Cog and Galley

GENERAL SHIP TYPES

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Round Ship (Ship Type)

Medieval ship type popular in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries and the Christian Crusaders’ transport of choice. Unlike the swift, more comfortable galleys that transported the wealthiest crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land, the round ship was ungainly and slow. Because of the need for large amounts of cargo space for retainers, equipment, and horses, it was, however, ideal.

Round ships had a length-to-beam ratio of three or even two to one, giving them a round appearance and their name. Most were single-masted and square-rigged vessels. The cog of northern Europe was a typical round ship.

Slow because of their hull shape, round ships had to await favorable winds before sailing from each port of call. However, the increase in carrying capacity made a slower passage economically feasible. In traveling to and from the Holy Land, round ships moved along the coasts, rarely venturing offshore. In their inevitable stops along the way, these ships opened up markets for the Italian merchants whose goods they carried. Over time these markets became regular trading ports for the maritime republics. The round ship began to disappear in the fifteenth century, replaced by the carrack and other ship designs.

References

Bass, George F., ed. A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology. London: Thames & Hudson, 1972.

Landstrom, Björn. The Ship. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1961.

Lewis, Archibald R., and Timothy J. Runyan. European Naval and Maritime History, 300–1500. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Unger, Richard W. The Ships in the Medieval Economy, 600–1600. Montreal, CA: McGill–Queen’s University Press. 1980.

Cog (Ship Type)

Medieval ship type, dominant in North Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Creation of the Hanseatic League in 1241 brought about a massive increase in maritime trading activity in northern Europe. This prosperity stimulated shipbuilding and revolutionized design of the merchant ship and later the warship, as seen in the development of the Hansa cog. Its high speed and large cargo capacity made the cog the dominant merchant vessel of the North Sea for 200 years.

In general, the medieval development of vessels may be divided into two classes: the oared longship built for war and the round ship designed for trade. These two classes held true for centuries until the superiority of the sailing cog in warfare became so apparent that it became the all-around vessel of choice. The ability to use merchantmen as warships proved so advantageous that the concept survived the demise of the cog.

In configuration, the cog resembled a medieval round ship. It was broad in beam, keeled, and clinker-built (in other words, the outer boards overlapped each other). It had a rounded bow and stern, and the rudder was located in the center of the stern. The cog had a square sail mounted amidships. Later versions displaced up to 600 tons and were up to 100′ in length, with two smaller masts fore and aft. By 1304 Denmark had converted its entire fleet of over 1,000 longships to cogs. In time, however, the cog gave way to more specialized carracks and galleons.

References

Chatterton, E. Keble. History of the Sailing Ship. New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1968.

Galuppini, Gino. Warships of the World. New York: Times Books, 1983.

Lewis, Archibald R., and Timothy J. Runyan. European Naval and Maritime History, 300–1500. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Nef (Ship Type)

A fully rigged medieval sailing merchantman and warship. Developed in France, the nef had a broad beam, rounded ends, and a carvel-planked (flush rather than overlapping) hull. Similar in design and purpose to the cog, this type of ship was normally single masted with a more rounded stern than the cog. Fore and after castles were part of the hull structure. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the vessel had grown to almost 400 tons and carried three masts. Its basic purpose as a naval vessel was to serve as a fighting platform.

References

Bruce, Anthony, and William Cogar. An Encyclopedia of Naval History. New York: Facts on File, 1998.

Longship

Two types of Viking vessels plied the northern seas, the knarr and the drakkar. The knarr was the oceangoing trading vessel supplanted by the Hansa cog. The drakkar was the Viking longship of lore and legend. It consisted of many rooms or spaces between deck beams used to house the oars. The largest of these raiding vessels were propelled by both sail and oar. The sail was mounted on a mast set amidships.

Reconstructions of longships prove they were capable sailing vessels. They could not only run before the wind effectively, but they could run across the wind better than most square riggers.

The best archaeological example of the longship is the Gokstad ship, a reconstruction of the longship displayed in an Oslo museum. Typical of Viking raiding vessels, she is 76′ long. Although the maximum size of these raiding vessels is still under debate, one, the Long Dragon, measured 140′ in length and could accommodate 34 rowers per side. Viking epics describe vessels up to twice this length, but there is as of yet no archaeological evidence of them.

There were no safer ships in which to cross the North Sea to raid England or up the Seine. As Winston Churchill put it, “The soul of the Vikings lay in the longships.”

References

Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Challu, Paul B. Du. The Viking Age: The Early History, Manners, and Customs of the Ancestors of the English Speaking Nations. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889.

Wilson, David M. The Vikings and Their Origins. New York: A & W Publishers, 1980.

Carrack (Type of Sailing Ship)

A type of merchant ship, often armed, of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The earliest carracks (circa 1367) were merchantmen of the Mediterranean type with a rounded stern in a carvel-built hull (the hull planks were flush rather than overlapping). Rigging included a mainmast and mizzenmast with a square sail on the main and a lateen sail on the mizzen. The square yard consisted of two lashed spars supported by topping lifts. A centerline ladder led to the round top of the mainmast.

By 1500 the carrack had evolved into a larger vessel measuring 98 feet overall, 69 feet on the keel, with a breadth of 33 feet and a depth from the midships rail to the keel of just over 21 feet. The hull type now included a foremast and an extra mizzen, called the bonaventure mizzen, or bonaventure for short. Armament included from 18 to 56 guns.

The hull form and rigging of the carrack varied greatly depending on locality and era. For example, carracks of northern Europe were more heavily timbered than those of the Mediterranean.

The word “carrack” is believed to come from Arabic, and from Arabic to the Old French caraque with the same meaning.

References

Blackburn, Graham. The Overlook Illustrated Dictionary of Nautical Terms. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1981.

Kihlberg, Bengt, ed. The Lore of Ships. New York: Crescent Books, 1986.

Landström, Björn. The Ship. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.

Rogers, John G. Origins of Sea Terms. Boston: Nimrod Press, 1984.

Galley (Ship Type)

Long, narrow wooden vessel with a shallow beam and low freeboard. The galley was propelled by rows of oars and almost always sailed on one or two masts. In the early days a square sail was carried on a single mast, but in later years lateen sails on two masts were more common. Galleys varied widely, although this ship type was the predominant warship of the ancient Mediterranean world and thrived for almost 5,000 years. Galleys were in use on the Nile and Mediterranean as early as 3000 b.c. The Phoenicians borrowed the design, and it was then further refined by Greek naval architects. Originally galleys had a single bank of oars, and the ship was used both for transport and war. Homer makes reference to galleys in The Iliad.

The war galley was effective because it could move quickly to an enemy vessel for boarding. In the eighth or ninth century b.c., the ram—a massive, pointed bronze projection set at the waterline—was introduced in war galleys. The ram could punch a hole in an opposing ship, sinking it.

War galleys progressed throughout the centuries, becoming more powerful as modifications evolved. The single row of oarsmen soon gave way to two banks of oarsmen. This was known as a bireme. The change to three superimposed banks produced the trireme. Vessels of this variety won the 480 b.c. Battle of Salamis against the Persians.

Originally each oar was pulled by one man, but later several men were put to one oar. Some galleys had four or five superimposed banks of oars; such ships carried crews of up to 500 men. By the first century a.d., however, the Romans had returned to the trireme as their main battle ship.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Genoa, Venice, and France maintained fleets powered by 25 three-man oars to a side and, later, five-man oars. Captives and convicts also came to row the ships. The usual practice until about 1450 had been to employ volunteers or hired mercenaries. Such ships might have a displacement of 200 tons and be approximately 164′ × 20′ in size.

After cannons were introduced at sea, they found their way onto galleys. Cannons were mounted on a platform at the bow—usually one large gun and one or two on each side of it. Aiming the guns was accomplished by turning the vessel.

Galleys were swift (up to 10 knots for short periods) and maneuverable. They were also not dependent on the wind, which was ideal in the Mediterranean, but they were vulnerable to adverse weather and unable to stay at sea for long periods because of their scant cargo capacity.

The galley had a considerable effect on the naval history of the Mediterranean. Eventually it gave way to the “galleass,” which combined the freedom of movement of the galley with the seaworthiness and fighting power of the sailing warship. The Battle of Lepanto on 7 October 1571 established the importance of the galleass as a warship. The last use of galleys in Mediterranean fighting occurred in the 1717 Battle of Matapan. They were present in the 1718 Battle of Cape Passero, but took no part in the action. Galleys also appeared in the Baltic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were in use there as late as the Russo-Swedish War of 1809. A Russian galley built in 1791 carried sails on three masts, including a square-rigged main, and mounted 22 cannon.

References

Anderson, Roger Charles. Oared Fighting Ships. London: Percival Marshall, 1962.

Bamford, Paul. Fighting Ships and Prisons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Cowburn, Philip. The Warship in History. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

Guilmartin, John Francis, Jr. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Rogers, William L. Greek and Roman Naval Warfare. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1937.

———. Naval Warfare under Oars. 4th to 16th Centuries. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1940.

Bireme (Galley)

A galley with two banks of oars on each side. Originated by the ancient Romans, biremes were usually warships and as such were extensively employed by the Turks, Venetians, and other Mediterranean powers in the sixteenth century. Most ships of this type were fitted with a pointed metal ram, or beak, attached to the bow at or just below the waterline. The traditional tactic was to sink an enemy vessel by ramming it. War galleys had as many as three or even four men to each oar, and the banks of oars were on different levels, the upper-level oars being longer than the lower-level ones. Most vessels of this type were fitted with a single mast and sail that were unstepped and stowed during battle and when rowing to windward. Measuring about 80 feet in length with a 10-foot beam, biremes were faster than single-banked galleys but slower than triremes. Biremes were replaced by sailing warships in the mid-1600s.

References

Kemp, Peter, ed. The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Landström, Björn. The Ship. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.

Wallinga, H. T. Ships and Seapower before the Great Persian War: The Ancestry of the Ancient Trireme. New York: E. J. Brill, 1993.

Wedde, Michael. Towards a Hermeneutics of Aegean Bronze Age Ship Imagery. Mannheim: Bibliepolis, 2000.

Trireme (Ship Type)

A Greek galley (later Roman) dating from the middle of the seventh century b.c., with three banks of oars, one above the other, used primarily as a ship-of-war. The 62 rowers in the upper bank were referred to as thranites and pulled 14-foot oars. There were 58 rowers in the middle bank, referred to as zygites, who pulled 10.5-foot oars, while 54 oarsmen in the lower bank, known as thalamites, pulled 7.5-foot oars. An additional 26 oarsmen, called perinoi, operated from the top deck, giving triremes a total complement of 200 rowers. Armed with a long, detachable ram, triremes frequently carried archers and soldiers for boarding enemy ships. They were capable of speeds in excess of 10 knots, albeit only for short periods of time, depending on the strength and stamina of the rowers. Triremes died out as warships around a.d. 1200 when they were rigged as sailing vessels with two masts and lateen sails, the oars being used only in battle to provide added mobility.

References

Haws, Duncan, and Alex A. Hurst. The Maritime History of the World. Vol. 1. Brighton, UK: Teredo Books, 1985.

Kemp, Peter, ed. The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Morrison, John S., John F. Coats, and N. Boris Rankov. The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Roundships Redux

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The round ships of the Mediterranean came from Roman ships with a 3:1 ratio of width to length. They were constructed with caravel-built hulls and no oars, but instead 1-3 masts often with lateen sails. They were used for transport and trade, and were know in the later 12th and 13th centuries to add castles, for and aft, to the ship, which later became part of the hull design. These were more decorative and helped hold more cargo and passengers; the aft castle often held the captain's quarters.
Marshall, Michal. Ocean Traders. Facts of File, NY: 1990. VM15.M368
#
Medieval ship type popular in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries and the Christian Crusaders’ transport of choice. Unlike the swift, more comfortable galleys that transported the wealthiest crusaders and pilgrims to the Holy Land, the round ship was ungainly and slow. Because of the need for large amounts of cargo space for retainers, equipment, and horses, it was, however, ideal.

Round ships had a length-to-beam ratio of three or even two to one, giving them a round appearance and their name. Most were single-masted and square-rigged vessels. The cog of northern Europe was a typical round ship.

Slow because of their hull shape, round ships had to await favorable winds before sailing from each port of call. However, the increase in carrying capacity made a slower passage economically feasible. In traveling to and from the Holy Land, round ships moved along the coasts, rarely venturing offshore. In their inevitable stops along the way, these ships opened up markets for the Italian merchants whose goods they carried. Over time these markets became regular trading ports for the maritime republics. The round ship began to disappear in the fifteenth century, replaced by the carrack and other ship designs.

The Nef as Ship

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Nef is an old term for a type of boat, originally referring a largish sort of Knarr or "Halfskip" (which was a double ended sort of canoe shape, about 2.5 to 3 times as long as wide, and used by Northern European travellers and trades for exploration and cargo).

A fully rigged medieval sailing merchantman and warship. Developed in France, the nef had a broad beam, rounded ends, and a carvel-planked (flush rather than overlapping) hull. Similar in design and purpose to the cog, this type of ship was normally single masted with a more rounded stern than the cog. Fore and after castles were part of the hull structure. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the vessel had grown to almost 400 tons and carried three masts. Its basic purpose as a naval vessel was to serve as a fighting platform.

Nef: 1.Also called a roundship, a single-masted clinker-built ship used in Europe during the middle-ages until the 14th century, for example as transportation for the crusades. Descendant of the Viking longship a Nef still had a side-rudder and was used in Northern regions a century or two longer with a sternpost-rudder. 2.A French word for ship.

Variegated Reference for 'nef' as ship, from
Lewis, A.R. and Runyan, T.J. European Naval and Maritime History, 300-1500. Indiana University Press. Bloomington. 1985.

p.66 "... the so-called _naves_ or _nefs_, which were large round-ships, lateen-rigged, with two masts ..."

p.73 has a line-drawing of a Genoese nef based on the best available evidence.

p.74 "They may have been cheaper to build or to operate than a_nef_." The word _nef_ is used two more times on this page.

p.82 "Already by 1400, as we have noted, the older Mediterraneanround-ships such as _nefs_ and _taurides_ had been replaced by more efficient northern European _cogs_."

p.83 "Often built as large as 700 or 1,000 tons, _carracks_,which were sometimes also called _nefs_ in the fifteenth century, carried most of the heavy bulk cargoes, such as salt, wheat, cotton, and timber, throughout the Mediterranean."

Featured Website: Engineering the Medieval Achievement

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Shipping Systems

Ships

Battles of the Azores, (1582–1583)

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Naval battles between Spain and France, the first in the Central Atlantic. Although the death of King Sebastian of Portugal in 1578 had made Philip II of Spain the clear heir to the Portuguese throne, eight of Portugal’s nine strategic Azores islands opted to recognize as king Sebastian’s illegitimate son, Dom Antonio de Crato. Forced into exile as the Spanish occupied Portugal, Antonio nonetheless managed to secure aid for his cause from England and France, which were keen to disrupt the powerful Hispano-Portuguese union and saw the Azores as a prime base for attacks on Spanish treasure fleets returning from America. French regent Catherine de’ Medici also had laid claim to the Portuguese throne and had been promised Brazil by Dom Antonio in return for aid. She sent a fleet of 63 ships and some 5,800 troops under the command of her cousin, former army general Filippo Strozzi, to seize the only Azorean island loyal to Spain, São Miguel, and to protect the other islands from a large Spanish fleet that had sailed from Cádiz.

This fleet consisted of 28 ships under Spain’s greatest sailor, Álvaro de Bazán, Marqués de Santa Cruz, with some 6,700 veteran soldiers aboard. Strozzi arrived in the islands six days before Santa Cruz and, despite a successful amphibious landing on São Miguel, failed to carry the crucial fort of Ponta Delgada. The French were in the process of re-embarking their infantry when the Spanish fleet appeared. The ensuing battle on 26 June 1582 lasted some five hours, with the French trying to stand off and cannonade, and the Spaniards seeking to grapple and board.

The French tactic failed for lack of a sufficient number of heavy guns and the early departure of 30 ships. Santa Cruz’s fleet sank six French ships. Some 2,000 French soldiers and sailors died, including their commander, Filippo Strozzi; another 390 were taken prisoner. The Spaniards lost 224 dead and 533 wounded. Five days later, Santa Cruz had all the prisoners executed, a much-decried act he tried to justify by claiming that the victims were lawless pirates.

But Santa Cruz sailed back to Spain without forcing the surrender of the main rebel island of Terceira, and a second French expedition to safeguard the island was mounted in May 1583 under the command of Aymar de Chastes, governor of Dieppe. Eager to crush the Azores rebellion once and for all, Philip II ordered Santa Cruz to return to the islands in 1583 with an even larger armada of 98 ships carrying over 15,000 men. After defeating the French fleet, the marquis, in one of the early modern world’s classic amphibious landings, overwhelmed the rebel stronghold and put most of its French, English, and Portuguese garrison to the sword.

Santa Cruz’s victory was hugely acclaimed in Spain, since it sealed the union of two great world empires. He himself saw the Azores victory as the prologue to an invasion of England, which he thought might take place as early as 1584. He seems to have believed that the fleets he had so easily defeated were partly English and thus reckoned that defeating England would be less difficult than heretofore believed. Chosen to lead Spain’s Enterprise of England, Santa Cruz died before it set sail. The battles off the Azores also underlined for the powers concerned the necessity of maintaining fleets that could operate efficiently in the Atlantic, which meant accelerating construction of galleons.

References
Fernandez Duro, Cesáreo. La conquista de las Azores en 1583: Descrita por el capitan de navio Cesareo Fernandez Duro. Madrid: Sucessore de Rivadeneyra, 1886.
Ibanez de Ibero, Carlos. Santa Cruz: Primer Marino de Espana. N.p., 1946.
Mariejol, Jean. Philip II: The First Modern King. Trans. Warre B. Wells. New York: Harper & Bros., 1933.

SHIPBUILDING IN SE ASIA

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During the past 5,000 years the expansion of the Austronesians from Taiwan into Southeast Asia, and from there into the Pacific and to Madagascar, has always been carried out, out of necessity, across the seas and upstream along the rivers of the major islands. At the turn of the first millennium C.E., local and regional maritime exchange networks had expanded into long-distance overseas commerce that brought local ships and traders to harbors of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Linguistic, ethnographic, archaeological, and historical research has all contributed to a considerable body of knowledge on Austronesian shipbuilding traditions. Other peoples of Southeast Asia, particularly the Mon, appear in time to have developed their own shipbuilding industries. However, for lack of proper studies, it is not clear how much of it was indigenous, or how much they owed to borrowings during interaction with the neighboring Austronesians (Austronesian nautical terms appear in Old Mon inscriptions).

The typical Austronesian vessel appears to have been developed from a dugout canoe. As its size grew, side-planks were added to the dugout hull, which progressively turned into a keel. In the early stages of seafaring, as in historical and modern smaller and narrower boats, outriggers were necessary stabilizing devices. As these smaller vessels grew into bulkier, high seas trading ships with rounded hulls, however, it appears that outriggers were not used: the earliest descriptions of Austronesian ships, in third- to eighth-century Chinese texts, do not mention stabilizing devices. What they do describe are very large ships, carrying hundreds of tons of cargo and passengers, propelled by multiple sails rigged on several masts. According to these early witnesses, no iron was ever used in fastening the planks of these ships, only strings made of vegetal fibers. Archaeological work carried out in Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and the Philippines has indeed brought to light an indigenous tradition of shipbuilding that fully confirms these early texts. Sites from the third to the twelfth centuries C.E. have yielded remains of hulls made of planks fastened together by wooden dowels and stitches of palm-sugar fiber strings. Some of these shipwrecks were as much as 30 meters in length. These sites also yielded some side rudders, a feature described in later ships that survived in twentieth century Javanese and Bugis traders. Their sails and masts were reconstructed from iconography, as depicted on a few early seals and on the famous eighth-century relief of the Borobudur temple: they carried multiple tripod masts and canted square sails made of matting. This early stitched technique partly survived in seventeenth- century Philippines and Moluccan boats and in modern whaling boats of Lomblen.

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, much of the local large-scale trade was carried out in ships known in Malay or Javanese as jong, a local term that gave birth to the word “junk” in European languages (later to be used only for Chinese ships). Their hulls were still being assembled without any iron fastenings: wooden dowels had by then completely replaced the earlier fiber lashings to keep the planks fastened together, and the shell was in turn dowelled to the sturdy frames. These were huge sailing vessels, even by European standards of the times: Malay and Javanese jong that hauled 500 tons of merchandise and a few hundred people were regularly described in Portuguese sources. Like earlier vessels, they were steered with a pair of side rudders and carried multiple masts, and as many lug sails of fiber matting, including a typical bowsprit sail.

The fleets of large indigenous jong were to disappear in the second half of the sixteenth century because of a combination of economic and political factors that laid considerable strain on the capacities of local powers to maintain their own trading fleets. As a result of increased warfare at sea, much of the local capital and energy was then spent on building and maintaining profusely armed war fleets of long craft. The largest were new ships for the region, galley-type craft built according to Mediterranean standards learned from Portuguese renegades and Turkish shipwrights, built in such a way as to allow them to carry and shoot the large cannon necessary for battles at sea.

Shipwreck archaeology has also proved that, by the fifteenth century, indigenous Malay and Javanese jong were no longer the only large trading ships built locally. Southern Chinese vessels had conquered their own share of the local shipping. However, the ban on shipbuilding and overseas shipping imposed by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) appears to have prompted many Chinese to settle in Southeast Asia and to build their ships locally. This contributed to the birth of the so-called South China Sea shipbuilding tradition, a blend of two nautical traditions, Austronesian and southern Chinese.

In Indonesian seas, a significant fleet of lesser coasters (under 100 tons) survived the disappearance of the large oceangoing jong. The building of these vessels kept the local shipbuilding traditions alive until modern times. Together with the fishing boats, these fleets of small to medium-size Madurese, Butonese, and Bugis ships were the last to bear witness to the earlier grandeur of Malay world shippers.

References: Green, Jeremy, and Rosemary Harper. 1987. The Maritime Archaeology of Shipwrecks and Ceramics in Southeast Asia. Special Publication no. 4.Albert Park: Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology. Horridge, G.Adrian. 1982. The Lashed-lug Boat of the Eastern Archipelagoes. Monographs and Reports, no. 54. London: National Maritime Museum. Manguin, Pierre-Yves. 1980.“The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2: 266–276. ———.1989.“The Trading Ships of Insular Southeast Asia: New Evidence from Indonesian Archaeological Sites.” Vol. I, pp. 200–220 in Proceedings Pertemuan Ilmiah Arkeologi V, Yogyakarta 1989. Jakarta: Ikatan Ahli Arkeologi Indonesia. ———.1993.“Trading Ships of the South China Sea: Shipbuilding Techniques and Their Role in the Development of Asian Trade Networks.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36: 253–280. ———.1996.“Southeast Asian Shipping in the Indian Ocean during the 1st Millennium AD.” Pp. 181–198 in Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean. Edited by H. P. Ray and J.-F. Salles. Lyon and New Delhi: Manohar (Maison de l’Orient Méditerranéen/NISTADS). Scott, William Henry. 1982.“Boatbuilding and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society.” Philippine Studies 30: 335–376.

Alamannic raiders

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When assessing the overall effectiveness of Roman frontier defense, therefore, it is necessary to factor into the equation that substantial economic losses to outside raiding were also part of the picture, since it took a fair amount of raiding to trigger a response. How substantial that raiding might have been has emerged from an exciting archaeological find made while dredging in the Rhine near the old Roman frontier town of Speyer. Late in the third century, some Alamannic raiders had been trying to get their booty back home across the Rhine when their boats were ambushed and sunk by Roman river patrol ships. This booty consisted of an extraordinary 700 kg of goods packed into three or four carts, the entire looted contents of probably a single Roman villa, and the raiders were interested in every piece of metalwork they could find. The only items missing from the hoard were rich solid silver ware and high-value personal jewelry. Either the lord or lady of the house got away before the attack or else the very high-value loot was transported separately. In the carts, however, was a vast mound of silverplate from the dining room, the equipment from an entire kitchen (fifty-one cauldrons, twenty-five bowls and basins, and twenty iron ladles), enough agricultural implements to run a substantial farm, votive objects from the villa’s shrine, and thirty-nine good-quality silver coins. If this haul represents the proceeds of just one localized raid, the magnitude of the more sustained disturbances required to trigger an imperial campaign should not be underestimated. Nonetheless, the overall pattern of the evidence is unmistakable. Late Roman emperors did not leave their troops passively behind the frontier merely waiting for trouble. Periodically, the field armies were trundled out in force to establish an overwhelming level of immediate military dominance, which was then used to dictate an overall diplomatic settlement for the region that was in line with the empire’s priorities, to maximize the cost-value ratio of the original campaign.

