Which country was the richest and most powerful in the 15th century and why?

Answer 1

Catholicism has little to do with any nation's power and wealth. And to substantiate that, the Anglican Church, which at one time was the official religion of the British empire, had little to do with the power & wealth of that empire.

Since the question doesn't specify any geographical area, the only sensible answer is China, with more people than the whole of Europe and an economy to match.

The 15th century dates from 1400 -1500.

By most accounts the most likely nations that fit the description of "rich and powerful" and the time frame could be the Ming Dynasty which occupied a good deal of modern China, or the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman's controlled important parts of three continents.

The idea that "population counts" is not a correct measure of wealth & power. Czarist Russia had a huge population and Soviet Russia did as well. Their population sizes, for most of their existence, were not a measure of wealth. It's been only in the last 20 years that China could fit into either category. India also had & has a huge population, however does not fit into either category.

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But population did count in the 15th century, at least as far as wealth was concerned across the main thoroughfares of Eurasia. Later Tsarist Russia's per capita income was only a fraction of that of the most advanced societies, but the gap between Europe and Ming China was far narrower - indeed there's debate as to which was ahead (I'd say Europe easily, not through any intellectual or moral virtues - others would disagree). China or Mughal India around 1700 would certainly fit into the category of economic superpowers. Seen long-term, the 21st century is just a return to normal, not a revolution of economic geography.

What worked against China from the 1430s was the dynasty's relative uninterest in the wider world, symbolised in the capital's move to Beijing (1421) and the abandonment of Zheng He's expeditions. Ming China was the greatest concentration of people and production that the world had yet seen. But in the readiness (whose importance would only emerge clearly after 1492) to go and see what was out there, the leading power for most of the 15th century was little Portugal, in crude manpower barely a match for Belgium, if there'd yet been a Belgium (though western Belgium could itself claim to be the cutting-edge power 150 years earlier). That's the problem with the question: the conflation of wealth and power - the two don't necessarily go together. China has always constrained its projection of power geographically; Portugal happily punched well above its weight, and eventually lost out, though not before making a huge impact.

India was still disunited at this time: after Babur's conquest in the following century the new Mughal dynasty could itself make a claim for leadership. The Ottoman realm was a subregional power, albeit in three regions (rather two: its reach never really went that deep into Africa). China and the Mughal polity however were subcontinental superpowers, of an entirely different order of magnitude. But it was the ramshackle maritime empires of wood and sailcloth that would set the agenda for the three centuries to come. That wasn't about crude physical power or imagined European genius, it was about being in the right place at the right time. And sometimes it was even about not having much to lose, a luxury never enjoyed by early modern China or India.