What's Going on in Europe?

The initial phases of exploration were very much a Southern European project to Spain, Portugal leading the way. And then eventually seeing what's out there further to the West in the ocean. All of those projects were motivated by, in a macro sense, those trips to the West. The Ottomans took Constantinople because it was a move out of necessity to compensate for closure of trade routes to the East. If you don't have actual colonial domination of like Near East and Central Europe and land connections to trade routes, I don't know if there's an incentive to put that much into Westward expansion or a trade.