The Athenian Empire

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The Athenian Empire, like all its predecessors, had been achieved by war, and many people could not conceive of one without the other. The problem was intensified by the character of the Athenian empire, a power based not on a great army dominating vast stretches of land but on a navy that dominated the sea. This unusual empire dazzled perceptive contemporaries. The Old Oligarch pointed out some of its special advantages:

It is possible for small subject cities on the mainland to unite and form a single army, but in a sea empire it is not possible for islanders to combine their forces, for the sea divides them, and their rulers control the sea. Even if it is possible for islanders to assemble unnoticed on one island, they will die of starvation. Of the main land cities which Athens controls, the large ones are ruled by fear, the small by sheer necessity; there is no city which does not need to import or export something, but this will not be possible unless they submit to those who control the sea.

Naval powers, moreover, can make hit-and-run raids on enemy territory, doing damage without many casualties; they can travel distances impossible for armies; they can sail past hostile territory safely, while armies must fight their way through; they need not fear crop failure, for they can import what they need. In the Greek world, besides, all their enemies were vulnerable: “every mainland state has either a projecting headland or an offshore island or a narrow strait where it is possible for those who control the sea to put in and harm those who dwell there.”

Thucydides admired sea power no less and depicted its importance more profoundly. His reconstruction of early Greek history, describing the ascent of civilization, makes naval power the dynamic, vital element. First comes a navy, then suppression of piracy and safety for commerce. The resulting security permits the accumulation of wealth, which allows the emergence of walled cities. This in turn allows the acquisition of greater wealth and the growth of empire, as the weaker cities trade independence for security and prosperity. The wealth and power so obtained permit the expansion of the imperial city’s power. This paradigm perfectly describes the rise of the Athenian Empire. Yet Thucydides presents it as a natural development, inherent in the character of naval power and realized for the first time in the Athens of his day.

Pericles himself fully understood the unique character of the naval empire as the instrument of Athenian greatness, and on the eve of the great Peloponnesian War he encouraged the Athenians with an analysis of its advantages. The war would be won by reserves of money and control of the sea, where the empire gave Athens unquestioned superiority.

If they march against our land with an army, we shall sail against theirs; and the damage we do to the Peloponnesus will be something very different from their devastation of Attica. For they cannot get other land in its place without fighting, while we have plenty of land on the islands and the mainland; yes, command of the sea is a great thing.

In the second year of the war, Pericles made the point even more strongly, as he tried to restore the fighting spirit of the discouraged Athenians:

I want to explain this point to you, which I think you have never yet thought about; it is about the greatness of your empire. I have not mentioned it in my previous speeches, nor would I speak of it now, since it sounds rather like boasting, if I did not see that you are discouraged beyond reason. You think you rule only over your allies, but I assert that of the two spheres that are open to man’s use, the land and the sea, you are the absolute master of all of one, not only of as much as you now control but of as much more as you like. And there is no one who can prevent you from sailing where you like with the naval force you now have, neither the Great King, nor any nation on earth.

This unprecedented power, however, could be threatened by two weaknesses. The first resulted from an intractable geographic fact: the home of this great naval empire was a city located on the mainland and subject to attacks from land armies. Since they were not islanders, their location was a point of vulnerability, for the landed classes are reluctant to see their houses and estates destroyed.

Pericles made the same point: “Command of the sea is a great thing,” he said. “Just think; if we were islanders, who could be less exposed to conquest?” But Pericles was not one to allow problems presented by nature to stand in the way of his goals. Since the Athenians would be invulnerable as islanders, they must become islanders. Accordingly, he asked the Athenians to abandon their fields and homes in the country and move into the city. In the space between the Long Walls they could be fed and supplied from the empire, and could deny a land battle to the enemy. In a particularly stirring speech, Pericles said, “We must not grieve for our homes and land, but for human lives, for they do not make men, but men make them. And if I thought I could persuade you I would ask you to go out and lay waste to them yourselves and show the Peloponnesians that you will not yield to them because of such things.”

But not even Pericles could persuade the Athenians to do that in mid-century. The employment of such a strategy based on cold intelligence and reason, flying in the face of tradition and the normal passions of human beings, would require the kind of extraordinary leadership that only he could hope to exercise, and even in the face of a Spartan invasion in 465–446, Pericles was not able to persuade the Athenians to abandon their farms. In 431 he imposed his strategy, and held to it only with great difficulty. But by then he had become strong enough to make it the strategy of Athens.

The corvus

2011-05-05T05:18:00.002+08:00

To compensate for their lack of nautical expertise, however, the Romans introduced a technical innovation that exploited their legionaries' aptitude for close-quarter fighting. A 12-foot pillar of wood with a pulley on the top was fitted to the prow of every vessel. To this pillar a boarding bridge was attached which could be hoisted up and swung around in the required direction. At the end of the bridge there was a large pointed spike called a COITUS which, when released, drove itself into the deck of the opposing vessel, locking the two ships together. Then the legionaries could storm aboard and slaughter the near-defenceless crews. As an example of a technical innovation which led to a precipitous reversal of battlefield superiority that had endured for centuries, the corvus outclassed all subsequent developments such as gunpowder, the tank, radar, submarines, air power and electronic warfare.

Like the Rhodians, the Carthaginians had a long tradition of naval warfare, and their experience in this area meant that in the First Punic War their main tactic was ramming, whereas the Romans preferred to grapple and board.152 Early in the First Punic War, the Romans introduced a new form of boarding involving the use of a special piece of equipment, a boarding-bridge called the ‘crow’(Latin corvus). The circumstances of this development are sketchy. The Romans had built a fleet in the latter part of 260, based on a captured Carthaginian vessel. The first proper voyage for this new fleet took it the along western coast of Italy towards the Straits of Messina. An advance force of seventeen ships, under the command of Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, one of the consuls of 260/59, headed directly to Messana. Its aim was to arrange for supplies and other facilities for the main fleet (Polyb. 1.21.4). Scipio was diverted to the Lipari Islands, possibly by the promise that they would be betrayed to him, but he was captured by Boodes, a Carthaginian commander who sailed out with a large naval force from Panormus and caught Scipio off guard. He abandoned his small squadron of ships and surrendered, earning the nick-name ‘Asina’ (she-ass). It is most likely that the new Roman ships did not have the corvus fitted to them, otherwise the Carthaginians would have been better prepared for it in the battle at Mylae, which occurred soon afterwards. Similarly, when the Carthaginian admiral Hannibal went out to reconnoitre the approaching Roman fleet with fifty ships and lost most of them, having come upon the Romans unexpectedly, it was a straightforward naval encounter, again not featuring the corvus (Polyb. 1.21.9–11).

It was apparently after these two episodes that the Romans introduced the corvus, probably as a result of appraising their tactical performance in the recent clash with the fifty Carthaginian ships under Hannibal. It would certainly seem logical for them to have introduced such a tactical innovation in order to counter a perceived weakness in their combat methods. For a description of the corvus we are reliant upon Polybius (1.22). The key details are as follows. It consisted of a pole 7.3 m (24 feet) high and 22–5 cm (9–10 inches) thick, with a pulley on top, from which was suspended the boarding bridge itself. This was 11 m (36 feet) long and 1.2 m (4 feet) wide. It had a spike on the underside at the far end to fix it into the deck of an enemy ship. A slot 3.65 m (12 feet) from the lowest end enabled it to slide up the pole (probably less than all the way to the top) and to be swung around. Rings were used to attach ropes to the far end so that it could be raised and lowered via the pulley. Polybius says it was mounted on the prows of the Roman warships, but it must have been set some way back from the very end of the prow, as it seems to have been swivelled around to grapple with ships on either side of the Roman vessel. The device was designed for a dual function: it held enemy ships fast and provided a relatively easy means for the Roman marines to board them. It also offered an alternative naval combat tactic to ramming.

Polybius implies that the corvi were a late addition to the Roman ships, a last-minute modification in anticipation of imminent naval combat. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the Romans made as much use as possible of existing fixtures and fittings. They may even have incorporated the footings or tabernacle used for masts. The fact that they are described as being on the prows of the Roman ships and swivelled around to grapple ships approaching from the sides could indicate that they were positioned where the foremast would have been.

The invention of the corvus could be characterized as a typical Roman response to a military problem by engineering a technological solution. Alternatively, it could just be seen as a desperate gamble aimed at turning sea-battles into land-battles and relying on the training and determination of the Roman legionaries turned marines to succeed in close-quarter fighting. However it is viewed, this bold tactical innovation certainly worked. The ensuing battle of Mylae in 260 was the first major naval battle of the First PunicWar (Polyb. 1.23; Diod. Sic. 33.10). About 100 Roman ships defeated about 130 Carthaginians. The Carthaginians were puzzled by their first sight of the corvi, but attacked the Roman fleet with determination. They lost their thirty lead ships immediately, all having been grappled by corvi and boarded. This included the admiral Hannibal’s flagship, a ‘seven’, but he escaped in a skiff. The remaining Carthaginian ships tried to use their superior speed and manoeuvrability to get at the Romans from better angles to avoid the corvi, but the swivel mechanism allowed the Romans to grapple some of these as well. The Carthaginians retreated after losing about fifty ships, and the victorious Roman commander, the consul Gaius Duilius, was honoured with a column in the forum, decorated with the prows of the captured ships.

Four years later, another major sea-battle at Ecnomus also ended in defeat for the Carthaginians. This battle was a deliberate attempt by one large naval expeditionary force to intercept and destroy another. It produced a sprawling, multi-part confrontation which happened within sight of the land, and may have been partly influenced by the proximity of the shoreline, but it was essentially a battle at sea between two fleets of warships heavily laden with marines. The Romans won because their various squadrons were able to defeat and drive off the Carthaginian squadrons in direct confrontations and then come to the aid of their fellows. Polybius insists that Carthaginian ships were faster (1.26.10, 1.27.10), but that does not seem to have made a great deal of difference. Most of the Roman captains were able to avoid being rammed in their vulnerable stern quarters and either grapple with the enemy or keep them at bay. For all their speed, the Carthaginians seem to have been too intimidated by the corvi to engage the Romans properly on the open sea.

Siege of Syracuse II

2011-05-05T05:17:00.006+08:00

The Athenian siege of Syracuse, 415-413 BC. The scene is from 414 BC, when the Athenians bad established a fort at Syca ('the fig tree ') on the Epipolae plateau above Syracuse, and embarked upon their usual strategy of periteichismos [encirclement]. Specialist masons and carpenters appear to have accompanied the army to Sicily, and tools for construction work were a normal part of their equipment.

In the spring of 414 the Athenians renewed offensive operations at Syracuse. Despite Syracuse's work during the winter, the Athenians captured the fortifications at Euryalus close to Syracuse and drove the Syracusans behind their city's walls. The Athenians then constructed a fortification, known as the Circle, along with other protective walls. They also destroyed several Syracusan counterwalls. Unfortunately for the Athenians, Lamachus was killed in the fighting, and leadership devolved on the ineffective Nicias.

Syracuse was now in despair, with the city on the brink of defeat. At this point a Corinthian ship made its way into the harbor with news that help was coming. Fortified by this development, the leaders of Syracuse vowed to fight on. Gylippus's expeditionary force then landed in northern Sicily and marched to Syracuse; Nicias failed to challenge it en route. Gylippus's men strengthened the defenses of Syracuse and, in the spring of 413, won a stunning victory over the Athenian Navy, capturing its base.

Rather than lose prestige by abandoning the siege, the Athenians decided to send out a second expedition. Led by Demosthenes, one of Athens's most distinguished generals, it consisted of 73 triremes carrying 5,000 hoplites and 3,000 bowmen, slingers, and javelin throwers-in all some 15,000 men-and arrived at Syracuse in July 413.

Demosthenes attempted to destroy one of the Syracusan counterwalls; when this proved unsuccessful, he mounted a night attack. It caught the defenders by surprise, and the Athenians took Euryalus and much of the Epipolaen plateau. Enough of Gylippus's troops held fast, and the Syracusans mounted an immediate counterattack that caught the Athenians disorganized and inflicted heavy casualties. Cut off from supplies and prey to enemy cavalry, the Athenians attempted a breakout from the harbor of Syracuse in September 413 with 110 ships-both fit and unfit for action-but were contained by a great boom of block ships across the mouth of the Great Harbor as well as some 76 Corinthian and Syracuse ships. The naval battle ended in Athenian defeat, with Athens losing 50 ships to its enemy's 26.

The Athenians still had 60 triremes to their enemy's 50, and the generals wanted to try another breakout. The crews refused and demanded an overland retreat. Instead of setting out at once in the midst of Syracusan victory celebrations, the Athenians paused for 36 hours because of a false report (which had been spread to gain time until the victory celebrations had ended) that the retreat route was blocked.

Once the retreat was under way, 6,000 Athenian men under Demosthenes were offered freedom if they would desert. They refused and fought on until the situation was hopeless. On receiving a guarantee that his men's lives would be spared, however, the Athenian commander surrendered. Another group of 1,000 men was also forced to surrender. Nicias and Demosthenes were butchered, against the will of Gylippus. These 7,000 men-out of 45,000-50,000 who had taken part in the expedition on the Athenian side-were sent off to the stone quarries of Syracuse. The expedition also cost Athens some 200 triremes. Thucydides concluded, "This was the greatest Hellenic achievement of any in this war, or, in my opinion in, Hellenic history; at once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered" (Finley, The Greek Historians, 379).

The annihilation of the Athenian fleet and army in Sicily shook the Athenian Empire to its core. The islands of Euboea, Lesbos, and Chios now revolted against Athens. Sparta built 100 warships, and Persia set out to regain its lost Ionian dominions.

Athens might have had peace in 410, but its people were buoyed by a naval victory that year and rejected Spartan overtures. In 405 an Athenian fleet of 170 ships was taken while beached in the "Battle" of Aegospotami at the Hellespont while taking on supplies. Lysander, the Spartan naval commander, then captured the remaining Athenian garrisons at the Hellespont and severed Athenian access to Ukrainian wheat supplies. The Spartans permitted their Athenian prisoners to return to Athens in order to increase the strain on its scant food stocks. Pausanias, the second Spartan king, then brought a large land force to Athens and laid siege to the city by land, while Lysander arrived with 150 ships and blockaded it by sea. Starved into submission, Athens surrendered in 404. Corinth and Thebes urged that the city should be utterly destroyed and its people sold into slavery. To their credit the Spartans rejected these proposals, insisting that the city's Long Walls and fortifications all be demolished. Athens also had to give up all its foreign possessions and its fleet, and the city was forced to enter into alliance with Sparta and accept its leadership. The Peloponnesian Wars were over, and so too was the period of Athenian supremacy.

References Finley, M. I., ed. The Greek Historians: The Essence of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius. New York: Viking, 1959. Green, Peter. Armada from Athens. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 2003. Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Viking, 2003.

Siege of Syracuse I

2011-05-05T05:17:00.005+08:00

The final sea battle in the Great Harbour at Syracuse, 413 BC. The largest single expedition that Athens mounted in the Peloponnesian War was to Sicily in 415 BC, consisting of 134 triremes. Reinforcements of 73 triremes followed the next year. In the first sea battle the Syracusans manned 76 triremes. Yet in spite of their advantage in numbers and skill, poor leadership meant that the Athenian armada was trapped in the Great Harbour, where their skill could not be exercised. The outcome in 413 BC was to be a total disaster.
Based on Thucydides 7.70, this reconstruction shows the first impetus of the Athenian attack, which carried them through the Syracusan vessels guarding the boom across the harbour mouth. The Athenians began loosening the chained merchantmen, but then other Syracusan warships joined in from all directions and the fighting became general throughout the harbour. Thucydides emphasizes that it was a harder sea-fight than any of the previous ones, but despite the best efforts of the Athenian helmsmen, because there were so many ships crammed in such a confined space, there were few opportunities to maneuver-and-ram, backing water (anakrousis) and breaking through the enemy line (diekplous) being impossible. Instead, accidental collisions were numerous, leading to fierce fights across decks and much confusion. In other words, this was an engagement in which Athenian skill was nullified.

Date 415–413 BCE
Location Syracuse in Sicily
Opponents (* winner) *Syracuse and Sparta Athens and its allies
Commander Gylippus Alcibiades, Lamachus, Nicias, Demosthenes
Approx. # Troops Sparta: 4,400; Syracuse: Unknown but probably equal to Athens and allies 42,000
Importance Leads to revolts against Athens from within its empire

The siege of the city-state of Syracuse in Sicily by Athens and its allies during 415-413 BCE initiated the final phase of the Second Peloponnesian War (431- 404 BCE). Alcibiades, a nephew of Pericles, convinced Athenians that if they could secure Sicily they would have the resources to defeat their enemies. The grain of Sicily was immensely important to the people of the Peloponnese, and cutting it off could turn the tide of war. The argument was correct, but securing Sicily was the problem.

The Athenians put together a formidable expeditionary force. A contemporary historian, Thucydides, described the expeditionary force that set out in June 415 as "by far the most costly and splendid Hellenic force that had ever been sent out by a single city up to that time” (Finley, The Greek Historians, 314). The naval force consisted of 134 triremes (100 of them from Athens and the remainder from Chios and other Athenian allies), 30 supply ships, and more than 100 other vessels. In addition to sailors, rowers, and marines, the force included some 5,100 hoplites and 1,300 archers, javelin men, and slingers as well as 300 horses. In all, the expedition numbered perhaps 27,000 officers and men. Three generals—Alcibiades, Lamachus, and Nicias—commanded.

The original plan was for a quick demonstration in force against Syracuse and then a return of the expeditionary force to Greece. Alcibiades considered this a disgrace. He urged that the expeditionary force stir up political opposition to Syracuse in Sicily. In a council of war, Lamachus pressed for an immediate descent on Syracuse while the city was unprepared and its citizens afraid, but Alcibiades prevailed.

The expedition’s leaders then made a series of approaches to leaders of the other Sicilian cities; all ended in failure, with no city of importance friendly to Athens. Syracuse used this time to strengthen its defenses. Alcibiades meanwhile was recalled to stand trial in Athens for impiety.

Nicias and Lamachus then launched an attack on Syracuse and won a battle there, but the arrival of winter prevented further progress, and they suspended offensive operations. What had been intended as a lightning campaign now became a prolonged siege that sapped Athenian energies. Alicibades, fearing for his life, managed to escape Athens and find refuge in Sparta. He not only betrayed the Athenian plan of attack against Syracuse but also spoke to the Spartan assembly and strongly supported a Syracusan plea for aid. The Spartans then sent out a force of their own commanded by Gylippus, one of their best generals.

Weather and Sea around Sicily

2011-02-28T20:04:00.000+08:00

Ancient Sicily is the boundary mark between the eastern and central Mediterranean. This boundary is not, however, a meteorological one, for, all round Sicily, winds generally blow from the west, becoming more and more regular during the sailing season, and blowing from west to northwest or even north between Sicily and Crete, from spring to late August. The real meteorological frontiers are in fact Sardinia and the Balearic archipelagos. Nevertheless, Sicily determines two straits: the strait of Messina and the Channel between Africa and Sicily, the latter being itself divided into 3 channels:

• Malta Channel, north of a line drawn between Malta and Pantelleria,

• Sicily Channel, between Pantelleria and Sicily

• Pantelleria Channel between Pantelleria and Cape Bon

The strait of Messina is a very complex zone (Flesca 2002): violent, sudden and turbulent winds, along with strong, alternate tidal streams, whose directions change every six hours, make it not only a very complex and dangerous zone, but also an area whose crossing may need several stops in order to wait for better conditions. The myth of Charybdis and Scylla reminds us the fears it inspired. In fact, journeys bound both southwards and northward along the strait could hardly be sailed in a straight line, given the capricious character of winds and the change of direction of tidal streams. It could take several days to go from the so-called “Adriatic” (the sea south Messina) to the Tyrrhenian basin and vice-versa. Several calls were necessary, as shown by the end of Paul’s travel when the Apostle sailed, not on a small coaster, but on a grain-ship from Alexandria, which had wintered at Malta. Having left Malta it stopped first at Syracuse, then at Rhegium, before entering the Tyrrhenian, proceeding straight to Puteoli. Travelers often preferred to go by land between Syracuse and some port on the northern shores of Sicily. So did Apollonius of Tyana (Philostr. VA, V. 11; VIII. 15).

Though situated almost 40 nm east the direct line between Cape Bon and Cape Lilibeo, Pantelleria divides the Channel between Cape Bon and Cape Feto in two almost equal parts. In the main, this channel has the same orientation as the northwest prevailing winds, generating a reasonable current of half a knot to one knot, running eastwards, and getting stronger in Malta’s channel. This undoubtedly made the direct route fast and easy for ships sailing eastwards, but longer and more difficult for those sailing in the opposite direction, especially for ancient sailing ships. This was also true for oared vessels, whose ability for tacking was scarce. One can imagine how difficult a westward journey must have been when a ship whose speed, under good conditions could hardly reach 3 knots, had to face a 1 kn. current from the opposite direction. This plight is especially accentuated when one considers that the best angle one could achieve was about 60° from the wind (and actually much less given the drift). Furthermore, the square sail, even when transformed into a triangular one, made tacking a long and fastidious operation as the ship had to wear. The best solution would have been to sail southwards in order to reach the sheltered zones between Lesser Syrtis and Cape Bon, characterized by smooth summer sea-breezes blowing from the East.

Subjective geography and sea-routes

The way ancient writers used to describe those islands or how they inserted them in a series of sea-measurements gives a clear idea of some changes in their place in sea-routes, and in political sea-power. Islands, even those considered by ancient writers as “pelagic” ones (i.e. . those situated one day far or more from the mainland), such as Pantelleria, Malta and Gozo, were generally described apart from the mainland. However, after a certain stretch of land islands were supposed to fit with. The way they are described thus shows the subjective perception of their links with continents. Pantelleria, Malta, Gozo and Lampedusa are described by ps.-Skylax (111) with regard to Cape Bon, which is quite surprising as far as Malta, Gozo and Lampedusa are concerned, but is quite normal to who considers them as Punic islands, as ps.-Skylax did in the IVth century.

Diodorus Siculus (V. 12) chose to associate not only Malta and Gozo, but also Kerhennah, with Sicily, instead of Africa. This point of view is clearly an Italic one, and reflects the fall of these islands into Roman hands. On the other hand, Strabo, who uses at least three different sources, mentions the islands alternately as part of Sicily - the latter being considered as part of Italy (VI.2.11) -, or Africa (XVII.3.16). Later authors, writing after the Roman conquest, when these islands were made part of prouincia Sicilia, described them entirely with Sicily. In his overview of the Mediterranean, Strabo names Pantelleria, together with Aegimuros, as one of the islands “in front of Sicily and Libya” (II.5.19, C 123), but omits Malta, which found no place with respect to another land or the division of seas inherited from Eratosthenes. It seems that, by later times, Malta had no substantial existence in the Greek framework of the Mediterranean. According to Mela (II.7.120) and Pliny (III. 92), depending on the same lost unknown author, Gaulos, Melita and Cossura were circa Siciliam, but Africam uersus or in Africam uersae thus closer to Sicily, but on the way to Africa. Orosius (IV.8.5) names Lipara and Melita as insulae Siciliae nobiles. Some scholars (Silbermann) consider that according to Mela (II.7.120), Pliny (III.92), and Martianus Capella (VI. 648), all three islands were parts of the fretum Siculum. This is clearly true of Martianus Capella, but he probably misunderstood Mela, Pliny and their common source. According to Procopius (BV 1.14) Gaulus and Melita “marked the boundary between the Adriatic and Tuscan Seas”. For classical writers down to Pliny, “Adriatic” meant the whole sea between Peloponnesus and Sicily. The Maltese Archipelago had later reached the status of boundary-marker between the central Mediterranean system, and the west-Italian one, which then included Sicily.

Subjective geography thus shows that bridging one island with one continent or another relied much upon geopolitical considerations rather than upon Natural Landscape. It also reflects the reality of sea-routes. Pantelleria is almost always situated in respect of both Cape Bon or Kelybia (Aspis/ Clupea) and Lilybaeum.

