Ironside and the Varangian guard ran into Greek Fire down in the Mediterranean.

>Who were the Vikings?

The guys who handed the fucking Inuits their only military achievement ever?

Nobility and aristocracy was alive and well until a true "merchant" class started to emerge in the 1700's or so. While, yes, in places like Reneissance Italy you had merchant republics ruled by plutocracy's, the rest of the world was still kings and lord and knights. In fact, i've been reading about the revolution of Haiti that occured parallel to the French Revolution, and many of the early powerful plantation owners or "big whites" were traditional nobles who ran their plots in absentia.

The reason we tend to associate the age of sail with mercantilism is because 1. Money was usually the driver for these endeavors, as everyone was looking for access to new resources and land wealth, and 2. Organizing and furnishing sea exploration usually required quite a lot of money, which in turn would require either a powerful and wealthy king with lots of centralized authority (and the very nature of Feudalism meant that few Kings actually had the kind of absolute authority people imagine they do - this in particular plagued France up until the revolution), or someone with a lot of wealth who needed other avenues of social power or advancement to use it. AKA, a Merchant or New Noble with a bought title who lacked the ancient pedigree and opportunities for political advancement the true sword nobility had.

So, what you need is a setting wherein supposed "Dark Ages" - by which I'm assuming you mean the middle ages - have the logistical ability to pull off the kind of age of sail colonialism you want. This would mean nations that were generally more stable, wealthy, and less fractious than the nation states of the period historically were.

Which, I guess, would kind of make it NOT a 'dark age'. Since we're arguably talking about a world where all the classical era powers did not balkanize into a hodgepodge of warring shit-holes.

Is that modern post-Aral sea-thing? Freaks me out every single time.

Aristocrats & Rich lads want to discover the world and gain riches, all start hiring adventurers to explore the seas.
Many start going missing and not responding, and eventually they (Aristocrats) all try to find out what happen...

Yes and no. No if you want huge galleons and fleets. Big ships need big resources, which means centralized and organized city states.

But scale it down a bit, and you can still have ships and pirates and all the fun stuff about sailing and exploring , but in a dark age.

Case in point: the sea peoples.

Counterpoint; you can also have age of sail in the same setting as a dark age, so long as the culture that does the sailing is just stumbling into someone elses dark age.

So you know how you often have games where an ancient civilisation has left ruins and tech behind?

You know how it's almost always a modern day civ or futuristic?

What if you did renaissance?

If you want them to.

Great post.
Could it be reasonably said that just having richer or larger nations overall could produce the same effect with the same amount of friction (E.G. rich merchant families with private fleets and so on)?
Unless you just want the Dark Ages aesthetic, that is, which is always possible.

Hue

Northeastern Europe and central Asia was still in the "dark ages" during the start of the age of sail.