What forced Europeans to look for other routes east

Question

What forced Europeans to look for other routes east

Answer 1

I assume you're referring to the period in history right before the "Age of Exploration" that led to the European discovery of the New World. If so, then I believe one factor was the dominance of Arab traders in the Middle East, eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean, through whom Europeans would have had to deal to trade with nations of "the East" like China and India. Like most "middlemen," these Arab traders sought to increase their own profits by charging the Europeans for their trading services, and naturally the Europeans looked for a way to cut out the middlemen by trading with Eastern nations directly, but the realities of world geography were an obstacle, hence the desire for a more direct route to the East.

 

As I also understand it, it was not only Arabs whom the Europeans had to parlay with in their trading with the East, but also some Europeans themselves, namely some of the Italian city-states like Venice who dominated trade in the Mediterranean Sea, through which European trade routes with the East had to begin. As a result, some of these Italian city-states grew quite wealthy at the expense of fellow Europeans, who naturally were both jealous and resentful of this added expense for their Eastern trading which only added to their yearning for a way to bypass the intervening parties and trade directly with the East.