Malta and Gozo were not considered by ancient writers as part of an archipelago. This is by no mean surprising: the same situation may be observed on other neighbouring city-islands such as Rhenea and Delos in the Cyclades. It is however of major interest to note that they belonged to a group of islands including Pantelleria, Gozo, Malta, Lampedusa and Kerkennah. In Silius Italicus, Malta appears before Cossyra, whose name, in contrast, occurs together with Gozo’s (XI. 272-274). A natural link between Pantelleria and Malta is also suggested by the naming of Malta immediately after Cossyrus, as situated further East away from Cape Bon, and by Strabo’s measurement (XVII.3.16) there was a very short distance between the two islands, that of 500 stadia. Editors have generally considered that the number is erroneous (it was probably closer to 1,500, equal to two days and one night at sea). This mistake may be traced to Strabo’s source, who considered, like Silius Italicus, that Pantelleria and the Maltese archipelago were close together. In turn this perception was probably due to the speed of the eastward route between the two points.

On the contrary, the three Islands mentioned by Diodorus (Malta, Gozo and Kerkennah) mark the westwards sea-route between Sicily and Africa through the so-called isole Pelagie. This is the exact route followed by Belisarius’ fleet[2] (Procop., BV 1.14), from Syracuse to Malta and Gozo, and thence, after a one day sail, on to Caput-Vada (Ras Kapudia), about 75° from the prevailing winds. Thence, ships sailing to Carthage had to follow the coastline and make for Cape Bon. This explains why Agathocles’ fleet needed 6 days (DS XX.6.3) (after leaving from Syracuse) before sighting Africa and landing, maybe at Cape Bon (Casson 1971: 295, n.108), but possibly at any other point along the eastern shores of modern Tunisia. It was already familiar to an Athenian such as Thucydides, who was able to estimate its normal duration. The abnormally high freight-rate from Carthage to Sicily in the Diocletian’s Prices Edict probably refers to the same route and to the same direction (Arnaud 2007), and shows that it was probably the normal route westwards (fig. 1).

A journey from Syracuse to Carthage may thus have lasted more than thrice the normal duration of the same journey in the reverse direction. The coasting part of the same route was probably followed by the Peloponnesian, sent off in the spring from Peloponnese in the merchantman, who arrived from Neapolis, in Libya, at Selinus in August. Thucydides considered Neapolis (= Nabeul) as “the nearest point to Sicily, which is only two days' and a night's voyage” to Selinus (Thc., VII.50.2). Pantelleria was just in the middle of this route and visible from Nabeul. Although Aspis/Clupea is geographically closer to Sicily, Neapolis is actually closer for a ship sailing from Lesser Syrtis.

By the mid-4th century, when Pantelleria was reaching a noteworthy place in trade-routes, as shown by the importance of the so-called “Pantellerian ware” ceramics (Massa 2002), the Expositio totius mundi et gentium lists Sicily (66), Cossora (67) and Sardinia (68), suggesting that they were part of a same route, maybe in a broader context characterised by the increasing importance of coasting, making Pantelleria a convenient relay.

It is thus clear that the islands organized, at least as landmarks, and possibly as commercial calls, relays or destinations, were the major sea-routes round Sicily. The unusual importance of Marettimo in the maritime itinerary within the Itinerarium Antonini as compared with Pantelleria suggests that it reflects the “direct” route between Carthage and Pozzuoli/Rome (Arnaud 2004).

It is otherwise noteworthy that, according to the Ancients, as early as Dicaearch, Rhodes, the southernmost capes of Peloponnesus, the Strait of Messina (fretum Siculum or, in Greek, simply “Porthmos”, “the Strait” par excellence), South of Sardinia, the Pillars of Herakles and Gades were distributed along the same parallel. The shape of Sicily was supposed to be roughly that of an equilateral triangle whose horizontal base was made of the shores between Cape Lilybaeum and Cape Pachynum, so that, for the Ancients, the shortest way from East to West did not run through the Sicily-Malta Channel, but through the Strait of Messina. This misconception is a direct consequence of the opinion held by the Greeks that the Straits of Messina provided a more convenient sailing route (fig. 2-3).

Changes in subjective geography indicate changes in perception of the importance of islands which reflect actual changes of their role and integration in maritime trade-routes: the emergence of Malta and Gozo as the boundary-mark between two systems, is probably the clearest sign of such changes that was impacted by Roman domination (Arnaud 2004).

[2] “And setting sail quickly they touched at the islands of Gaulus and Melita,[47] which mark the boundary between the Adriatic and Tuscan Seas. There a strong east wind arose for them, and on the following day it carried the ships to the point of Libya, at the place which the Romans call in their own tongue "Shoal's Head." For its name is "Caputvada," and it is five days' journey from Carthage for an unencumbered traveller”.

Website: Jewel of Muscat

2011-02-14T14:57:00.000+08:00

Jewel of Muscat

After completing her voyage last year, the Jewel of Muscat ship is currently being prepared for its move to a maritime museum in Singapore.
In the meantime, there continues to be widespread interest in the historic project. The second TV documentary about the ship has been completed, and will be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel later in 2011.
The one-hour programme follows the ship as it sails from Oman to Singapore – and includes dramatic filming of the ship at sea.

The Roman Navy: Masters of the Mediterranean

2011-02-07T19:02:00.000+08:00

By Richard Gabriel
In 31 bc the last two great generals of the Roman civil wars faced each other at Actium off the coast of Greece in a naval battle that would settle the future of Rome. For months Mark Antony and Egyptian Queen Cleopatra had tried in vain to break Octavian's land and naval blockade of their forces in Greece. By late summer Antony's armies were low on supplies and ravaged by disease. On September 2 his fleet of more than 200 ships carrying 20,000 marines and 2,000 archers put to sea to challenge the blockade. They faced a fleet of some 400 ships carrying 16,000 marines and 3,000 archers under the command of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.

Antony's fleet comprised big quinqueremes and even larger ships of Levantine design whose decks were high off the water, affording his marines and archers a significant advantage in close combat. Agrippa's ships were mostly liburnae—smaller, lower biremes of Illyrian design constructed two years earlier in Naples. But they were lighter and faster than those of his opponent.

Antony intended to fight a typical Roman sea battle: Close with the enemy ship, board it with marines and slaughter the enemy. Agrippa, however, was the most daring and imaginative commander Rome had produced since Caesar and was the real genius behind Octavian's military successes. He had a different plan.

Antony's 5,000-yard line of ships was the first to attack. For four hours the fleets skirmished and maneuvered in light winds without result. Just past noon the breeze freshened, and Antony's ships increased the intervals between each ship to lengthen their line and prevent envelopment by Agrippa's longer line of ships. But Agrippa had anticipated this move, and his biremes raced toward the heavier and slower quinqueremes, passing them closely to break their oars and rudders. Agrippa then brought his numerical advantage to bear by having several biremes attack a single quinquereme. Whenever a bireme successfully rammed a quinquereme, it would disengage and maneuver away. After a few hours many of Antony's large ships lay dead in the water, awaiting the final boarding attack.

The attack never came. Instead, Agrippa's biremes maneuvered close to the drifting quinqueremes and with onboard ballistae, or crossbows, launched flaming pots of pitch and charcoal at the ships. Historian Dio Cassius wrote later that crews tried to quench the fiery projectiles with water, but "as their buckets were small and few and half-filled, they were not always successful. Then they smothered the fires with their mantles and even with corpses. They hacked off burning parts of the ships and tried to grapple hostile ships to escape into them. Many were burned alive or jumped overboard or killed each other to avoid the flames." Thousands perished.

Thanks to Agrippa, Octavian's Rome was now master of the Mediterranean. Yet there was no permanent navy. Until Actium, the empire had simply created one whenever the need arose. Octavian thus established the Roman imperial navy, which historian Chester Starr termed "the most advanced and widely based naval structure in antiquity." For the next 500 years the Roman Empire would control the region, depending as much on its fleets as on its legions and roads for survival.

At the outset of the 3rd century bc, Carthage, with its fleet of 300 ships, was the preeminent naval power in the western Mediterranean. At that time, Rome had no naval force or experience in naval warfare. But when the First Punic War broke out between the two powers in 264 bc, Rome quickly realized that victory could only be achieved at sea. The Senate ordered Cornelius Scipio, grandfather of Scipio Africanus, to construct the first Roman fleet.

Italy had large forests of fir from which to build boats but no ship designers, crews or captains to take them to sea. The Romans hit upon the idea of copying a quinquereme that had fallen into their hands. Although commonly believed to have come from the Carthaginians, it was actually a vessel from the navy of Hannibal of Rhodes. Using the captured boat as a template, the Romans constructed a fleet of 100 quinqueremes and 20 triremes in just two months. As historian Polybius described, production required 165 woodcutters, carpenters and metalworkers working full-time on each of the ships, or a labor force of 20,000 men.

Manpower shortages and the cost of trained crews, more than the cost of the ships themselves, were often the most important factors in determining the size of a country's navy in antiquity. Galley crews were not slaves but expensive skilled freemen. So, as it constructed a fleet, Rome instead turned to its army conscripts, teaching them rudimentary rowing and maneuvers on wooden ship mock-ups onshore. This was the navy that put to sea to fight the largest and most experienced naval force in the western Mediterranean.

Naval tactics of the day relied on skilled captains and rowers to maneuver their vessel past an opposing ship and break its oars, leaving it crippled and vulnerable. The attacker could then pierce the hull of the helpless boat with a metal prow ram and leave it to sink.

Lacking skilled captains and trained crews, the Romans played to their strongest military tactic: close infantry combat. A Roman captain would use catapults to launch grappling irons at the enemy ship, holding it fast while marines boarded and engaged in close combat. To facilitate boarding, the Romans introduced the corvus, a wooden boarding ramp 36 feet long and 4 feet wide with railings on either side and a long metal spike extending from its bottom. Using ropes, the men would swing the ramp over the side of their ship onto the enemy's deck. The spike would drive into the deck, holding both ships together and steadying the ramp as Roman marines poured across. The new tactics caught the Carthaginians by surprise at the Battle of Mylae in 260 bc, when the Romans boarded and destroyed their ships one by one.

In 256 bc the Romans launched an amphibious invasion of North Africa, sending a fleet of 250 warships and 80 transports carrying 60,000 men. Two hundred Carthaginian warships met the Roman fleet off Mount Economus. This time, seamanship rather than manpower decided the outcome, as Roman commanders acted on their own initiative to thwart multiple attacks against the troop transports. While the Romans lost 24 ships, the Carthaginians suffered 30 sunk and 50 others captured. The Roman invasion force got through and landed in North Africa, only to be defeated in a land battle and forced to withdraw.

Roman naval losses during the First Punic War were extremely high, due mostly to the Roman practice of sailing in rough weather, as the weight of the corvus and its position on the bow made ships especially unstable in rough seas. Rome lost as many as 600 Roman warships, 1,000 transports and more than 400,000 men, a number approaching the total American dead in World War II. Probably no war in naval history has recorded as many casualties from drowning, losses representing some 15 percent of the able-bodied men of military age in Italy. Polybius called it the bloodiest war in history. Despite the casualties, the Romans pressed on, replacing lost ships and training fresh crews.

In 241 bc the Carthaginians sought to lift the Roman siege of Lilybaeum in Sicily by sending a naval force to break the Roman blockade. Certain of victory, the Carthaginians sent no marines with their ships, planning to acquire them in Lilybaeum following the battle. Despite foul weather, the Roman captains put to sea to intercept the Carthaginian fleet. In a clash near the Aegates Islands off Sicily, the Romans sank 50 ships and captured 70 of the 200 Carthaginian combatants that took part. Its last fleet gone and lacking enough money and raw materials to build another, Carthage surrendered. Rome now commanded the western Mediterranean.

Two decades later Rome and Carthage were again at war. Probably for financial reasons, Carthage had not rebuilt its combat fleet. When the Second Punic War (218–202 bc) broke out, it had no more than 50 warships to counter the Roman fleet of 220. Hannibal was forced to take his army overland through Spain rather than landing directly on the Italian mainland. Without a navy, Hannibal could not shift his forces from theater to theater as could the Romans, and his supply lines to Carthage were always under threat. As a result, there were no major sea engagements during that long war. In 204 bc a Roman invasion force of 400 transports carrying 26,000 troops and 1,200 horses and protected by 40 warships crossed from Sicily and invaded North Africa. Two years later Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Carthage surrendered. Now only Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire stood between Rome and complete dominance of the Mediterranean.

Rome had learned that the proper role of a navy was to support ground operations and that naval combatants could not bring about a strategic decision by themselves. Thus it placed equal emphasis on its transport ships and combatants.

War broke out with the Seleucid Empire in the eastern Mediterranean in 192 bc. As Antiochus maintained a large fleet, transporting the Roman army across the Aegean from Greece was a risky proposition. Lucius Scipio, the brother of Scipio Africanus, marched his army overland to cross the Hellespont and take the war to the Asian mainland (present-day western Turkey). Transports ferried his troops across the strait while other naval units blockaded the Syrian fleet at Ephesus. For weeks both sides skirmished off the coast. In December 190 bc, as the Roman army marched down the coast to bring the fight to Antiochus, the Seleucid fleet tried to break the Roman blockade. In a battle off Myonnesus, the Romans carried the day. A few weeks later Antiochus' army was defeated at Magnesia. Rome now controlled the entire Mediterranean. Only Rhodes, a Roman ally, and Egypt, a broken reed, were left with significant naval assets.

Regardless, Rome still considered itself a land power, and over the next century, wrote Chester Starr in The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History, "the Romans carried out the most complete process of naval disarmament that the world has ever seen and let her own naval establishment rot away." That decision led to one of the worst waves of piracy in classical times. By 102 bc more than 1,000 pirate ships preyed on Mediterranean shipping, and more than 400 coastal settlements had been sacked, their populations sold at Roman slave markets. Rome finally reacted when the pirates threatened its grain imports. In 67 bc the Senate sent Pompey the Great to eradicate the outlaw scourge. He attacked the pirates' coastal strongholds and regained control of the seas within a year. The experience convinced Rome to rebuild its navy.

Until then, Roman naval experience had been restricted to the tideless Mediterranean. It fell to Julius Caesar to fight the first Roman naval battle on the ocean. In 56 bc he launched a campaign against the Veneti in Gaul, who lived along the Bay of Biscay and were excellent sailors. While Caesar moved his armies overland, Decimus Brutus commanded the fleet that engaged the Veneti navy.

The Gallic ships were superior to Roman quinqeremes in every respect. Constructed of oak, they were almost impervious to ramming, with flat bottoms better suited to the coastal shallows. They were higher at the deck line with high sterns and prows from which to fight off Roman marines. The Gallic ships also flew large leather sails that withstood high winds better than canvas and enabled them to run faster before the wind, easily eluding their foes.

But their great strength also revealed a weakness, as the Gallic ships had no oars and relied on the mainsail for propulsion. Supportive halyards were tethered to the deck on either side of the mast. The Romans devised a new weapon to cripple the ship. "Sharp and pointed hooks secured to the ends of long poles," wrote Caesar of the device, "after the fashion of siege hooks. When these contrivances had caught the halyards supporting the yards, the Roman ship was driven away by the oars, and the halyards were cut in consequence, so the yards fell to the deck." Their mainsail halyards thus severed, the Gallic ships were immobilized. The Romans could now close with their grappling irons and deploy marines to deal with the crew.

Octavian had formally established the Roman imperial navy following the battle of Actium, when he sent Antony's captured ships to Forum Iulii (present-day Fréjus on the south coast of France), establishing a permanent naval base to control the northern Mediterranean. He started with two major fleet commands: Classis Praetoria Misenensis, at Misenum on the Gulf of Naples, to protect Italy itself and its grain imports in the south; and Classis Praetoria Ravennatis, at Ravenna at the head of the Adriatic, to deal with trouble in Dalmatia and Illyria. To protect Egypt, the source of Rome's grain supply, Octavian created the Classis Augusta Alexandrina, at Alexandria.

Campaigns along the German Rhine (AD 5–16) necessitated creation of Classis Germanica, with heavier seagoing ships based at the river's mouth and lighter river squadrons based at Altenburg near Cologne. The invasion and eventual conquest of Britain (AD 43–60) also required strong naval logistical support. The main Roman naval base was at Gesoraicum (present-day Boulogne) and served as the headquarters for Classis Britannica. Among the navy's significant achievements during the conquest was its circumnavigation of Scotland, proving that Britain was an island.

After the Armenian wars, Nero (reign: ad 54–68) created the Classis Pontica to control the Black Sea. The empire's other great water border lay along the Danube. The river splits at the Kazan Gorge, which prompted the Romans to create two fleets: Classis Pannonica in the west and Classis Moesica in the east. Classis Moesica provided naval and logistical support to Trajan's conquest of Dacia (AD 101–106). Under Hadrian (reign: ad 117–138) Classis Moesica controlled the mouth of the Danube and the area north, while Classis Pontica was responsible for the south and the Hellespont. Later, smaller fleets such as the Classis Nova Libyca were created to patrol the western littoral, while a larger fleet, Classis Syriaca, supported Roman forces on the border with Parthia.

Fleets were usually collocated with legion camps and provided logistical support to the army, transported troops and patrolled the rivers and coast with complements of marines. The navy remained subordinate to the army throughout the imperial period. Naval personnel did not think of themselves as sailors but as soldiers, even choosing to memorialize themselves as legionnaires on their tombstones. Naval crews were organized into centuries just like the army, and each ship had a centurion aboard with an assistant who fulfilled the role of first sergeant. The centurion was responsible for teaching infantry tactics, training his men to repel boarders or act as an assault party.

Fleets were organized into squadrons of about 10 ships. Commanding officers were drawn from the equestrian class of Roman nobles, and fleet commanders carried the rank of prefect. The sailors were free men dawn from the lower ranks of society. Few were Romans, however; most were drawn from seafaring peoples of the eastern Mediterranean or the provinces. Service was for 26 years, and citizenship was awarded on discharge.

The navy's role changed over time, from active combat fleet to multipurpose military service and finally to a smaller, mobile force. Once rival navies were no longer a concern, the river fleets (Rhine, Danube and Nile) came into being to support ground operations and secure the imperial borders. Historian Publius Tacitus recorded that as early as ad 15 Germanicus' campaign in Germany required a new type of ship to navigate the inland waterways and canals. His ships had narrow sterns and bows, wide hulls and flat keels to ply the shallow rivers. They could be sailed or rowed and had covers to protect men and cargo from the weather.

Increased coastal and river patrols eventually called for a fast, light combat ship with a shallow draft. The Romans chose a modified version of Agrippa's liburna, reduced to about 80 feet in length. Its forward-raking mast flew a single sail, while its crew of 60 manned two rows of oars. Under sail it could make close to 14 knots. Built decked or undecked, the ship could carry 30 to 50 marines, depending on the mission.

The fleets became vitally important to the defense and survival of the empire, as they patrolled its waterways and borders, safeguarding regional trade routes. In times of crisis, the navy switched roles to transport troops and supplies, but even then its light combatants could be brought into play in direct support of ground operations.

Rome ruled the seas for more than four centuries, until finally, weakened by repeated barbarian invasions from the east, it was unable to sustain the navy. By 450 the Vandals had established a kingdom in North Africa and built a powerful navy. Their king, Gaiseric, sent his fleets to raid the Mediterranean coasts and shipping and eventually to attack Rome itself. By the time of Gaiseric's death in 477, the Vandals had eliminated Rome as a naval power and become the new masters of the Mediterranean.

For further reading, Richard Gabriel recommends: Greek and Roman Naval Warfare, by William Rodgers, and The Roman Imperial Navy, by Chester Starr.

The Ottoman conduct of Naval warfare, 1370s–1453

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Naval and river fleets
For an empire possessing large dominions in both Asia Minor and Europe it was essential to secure the continuity of communication and transfer of forces between the two continents. This could not be achieved without effective control of the Straits, a task which, in turn, could not be fulfilled without a naval fleet, especially as long as Byzantium existed in the heart of the empire.

However, lacking any seafaring experience, the Ottomans were forced to turn for help to various Turkish forces who practised piracy on the Aegean. A Venetian report suggests that they had a smaller fleet of their own as early as 1374. After the conquest of the maritime principalities of Aydýn and Menteşe several skilled men and experts came into Ottoman service, giving a great impetus to the development of the navy. The Ottomans also used and integrated Byzantino-Greek traditions and manpower, just as they were ready to learn from, and accept the help of, the Latins, especially the Genoese, in the Levant. It was the Genoese who undertook several times to ship the Ottoman troops across the sea. In shipbuilding and dockyard technology, they were most strongly influenced by the Venetians. This openness and multi-directional acculturation is reflected by the Ottoman nautical vocabulary which abounds in Greek and Latin/Italian words.

During Bayezid I’s reign, the Ottoman fleet had a mere seventeen vessels, whereas around 1402 a traveller reported forty to sixty ships. The first marine base and main crossing point of the Ottomans was Gelibolu (Gallipoli), earlier the centre of the Byzantine fleet. The Byzantine historiographer Doukas recorded that Sultan Bayezid had it considerably rebuilt and fortified with towers to make it suitable for shipbuilding and the accommodation of large galleys, and to enable its naval forces to control the commercial traffic through the Straits and to levy duties on it. The harbour consisted of an outer and an inner pool separated by a bridge fortified by a three-storey tower. The mouth of the harbour was closed by a chain in case of necessity. By 1422, further fortifications (walls and towers) had been built, necessitated by the enemy attacks of the previous years.

The Gelibolu base had irritated the Venetians from the beginning, since they were worried that the strengthening Ottoman naval forces would threaten the freedom of their trade. The first open sea battle between the two powers took place on 29 May 1416, after the Ottoman fleet, consisting of thirty vessels and led by Admiral Çali, had plundered the Venetian islands. The Venetians scored a crushing victory, seizing twelve, fourteen or twenty-seven ships, according to different sources. In the course of the Venetian–Ottoman war of 1423–30 the Venetians broke into the inner harbour of Gelibolu but in the end failed to keep the docks.

By the middle of the century the size of the Ottoman fleet, which consisted mainly of oared galleys with single masts and lateen sails (kadirga), had increased considerably. According to a Venetian eye-witness account, the Ottoman fleet blockading Constantinople in 1453 comprised 145 ships: 12 galleys, 70 to 80 large galiots (fusta/kalyata), 20 to 25 parandaria and other ships, including pirate vessels. In addition to the warships, the Ottomans probably from an early date used larger ships for transporting men, horses, ammunition and, later, ordnance. The fleet admiral’s post was probably filled by the district governor of Gelibolu, although the first evidence to verify this assumption dates from 1453.

The Ottoman fleet was for a long period deployed around the Straits, its activity being restricted to covering the crossings, as well as attacking enemy ships and shores. In the late 1420s, it ventured into the Aegean and, in support of the land troops, took part in combined attacks, for example in the sieges of Thessalonike (1430) and Constantinople (1453). The role of the navy in both cases was to complete the blockade of the city on the side facing the sea and deprive the defenders of the possibility of obtaining external help. Although it was a great step forward, the Ottoman warships were still far from standing their ground in an open formal battle with the more heavily built, better equipped western fleets. The fact, however, that apart from the Venetians and the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes, only the Ottomans had a regular navy, considerably increased the political weight of their state.

When the Ottomans reached the Danube and encountered the Hungarian ships laden with artillery, they quickly recognised the importance of river fleets. Apparently, they already had river forces on the Danube and on the Morava in Serbia during Murad II’s reign. Hungarian sources inform us that when King Sigismund laid siege to the fortress of Galambóc (Golubac, Güğercinlik) on the Danube in 1428, the Ottomans tried unsuccessfully to break through the Hungarian blockade with ships sent up the Morava. In 1433, Bertrandon de la Broquière noted that the sultan kept eighty to a hundred fustas (galiots, small oared warships) at the confluence of the Serbian rivers, the western and southern Morava, for the crossing of horses and troops, and that the ships were guarded by 300 men, replaced every two months. He found another hundred fustas at Galambóc, also used to transport soldiers across to Hungary. It has been suggested that the Ottomans may have used some sort of ordnance aboard these ships because their Hungarian counterparts were also equipped with small cannons. On the basis of this information and these suggestions, it can be concluded that river flotillas must have been employed for the transport of troops and animals as well as for the siege of riverside fortresses in a variety of ways: taking troops to the shore, blockading a fortress and shooting at the fortress wall from the cannons aboard.

Polyxenidas

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Polyxenidas a Rhodian general and admiral, who was exiled from his native country, and entered the service of Antiochus III the Great, king of Seleucid Empire. We first find him mentioned in 209 BC, when he commanded a body of Cretans mercenaries during the expedition of Antiochus into Hyrcania . But in 192 BC, when the Syrian king had determined upon war with Rome, and crossed over into Greece to commence it, Polyxenidas obtained the chief command of his fleet. After co-operating with Menippus in the reduction of Chalcis, he was sent back to Asia to assemble additional forces during the winter.

