Exchange between christians and muslims in the 15th century

[Orser67]

It is pretty interesting how the two regions changed "civilizational" (if one accepts the notion that the Islamic Middle East and Christian Europe were civilizations) hands at roughly the same time. I think it's a good example of how history isn't always driven by long-term factors and can be quite contingent on the actions of relatively small groups of people; it probably makes more geographic sense for Constantinople to be part of the Islamic Middle East than Spain, but the latter was conquered by Islamic leaders centuries earlier in large part because it was ruled over by a weaker state than the Byzantine Empire.

Anyway, I would say that Christian Europe won the trade, because the success of the Reconquista played a major role in the exploration of the New World and the opening of new trade routes to Asia, which gave Europe a short-term commercial advantage and in turn ultimately led to long-term European political and military dominance.