We do not hear anything of his operations in the ensuing campaign, 191 BC, but when Antiochus, after his defeat at the Battle of Thermopylae (191 BC) , withdrew to Asia, Polyxenidas was again appointed to command the king's main fleet on the Ionian coast. Having learnt that the praetor Gaius Livius Salinator was arrived at Delos with the Roman fleet, he strongly urged upon the king the expediency of giving him battle without delay, before he could unite his fleet with those of Eumenes II of Pergamon and the Rhodians. Though his advice was followed, it was too late to prevent the junction of Eumenes with Livius, but Polyxenidas gave battle to their combined fleets off Corycus. The superiority of numbers, however, decided the victory in favour of the allies ; thirteen ships of the Syrian fleet were taken and ten sunk, while Polyxenidas himself, with the remainder, took refuge in the port of Ephesus.

Here he spent the winter in active preparations for a renewal of the contest; and early in the next spring (b. c. 190), having learnt that Pausistratus, with the Rhodian fleet, had already put to sea, he conceived the idea of surprising him before he could unite his forces with those of Livius. For this purpose he pretended to enter into negotiations with him for the betrayal into his hands of the Syrian fleet, and having by this means deluded him into a fancied security, suddenly attacked him, and destroyed almost his whole fleet. After this success he sailed to Samos to give battle to the fleet of the Roman admiral and Eumenes, but a storm prevented the engagement, and Polyxenidas withdrew to Ephesus. Soon after, Livius, having been reinforced by a fresh squadron of twenty Rhodian ships under Eudamus (Rhodian), proceeded in his turn to offer battle to Polyxenidas, but this the latter now declined. Lucius Aemilius Regillus, who soon after succeeded Livius in the command of the Roman fleet, also attempted without effect to draw Polyxenidas forth from the port of Ephesus : but at a later period in the season Eumenes, with his fleet, having been detached to the Hellespont while a considerable part of the Rhodian forces were detained in Lycia, the Syrian admiral seized the opportunity and sallied out to attack the Roman fleet.

The action took place at Battle of Myonessus near Teos, but terminated in the total defeat of Polyxenidas, who lost 42 of his ships, and made a hasty retreat with the remainder to Ephesus. Here he remained until he received the tidings of the fatal battle of Magnesia, on which he sailed to Patara in Lycia, and from thence proceeded by land to join Antiochus in Syria. After this his name is not again mentioned

The Rhodian Fleet

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Carving of a triemolia (Rhodian ship), 2nd century BC, Lindos. Carved into the rocks on the route to the Acropolis at Lindos. On the bow there stood a statue of General Hagesander Mikkion, by sculptor Pythocritos. Dates from c 180 -170 b.c.

Most easterly of the islands in the Aegean, situated off the coast of Caria in Asia Minor. From the time of Vespasian (ruled 69-79 A.D.), Rhodes, known as Rhodus, was attached to the province of ASIA. The island had a long history of excellent relations with Rome, helping in the Macedonian and Mithridatic Wars. Supporting the cause of Julius Caesar during the Civil War, Rhodes was plundered mercilessly by Gaius Cassius in 42 B.C. but was richly rewarded by Augustus for its loyalty. Starting in 6 B.C., Tiberius took up residence on the island in a self-imposed exile from the disappointments of Rome; he would depart to become adopted by Augustus in 4 A.D. Because of their act of crucifying several Roman citizens, the Rhodians were deprived of their independence in 44 A.D. by Claudius. Appealing to Nero in 53, they were given their own government again, although prosperity was never actually attained. An earthquake in 155 A.D. flattened most of the island, and henceforth it remained one of the least developed corners of the Empire.

Though never large, this should be the best fleet of the ancient period. Excellent seamanship coupled with generally heavier types than the Carthaginians. Superior Rhodian naval architecture was a state secret, with the sentence death passed on unauthorized persons in military shipyards. Frequently allied to Rome, the Rhodians provided the major check on pirate activity in the Mediterranean. When Roman policy later diverted trade revenue from Rhodes destroying the economic basis of the fleet, the Mediterranean largely fell under the control of pirates.

Rhodes as a Naval Power

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Plan of the shipsheds of the military port of Rhodes: those to the west are the width suitable for larger triremes and quadriremes, but the eastern slips are narrower and presumably intended for lighter craft like tribemioliae with which Rhodes was closely associated.

The ships rated higher than ‘ten’ seem not to have been used for ship-to-ship combat, so an additional explanation must be sought for their design. The use of ships as fighting platforms to attack city and harbour defences, for example by Demetrius I Poliorcetes against Rhodes in 305 (Diod. Sic. 20.85–8), suggests that the very large polyremes may have been designed with this function in mind. Demetrius’ fleet of 500 ships was likely to have been deployed against the coastal cities of Asia Minor, had he not been ousted from Macedon by Pyrrhus in 287. In this respect, the largest polyremes are analogous to the very large siege towers built for Demetrius’ attacks on Salamis and Rhodes in 306 and 305 respectively.

By no means all the ships used in the naval warfare of this period were triremes or polyremes. The Rhodian navy contained a substantial number of vessels of a type known as tribemioliae, which means something like ‘three and a half’. This ship was probably a variation of the trireme, or ‘three’. The Rhodian tribemioliae seem to have had a crew of 144, as compared to an Athenian trireme which had 200. It seems that about 120 of the crew were oarsmen, compared to the 170 used on the trireme. It is most likely that the reduction was effected by having fewer men on the lowest level, enabling the ships to be narrower towards the bows and stern than a trireme, thus compensating for the loss of oar power with a sleeker shape. As they also carried fewer marines and sailors, they would have been significantly cheaper to operate.

The various Macedonian generals who fought over all or part of Alexander’s empire were gifted with vast ambitions, enormous funds and manpower resources, plus access to the timber supplies of Cilicia, Syria, Phoenicia, Cyprus and Macedonia. Hence they were able to build substantial fleets of increasingly large ships. Antigonus Monophthalmus established three shipbuilding yards in Phoenicia, one in Cilicia and another on Rhodes to create the ships for his contest with Ptolemy I Soter. These facilities produced an impressive number of ships in the period 314–302, so many that Antigonus had nearly 400 warships, plus at least 100 transports.

Smaller political entities like the Achaean and the Aetolian Leagues, or the island of Rhodes, did not attempt to operate large fleets. In 191–190 the Rhodians played a significant part in the naval conflict between Rome and her allies and Antiochus III, but the largest Rhodian fleet assembled consisted of only thirty-two ‘fours’ and four triremes (Livy 37.22–3). The Rhodians had a good supply of experienced sailors, marines and naval officers, as well as well-trained oarsmen. It is likely that naval service was required of all young men with full or partial Rhodian citizenship, but even these reserves had to be supplemented by foreign oarsmen and sailors.

The three ancient harbours of the Piraeus

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The trireme shipsheds of Zea reconstructed as a model in Piraeus Museum.

Reconstructed view of the three ancient harbours of the Piraeus: Kantharos (today the main harbour), Zea (also called Pashalimani in modern times) and Mounychia (modern Mikrolimano). Note the ship sailing through the fortified harbour mouth of Kantharos.
Illustrator: Ioannis Nakas/© Zea Harbour Project

Zea Harbour Project

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The Zea Harbour Project combines land and marine archaeology to obtain a full picture of the ancient Zea Harbour in the Piraeus, Greece. The ancient naval installation at Zea is among the largest Classical building complexes, and it accommodated the ship of the line in the Classical period - the trireme. The objective of this website is to introduce you to the work of the Zea Harbour Project and its most important results. The Zea Harbour Project is a collaboration between the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, The 26th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and the Danish Institute at Athens.

LINK

The Chinese sampan

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Ming soldiers use a sampan to repel Japanese wako (pirates). The wako were the curse of the Far East for much of the 14th and 15th centuries, raiding Korea and China.

When we turn to the first all-wooden boats in China we encounter a word that was to become very well known. The word 'sampan' is derived from the Chinese 'san' meaning 'three' and 'pan' meaning 'planks', the whole being a symbolic representation of a small boat. As a class it represents boat in its most rudimentary form, and doubtless the derivation of its popular name indicated its origin from a raft of three planks or logs. If its construction is studied, it becomes apparent how, through a process of evolution, it would occur to the ancient naval architects to build up the fore end of the raft to create a bow. Later improvements would have included the introduction of a transom in the stern. Ancient stone carvings give us our first pictures of Chinese sampans, and it is fascinating to note that one representation, dating from AD 147, shows sampans being used for naval warfare. The boats are of a characteristic shape, and we see combatants armed with swords and shields, while one has a bow and arrow. A single oarsman in the stern propels the sampans.

THE ROMAN IMPERIAL NAVY

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After Actium, as we have seen, Augustus concentrated his ships at two bases, Misenum and Ravenna, to watch the western and eastern Mediterranean. These two ports continued to be the chief bases of the Roman fleets for three centuries or more. Under the Empire, the fleets had, we may think, not much to do. Little is heard about piracy or other seaborne hazards. The ships served to transport troops to new postings, and protect the grain supply to the city. Detachments from both Misenum and Ravenna were based in Rome, to handle the awnings at theatres and amphitheatres there. The overall manpower of both fleets remained at a high level, with about 10,000 sailors at each base. Under Augustus and his immediate successors the fleets were commanded by equestrian officers, often ex-legionary tribunes, and later by freedmen of the Emperor’s household. But after AD 70 the commands were integrated into the equestrian civil service, and became two of the most senior posts; the Elder Pliny, encyclopaedist, naturalist and a senior procurator in the government service, was prefect of the fleet at Misenum when he lost his life in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.18 Professional admirals in the Hellenistic mould, briefly renascent in the Civil Wars of the Late Republic, are not heard of again, nor (with very few exceptions) are the squadrons of the eastern dynasts; these were incorporated along with the kingdoms and principalities into the Roman system. Control of a fleet no longer required any professional skills in seafaring, or a particular interest in naval warfare; administrative competence was the only expertise demanded. Detached squadrons on the Rhine, Danube and the English Channel played a more serious role in the maintenance of security in the frontier context. Here again their commanders were equestrians in the course of a procuratorial career.

The fleets’ manpower was drawn from free-born provincials, like the auxiliaries; slaves were not used, as in popular modern tradition. The Ravenna fleet drew a substantial number of men from the Balkan provinces and Pannonia, the Misenum fleet from Sardinia, Corsica, Africa and Egypt. No experience of sailing, or a home on the coast, were deemed of special importance in the selection of men, any more than in modern navies. The men served 26 years (one year more than the legionaries and auxiliaries), receiving—like the latter —citizenship and regularisation of marriage on discharge. From the time of Vespasian sailors began to use Latin names, and this general improvement in status is marked also by the award, probably made under Domitian, of the title praetoria to both main fleets, indicating an acceptance of their role in the central defence of the Emperor’s position. The title matches the cohortes praetoriae of the imperial bodyguard. The civil war of AD 68–69 saw the creation of legio I Adiutrix from the fleet at Misenum, and legio II Adiutrix from Ravenna; the latter saw service under Agricola in Britain. The title Adiutrix indicates that they were envisaged at first as offering ‘Support’ or ‘Assistance’ to the regular forces. It seems that founder members of both legions remained non-citizens until discharge, but fresh drafts were drawn from the normal sources thereafter so that they were quickly assimilated.

After Actium we hear no more of legions serving on shipboard, presumably because the military presence of such heavily armed infantry was deemed no longer necessary.

NAVAL WARFARE IN EUROPE, 1500-1600

2010-12-18T11:09:00.002+08:00

A painting by Agostino Tassi or Buonamico (1565-1644) shows a ship under construction at the leading Tuscan port of Livomo. The painting illustrates the large quantities of wood required for shipbuilding, and the immensity of the task posed by the construction of large warships using largely unmechanized processes. The capital investment required was formidable, but ships generally had a life of only twenty to thirty years.

Naval warfare entailed a commitment of resources which was often greater than that required for warfare on land. The failure of Philip II's huge and costly attempt to mount an invasion of England in the summer of 1588, and of subsequent expeditions, both Spanish and English, demonstrate the limits of sixteenth-century seapower.

THE LOGISTICS OF NAVAL WARFARE
The wooden warship equipped with cannon, whether driven by sails, muscle-power, or both, was the single most costly, powerful, and technologically advanced weapons system of the entire early modem period. The construction, equipment, manning, supply, and maintenance of a fleet required considerable financial and logistical efforts. Warships and equipment were durable, a heavy capital investment requiring maintenance; they therefore demanded not only technologically advanced yards for their construction, but also permanent institutions to manage them.

Warships provided effective mobile artillery platforms, and an individual vessel might carry the heavy firepower capacity comparable to that of an entire army. The trading wealth unlocked by the 'Age of Discoveries' encouraged the development of naval power to both protect and attack long-distance trade routes. Warships were also the most effective means of attacking distant hostile bases. In European waters, the strategic commitments of many powers involved maritime links, as for example between Spain and both Italy and the Low Countries, or Sweden and the eastern Baltic.

The sixteenth century saw the establishment and growth of state navies and the greatly increased use of heavy guns in sailing warships: heavy guns were carried in the Baltic from the early 1510s, and by English and French warships in the same period. Carvel building (the edge-joining of hull planks over frames) began to replace clinker (overlapped planks) construction in about 1500, contributing significantly to the development of hulls which were stronger and better able to carry heavy guns. Also, their sizes grew: there were warships of up to 2,000 tons (2,032 tonnes) displacement from early in the century. The English Henry Grace d Dieu (also known as Great Harry) had a 15 14 specification of 186 guns and 1,500 tons (1,524 tonnes) deadweight. The French, Scottish, Maltese, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Lubeck, and Portuguese navies all included ships of comparable size during the course of the century.

Medieval naval warfare had been dominated by boarding, and this continued to play a role. The rising importance of firepower, however, led to a shift towards standoff tactics in which ships did not come into direct contact and boarding became impossible. The Portuguese were the first systematically to exploit heavy guns to fight standoff actions against superior enemies, a development often incorrectly claimed for the English at the time of the Armada. In northern Europe, the shift towards stand-off tactics can be seen by contrasting the Anglo-French war of 1512-14, in which the fleets fought in the Channel in the traditional fashion, with the gunnery duel in which they engaged off Portsmouth in 1545. This shift had important implications for naval battle tactics - though truly effective ways of deploying naval firepower were not found until the next century - and it further encouraged the development of warships primarily as artillery platforms. Forged-iron guns were dangerously unreliable, while the manufacture of large cast-iron weapons was beyond the technological scope of the period, but from mid-century firepower was increased by the development of large guns cast instead from lighter, more durable, and workable 'brass' (actually bronze). Simultaneously, improvements in gunpowder increased their range.

Reale De France Galley

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Lateen rigged galleys like this one were the backbone of Louis XIV's Mediterranean fleet. The "Reale" in the name means that the ship belonged to the king. She carried 8,000 square feet of sail and 427 oarsmen. Because of her low hull, water swamped her deck even in slight seas. Reale De France model ship kit by Corel features double plank-on-bulkhead construction in beech and walnut with pre-cut wooden parts. Decorated by the famous sculptor Pierre Puget, some of the stern ornaments are displayed in the Musée de la Marine in Paris which holds the original plans and many documents about the ship.Stern ornamentation is gilded cast metal. Other decorations are etched brass. Armament includes five cannon and eleven turned brass falconets. Rigging is supplied in five diameters. Also included are 59 pre-shaped oars, cloth sails, and silk-screened flags. Thirteen sheets of detailed plans plus instruction book show you how build a magnificent replica that's almost four feet long.

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Zheng He

2010-11-28T18:10:00.002+08:00

According to ancient Chinese sources, Zheng He commanded seven expeditions. The 1405 expedition consisted of 27,800 men and a fleet of 62 treasure ships supported by approximately 190 smaller ships. The fleet included:
·                     Treasure ships, used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies (nine-masted, about 126.73 metres (416 ft) long and 51.84 metres (170 ft) wide), according to later writers. Such dimension is more or less the shape of a football field. The treasure ships purportedly can carry as much as 1,500 tons. By way of comparison, a modern ship of about 1,200 tons is 60 meters (200 ft) long, and the ships Christopher Columbussailed to the New World in 1492 were about 70-100 tons and 17 meter (55 ft) long.
·                     Horse ships, carrying tribute goods and repair material for the fleet (eight-masted, about 103 m (339 ft) long and 42 m (138 ft) wide).
·                     Supply ships, containing staple for the crew (seven-masted, about 78 m (257 ft) long and 35 m (115 ft) wide).
·                     Troop transports, six-masted, about 67 m (220 ft) long and 25 m (83 ft) wide.
·                     Fuchuan warships, five-masted, about 50 m (165 ft) long.
·                     Patrol boats, eight-oared, about 37 m (120 ft) long.
·                     Water tankers, with 1 month supply of fresh water.
Six more expeditions took place, from 1407 to 1433, with fleets of comparable size.
Trade in the Indian Ocean was decentralized and cooperative. Commercial interest prevailed over political authorities.
Strait of Malacca was the meeting point between Indian Ocean and South China Sea, between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra. The Kingdom of Siam gained control of the upper Malay Peninsula, while the Java-based Kingdom of Majapathi ruled over the lower portion of the peninsula and most of Sumatra. Majapahit was not strong enough to stop the Chinese pirates that were affecting trade in this region. In the 1407, the Chinese government sent a fleet and smashed the pirates.
The city of Alden (Arabia) had a double advantage: enough rainfall to supply drinking water to a large population and to grow grain for export and to be a convenient stopover for trade between India and the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and Egypt.

Knights of Malta – 18th Century Galleys

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From... "Admiral Satan, The Life and Campaigns of Suffren" describing the Knights of Malta as a training corps for the French navy

In the Mediterranean, one of the primary occupations of the galleys was suppression of the North African pirates. "the oar powered Galliot was the best instrument since it could navigate calm, shallow and sheltered waters, and was not dependent upon the wind"

Economy was another motivator.. "A small squadron of sailing ships had been built.... but it was a crippling burden to the treasury" (of Malta)

I don't think the major powers used the galleys against each other except as prestige 'toys" and for harbor defence. The rowing and sailing corps were independent until the late 1740s. The death of the Grand Prior of France, Jean-Phillipe d'Orleans, allowed the unification of the French Navy.. and essentially the demise of the galleys as a serious force. "Most of the galley officers retired and only 28 transferred to service under sail" (including Suffren)

The galley fleet at Malta did provide the aristocracy a means of establishing rank seniority in the French Navy.... service in the Maltese fleet was valued and recognized by the French navy... and young aristocrats could be entered into Maltese service as children, acquiring seniority from the time of entry! (ages 7 and 8 for the Suffren brothers)

They were too narrow to mount broadside guns and therefore lacked the power of massed artillery. Against a grounded or becalmed sailing ship they could gain favorable position but were limited in their bow mounted firepower. Ramming a sailing vessel from astern or ahead would produce a glancing blow.... from abeam against a battery would be suicidal. Pursue and board would be the most likely tactic... against smaller Islamic vessels.

There is an excellent book: "FIGHTING SHIPS AND PRISONS The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV" by Paul W. Bamford Copyright 1973 University of Minnesota, LC # 72-92334, ISBN 0-8166-0655-2.

It is well worth tracking down through your library. You are right on as to the worth of the Galley Fleet. It and its shore establishment constituted a primary component of the French Prison System well into the Napoleonic Era. It is useful to remember that patronage of Malta and the Galley Fleet represented an important part of Louis' activities in support of the Catholic Church. The Chaplains were very important officers on the ships. The number of war-like sorties was next to nothing in spite of the theoretical uses they could be put to. The most important voyages were those to deliver ambassadors. While the number of prisoners from both France and the other continental countries (small German states) who paid to have France keep their prisoners was swelling far beyond the needs of the fleet, French representatives were busy buying Muslim slaves to send to the oars.

While only a few officers were incorporated into the sailing fleet at the end of the separate galley fleet, the galleys lingered on. I suspect the extraordinary level of venality of the galley fleet afloat and ashore had more of a cross-over to the sailing fleet than is generally recognized. If nothing else, the association of a major component of the national naval establishment in the public mind with unjust imprisonment for life under cruel conditions, was a handicap to the navy.

Korean-Japanese Wars (1592–1593 and 1597–1598)

2010-11-26T07:13:00.001+08:00

After the successful unification of Japan, Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi made two attempts to seize Korea as the first step in a Japanese conquest of China. Japanese defeats at sea, however, made the maintenance of supply lines between Kyushu and Japanese bridgeheads in southern Korea increasingly difficult, and the campaigns were eventually abandoned.

In the first campaign Hideyoshi landed some 160,000 men in southern Korea, his army advancing north with relative ease. The Japanese suffered reverses at sea, however, under Korean naval units commanded by Yi Sun Sin. In the summer and autumn of 1592 Yi’s navy won some 10 engagements around the southern coast of Korea between Sach’on and Pusan. The largest of these were the 8 July Battle of Hansan-do and 10 July Battle of Angolp’o. At Hansan-do the Japanese had 36 large vessels and 14 medium-sized ships, as well as a large number of junks. Yi sent six ships to lure out the Japanese and then destroyed one of the three formations of the Japanese fleet. He then chased the Japanese to nearby Angolp’o, where he again got them to come out for a full attack and trapped them. In these two battles the Japanese lost some 59 ships. Yi’s fleet continued to blockade the Japanese base at Pusan until the end of the first campaign.

In the second campaign the Japanese navy gained an initial victory. In the 15 July 1597 Battle of Koje-do, the Koreans lost 160 ships and its commander Won Kyun was killed in action. The Koreans were forced to abandon their base on Hansan-do and pull back to the west.

This victory enabled the 140,000-strong Japanese landing force to advance, but it provoked a Chinese intervention and consequently a stalemate on land. In an attempt to support the land forces, the Japanese fleet sailed into the Yellow Sea through Myongnyang Strait, where the Koreans under Yi Sun Sin intercepted it. In the Battle of Myongnyang, 16 September 1597, Yi checked the Japanese advance at sea, and the campaign again reverted to a stalemate. Japanese land forces were besieged in coastal strongholds such as Sunch’on, Sach’on, Pusan, and Ulsan.

This strategic stalemate and Hideyoshi’s death on 18 August 1598 caused Japanese to withdraw its land forces from southern Korea. The last naval battle in the campaign took place during this process. The Japanese garrison at Sunch’on was under blockade by the Chinese squadron under Ch’en Lin and the Korean fleet led by Yi Sun Sin. The Battle of Noryang, 18 November 1598, occurred when a Japanese fleet led by the Shimazu clan tried to break through the blockade. Although the Shimazu fleet was severely damaged by the combined Chinese-Korean fleet, the Japanese Sunch’on garrison was evacuated. Yi Sun Sin was killed in the battle.

Throughout the two campaigns, in contrast to the fighting on land, the Korean navy was always superior. This was in part because of the splendid leadership of Admiral Yi Sun Sin, who nearly always led the entire Korean fleet. In contrast, the Japanese fleet lacked strong leadership and was little better than a combination of small coastal/inland water navies. The Koreans also enjoyed a technological advantage in the form of their armored Kobukson (turtle ships). These formed the core of the Korean fleet and inflicted serious damage on the Japanese fleet. The Korean victories at sea constantly threatened the Japanese supply lines and were one of the major causes of Japan’s abandonment of the campaign.

References
Berry, Mary Elizabeth. Hideyoshi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Eckert, Carter J., et al. Korea Old and New: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Hall, John Whitney. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 4. Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Turnbull, S. R. Samurai: A Military History. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

Battle of Cnidus, (394 b.c.)

2010-11-26T07:12:00.000+08:00

Naval battle that ended Spartan hegemony in the Aegean Sea after the Peloponnesian War. Harassed by a Spartan-led expeditionary army operating in western Asia Minor, the Persian satrap Pharnabazus persuaded King Artaxerxes II to equip a fleet and appoint Conon as admiral in 397 b.c. When four mainland Greek cities (Athens, Thebes, Corinth, and Argos) started a war with Sparta in 395 b.c. with Persian encouragement, the Spartan King Agesilaus was forced to lead the army in Asia Minor back to Greece in the summer of 394 b.c. At about the same time, Agesilaus’s brother-in-law, the nauarch Peisander, met the Persian fleet in a battle off the south coast of the Reşadiye Peninsula near the city of Cnidus (then located near modern Datça). Peisander’s fleet of 85 triremes faced an enemy fleet of 80 Phoenician ships, 10 Cilician ships, and perhaps 80 Greek ships.

We have two brief descriptions of the battle, by Xenophon and Diodorus Siculus. According to Xenophon, Conon’s Greek ships were posted in front of Pharnabazus’s Phoenician ships. Peisander’s allies soon fled or were driven ashore, and he himself died in the fighting. According to Diodorus, Conon captured 50 triremes and took 500 prisoners, the rest getting back safely to Cnidus. News of the disaster reached Agesilaus about the time of the solar eclipse of 14 August 394 b.c.

The impact of the battle was dramatic, destroying Sparta’s naval supremacy and leading to the wholesale defection of Aegean and Anatolian Greek city-states from the Spartan alliance. Athens tried to reverse the verdict of the Peloponnesian War, rebuilding the fortifications demolished in 404 b.c. and seeking to reassert its authority over its former empire.

References
Hornblower, Simon. “Persia.” In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 6, The Fourth Century B.C., 2d ed., ed. D. M. Lewis et al., 45–96. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Seager, Robin. “The Corinthian War.” In The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 6, The Fourth Century B.C., 2d ed., ed. D. M. Lewis et al., 97–119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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Navy of Venice

2010-11-26T07:10:00.002+08:00

The Venetian Arsenal was the biggest and more efficient shipyard of the Renaissance, and the reason why Venice was capable of standing up to the Turks for three hundred years and seven wars.

San Lorenzo (?) galleasse in an illustration by eslovac artist Avor. It is based in a Venetian engraving. It is probably the galleasse of Antonio Bragadino that has sunk a Turkish galley. Next to it we can see another galleasse, and behind the galleys of the Christian line, that probably were not using the sail. At the far back we can see the Turkish watch tower at Point Scropha. The morning was clear, although the smoke from the cannons rose over the fleet.

Situated on islands in a lagoon at the northern extremity of the Adriatic Sea, the Republic of Venice depended upon sea power for prosperity and survival. Founded during the collapse of the Roman Empire, Venice retained ties with the Byzantine Empire and resisted incorporation into the medieval Germanic Holy Roman Empire.

In the age of the Crusades Venice battled both Muslim powers and Italian rivals. With its fleets Venice defeated the attempt of the Normans of the Two Sicilies to dominate the Byzantine Empire. Then in 1204 it diverted the Fourth Crusade to the conquest of Constantinople. Venice enjoyed a favored position in the eastern trade, which it generally maintained even after the Byzantines recovered Constantinople.

The need for specialized war galleys caused Venice in 1104 to establish a government-run arsenal and develop Europe’s first regular navy. The patricians who dominated Venice willingly captained its galleys and fleets. To control the Adriatic and the sea routes to the east, Venice established strongholds on the Dalmatian coast, Corfu, and the Greek coast, and colonized Crete and several Aegean islands. In 1480 Venice acquired Cyprus.

Venice emerged victorious in its struggle with Genoa and Padua over the eastern trade in the War of Chioggia of 1379–1381, in which the Venetians mounted for the first time cannon on their galleys. Threats from Milan drove Venice to acquire a mainland empire that stretched from Padua to Bergamo. Piracy remained a perpetual problem.

Under a supreme Captain General of the Sea, Venice’s fleet was organized into squadrons for operations against Uskoks (Dalmatian pirates), patrol of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas from Corfu under the Captain of the Gulf, and defense of Crete and Cyprus. As many as 50 galleys might have been operational at any time.

Extra hulls were mothballed in the arsenal, and for a major war 200 galleys might have become operational. While the elite volunteered to command, seamen and rowers came to be conscripted throughout the Venetian Empire, and marine infantry were hired from the Italian mainland or Germany. In 1545, as wages rose, Venice turned to convicts (but never slaves) to row its galleys. Cristoforo da Canal provided a treatise on administration and tactics, Della milizia marittima, which was written around 1550 and published in 1930.
In the fifteenth century the expanding Ottoman Empire, which captured Constantinople in 1453, posed Venice’s greatest challenge. Periods of peace and trade were interrupted by sharp wars. In August 1499 the Ottomans won the Battle of Zonchio and began to pick off Venetian strongholds in the Aegean and Greece. The 25–28 October 1538 Battle of Prevesa, fought in alliance with Genoa and Spain, proved another setback.

Venice resumed its precarious but lucrative peace with the Ottomans until the Ottomans demanded Cyprus in 1570. Through the pope, Venice forged an alliance that included Spain and most of Italy. Venice provided over half of the galleys and six galleasses in the allies’ victory of 7 October 1571 at Lepanto. By then Cyprus had fallen, though Crete was saved. Venice, whose aims differed from Spain’s, made peace with the Ottomans in 1573 and returned to trade.

In the same years piracy had burgeoned in the Mediterranean. It was committed not only by Uskoks (egged on by the Austrian Hapsburgs) and Barbary corsairs, but even by English and Dutch rovers, who operated from Barbary and marauded in large, well-gunned sailing ships. Venice’s former allies also proved a threat: the Knights of Malta disapproved of Venice’s trading with the Turks and attacked its shipping, and the Spanish viceroy of Naples waged in 1617–1620 an undeclared naval war against the Republic.

In 1645 the Turks invaded Crete to begin the War of Candia (1645–1669), which was named for the long siege of its capital. The Venetian navy that opposed them mustered over 60 galleys, four galleasses, and, in an admission of the gun-power of sailing ships, three dozen galleons. Venice won most of the naval battles, among them two in the Dardanelles in 1665 and 1666, but the Turks conquered Crete.

By the end of the seventeenth century, small states such as Venice could no longer match the greater states, which now had the requisite administrative structures to wage war on a giant scale. Having made a humiliating peace with the Turks in 1718, Venice eased its naval efforts, maintaining only minimal forces afloat. War expenses drastically increased the public debt, while neutrality in Europe’s constant dynastic conflicts enriched Venetian merchant shipping. The perennial threat from Barbary, despite the payment of tribute, led to renewed naval building in the 1780s. In 1792 Venice had four ships of the line and six frigates on patrol off Tunisia. But in 1797 Napoléon Bonaparte toppled the Republic, ending forever its independence. Its remaining war fleet was appropriated by France.

References
Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
Tenenti, Alberto. Piracy and the Decline of Venice, 1580–1615. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.
Wiel, Alethea J. The Navy of Venice. London: J. Murray, 1910.

Battle of Curzola (Korčula), (7 September 1298)

2010-11-26T07:09:00.000+08:00

The greatest naval battle fought between Genoa and Venice. At war with Venice since 1294, the Genoese sent an armada of more than 90 galleys into the Adriatic in the summer of 1298 under the command of Lamba Doria. The armada was missing some galleys because of a storm, and most of the fleet proceeded up the Dalmatian coast to the island of Curzola (Korčula), then a feudal possession of the Venetian noble family Zorzi. The Genoese captured and burned the city of Curzola on 5 September 1298. Meanwhile, the Venetians, learning of the Genoese intrusion, had sent a fleet commanded by Andrea Dandolo. When the opposing fleets came into visual contact late on 6 September, the Venetian galleys probably outnumbered the Genoese 96 to 76.

The battle began early on Sunday, 7 September, and seems to have been fought in the channel between the island and the mainland, to the southeast of the city of Curzola. The Venetians, facing southeast, had the morning sun in their eyes. The battle lasted until the afternoon and was marked by heavy casualties on both sides. The Venetians had the advantage initially, capturing 10 Genoese galleys, but later the Genoese were able to take advantage of disorder in the Venetian line and gain a decisive victory. Nearly the entire Venetian fleet was captured or destroyed, except for a dozen galleys that escaped. Andrea Dandolo, the defeated commander, either died in the battle or afterwards as a prisoner (either of fever or suicide). The war ended with the peace treaty of 25 May 1299.

According to a tradition first recorded in 1553 and usually accepted, Marco Polo was taken prisoner in this battle; it was during his imprisonment in Genoa that he dictated his account of his travels.

References
Caro, Georg. Genua und die Mächte am Mittelmeer, 1257–1311. Vol. 2. Halle an der Salle, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1899.
Lane, Frederic C. Venice: A Maritime Republic. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973
Manfroni, Camillo. Storia della Marina Italiana dal trattato di Ninfeo alla caduta di Costantinopoli (1261–1453). Leghorn, Italy: Reale Accademia Navale, 1902.
Polo, Marco. The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. Trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule. 3d ed. Revised by Henri Cordier. London: John Murray, 1903.

The Medieval Galley

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Russian Galley 1720

The history of medieval naval warfare is the history of the galley. Since ancient times, battles at sea have taken place largely on the decks of ships and were fought much like land battles, with hand-to-hand combat. Medieval naval battles usually followed a similar pattern. First, smaller, more maneuverable ships would pin down the enemy fleet. Then the larger, more heavily armed galleys would attack, initially firing missiles and then ramming or grappling the enemy vessel in order to board it. Blasts of lime were often fired to blind the enemy and were then followed by volleys of stones. One of the most dreaded tactics was to fling onto the enemy ship what was known as Greek fire, a substance that, once ignited, was inextinguishable in water. Crossbows, lances, bows and arrows, and, by the late Middle Ages, guns and cannons served as well at sea as on land. However, the ship itself was the most powerful weapon, often determining the outcome of a naval battle. The warship at sea was likened to the warhorse on land and, like the warhorse, the warship was bred for fighting.

Equipped with sails for distance and oars for maneuverability, the medieval galley was ideally suited for the purpose of war. Medieval variations on the classical galley were many. The dromon, developed by the Byzantines, was a large galley that utilized one or two tiers of oars, a square sail set on a single mast, and a stern-hung rudder. In times of war, the dromon could carry troops, weapons, supplies, and cavalry horses, as well as engage in sea battles when necessary. The beam of the dromon permitted mounted cannons in the bow of the ship, which could be fired directly ahead of the vessel. A variation on the dromon was the Italian galley, which had one level of oars with two or three oarsmen to each rowing bench, a total of approximately 120 oarsmen. The Italian galley was manned by about fifty soldiers and typically had a large catapult mounted on a platform on the front deck.

The galleas was another variation on the galley. Developed by the Venetians, the galleas had a gun deck, oars, and two to three masts. The triangular lateen sails, adopted from those of the Arab dhows, permitted the galleas to sail nearly straight into the wind, impossible with square sails. Sailors armed with crossbows and lances could fight on the ships’ decks.

The last major naval battle in which galleys were employed was the Battle of Lepanto II, fought off the coast of southwestern Greece on October 7, 1571, between the Ottoman Turks, under the command of Ali Pala (died 1616), and the Christian forces, under the command of Don Juan de Austria (1547-1578), half-brother of King Philip II of Spain (1527-1598). The Turks’ 273 ships (210 were galleys) and the Christians’ 276 ships (208 were galleys) faced off in long lines across from one another, with the Christian forces hemming in the Muslim forces. Don Juan skillfully placed his most heavily armed galleys in the center of the line and his smaller, more maneuverable galleys on the outside, where they could dominate the flanks. The massive and heavily armed Christian galleys eventually triumphed over the lighter and less armed Arab ships, giving naval supremacy to the Christian forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Battle of Lepanto was the last major naval battle in which galleys were employed, and it was the first major naval battle in which guns and gunpowder played the decisive role. From this point on, guns and cannons would be increasingly important in naval warfare.

Although the galley was the vessel of choice in the Mediterranean Sea for more than four millennia, it was a typically unstable ship, particularly in rough waters. Maneuverability during battle was provided by oars, rather than by the sails, which had to be lowered during battles to prevent the enemy from tearing or setting fire to them. Despite their shortcomings, however, various forms of galleys continued to be employed in the Mediterranean until 1717 and in the Baltic Sea until 1809. In an effort to produce a more seaworthy craft, medieval shipbuilders turned to other designs for seagoing vessels.

Syrian-Roman War (192–189 B.C.E.)

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PRINCIPAL COMBATANTS: Syria (Seleucids) vs. Rome (with Rhodes and Pergamum)
PRINCIPAL THEATER(S): Asia Minor
DECLARATION: Rome on Syria, 192 B.C.E.
MAJOR ISSUES AND OBJECTIVES: Syria wanted Rome’s compliance in the conquests of its ally Aetolia.
OUTCOME: Rome attacked a Syrian fleet, triggering a war that proved disastrous for the Syrians, who lost their seaports and became landlocked.
APPROXIMATE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF MEN UNDER ARMS:
Syrian forces, 75,000; Roman-Pergamenian forces, 40,000
CASUALTIES: Unknown
TREATIES: None
Following the defeat of Macedonia at the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197, during the Second MACEDONIAN WAR, the Aetolians of central Greece jockeyed for position to take Macedonia’s place as the dominant state in Greece. After attacking the allies of Rome among the Greek states, they appealed to Syrian king Antiochus III (the Great; 242–187 B.C.E.) to intervene with Rome on their behalf.

Taking this as an invitation from the Aetolian League to invade Greece, Antiochus sailed with an army of 10,000 across the Aegean in 192 and was met by a Roman army at Thermopylae. Under the leadership of M. Acilius Glabrio (d. 152 B.C.E.), the Roman forces defeated Antiochus, who fled with the remainder of his forces back to Ephesus. However, the naval fleets of Rhodes and Pergamum collaborated with the Romans against Antiochus’s navy, winning three victories at sea, first at a location between Ionia and Chios (191 B.C.E.), then at Eurymedon and Myonessus, both in 190 B.C.E. The Romans capitalized on these triumphs by invading Asia Minor with an army under the command of two great generals, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (237–183 B.C.E.) and his brother Lucius Cornelius Scipio (fl. second century). They met the Syrians at the Battle of Magnesia near Smyrna in December 190. After initial gains, Antiochus III made a serious tactical blunder by pursuing a flank of the Roman cavalry too far, laying himself open to encirclement by another Roman flank. This infantry force destroyed most of the Syrian army. As a result, Syria gave up all of its coastal territories, surrendered all but 10 of its warships, gave up its war elephants, and agreed to pay a heavy indemnity. Landlocked, Syria’s power was greatly diminished.

Further reading: John D. Grainger, Roman War of Antiochos the Great (Boston: Brill Academic, 2002); Susan Sherwin-White and Amelie Kuhrt, From Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

NAVAL OPERATIONS ON THE RHINE, 357 AD

2010-08-24T05:43:00.001+08:00

1: Alaman warrior

This reconstruction follows the rich graves of the Rhine border and the descriptions of the ancient authors. Ammianus describes long, thick hair dyed red with natural substances. The narrow, long-sleeved woollen tunic is decorated with trim in red-purple silk. Note his woollen close-fitting trousers, and typical Germanic boots copied from specimens found in Marx-Etzel. The shield is brightly painted, copied from the insignia of an Alamanic tribe, the Bucinobantes, recruited as auxilium palatinum into the Roman army. We illustrate a typical Germanic javelin or angon (jaculum); other weapons might include a throwing axe or francisca tucked into the belt, and a yew-wood Germanic bow about 2m (6ft 6in) long.

2: Roman officer of the Rhine Fleet

He wears an iron helmet of Ausburg-Pfersee type, sheathed in gilded silver. His imposing muscled armour might have mobile shoulder-guards, and shows lappets around the lower abdomen. It is worn over a thoracomacus of felt lined with cotton or coarse silk, and the pteryges hanging from the waist are like those represented on the I lias Ambrosiana, fringed with dark purple. According to Vegetius the marines and sailors of the lusoriae or exploratoriae scaphae were dressed completely in venefus-colour, i.e. sea-blue. His clothing, especially the sagum and the bracae, presents a mixed Romano-Germanic style, as was usual on the limes.

3: Romano-Germanic naval scout

Apart from his ridged Sassanian-style helmet, copied from the Worms specimen, his whole armament and clothing is mainly Germanic in fashion, although his military belt in Kerbschnitt style and the shield pattern are typical of the late Roman limitanei along the Rhine and Danube frontiers.

4: Roman classiarius of the Rhine Fleet

This marine is reconstructed after the Lyon seal that shows the city of Mainz, but supplemented with other archaeological details. The ridge-style helmet from Augst fits well with the classiarius helmet visible on the Ham mosaic, furnished with a red crest. His simple mail armour is worn over a leather jerkin of the same shape; a recent interpretation of the Thorsberg find by German archaeologists suggests that silvered clasps were used for shoulder fastenings while small hooks were used for fastening the breast. The sleeved tunic is made of an undyed wool-linen mix and decorated with typical orbiculi and segmenta of the late Empire. His weapons are a culter venatorius and a sword, here copied from the Idesheim specimen, and a light javelin (verutum).

Provincial Fleets, to defend the frontiers and support the legions in the different provinciae, were soon added. One of the first and strategically most important was the Rhine Fleet in Germania, whose military ports were linked by road with those in Gaul (France). At the time of Drusus' expedition in 12 B C we read that the military port of Bonna (modern Bonn), perhaps the main base of the Rhine Fleet, was directly linked with Gessoriacum (modern Boulogne - Florus 2,30). Under the early Empire the Rhine Fleet was an integral part of the army of Germania Inferior, composed of four legions in the 1st century AD, including Legio XI; this means that the soldiers of these legions could be used in the fleet as milites classiarii (fleet soldiers or 'marines'). During the Civilis revolt we find in the army of Germania Inferior the Legiones V and XV at Vetera, XVI and I at Novaesium (Neuss) and Bonna, serving with the Rhine Fleet. Among the additional legions sent to crush the revolt we find I Adiutrix and II Adiutrix formed from fighting sailors: later I Adiutrix was temporarily sent to Hispania, but by 88 AD we find it back in Germania Superior, then in Pannonia under Domitian. After the Civilis revolt II Adiutrix was sent to Britain, and then also to Pannonia by Domitian. A later inscription found at B a d e n Baden confirms the presence of this legion in Germania under Trajan.

Featured Website: BTOHistoryShips.com

2010-08-19T16:37:00.000+08:00

This floating giant comes from the era of Alexander the Great’ s descendants. Her big bronze ram and the fierce eyes cause terror. Those vessels were three or four times bigger than the triremes of the classical era and had amplified sides and hull, an apparent feature in the model when seen from close distance. Equipped with towers and functional ballistic machines is, perhaps, the only recreation of this type of vessels.

About us

When love for the history of navigation overflows your existence, it becomes magic, energy that passes through your hands and impels them to create. Wood is a living material that, when you give it your love and affection, it takes shape and the result is these floating monuments of history and human progress, of the contact of nations, the expansion of trade, the achievements and revelations. This is Evaggelos Gripiotis, an adorer of history and sea. The love for sea is immense. When I’ m close to it my eyes gaze at the horizon and my soul travels beyond it. This is what I do with my ships, travels into bygone worlds, glorious moments of maritime history when wooden hulls and sailors made of steal conquered the seas of the world transferring products, knowledge, culture, wealth but also, sometimes, disaster. I build ships, models of which are rare to be found in our days, ancient hulls, triremes, Hellenistic and Roman, galleys, dromons, chelandions, renaissance galleys, drekars, galleons, galeotas, frigates and various different types. I use raw materials of excellent quality (oak, walnut, beech, mahogany, pine, teak). The ships are literally constructed and built with respect in the culture and shipbuilding tradition of each country. My structures are not simple models (covered empty spaces). They are real ships in a smaller scale than their real ancestors, since their gear in both their interior and exterior parts is designed in an unconceivable detail, beyond all imagination. Thereby, each piece is unique and their buoyancy proves the originality of the ship- building standards followed by the artist.

LINK

Battle of Cyzicus

2010-08-17T06:01:00.001+08:00

The naval Battle of Cyzicus took place in 410 BC during the Peloponnesian War. In the battle, an Athenian fleet commanded by Alcibiades, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes routed and completely destroyed a Spartan fleet commanded by Mindarus. The victory allowed Athens to recover control over a number of cities in the Hellespont over the next year. In the wake of their defeat, the Spartans made a peace offer, which the Athenians rejected.

Battle of Cyzicus

Part of Peloponnesian War

A Greek trireme

Date	410 BC
Location	Near Cyzicus, Hellespont, modern-day Turkey
Result	Decisive Athenian victory
Territorial changes	Cyzicus and other cities in the region captured by Athens.

Belligerents

Athens

Sparta

Commanders

Alcibiades,
Thrasybulus,
Theramenes,
Chaereas`

Mindarus †

Strength

86 triremes

80 triremes

Casualties and losses

Minimal

Entire fleet

1. Prelude

In the wake of the Athenian victory at Abydos in November 411 BC, the Spartan admiral Mindarus sent to Sparta for reinforcements and began working with the Persian satrap Pharnabazus to plan for a new offensive. The Athenians, meanwhile, were unable to follow through on their victory, since the depletion of the Athenian treasury precluded any major operations ^[1] . Thus, by the spring of 410 BC, Mindarus had built a fleet of eighty ships, and with the support of Pharnabazus's troops, besieged and took the city of Cyzicus. The Athenian fleet in the Hellespont withdrew from its base at Sestos to Cardia to avoid the superior Spartan force, and ships under Alcibiades, Theramenes, Thrasybulus that had been dispatched to raise money combined with this force, creating a fleet of 86 ships ^[2] . This fleet, along with a force of land troops under Chaereas, set out to the Hellespont to challenge Mindarus.

2. The battle

The Athenian force entered the Hellespont, and, passing the Spartan base at Abydos by night so as to conceal their numbers, established a base on the island of Proconnesus (modern-day Marmara), just northwest of Cyzicus. The next day, they disembarked Chaereas's force near Cyzicus. The Athenian fleet then divided, with 20 ships under Alcibiades advancing towards Cyzicus while two other divisions under Thrasybulus and Theramenes lurked behind. Mindarus, seeing an opportunity to attack what appeared to be a vastly inferior force, set out towards them with his entire force. Alcibiades's force fled, and Mindarus's ships gave chase. When both forces had gotten well out from the harbor, however, Alcibiades turned to face Mindarus, and Thrasybulus and Theramenes appeared with their forces to cut off his retreat. Mindarus, seeing the trap, fled in the one open direction, towards a beach south of the city, where Pharnabazus was located with his troops. The Spartan fleet suffered losses in the flight, and reached the shore with the Athenians right behind them.

Athenian naval strategy at the battle of Cyzicus: Alcibiades' decoy force draws the Spartan fleet out into open water, and then turns about to engage them. Squadrons commanded by Thrasybulus and Theramenes move in behind the Spartan ships, to cut off their line of retreat, trapping the Spartans between three groups of Athenian warships; a much larger force than they had initially expected to engage.

Alcibiades's troops, leading the Athenian pursuit, landed and attempted to pull the Spartan ships back out to sea with grappling hooks. The Persian troops under Pharnabazus, however, entered the fighting on the shore and began to drive the Athenians, who were outnumbered and fighting against opponents on firmer ground, into the sea. Seeing this, Thrasybulus landed his force as a diversion and ordered Theramenes to combine his troops with those of Chaereas and join the battle. For a time, Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were both driven back by superior forces, but the arrival of Theramenes and Chaereas turned the tide; the Spartans and Persians were defeated, Mindarus was killed. All the Spartan ships were captured save for those of the Syracusan allies, who burned their ships as they retreated.

3. Aftermath

In the wake of this dramatic victory, the Athenians had full control of the waters of the Hellespont. The next day, they took Cyzicus, which surrendered without a fight. An intercepted letter from the Spartan troops stranded near Cyzicus reads “The ships are gone. Mindarus is dead. The men are starving. We know not what to do." ^[3] Demoralized by the devastation of their fleet, the Spartans sent an embassy to Athens seeking to make peace; the Athenians rejected it ^[4] .

At Athens, the oligarchic government that had ruled since 411 gave way to a restored democracy within a few months of the battle. An expeditionary force under Thrasyllus was prepared to join the forces in the Hellespont. This force, however, did not depart until over a year after the battle, and although the Athenians eventually recaptured Byzantium and resumed collecting tribute from Chalcedon, they never truly pressed the advantage that Cyzicus had given them. Largely, this was a result of financial inability; even after the victory, the Athenian treasury was hard pressed to support large-scale offensive operations ^[1] . Meanwhile, the Spartans, with Persian funding, quickly rebuilt their fleet, and would go on to undermine the Athenian advantage. Athens would win only one more naval battle in the war, at Arginusae, and their defeat at Aegospotami in 405 BC would bring the war to a close. Cyzicus, although a dramatic victory, failed to bring any lasting advantage to the Athenian side, and only served to postpone the eventual outcome of the war.

4. References

Diodorus Siculus, Library
Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War (Penguin Books, 2003) ISBN 0-670-03211-5
Xenophon: Hellenica on Wikisource

THE FOURTH CRUSADE DETOUR

2010-08-14T02:36:00.000+08:00

Crusaders arriving at the land and sea walls of Constantinople, from a Venetian manuscript (ca. 1330) if La Conquete de Constantinople by Geoffrey of Villehardouin, who took part in the Fourth Crusade. When the Venetian force's entry into the city was pushed back by the imperial bodyguard, they set fire to a number of buildings and burned a large section of an affluent suburb. It was a harbinger if worse destruction to come.

On 11th November 1202 the crusaders landed at Zara on the Adriatic and quickly made camp. The citizens saw the large army and its siege engines and knew that resistance was impossible, so they promptly sent out a delegation offering to surrender the city if their lives were spared. This was agreeable to Dandolo, who asked the delegates to remain in his tent while he went to confer with the barons.

In Dandolo's absence, Simon de Montfort the Elder (1160-1218), the leader of a small faction of crusaders opposed to the detour to Zara, informed the Zarans that the crusade leaders had a letter from Pope Innocent III threatening to excommunicate anyone who raised a sword against Zara. Simon insisted that if the citizens could defend themselves against the Venetians they would be safe from the Frankish (non-Venetian) crusaders, who would not disobey the pope. The delegates thanked Simon and returned to their city. When Dandolo and the crusader barons returned they were outraged by these actions. A peaceful surrender had been thwarted.

The pope's stern letter forced the crusade's leaders to choose between excommunication, for attacking a city under church protection, and the end of the crusade. Believing that God could not desire the latter, most chose to keep their word to the Venetians as a matter of honor. Simon and his men withdrew from the army, but the majority of the crusaders attacked Zara, capturing it on 24th November-as a result, the Fourth Crusade was excommunicated.

The Frankish leaders sent a delegation to Innocent III, begging forgiveness. He granted them the absolution they sought, but reaffirmed the excommunication of the Venetians. The pope was now convinced that the Venetians had deliberately taken over the crusade for their own ends. In a letter to the crusade leaders he said that once the Franks had been delivered to the Holy Land, they should have nothing more to do with the Venetians.

The crusade had other problems too, with huge debts, no money, and a shortage of provisions. According to the contract, Venice supplied each man with enough to sustain him at low activity levels for about nine months. Since they had begun eating their provisions in late June 1202 the crusaders would have been out of food by late March 1203, when the fleet was again ready to sail from Zara. There were insufficient resources to keep the army and fleet together, let alone support it on its mission to fight in Egypt.

It was at this moment that a group of envoys arrived at Zara led by a Byzantine prince, Alexius Angelus, who had recently fled to the West. His father, the emperor Isaac II Angelus, had been blinded and deposed by his own brother, Alexius III, in 1195. The young man asserted that he, not his usurping uncle, was the rightful emperor of Constantinople. If the crusaders would help him to his throne he would provide them with food, pay them 200,000 silver marks, join their crusade with 10,000 soldiers, place a permanent garrison in the Holy Land, and restore the obedience of the Greek church to Rome. For the crusaders this offer was extremely attractive. But it would, of course, necessitate a further diversion of the troubled crusade.

There was considerable debate among the crusaders concerning the offer made by Alexius Angelus. The majority of the troops wanted no more detours or delays. They had made vows to fight for Christ, not a Byzantine pretender. However, the crusade leaders favored helping the young man. They saw that with only a few months left on the fleet's lease, no food, and crushing debt, the crusade simply could not survive without replenishing its resources. It would have made little sense to transport an impoverished army directly to the East. They also saw the detour to Constantinople as an errand of mercy to free the Byzantine people from the oppression of a tyrant. Alexius Angelus assured them that his uncle, the emperor, was so hated in the city that he would be overthrown as soon as the crusaders arrived with the rightful heir.

The crusade leaders accepted, informing the pope shortly afterward: "lacking all foodstuffs and supplies, we appeared to be bearing a burden to the Holy Land... rather than bringing some sort of aid; nor did we believe that, given such extreme poverty, we could effectively land in the territory of the Saracens. “When the rank-and-file soldiers learned of the leaders' action, many of them abandoned the crusade, making their own way to the East to fulfill their vows. Only by swearing that the stop in Constantinople would be brief were the leaders able to win the grudging acceptance of the other crusaders.

The crusade left Zara in April 1203, made its way through the Aegean and arrived at Constantinople in late June. Mismanagement had reduced Byzantium's once proud navy to a few worm-eaten vessels incapable of challenging the enormous crusade fleet. In several dramatic displays, the crusaders let the people of Constantinople know that they came as friends, having brought them their rightful lord. The Byzantines responded with insults, rocks, and bare backsides. They wanted nothing to do with the Westerners' pretender.

Reluctantly, the crusaders at last accepted that they would have to attack. The massive city had enormous fortifications that no enemy had ever breached before and a garrison three times the size of the crusader force. Nevertheless, on 17th July the crusaders attacked the northeastern area of the city, the Franks assaulting the land wall and the Venetians the seawall. After fierce fighting the Venetians captured a portion of the wall and entered a short distance before being pushed back by the elite imperial bodyguard.

Discontent at Alexius III's ineffectiveness made him fearful of a coup and he fled. His brother, Isaac II Angelus, was freed and restored to the throne. He ordered the gates to be opened so that Prince Alexius could enter. The crusaders were dutifully acclaimed as heroes and within days the young man was crowned co-emperor Alexius IV

VENICE AND THE PAPACY

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A Venetian galley with a seaman blowing a horn (above). They are the only surviving artistic representations of the Fourth Crusade from the Middle Ages. The crusade is depicted in the mosaics from a decidedly Venetian point of view closely following the story told by the Venetian Martino da Canal in the 13th century.

The excommunication of Venice on the Fourth Crusade marked the end of an exceptionally close relationship with the papacy. Venetians did most of their business in the East, but remained devoted to the church of Rome, supporting it during various disputes. In 1077, Pope Gregory VII spoke of the "uniquely close relationship" between Venice and Rome, and in 1177 the republic helped to end a struggle between the pope and the German emperor.

Venetians were also strong supporters of the crusades-indeed, no state in Europe so often and so vigorously took up the cross. Venice's fleet was the largest single contribution to the First Crusade, and in 1122 the doge in person led thousands of Venetians to the Holy Land, where they crushed the Fatimid navy and helped to conquer Tyre. That Innocent III should turn to Venice for help with the Fourth Crusade was unsurprising, but circumstances outside anyone's control made him regret that choice.

Thera – Representation of a Minoan Ship/Fleet

2010-08-05T13:13:00.001+08:00

The south section of the frieze constitutes the last chapter in the story. The fleet is sailing away from the harbour of Town IV in the direction of the home port (Town V). A small rowing boat in front of Town IV, with five oarsmen and a helmsman, seems to be carrying an important person, whose head projects above the throne-like structure on the stern. Perhaps it is a local dignitary who is accompanying the departing fleet as it leaves the harbour. The fleet comprises seven large sailing vessels depicted in two rows, three above and four below. Of these, presumably because of limited space, only three - two above and one below - are shown with their masts raised and only one in full sail. On this ship the passenger section is closed and the paddlers are not depicted. Perhaps the representation of two steersmen and the decoration of its bows with flying doves emphasize the fact that this craft is the swift messenger ship of the fleet. On the remaining ships the mast and rigging are arranged horizontally supported on forked poles.

The fine red lines above the heads of the passengers represent long spears, also resting on poles, sometimes topped by a boar's tusk helmet. In addition to the passengers, seated and dressed in white tunics, between 18 and 20 paddlers, intent on their task, are also shown on each vessel, as well as the helmsman. On the ship top left there is another figure who may well be the 'time-keeper'. On the stern behind each helmsman a light construction is depicted, the lower part of which is covered with ox hide. Drawn within each of these 'cabins' is the head of a male figure with a long spear, while a boar's tusk helmet hangs from one of the vertical poles of its frame. These elements suggest that the light structure is a kind of shield to protect the warrior-captain. Various motifs (e.g. butterflies, flowers, birds) decorate the bowsprit of each boat, while the poop, which terminates in a kind of pontoon, is likewise embellished with a representation of a wild beast. Indeed, constructional details of the vessels, with their equipment, means of propulsion and many other traits are rendered so meticulously that the Miniature Frieze could be considered a shipwright's manual of the day.

The presence of weapons such as the rectangular shields in front of the helmsman, the spears and helmets, indicates that the ship's passengers are warriors, who are depicted in action elsewhere on the frieze. Thus the character of the entire expedition is revealed as long and dangerous.

The fleet progresses from left to right, across the dolphin-filled sea, and sails into the port which is its final destination. The topographic features of the landscape, the configuration of the habour and the beached boats, the multi-storeyed buildings with Aegean architectural traits, and the appearance of the inhabitants argue for the identification of Town V as Akrotiri. The artist converys the festive nature of the event by showing the population drifting from the town and its environs towards the harbour to welcome the returning mariners.

Since the time of its discovery, the Miniature Frieze has been the subject of many interpretations. It used to be claimed that this important monument immortalized a specific historical event - a campaign of Minoans in Libya and the victors returning home in triumph. The section of the south wall, in particular, has been regarded as a kind of sacred regatta in memory of an old tradition, as a symolic depiction of communications and contacts in the Aegean in general, as the representation of an annual nautical festival, or even as a wedding procession. Recent studies recognize in the Miniature Frieze elements which later appear in descriptions in the Homeric poems.

Whatever the story shown it must be connected with the master of the West House and concern an event significant for his status in Theran society. Perhaps the Miniature Frieze, which is undoubtedly one of the earlier records of a voyage and overseas missions of the seafarer who lived in this building. Its detailed depictions of harbors and lands bring to mind sixteenth - and seventeenth - century maps and the Miniature Frieze could well be regarded as a Bronze Age 'portolan', and must surely by the earliest known map in Europe.

Indian Sea Trade with the West

2010-08-01T12:48:00.002+08:00

The West

Gordon Childe says: "The most startling feature of pre-historic Indian trade is that manufactured goods made in India were exported to Mesopotamia. At Eshunna, near Baghdad, typically Indian shell inlays and even pottery probably of the Indus manufacture have been found along with seals. After c. 1700 B. C. C. E. the traders of India lost commercial contact with the traders of Mesopotamia."

S. R. Rao says that the Indian traders first settled in Bahrein and used the circular seal. Later on the different sections of the Indian merchants colonized the different cities of Mesopotamia after the name of their race. The Chola colonized the land where the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, approach most nearly and the banks touch the so called Median wall. They called their colony Cholades which later came to be known as Chaldea (i.e. the land of the Cholas) as a result of corrupt pronunciation. Similarly the Asuras of Vedic India colonized the city Asura after their name and later they established the Assyrian empire.

Archaeological evidence of the use of indigo in the cloths of the Egyptians mummies, Indian cedar in the palace of Nebuchandnzzar and Indian teak in the temple of the moon god at Ur shows the continuity of Indian commercial relations with the West. Rassam found a beam of Indian cedar in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar (604-562 B.C) at Birs Nimrud. In the second storey of the Temple of the Moon-God at ur rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus (555- 538 B.C.) Taylor found "two rough logs of wood apparently teak".

The ancient Egyptian traders sailed there boats not only on the Nile but also ventured into the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and even into the Indian Ocean, for they are said to have reached "God's land" or the land of Punt (India). Similarly the Indian traders sailed their ships not only on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, they also ventured into the Red Sea and even into the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea. From the very beginning Indian traders had a very fair knowledge of all the ancient oceans and seas of the populated world. the Egyptians called India as "God's land" because India was in those days culturally very much developed. The priest of ancient Egypt required vast quantities of aromatic plants for burning as incense; frankincense, myrrh and lavender were also used for embalmment purpose. Herodotus has left us a sickening description of the great number of spices and scented ointments of which India was the center. Beauty products from India also attracted the women of Egypt. The cosmetic trade was entirely dependent on imports chiefly from India. The Pharaohs of the fifth and sixth dynasties made great efforts to develop trade relations with the land of Punt. Knemphotep made voyages to Punt eleven times under the captainship of Koui. This expedition was organized and financed by the celebrated Queen Halshepsut.

(source: Foreign Trade and Commerce in Ancient India - By Prakash Charan Prasad p. 36-43. For more information refer to chapter on India and Egypt)

Before trade with the Roman Empire, India carried on her trade chiefly with Egypt; whose king, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.) with whom Ashoka the Great had intercourse, founded the city of Alexandria, that afterwards became the principal emporium of trade between the East and West.

M. A. Murray, the Egyptlogist says in his book, " The splendor that was Egypt" that the type of men of Punt as depicted by Halshepsut's artists suggests an Asiatic rather than an African race and the sweet smelling woods point to India as the land of their origin.

(source: Art Culture of India and Egypt - By S. M. El Mansouri p. 14).

This expedition really appears to have been a great commercial success. The queen proudly recorded on the walls of the temple of Deir-el-Bahri: "Our ships were filled with all marvelous things from Punt (India); the scented wood of God's land, piles of resin, myrrh, green balsan trees, ebony, ivory, gold, cinnamon, incense, eye-coloring, monkeys, grey dogs and panther-skins." These objects indicate Indian goods exported to Egypt.

Alexander's passage of the Indus was effected by means of boats supplied by Indian craftsmen. A flotilla of boast was used in bridging the difficult river of Hydaspses. For purpose of the voyage of Nearchus down the rivers and to the Persian Gulf, all available country boats were impressed for the service, and a stupendous fleet was formed, numbering around 800 vessels, according to Arrian, and to the more reliable estimate of Ptolemy nearly 2,000 vessels which accommodated 8,000 troops, several thousand horses, and vast quantities of supplies. It was indeed an extraordinary huge fleet, built entirely of Indian wood and by the hands of Indian craftsmen. All this indicates that in the age of the Mauryas shipbuilding in India was a regular and flourishing industry of which the output was quite large.

A book, called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written by a Graceo-Egyptian sailor in the first century A.D., gives a very detailed and interesting account of Indian trade from the author's personal knowledge. He came to India and found the Indian coast studded with ports and harbors, carrying on brisk trade with foreign countries. The chief articles of export from India were spices, perfumes, medicinal herbs, pigments, pearls, precious stones like diamond, sapphire, turquoise and lapis lazuli, animal skins, cotton cloth, silk yarn, muslin, indigo, ivory, porcelain and tortoise shell; the chief imports were cloth, linen, perfume, medicinal herbs, glass vessels, silver, gold, copper, tin, lead, pigment, precious stones and coral.

***

The value of Indian trade may be estimated from the well-known passage of Pliny, in which he recorded that India drained the Roman empire of fifty million sesterces every year. The wealth of early India is confirmed by the lament of Pliny the Elder in Historica Naturalis (Natural History), completed in 77 AD that all of Rome's coffers were being emptied into India to satisfy Roman demand for transulent Indian muslins. Pliny's statement is corroborated by the discovery, in India, of innumerable gold coins of the Roman emperors, which must have come here in course of trade. Most of the coins have been found. Most of these coins have been found in South India, and their evidence is corroborated by many passages in classic Tamil literature. We read of 'Yavanas of harsh speech' with many wares; of foreign merchants thronging sea-port towns like Mamallapuram, Puhar, and Korkai; or busy customs officials, and those engaged in loading and unloading vessels in the harbor. The wealth of the Roman Empire reached India through the ports of Kalyan, Chaul, Broach, and Cambay in Western India. Tamralipti was an important port in Bengal. It carried on trade with China, Lanka, Java and Sumatra. In the Andhra region, the ports were Kadura and Ghantasala, Kaveripattanam (Puhar) and Tondail were the ports of the Pandya region. The ports of Kottayam and Muziris were on the Malabar coast. There was a great maritime trade between India and Southeast Asia and China. The rulers of India facilitated trade by building and maintaining lighthouses at the necessary points and by keeping sea routes free and safe from pirates.

According to Surjit Mansingh: "India's trade with Europe, both by land and sea, was a constant fact of history from ancient times"

(source: India: A Country Study 1985).

The close connection between the early civilization of Ninevah and Babylon and the West Coast of India is borne out by indisputable evidence and this was possible only through the navigation of the Arabian sea. There is ample evidence of a flourishing trade between the Levant and the West Coast of India, as may be inferred from allusion in the Old Testament.

As stated by Prof. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri in Indian Antiquary, 1938 p. 27: "the evidence of South Indian connections with the West drawn from references in his (Solomna's) reign to Ophir and Thar Shih to ivory, apes and peacocks is seen to be only a link in a more or less continuous chain of data suggesting such connections for long ages before and after. The earliest Indian literature, the Vedas speak of sea voyage. One well-known mantra (Rig Veda 1, 97, 8) prays: "Do thou convey us in a ship across the sea for our welfare." Besides this, there are numerous allusions in the Rig Veda to sea voyages and to ships with a hundred oars.

(source: India and the Indian Ocean - K. M. Panikkar The MacMillan Company, 1945 p.23-24).

Indian seafarers did not absent themselves from the Middle East or the European mainland. From the Sanskrit name of Socotra (Island abode of bliss) and from certain Hindu-like divisions and customs among the people of East Arabia. C. Lassen suggested that the first sailors and colonizers on the Indian Ocean came from India. According to Jeannie Auboyer "merchant shipping was very active in India and had, even since Roman times, linked the Mediterranean world to China with great vessels (nava) of which the Indian king owned a fleet, though most of them belonged to wealthy individuals."

(source: Daily Life in Ancient India - By Jeannie Auboyer ISBN 8121506328 p. 75).

The achievements of Indian seafarers in the Far East and Southeast Asia have been acknowledged by a host of scholars. The late Professor Buhler says: "References to voyages are also found in two of the most ancient Dharma Sutras."

There was also an active trade between India and Greece. The mention of ivory by Homer and of several other Indian articles assign the trade a very ancient date. In addition to ivory, India also supplied indigo to Greece, whence the inhabitants derived their knowledge of its use. Homer knew tin by its Sanskrit name. Professor Max Duncker says that the Greeks used to wear silken garments which were imported from India, and which were called "Sindones, or "Tyrian robes." "Trade existed between the Indians and Sabaens on the coast of South Arabia before the 10th century B.C. the time when, according to the Europeans, Manu lived.

Of the producer of loom, silk was more largely imported from India into ancient Rome than either in Egypt or in Greece. "It so allured the Roman ladies, " says a writer, that it sold its weight in gold."

(source: Encyclopedia Britannica Vol. XI p. 459). For more information refer to chapter on India and Egypt).

Testimony to the flourishing condition of the ship-building industry in India is available in the description of the return journey of Alexander from India via the sea route. According to estimates of Ptolemy nearly 2000 vessels which between them accommodated 8000 troops, several thousand horses, and vast quantities of supplies. This vivid description speaks not only of the ready resources and expertise of the Indian craftsmen but also of the tonnage of the seaworthy ships estimated at about 75 tons (or 3000 amphorea) by Pliny.

The most valuable of the exports of India was silk, which was under the Persian Empire is said to have exchanged by weight of gold.

(source: Indian Shipping - By R. K. Mookerji p. 83).

It is evident that "there was a very large consumption of Indian manufactures in Rome. This is confirmed by the elder Pliny, who complained that there was "no year in which India did not drain the Roman Empire of a hundred million sesterces (1,000,000 pounds)....so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women." The annual drainage of gold from Rome and its provinces to India was estimated by him at 500 steria, equal to about Rs. 4,000,000. We are assured on undisputed authority that the Romans remitted annually to India a sum equivalent to 4,000,000 pounds to pay for their investments, and that in the reign of Ptolmeies, 125 sails of Indian shipping were at one time lying in the ports whence Egypt, Syria, and Rome itself were supplied with the products of India."

(Life in Western India (Guthrie), from Colonel James Tod - Western India p. 221. Hindu Raj in the World - By K. L. Jain p. 37).

Roman coins in large quantities are found in places in Southern India, whence beryl, pepper, pearls and minerals were exported to Rome. Some of these are described by Mr. Sewell. "These hoards," he says, "are the product of 55 separate discoveries, mostly in the Coimbatore and Madura districts."

(source: Journal of Royal Asiatic Society for 1904, Roman Coins).

There is extant, a Prakrit text on ship-building named Angavijja written in the Kushana period and edited in the Gupta period. This text enlists about a dozen names of different types of ships, such as Nava, Pota, Kotimba, Salika, Sarghad, Plava, Tappaka, Pindika, Kanda, Katha, Velu, Tumba, Kumba and Dati. Some of these varieties of ships such as Tappaka (Trappaga), Kotimba and Sarghad have also been mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea. They are considered to be very large ships capable of sailing along the coast as well as in deep sea.

Mr. Momensen in his Provinces of the Roman Empire (Volume II p. 301), says: "Somewhat further to the south at Kananor numerous Roman gold coins of the Julio Claudian epochs have been found, formerly exchanged against the spices destined for the Roman kitchens."

Arabia being the nearest of the countries situated to the west of India, was the first to which the Indian commercial enterprises by sea were directed. The long-continued trade with Arabia dates from a very remote antiquity. "The labors of Von Bohlen (Das Alte Indian, Volume I, p. 42), confirming those of Heeran and in their turn confirmed by those of Lassen (Ind Alt. Vol II. p. 580), have established the existence of a maritime commerce between India and Arabia from the very earliest period of humanity. Lassen also says that the Egyptians wrapped their mummies in Indian Muslin.

Agarthchides of Cnidus, Ptolemaic Dynasty, President of the Alexandrain Library, who is mentioned with respect by Strabo, Pliny and Diodorus, and who lived upwards of 300 years before the time of Periplus, noticed the active commercial intercourse kept up between Yemen and Pattala - a seaport in Western India. Pattala in Sanskrit means a "commercial town" which circumstance if it is true, says Prof. Heeran, "would prove the extreme antiquity of the navigation carried on by the Indus. Agatharchides saw large ships coming from the Indus and Pattala.

The importance of trade was highly appreciated by the people of Kalinga - a kingdom on the Eastern seaboard of India. Inscriptions "speak of navigation and ship commerce as forming part of the education of the princes of Kalinga."

J. Takakusu writes: "That there was a communication or trade between India and China from 400 A.D. down to 800 A.D. is a proven fact. Not to speak of any doubtful records we read in the Chinese and Japanese books, Buddhist or otherwise, of Indian merchant ships appearing in the China Sea; we know definitely that Fahien (399-415 A.D) returned to China via Java by an Indian boat...at further in the Tang dynasty an eyewitness tells us that there were in 750 A.D. many Brahmin ships in the Canton River."

(source: Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland. October 1905 p. 872).

Historian Vincent Smith in his book Early History of India, writes" "Ancient Tamil literature and the Greek and Roman authors prove that in the first two centuries of the Christian era the ports on the Coromandel or Cholamandal coast enjoyed the benefits of active commerce with both East and West. The Chola fleets.....uncrossed the Indian ocean to the islands of the Malaya Archipelago."

(source: Early History of India - By Vincent Smith p. 415).

"The Hindus themselves were in the habit of constructing the vessels in which they navigated the coast of Coromandel, and also made voyages to the Ganges and the peninsula beyond it. These vessels bore different names according to the size." writes Prof. Heeran. There were commercial towns and ports on the Coromandel coast. Masulipatam, with its cloth manufactures, as well as the mercantile towns situated on the mouth of the Ganges, have already been noticed as existing in the time of Periplus. Even as late as the 17th century, French traveler Tavernier in 1666 A.D. said: "Masulipatam is the only place in the Bay of Bengal from which vessels sailed eastwards for Bengal, Arrakan, Pegu Siam, Sumatra, Cochin China and the Manilla and West to Hormuz, Makha and Madagascar."

(source: Hindu Raj in the World - By K. L. Jain p. 42).

Early Arab Warships

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Frederick M Hocker’s hypothetical reconstruction of a tenth-century bireme dromōn, based on the few contemporary documentary sources. An Arab heavy warship would have looked similar in many respects.

Arab ships were similar enough to Byzantine warships that they were often referred to as dromōns as well, in both Greek and Arab sources, and the Greek terms chelandion, galea, and dromonarion also found their way into Arabic naval terminology, with shalandi one of the most common Arabic terms for large, dromōn-like ships. The main Arab ships were considered to be larger, heavier and slower than their Byzantine opponents. Arab types that do appear to be more specific include shalandi, shīnī and ghurāb for galleys and musattah for a large, decked galley common in later periods, especially in the Crusades. Another Arabic type of note is the harrāqa, or ‘fire ship’, which is the type most often equipped with Greek fire.

Islamic Conquest - The war at sea

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For centuries, power in the Mediterranean had depended on naval might. At the end of the 6th century the Byzantine Empire dominated both the Mediterranean and the Black Seas with naval bases at Carthage, Alexandria, Acre and Constantinople. Yet the number of Byzantine warships remained few, because the Empire faced no serious maritime rivals until the Sassanian occupation of Egypt and Syria. Even more threatening were the subsequent Muslim conquests of these areas, as well as North Africa and, eventually, the Iberian peninsula.

In the Islamic forces' first major naval operation in the Mediterranean, they temporarily occupied the island of Cyprus after having driven off a Byzantine fleet near Alexandria in 652 - their first naval victory. Then, in 655, the Islamic fleet won a convincing victory over the Byzantine navy off the south-western coast of what is now Turkey. For nigh on a thousand years Greeks and then Romans had dominated the Mediterranean Sea. Now, in the first major Mediterranean sea battle for centuries, an Arab fleet had successfully challenged the Byzantines in their home waters.

Surprisingly, given the relative inexperience of the Muslim fleet, this battle saw the Byzantines defeated both at sea and in a skirmish on shore at the same time. This clash in 655 near Cape Chelidonia, off the Lycian coast, came to be known as the 'Battle of the Masts' because the Muslims had landed to cut tall trees for the masts and yards of their new fleets, based in Egypt and Syria. A lack of suitable large timber would in fact hamper Muslim naval development throughout the medieval period, though it did encourage technological innovation in Islamic naval architecture. During this encounter the Byzantine ships seem either to have been moored in close formation or to have been tied together. As a result the Muslims were able to win because of their superior boarding and close-combat tactics.

The possible importance of the Sassanian influence on naval developments in the Middle East has only recently been considered. During their brief occupation of much of the eastern Mediterranean littoral, they had extended as far as to occupy the Greek island of Rhodes, plus some Anatolian coastal towns, though they almost certainly used captured Syrian, Cilician, Egyptian or Greek ships to do so.

The subsequent Muslim conquest of many of the same regions brought the Arabs to the shores of the Mediterranean for the first time as a great military power and as the inheritors of Sassanian naval traditions. On the other hand the Arabian peoples had a far more active naval heritage than their initially cautious attitude to the Mediterranean might suggest. The pre-Islamic Yemenis and perhaps Omanis had, for example, been raiding Sassanian territory by sea since at least the 4th century AD while various other tribes from both the Gulf and Red Sea coastal regions of Arabia had similar maritime traditions. Here it is worth noting that, following the first wave of Islamic conquest, these same Yemeni and other coastal Arab tribes were often selected as garrison troops for strategic coastal bases including Alexandria.

In response to the challenge by new Arab-Islamic fleets, a more powerful Romano-Byzantine navy would emerge in the late 7th century. The 'Battle of the Masts' would not be the last naval encounter between these two rivals. Indeed, later Byzantine attempts to retake Egypt would convince Mu'awiya, the governor of Syria and subsequently the first Umayyad Caliph, of the need for a full Islamic navy in the Mediterranean.

The first such fleet was built in Egypt, where all qualified sailors were registered for naval service. Although many of these sailors were in fact Christians, the bulk were Yemeni in origin and Muslim in religion. The new fleet used Tyre and Acre as forward bases while Iranian and Iraqi shipwrights were brought from the Gulf to build and man the new or restored shipyards at Acre, Tyre and Beirut.

Other naval bases and fleets were established in newly conquered Tunisia and rather later in Libya; the resources of wood, iron and tar essential for medieval naval warfare all being available in North Africa. From the early 8th century onwards these new Islamic fleets undertook almost annual raids against Byzantine territory and islands in the western Mediterranean, mirroring the annual raids undertaken on land.

If there were any real differences between Byzantine and early Islamic warships, it would seem to have been in the increased height of the forecastle of the latter. This was soon being used to mount stone-throwing engines and to provide an advantage when boarding enemy vessels. The main fighting ship was a galley called a shini which, like the Byzantine galleys of the day, had between 140 and 180 oarsmen. It is also important to note that, with very few exceptions, the oarsmen in medieval galleys, be they Christian or Muslim, were paid volunteers not slaves.

By the mid-8th century such galleys defended themselves against the terrifying Byzantine incendiary weapon known as 'Greek fire' using various systems of water-soaked cotton, and would shortly use Greek fire themselves. However, the vessels of the rival naval powers remained remarkably similar, as there was an exchange of both technology and terminology between them.

The main difficulty facing any Islamic fleet continued to be a lack of timber. Indeed, this lack of resources may have stimulated the construction of larger ships, which were better able to defend themselves and were no longer regarded as expendable assets. Certainly, there was also a change from the hull- or skin-first method of construction to the more economical frame-first method, although this change would not be truly complete until the 11th century.

Ottoman Expansion

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Barbarossa's fleet wintering in the French harbour of Toulon, 1543.

Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent had the good fortune of succeeding Selim I (1512–1520). In his short reign, Selim had thoroughly beaten a newly emergent foe, the Safevid state on the battlefield of C¸ aldýran in 1514. (The Safevids, a Turkish-speaking dynasty who had acquired an Islamic and Persian identity, became the major opponent on the Ottoman eastern frontiers during the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.) Selim then (1516–1517) conquered the Arab lands of the Mamluk sultanate based in Cairo, filling the treasury and bringing the Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina under the Ottoman rulers’ dominion. During the long reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566) the Ottomans enjoyed considerable power and wealth. Under Süleyman’s leadership, the Ottomans fought a sixteenth-century world war. Sultan Süleyman supported Dutch rebels against their Spanish overlords while his navy battled in the western Mediterranean against the Spanish Habsburgs. At one point, Ottoman troops wintered on the modern-day Riviera at Toulon, by courtesy of King Francis I of France who also was fighting against the Habsburgs. On the other side of their world, Ottoman navies warred in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, as far east as modern-day Indonesia. There they fought because the global balance of power and wealth had been overturned by the Portuguese voyages of discovery around Africa, that opened all-water routes between India and south and southeast Asia. These new passages threatened to destroy a transit trade that Middle Eastern regimes for many centuries had dominated and profited from. To loosen the mounting Portuguese (and later Dutch and English) chokehold on this trade and break its growing dominance of the all-water routes, the Ottomans launched a series of offensives in the eastern seas. For example, they aided local rulers on the India coast who were fighting the Portuguese and sent fleets to aid the Moluccans (near modern Singapore) who were struggling to break mounting European maritime domination. On the Balkan fronts, Sultan Süleyman’s forces similarly moved to impose Ottoman domination over trade routes, rich mines and other economic resources. In an important series of victories, the Ottomans seized Belgrade in 1521, crushed the Hungarian state at the battle of Mohács in 1526 and later (in 1544) annexed part of it. In 1529, Ottoman troops stood outside the walls of Habsburg Vienna, which neither they nor their successors in 1683 were able effectively to breach. By this date the Istanbul-based state stood astride the rich trade routes linking the Aegean and Mediterranean seas to east and central Europe. Thus both Venice and Genoa suffered grievous blows, losing the wealth and power that the trade routes and colonies of these regions had brought them.

If the phrase “expansion” aptly depicts the overall Ottoman military and political experiences until the later sixteenth century, then “consolidation” likely best summarizes the situation during the subsequent century or so. Following Süleyman’s death, Ottoman victories continued but less frequently than before. The great island of Cyprus with its fertile lands became an Ottoman possession in 1571, bolstering Istanbul’s dominance over the sea routes of the eastern Mediterranean. The Europeans’ naval victory at Lepanto in 1571 and utter destruction of the Ottoman navy, one of the greatest in the Mediterranean at the time, proved ephemeral. The next year a new fleet re-established Ottoman dominion in the eastern Mediterranean, the locale of their recent defeat. On land, Ottoman armies captured Azerbaijan between 1578 and 1590 and regained Baghdad in 1638. Crete, the largest of the eastern Mediterranean islands after Cyprus, was incorporated into the state in 1669, followed by Podolia in 1676.

Battle of Diu, February 3, 1509

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Indian Ocean Becomes Portuguese Lake

During the mid- to late fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Portugal took the early lead in exploring the world via the oceans. They were looking for trade routes to bypass the famed Silk Road to China, as well as ways of obtaining rare spices and other products that were being monopolized by the Venetians. By 1500, Portuguese colonies or trading posts had been planted on the west African coast (Angola) and the east African coast (Mozambique). These colonies were used as stepping stones on the way to the Indian subcontinent. Fort Kochi, on the southwest coast of India, was established by the Portuguese in 1503. The Portuguese managed to establish trading agreements with several Indian rulers, with mixed results. By 1508, the Europeans had managed to get on the wrong side of a coalition of various nations, including the Calicut, the Sultan of Gujarat, the Mamlûk sultan of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.

A Portuguese fleet of 21 vessels had been dispatched to the Indian Ocean in 1505 to add some muscle to their nation’s presence in that area. They were under the command of Portugal’s First Viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, who had been appointed to represent the interests of Portugal in India. In opposition, the Ottoman sultan had provided some galleys to Egypt, in order to counter Portuguese interdiction of the Malabar timber trade from India. The Mamlûks – with some technical assistance from the Venetians – disassembled these galleys in Alexandria and reassembled them in the Red Sea below Suez. These galleys then had to navigate the Indian Ocean, a dicey situation considering that the galleys were constructed to sail on the Mediterranean Sea. Mostly hugging the coast, the Turkish- Mamlûk fleet arrived off the coast of Gujarat, one of the Muslim kingdoms on the coast of India. The Sultan of Gujarat had previously contacted the Ottomans, recommending that a sufficient naval force could help tip the balance of power and allow large portions of India to be added to the Ottoman Empire. The only major force standing in the way of that plan was the Portuguese.

In March of 1508, a smaller Portuguese fleet had been surprised and defeated by the Ottoman-Mamlûk fleet at the battle of Chaul. The Portuguese commander, Lourenço de Almeida, was killed and many Portuguese captured and imprisoned. When the First Viceroy, his father, heard of his son’s demise, he swore vengeance saying, “He who ate the chick must now eat the rooster, or pay for it.” While preparing to chase the Ottoman-Mamlûk fleet, the nobleman Afonso de Albuquerque arrived in India on December 6, 1508, with a royal commission to become the new Viceroy in India, replacing Almeida. Almeida refused to relinquish his position until he had hunted down the enemy fleet and avenged his son’s death. In sympathy with Almeida’s state of mind, Albuquerque agreed to wait until Almeida had accomplished his plans. [One chronicle states that Almeida threw Albuquerque into prison to await his pleasure.]

The Portuguese fleet, now numbering 18 vessels, left Fort Kochi in late 1508 and sailed north along the west Indian coast, seeking the Ottoman-Mamlûk fleet. They stopped at various ports along the way, either picking up provisions or attacking enemies, giving their soldiers experience. Ottoman admiral Mir Hussein Pasha, probably following standard Mediterranean tactics, anchored his fleet in the harbor of the port of Diu. This port had a fort with its own artillery, which Hussein Pasha hoped to use to support his fleet. The Ottoman-Mamlûk fleet had received reinforcements from the Sultan of Gujarat and the ruler of Calicut. However, these reinforcements were small, shallow-draft vessels little better than fishing boats. Eventually, on February 2, 1509, the Portuguese fleet discovered the enemy fleet in Diu’s harbor and prepared to attack the next day. The Turkish fleet was anchored in the inner harbor of Diu, with a treacherously narrow and shallow channel to navigate. However, the Portuguese found an 18-year odd native who was familiar with the channel and offered to help in exchange for his freedom.

The Portuguese fleet, consisted of some 18 ships, all but two armed with cannons in broadside, and teeming with 1500 well-armed, well-equipped, well-trained Portuguese soldiers and 400 Nayar warriors from the Kochi area. Their ships consisted of:

• Five large carracks, or naus. They were large vessels with high forecastles and aftcastles, and usually three, sometimes four, masts. The foremast and mainmast were square-rigged, while the mizzenmast was lateen-rigged (triangular sail);

• Four smaller naus, probably with three masts;

• Four caravelas (caravels) redondas, three-masted ships with a square foresail and lateen sails on the other two. They were probably up to 30 metres in length and with a weight of 50 tons;

• Two caravelas Latinas, two-masted, lateen-rigged precursors of the caravela redonda, probably shorter in length and a bit lighter in weight;

• Two gales, probably two-masted, lateen rigged galleys with 25-30 oars on each side, with 3 men to an oar. Like most galleys, a gale had only fore and aft guns, but could also carry 200-300 men-at-arms; and,

• One bergantim (brigantine), a smaller, two-masted vessel with a square sail on the foremast and lateen-rigged on the other. At this time period, it was probably also equipped with oars.

The Ottoman-Mamlûk fleet, besides the 100 or so smaller galleys from Gujarat and Calicut, had 16 larger vessels. They were all galleys, though they were referred to by names similar to the Portuguese vessels. As stated above, these Turkish vessels were only equipped with light cannon fore and aft. The vessels were:

• Four naus from Gujarat;

• Four Mamlûk naus;

• Two caravelas;

• Four galeotas (galliots), small galleys with two lateen-rigged sails and up to 20 oars per side; and,

• Two gales.

As mentioned above, the Portuguese vessels had a large complement of fighting men, trained for sea battle, armed with arquebuses and primitive grenades. The Turkish fleet marines, trained for fighting in the Mediterranean, wore almost no armor and were mainly archers. Also, the Portuguese ships sat higher in the water, and were almost impossible to board. Further, their cannon could bombard any enemy vessel attempting to approach them for boarding action.

The battle started at about 11 a.m., when the prevailing winds and the incoming tide were favorable. The Portuguese began a major bombardment of the artillery batteries guarding the port and the Turkish fleet. Then, when the Turkish and Gujarati vessels refused to leave the “safety” of the harbor – as Almeida anticipated – the Portuguese moved in to engage the enemy.

The superiority of the state-of-the-art European vessels became obvious as, for the next six hours, the Portuguese blasted the enemy vessels with full broadsides, grappled and boarded the enemy ships, capturing two Turkish naus, two Gujarati naus and the two Turkish gales in bloody hand-to-hand fighting. In addition, two Turkish naus, 2 Gujarati naus and two Turkish caravelas were sunk. By five o’clock, the wind began to change and Almeida ordered his fleet – which lost no ships despite one of his naus sustaining heavy damage – to leave the harbor with some of their prizes.

The next day, Viceroy Almeida demanded the return of the men captured at the battle of Chaul, which was accomplished within the hour. He further demanded reparations of 300,000 gold xerafins (about 180,000 rupes). The ruler of Diu offered to give his port to the Portuguese, but Almeida turned that offer down, as he felt it would be too expensive to rule – but he did leave a garrison in the city. The Portuguese fleet stayed in the area for several days; the ruler of Diu, grateful that the Europeans did not loot his city, almost daily sent them a boat loaded with “… sheep, hens, eggs, oranges, lemons, cabbages, etc.” as well as rich gifts. Almeida refused a gift of a brocade tapestry and a string of pearls, which he instead sent home to the Queen of Portugal. Nine days after the battle, the Portuguese fleet headed back south.

Casualties from the battle amounted to 32 Portuguese dead, and about 300 wounded. The combined enemy dead were estimated at 3000 killed and an “even larger” number of wounded. The Egyptian and Turkish prisoners were treated…well, badly. Almeida, in retaliation for his son’s death, ordered most of them to be hanged, burnt alive or torn to pieces by tying them to the mouths of cannons, then firing them. Writing about the battle afterwards, the Viceroy said, “As long as you may be powerful at sea, you will hold India as yours; and if you do not possess this power, little will avail you a fortress on the shore.” Several of the captured Turkish and Gujarati vessels were sold as prizes, with portions of the money distributed to the fleet sailors and marines.

Among the more long-standing reminders of this fight were three royal battle standards of the Mamlûk sultan of Egypt captured at this battle. They were sent home to Portugal, where to this day they hang in the Convent of the Order of Christ in the city of Tomar, formerly a stronghold of the Knights Templar.

CROSS VERSUS CRESCENT

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Later generations of Europeans, from the seventeenth century on, would grow increasingly confident, even complacent, regarding their military superiority over the East (excepting such scares as the 1683 siege of Vienna). There was no such confidence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then, a long string of battlefield victories indicated that the Muslim world, particularly the wealthy, populous, militant and expanding Ottoman Empire, had every chance of stretching its grasp to seize first Sicily or Vienna, then Naples and Rome, and finally all of western Europe. This was by no means an improbable, or even unlikely scenario. The sultan planned for it, sending his armies and fleets west. In response, the European powers fretted, drew themselves together in a sequence of Holy Leagues and prepared for the sultan's blows. Only the most powerful of Christian princes, 'his most Catholic majesty' the King of Spain, could direct his own sustained offensive east to match and meet the Turk.

The battles of East versus West were of course fought along the shores of the Mediterranean and the banks of the Danube. But there were more exotic, farther flung points of conflict as well: the Renaissance struggle between Muslim and Christian European was the first truly global war. Portuguese exploration into the Indian Ocean in search of pepper, cloves and nutmeg (and also the fabled Eastern ally for the war against the Moors, 'Prester John', eventually identified as the black Christian king of the Ethiopian highlands) brought the age-old conflict of crusader and Ghazi to the monsoon-lands of Asia and East Africa. In 1498 Vasco da Gama made landfall in India. The Portuguese governors 'of India' (their brief actually included the whole of the Indian Ocean) who followed da Gama brought the customs of the Iberian Reconquista - fire and sword - to the work of carving out a maritime empire: this was no mere commercial creation. Afonso da Albuqerque seized Hormuz in 1509, Goa in 1510 and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula - gateway to the spice wealth of the East Indies - in 1511. These were all Muslim cities. Between 1503 and 1513 the Portuguese almost annually raided into the Red Sea; in 1517 they almost seized Jiddah, the very port of Mecca. The Mameluke sultan in Cairo (until 1517) and thereafter the Ottoman sultan had to respond to these provocations. In 1508 a Mameluke fleet co-operating with Indian Muslim rulers surprised the Portuguese at Chaul off the coast of India, but this Muslim-allied fleet was destroyed the following year. In 1538 a large Ottoman army landed at Diu in India, but failed to take the Portuguese city despite the support of a massive siege battery of 130 guns. In 1552 the Ottomans attacked but failed to retake Hormuz; Portuguese counter-raids reached Basra in southern Iraq. In 1567 as many as forty Ottoman ships arrived at Sumatra to aid the Muslim sultan of Atjeh. Significantly this expedition coincided exactly with a peak in Ottoman activity against the Christian powers in the Mediterranean. This was indeed a world war.

LINK

Fighting Crew of a Greek Trireme

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Marines
According to Herodotos (6.15.2), the 100 Chiot triremes at Lade in 494 BC each carried 40 picked hoplites serving as epibatai Herodotos (7.184.2) mentions that Persian triremes carried, in addition to native marines, 30 additional fighting men who were Persians, Medes or Sakai, the last of whom were a nomadic people of central Asia, highly valued for their archery skills. Every Persian ship was supplied by Persian subjects, including Phoenicians, Egyptians, Carians, Cypriots and Greeks, among others. The non-seafaring Persians supplied only admirals and marines. The last were probably on board to ensure the loyalty of the ship's company and for that reason they were undoubtedly carried in battle.

The ten epibatai on an Athenian trireme had the highest status in the ship after the trierarchos. They are mentioned second in the Decree of Themistokles, and this is the position they occupy in the 4th-century crew lists (IG 22 1951.79-82). Thucydides notes that they joined the trierarchos in pouring libations at the ceremonial departure of the Sicilian expedition (6.32.1).

One reason for the Athenian practice of taking only a few hoplites on deck to serve as marines was that the crew's pulling efficiency was seriously jeopardized if there were too many people moving about topside. Such movement inevitably caused the ship to roll. Under oar, therefore, the epibatai had to be seated (Thucydides 7.67.2), and the procedure appears to have been to keep them centred on the middle line of the ship. Once the vessel had stopped to board an enemy vessel, the epibatai would leap up to fight once the ships grappled. In his speech before the final sea battle in the Great Harbour at Syracuse, the Athenian commander Nikias revealed another reason: 'Many archers and javelineers will be on deck and a mass of hoplites, which we would not employ if we were fighting a battle in the open sea, because they would hinder us through the weight of the ships in exercising our skill.' (Thucydides 7.62.2) Weight, particularly on deck, prevented the triremes doing what they did best, namely, conducting the tactical manoeuvres in which speed and agility were essential.

Archers
The four toxotai were distinct from the ten epibatai, namely they were not carried on deck. An inscription (IG I2 950.137), dated to 412/411 BC, gives them a descriptive adjective, paredroi, meaning 'sitting beside'. It seems that they were posted in the stern beside the trierarchos and kubernetes and acted as their bodyguard in action. The helmsman would certainly have been vulnerable and would have needed protection, being too busy to defend himself. The Athenian playwright Euripides (Iphigenia among the Taurians 1377) talks of archers stationed in the stern, giving covering fire during an embarkation.

Herluf Trolle, (1516–1565)

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Danish-Norwegian admiral. Born on 14 January 1516 in Lillö, Scania, Herluf Trolle was a nobleman and a scholar. He owned several large estates and had wide political influence as a member of the Danish State Council. In 1559, without any previous naval experience, he was appointed admiral of the fleet and inspector of the navy.

Trolle threw himself into his work, and during 1560 he sailed with the fleet on maneuvers. He also encouraged construction of new ships. From the start of the Seven Years’ War of the North (1563–1570) he was commander in chief of the Danish-Norwegian navy. During 30–31 May 1564, a combined Danish-Lübeck fleet of 39 ships under his command met a Swedish fleet of 36 ships off Öland Island. After two days’ battle, the allies captured the Swedish flagship Makalös, the largest ship of the line at the time in Scandinavia; Swedish Admiral Jacob Bagge was taken prisoner. However, the ship blew up before she could be secured.

On 14 August 1564, Trolle with 39 ships again met a Swedish fleet at Öland. This time it consisted of 28 ships commanded by Admiral Klas Horn. The battle was indecisive. That year Trolle issued one of the first known sets of fighting instructions, in which he stressed fighting by line-ahead tactics. On 1 June 1565, Trolle again met Klas Horn, this time at Fehmam. Horn had 40 ships and Trolle commanded an allied force of 32 Danish-Lübeck ships. The action was hotly contested but again indecisive. Trolle, however, was severely wounded and died on 25 June in Copenhagen.

References

Briand de Crèvecoeur, E. Herluf Trolle: Kongens Admiral og Herlufholms Skoles Stifter. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1959.

Phormio (c. 480–428 b.c.)

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The Modern Facsimile trireme Olympias

Athenian admiral recognized for his skillful use of triremes in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Little is known of the family or early career of Phormio, son of Asopios. By 440 b.c. he appears to have obtained the Athenian military office of strategos, when he shared command of 40 ships sent to reinforce a blockade of the island city-state of Samos, a rebellious member of the Athenian Empire. Some years after the successful siege of Samos, possibly in 437 b.c., Phormio commanded 30 ships on an expedition to the western Greek district of Acarnania and enlisted the Acarnanians as allies of the Athenians. In 432 b.c. he completed the investment of Potidaea, another defiant member of the Athenian alliance. By these actions Phormio helped strengthen the Athenian alliance on the eve of its great war with the Sparta and the Peloponnesian League.

Once the war with Sparta commenced, Phormio played a major role in Athenian naval operations. In 430 b.c. he led 20 Athenian triremes into the Gulf of Corinth and undertook a blockade of the city of Corinth, an important ally of Sparta. In the next year, just outside the gulf, Phormio demonstrated his superior tactical abilities when he decisively defeated a larger Peloponnesian fleet of 47 ships. Shortly after this victory, as he reentered the Gulf to protect his base at Naupactus, Phormio lost 9 of his ships to the Peloponnesian fleet, then reinforced to a total of 77 vessels. With only 11 ships remaining at his disposal, Phormio nevertheless managed to prevent an attack on Naupactus and with a brilliant counterattack dispersed the Peloponnesian fleet. The detailed descriptions of these two engagements by the Athenian historian Thucydides are among the most important sources for modern understanding of ancient Greek naval tactics.

After leading a second expedition into Acarnania from Naupactus during the winter of 429–428 b.c., Phormio returned to Athens. In 428 b.c. Phormio was unavailable for another command. This may be attributed either to his illness or death, possibly from the plague that ravaged Athens, or to his loss of civic rights following a judgment against him in the examination to which Athenian commanders were normally subject at the expiration of their commands.

References
Hornblower, Simon. A Commentary on Thucydides. Vol. 1. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Kagan, Donald. The Archidamian War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974.
Morrison, John S., John F. Coates, and N. Boris Rankov. The Athenian Trireme. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Various editions.

Slave carrack

2010-07-08T10:48:00.000+08:00

During the sixteenth century the Portuguese, with their large Brazilian possessions, were dominant in the transatlantic slave trade. Speed at sea was essential, as the mortality rate in the slave hold was very high.

Slave ships would moor in creeks on the West African coast in order to rendezvous with their agents in the grim trade. In turn these agents would acquire slaves inland, often from the winners of tribal conflicts where the losers were sold to the highest bidder. At this time there was no ban on slaving in Europe, but official licences were needed. Many captains did without them, as they were expensive to procure. This fast carrack was typical of the vessels involved in the trade, being longer and slimmer in line than a conventional cargo ship.

Length: 36m (120ft)

Beam: 804m (27ft 6in)

Depth: not known

Displacement: 400t

RIgging: four masts; square-rigged on foremast, others lateen-rigged

Complement: not known

Routes: West Africa to the West Indies and Central America

Cargo: slaves

Ships of the Crusade Era Part II

2010-06-25T23:33:00.001+08:00

Thirteenth-century warships. Illustration from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, by King Alfonso X of Castile. (Bridgeman- Giraudon/Art Resource)

By John H. Pryor

From the sixth to late eleventh centuries, the warship par excellence in the Mediterranean was the dromon and its Muslim and Latin imitations, although Byzantines also developed the chelandion, originally an oared horse transport, which was also imitated. By the tenth century dromons had become biremes with two banks of 50 oars, one below and one above deck. A standard ship’s complement (Gr. ousia) consisted of 108 men, excluding officers, marines, and specialists such as helmsmen and a carpenter. Around 31.5 meters (103 ft.) long, they carried two masts with lateen sails and had quarter rudders on both stern quarters. They also had fighting castles on each side just aft of the foremast and a foredeck at the prow, below which was housed their siphon for hurling Greek fire: this was a weapon that used a force pump to eject a stream of petroleum naphtha fuel that was set alight, creating a tongue of flame that could destroy enemy ships.

Monoreme dromons with only 50 oars were known as galeai, and it seems certain that the Latin galea developed from them. The earliest uses of the Latin term were by a group of eleventh-century Italo-Norman chroniclers, which suggests an adaptation of this ship type in southern Italy from Byzantine originals encountered there. Even though references to galee proliferated rapidly, however, they were never described in detail and all that is known about early galee is that they had fine lines and were fast. The earliest documents with construction details are from the Angevin kingdom of Sicily between 1269 and 1284.

Almost certainly, the oarage system was reconfigured so that two oarsmen could row from one bench position above deck. This made immeasurable difference to the oar mechanics, increasing oarsmen’s combined power delivery markedly. No longer did one bank row below deck in stygian darkness and foul air. It also freed holds for supplies, water, spare gear, and armaments. No wonder that the galea spread rapidly in the West and came to be emulated in both the Byzantine and Muslim worlds.

The earliest datable illustrations of galee are three miniatures in the Madrid manuscript of the Synopsis historiarum of John Skylitzes, produced in Palermo around 1160 (MS Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, vitr. 26–2). These clearly show bireme galleys with a different oarage system. One file of oars was rowed through oarports, but the other was worked above the gunwale. The same system is depicted even more clearly in an early thirteenth-century manuscript of the Carmen ad honorem Augusti of Peter of Eboli (MS Bern, Burgerbibliothek, 120).

This bireme oarage system became known as the alla sensile system. Two oarsmen each rowed single oars from the same bench above deck. Using a stand-and-sit stroke as opposed to the fully seated stroke of classical and Byzantine galleys, they threw their whole weight and the power of their legs into the stroke by falling back onto the bench. The inboard oar was pulled through an oarport in the outrigger, while the outboard oar was pulled against a thole, a pin set in the gunwale (Gr. apostis, It. posticcio, apposticio), to which an oar was held by an oar thong or grommet.

Such bireme galleys remained the norm throughout the main age of the crusades. There is no clear evidence for galleys using any other type of oarage system, and occasional literary references to triremes or to more than one oarsmen pulling each oar are either classical allusions or mistakes. Only in the early fourteenth century did Marino Sanudo Torsello report that: “in [ . . .] 1290, two oarsmen used to row on a bench on almost all galleys which sailed the sea. Later more perceptive men realized that three oarsmen could row on each of the aforesaid benches. Almost everyone uses this nowadays” [Marino Sanudo Torsello, “Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis,” in Gesta Dei per Francos, ed. Jacques Bongars, 2 vols. (Hannover: Typis Wechelianis, 1611), p. 57].

Standard bireme galee came to measure around 39.5 meters (1291/2 ft.) in overall length; they were longer than dromons because they mounted 108 rather than 100 oars and because the stand-and-sit stroke needed a distance between any two tholes (Lat. interscalmium) of around 1.20 meters (4 ft.) rather than the 1 meter (31/4 ft.) for fully-seated oarsmen. Their beam was around 4.6 meters (15 ft.) at the deck amidships, and their depth in hold around 2 meters (61/2 ft.). They still carried only two masts with lateen sails, the foremasts being almost 16 meters (521/2 ft.) long with yards nearly 27 meters (881/2 ft.) and the midships masts being 11 meters (36 ft.) long with yards of 20.5 meters (671/4 ft.). The stern-quarter rudders were 6 meters (193/4 ft.) long. By the later thirteenth century, standard crews on Angevin galleys consisted of 108 oarsmen, 2 masters, 4 helmsmen, 36 marines, and 2 ship’s boys. Standard armaments included around 30 crossbows, 8 cases of quarrels (crossbow bolts), 40 shields, 200 lances, 10 halberds, 47 axes, 400 darts, 108 helmets and padded jackets for the oarsmen, 40 glass bottles for Greek fire and 100 pots of powdered quick lime, 2 iron grapnels, rigging cutters, and possibly iron rockets for shooting Greek fire.

Although no substantiatable evidence suggests that any oarage system other than the alla sensile system was used until the late thirteenth century, a variety of names for galleys other than galee appeared sporadically in the sources: sagene, sagittae, gatti, and garabi in particular.

The term sagena appeared first for vessels of Muslim and Croatian corsairs in Byzantine sources. The type was developed among the Slavs on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea.

Sagitta (lit. “arrow”) was also applied to corsair galleys, but to those of the Latin West. They were smaller than galee and presumably very fast, to judge by their name. Thirteenth-century Genoese documents refer to sagittae with 48, 58, 64, and 80 oars. Gattus was derived from the Arabic qiț‘a and appeared mainly in late eleventh- and twelfth-century sources, referring to galleys larger than the norm. The ships were sometimes described as triremes, although that may have been a classicizing literary affectation. Garabus was again derived from Arabic: ghurāb, or possibly also qārib, since it is unclear whether these terms were not simply variants of the same name. ‘Aghriba were sometimes said to have carried 140 oars, and garabus may also have been applied to galleys larger than the norm. If they really did row 140 oars, then they must have been triremes.

Horse Transports

Byzantines had oared horse transports equipped with landing ramps as early as the ninth century and retained that capability into the twelfth. The chronicler William of Tyre reports Byzantine horse transports supplied for a combined Byzantine-Frankish attack on Egypt in 1169 as “also having accessible ports at the poops for embarking and disembarking them [horses], also with bridges by which ease of entrance and exit both of men and of horses might be attended to as usual” [William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), p. 927].

Muslims too were transporting horses on specialized ‘ushāriyyāt and tarā‘id by the tenth century. Twelfth-century tarā‘id could hold forty horses. The Venetians were apparently the first Latins to transport horses to Outremer in 1123, but it is unknown what types of ship they used. By this time the Normans of Sicily definitely could transport horses by galley, because during the Mahdia campaign (1087) 500 cavalry disembarked from beached ships to attack Muslim troops; only galleys could be beached.

Horses were transported in both sailing ships and galleys from the West to Outremer from 1129 up to the time of the Third Crusade. Venice used oared horse transports with stern-quarter ports and landing bridges for the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), and both appeared among the miscellaneous fleets that reached Damietta during the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221). In 1224 Emperor Frederick II prepared a great fleet of 50 oared horse transports, each carrying forty horses, and in 1246 agents of King Louis IX of France contracted with Genoa for 12 taride to carry twenty horses each for his Crusade to the East.

The Byzantine term for an oared horse transport was chelandion while those of the Muslims had been ‘ushari and tarrīda. In the West uscerius and variants became the generic term for an oared horse transport, while chelandion became adopted as chelandre and variants and tarrīda as taride/tarida. Whether there was ever any real difference between Western chelandre and taride is debatable, but as the thirteenth century wore on, tarida became more common and chelandre disappeared.

Louis IX’s contract of 1246 has the earliest specifications, and these may be compared to those of thirty-horse taride constructed for Charles I of Anjou between 1274 and 1281.

The Later Middle Ages

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw no innovation in the technology or construction of Mediterranean sailing naves; however, the length and beam, number of masts, and number of decks and depth in hold of some increased dramatically. By the mid–twelfth century, iconography depicted as a matter of course two-masted naves with multiple-tiered sterncastles and substantial forecastles, such as the Genoese ship conveying Conrad of Montferrat to the Holy Land in the Paris manuscript of the Annals of Genoa [MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, suppl.lat.773]. By the thirteenth century, the mosaics of San Marco in Venice also showed three-masted ships. No documentary evidence for three-masted ships survives; however, it is available for two-masted ships provided by Genoa and Venice in 1246–1269 for the two crusades of Louis IX of France. The data vary considerably but may be averaged out or calculated as laid out in the accompanying table.

With the amount of deck space legislated by Marseilles for each pilgrim or crusader, ships of the size of the average three-decked ship could carry around 500–550 passengers. One thirteenth century Genoese ship, the Oliva, is known to have had a capacity of 1,100 passengers. Such ships were intercepted and captured by Saladin’s squadrons in the 1170s and 1180s and were referred to in Arabic sources as buțash. According to Arabic sources, one bațsha wrecked off Damietta in 1181/1182 was carrying 2,500 passengers, of whom 1,690 were taken alive. The figures are probably exaggerated, but perhaps not by a great deal if the ship was indeed very large. They could also carry up to 100 horses, normally on the lowest deck, as revealed by a Marseillese contract of 1268 with Louis IX, which specified a fare of 25 shillings for passengers if horses were not stabled there. As the French chronicler Joinville remarked: “On the day that we entered into our ships, the port of the ship was opened and all the horses we wanted to take to Outremer were put inside, and then the port was closed again and plugged well, as when a cask is caulked, because, when the ship is on the high sea, the whole port is under water” [John of Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris: Classsiques Garnier, 1998), p. 62].

Another Northern ship, the cog (MLG kogge), appeared in crusader fleets as early as the Second Crusade (1147–1149). Originally cogs had been flat-bottomed estuarine and river craft in Frisia, but in the early twelfth century cogs appeared that had flat floors and high sides, a radical new rudder hung off a straight sternpost, and straight stemposts, and that could hold the high seas. The wreck from Kolding Fjord (Denmark), dated to the late twelfth or thirteenth centuries, was around 18.3 meters (60 ft.) long and 6.1 (13/4 ft.) meters wide, with a mast step around 1.98 meters (61/2 ft.) forward of midships. It had a flat bottom with edge-joined strakes and sides with clinker strakes. Traces of rust on the sternpost revealed a sternpost rudder rather than the Norse quarter rudder. One of the earliest depictions of such a cog is on the first seal of the city of Elbing (mod. Elbląg, Poland) in Prussia (1242). Whether they evolved from earlier Frisian cogs or whether this name was taken over by a completely new ocean-going craft is debatable.

Cogs of the new type appeared in northern fleets for the Third and Fifth Crusades. In 1217 Count William I of Holland left with a fleet of cogs to join the Fifth Crusade at Damietta. Ports were cut into their sterns to embark the horses, and when the horses were on board, the ports were covered and sealed with pitch and tar. The Mediterranean technology for embarking and disembarking horses by ramps through ports in the hull became adopted in northern Europe.

Maritime history was an evolutionary process. The bireme galee, one-decked and single-masted Mediterranean naves, and Norse knerrir and snekkjur of the age of the First Crusade were replaced 200 years later by trireme galee, multiple-decked and masted naves, and northern cogs.

Bibliography The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre- Classical Times, ed. John Morrison (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995). Cogs, Caravels and Galleons: The Sailing Ship, 1000–1650, ed. Richard W. Unger (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1994). Crumlin-Pedersen, Ole, “The Skuldelev Ships,” Acta Archaeologica 38 (1967), 73–174. A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology, ed. George F. Bass (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). Pryor, John H., “The Transportation of Horses by Sea during the Era of the Crusades: Eighth Century to 1285 A.D.,” Mariner’s Mirror 68 (1982), 9–27, 103–125. ———, “The Naval Architecture of Crusader Transport Ships: A Reconstruction of Some Archetypes for Round- Hulled Sailing Ships,” Mariner’s Mirror 70 (1984), 171–219, 275–292, 363–386. ———, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). ———, “The Naval Architecture of Crusader Transport Ships and Horse Transports Revisited,” Mariner’s Mirror 76 (1990), 255–273. ———, “The Galleys of Charles I of Anjou, King of Sicily: ca. 1269–84,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 14 (1993), 33–103. Serçe Limaný: An Eleventh-Century Shipwreck, vol. 1: The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers, ed. George F. Bass et al. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004). Steffy, John R., Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994). Unger, Richard W., The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600–1600 (London: Croom Hill, 1980). ———, “Warships and Cargo Ships in Medieval Europe,” Technology and Culture 22 (1981), 233–252. Yassý Ada, vol. 1: A Seventh-Century Byzantine Shipwreck, ed. George F. Bass and Frederick H. van Doorninck, Jr. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982).

Ships of the Crusade Era Part I

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A stylised drawing of a Nef

By John H. Pryor

The types of ships involved in the crusades at various times were referred to in contemporary sources by a wide variety of different names, and in most cases the types of vessels to which the terms corresponded are known reasonably well; however, there are exceptions that are sometimes difficult to categorize with certainty. This is particularly true of the Muslim world. Only a handful of scholars have addressed the issues, and none have examined the nature of the ships involved, their historical evolution, and their performance capabilities, issues that influenced, indeed governed profoundly the actual participation of naval forces in the crusades.

Terminology

The first Western fleet to sail to the East in the period of the crusades was probably that commanded by Guynemer of Boulogne, who anchored off Tarsos (mod. Tarsus, Turkey) in September 1097. His vessels are characterized merely as naves by the chronicler Albert of Aachen, who was undoubtedly using the term as a generic for ships. The Genoese fleet that sailed in summer 1097 reportedly consisted of 12 galee (galleys of a new Western design) and 1 sandanum. The term sandanum was a Latinization of the Greek chelandion, for a transport galley. The Pisan fleet that left in summer 1099 reportedly numbered 120 naves, while that of the Venetians that sailed in summer 1099 had at least 30 naves. The fleet of Sigurd Jorsalfar, which left Norway in 1107, was said by Thórarin Stuttfeld to have consisted of 60 ships (ON skip). In 1123 the Venetian fleet that sailed for Outremer reportedly numbered 120 naves plus some small boats (Lat. carabii).

During the Third Crusade (1189–1192), a Northern fleet of 50 ships referred to as cogas (cogs) reached Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel). The fleet of Richard I the Lionheart, king of England, consisted of ships variously called esneccas or enekes, galees, naves or nefs, dromonz, and bucee. For the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) the Venetians supplied a battle fleet of 50 galeae (galleys) and a transport fleet consisting of naves for the men and uissiers for the horses. In 1217 Count William I of Holland led a fleet of coccones to Damietta in Egypt. For his Crusade of 1227–1229 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II prepared various fleets of ships described as naves, galee, usseria, chelandre, and taride. King Louis IX of France contracted with Marseilles and Genoa for squadrons of naves, taride, and galee for his Crusade of 1248–1254.

Byzantine sources of the crusade period mostly use classical Greek terms such as trieres (pl. triereis) or generic terms such as naus (pl. nees) or ploion (pl. ploia) for ships, although Anna Komnene and Niketas Choniates occasionally use dromon (pl. dromones), the term par excellence for Byzantine war galleys since the sixth century. From the late twelfth century a new term, katergon (pl. katerga), began to be used, displacing dromon and becoming the generic for war galleys during the late Byzantine Empire.

Arabic sources of the period use terms such as qārib (pl. qawārib) for small boats and also for galleys, shīnī (pl. shawānī) and ghurāb (pl. ‘aghriba/ghirbān/‘aghrub) for galleys; markab (pl. marākib) and qiț‘a (pl. qița‘) for vessels in general, but often with reference to war galleys; safīna (pl. sufun, safā‘in) for vessels in general, but often for transport ships; musattah (pl. musattahāt) for transport ships; bațsha (pl. buțash) for large sailing ships; ‘ushari (pl. ‘ushāriyyāt) for transport galleys, tarrīda (pl. tarā‘id) for horse transports, and harrāqa (pl. harrāqāt) for fire ships, as well as loan words such as shalandī (pl. shalandiyyat) from the Byzantine chelandion, frequently used for Byzantine war ships but also for galleys built in Egypt.

Such words were rarely used in a technical or technological sense. Most authors were unfamiliar with the sea, were not writing for maritime audiences, and used approved or literary terms for ships even if they did know what particular types ought to be called. Generic terms such as naves, nees, or ploia, and sufun/safā‘in or marākib were used for all types of ships in fleets. The Latin word naves was used for all ships of the Pisan and Venetian fleets in the First Crusade (1096–1099), even though they included galleys. But as well as its generic meaning, by the twelfth century the term navis/naves had acquired a specific reference in a Mediterranean context to lateen-rigged, round-hulled sailing ships.

Evolution of Ship Types

The historical evolution of ship types was continuous. A type could change in its fundamental technology and yet retain the same name, as in the case of the cog. Alternatively a name could become applied to a completely different type of ship, as occurred with dromon in its Latin and Arabic variants. By the twelfth century it was used for sailing ships that had nothing in common with Byzantine galleys.

In the centuries before the First Crusade, Mediterranean maritime commerce was carried on a cloud of small sailing ships. Judging from excavations of shipwrecks (the Yassý Ada ship of the seventh century, the Bozburun ship whose timbers were felled in 874, and the early eleventh-century Serçe Limani ship, all from within modern Turkey, and the thirteenth-century Contarina ship found near Venice), such ships averaged around 20 meters (c. 651/2 ft.) in overall length, around 5 meters (c. 161/2 ft.) maximum beam, and around 2–2.5 meters (c. 61/2–81/4 ft.) depth in hold. They probably had single masts and lateen sails, were steered by two stern-quarter rudders, and carried multiple anchors because of their inefficient design and light weight. Smaller versions had only half-decks at bow and stern. Larger ones were fully decked with a small, low cabin at the stern, such as was the case with the Yassý Ada ship.

There certainly were large ships, such as the fine one sailing up the Bosporus that reportedly incensed the Byzantine emperor Theophilos (d. 842) when he learned that its owner was his wife Theodora, or the three-masted “pirate” naus reported by Anna Komnene during the First Crusade. Three-masted sailing ships certainly existed in the eleventh century, as is proved by a depiction on glazed Pisan bacini, which were glazed pottery bowls from the Muslim world placed on the facades of churches at Pisa and elsewhere to reflect sunlight and give the churches a glittering aspect. However, such large ships have left no trace in the documentary record before the thirteenth century.

In the Mediterranean, ships had always been built with strakes edge-joined: that is, with the planks of the hull joined edge to edge and not overlapping as in clinker construction. In classical antiquity, hulls had been shell-constructed from the keel out by holding the strakes together with closely spaced mortise-and-tenon joints pegged with treenails (wooden pegs). Frames were inserted only when hulls had been built to a point where they could be usefully positioned. This produced light and strong hulls but was extremely expensive in terms of the labor and carpentry skills required. By the fourth century (as evidenced in another wreck found at Yassý Ada), tenons had become less tightly fitting, wider but shorter, and spaced more widely apart. The evolutionary process was yet more clearly apparent in the seventh century Yassý Ada wreck. The Bozburun wreck showed no signs of mortise-and-tenon edge-joining, and by the eleventh century, in the Serçe Limani wreck, skeleton construction over a framework of ribs and stringers had replaced shell construction.

Coating ships with a layer of pitch over the whole hull was replaced by driving caulking into the seams between the planks. The first usages of the Greek word for a caulker (kalaphates) occurred in sixth-century Egyptian papyri and appeared in Byzantium itself in the tenth century, in inventories for expeditions to Crete in the De cerimoniis attributed to Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, which included linen for, and the cost of kalaphateseos: caulking. The first picture of caulkers working on a ship is in a manuscript of the De materia medica of Dioskorides Pedanios, probably made for Emperor Constantine VII (MS New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 652 fol. 240r).

In northern Europe, ships were also shell-constructed, but there strakes were not edge-joined but rather clinker-overlapped. Up to the eleventh century, the sailing ship par excellence was the Norse knörr (ON, pl. knerrir). Two such ships, dated to around 1000, were among 5 ships excavated off Skuldelev in Roskilde Fjord (Denmark). The smaller was around 13.72 meters (45 ft.) long and around 3.20 meters (101/2 ft.) in beam, the larger around 14.94 meters (49 ft.) long and 4.57 meters (15 ft.) in the beam. Both had half decks forward and aft and an open hold amidships. The mast of the smaller was socketed into the kelson, with a stringer laid over the floor timbers and keel to provide fore-and-aft rigidity and to lock the floor timbers to the keel, while that of the larger was set in a complex mast-step. Both would have been steered by a starboard stern-quarter rudder. The larger may well have ventured out into the Atlantic Ocean, since it was heavily built with sturdy frames. Larger knerrir were primarily sailing ships, using what oars they carried only for entering and leaving harbor, for close maneuvering, and in emergencies.

The Skuldelev ships also included two long ships (ON langskip) like the famous ships excavated at Oseberg and Gokstad. The Oseberg ship (from around 800) and the Tune ship (from around 875) had dimensions of 21.4 meters (701/4 ft.) in length, 5.1 meters (163/4 ft.) in the beam, and 1.4 meters (41/2 ft.) depth in hold and around 20.0, 4.6, and an unknown depth in hold respectively (651/2 and 15 ft.). The Gokstad ship (of around 900) was 23.4 meters in length, 5.2 meters in the beam, and 1.9 meters depth in hold (763/4, 17, and 61/4 ft.). Those of the two Skuldelev ships were approximately 18, 2.6, and 1.1 meters (59, 81/2, and 31/2 ft.) and 30, 4.2 meters (981/2 and 133/4 ft.), and unknown depth in hold, respectively. The Oseberg ship carried 15 pairs of oars, the Tune and smaller Skuldelev ships 12 pairs. The Gokstad ship carried 16 pairs of oars and the larger Skuldelev ship between 20 and 30 pairs. In Norse literature the terms langskip and “snake” (ON snekkja, pl. snekkjur) were interchangeable, although snekkjur may have been larger. As the length of northern longships began to increase, the largest became known as drekar, “dragon ships” (sing. dreki). Those such as the Gokstad ship and the larger Skuldelev ship would certainly have been capable of voyages to Outremer; however, whether Norse langskip, snekkjur, or drekar actually made such voyages is debatable. Crews would have been much more comfortable in knerrir, and there would have been no reason to use longships unless naval combat was expected.

In England knerrir became known as céolas (OE sing. céol), that is keels, perhaps reflecting originally the pronounced keels of Norse ships as opposed to keel-less Frisian hulks and cogs. By the eleventh century the Old English term céol was used commonly for sailing ships in the lower North Sea and English Channel. Another name that appeared increasingly from the eleventh century was bussa/busse/bus/buza (Lat. bucia/bucius); however, whether the Mediterranean Latin bucia/bucius was adopted in the north or vice-versa is unclear. No descriptions of these terms permit attribution of particular characteristics to ships. Nor do illustrations name types until much later. By the thirteenth century ships like knerrir but with light and possibly demountable castles added at the stern, and sometimes the bow, appeared on town seals. Beam ends through the hull of some were probably deck beams. Such ships were probably the buciae in the English fleet of the Third Crusade, and according to Richard of Devizes, the naves of the English fleet, which were only half the size of the buciae, carried forty foot soldiers and forty horses as well as their supplies. The Norse snekkja was also imitated in England under the names esnecca or esneke. King Henry II had a sixty-oared esnecca that made the voyage to Outremer during the Third Crusade. Other flotillas of snekkjur and smaller oared ships from France, Flanders, and Denmark also participated.

Chinese Invention - Ship’s Rudder

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Han Dynasty: circa 202 BC – 220 AD

Chinese naval developments occurred far earlier than similar western technology. The first recorded use of rudder technology in the West was in 1180. Chinese pottery models of sophisticated slung axial rudders (enabling the rudder to be lifted in shallow waters) dating from the 1st century have been found. Early rudder technology (c 100 AD) also included the easier to use balanced rudder (where part of the blade was in front of the steering post), first adopted by England in 1843 – some 1700 years later. In another naval development, fenestrated rudders were common on Chinese ships by the 13th century which were not introduced to the west until 1901. Fenestration is the adding of holes to the rudder where it does not affect the steering, yet make the rudder easy to turn. This innovation finally enabled European torpedo boats to use their rudders while traveling at high speed (about 30 knots).

Ghanjah

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Easily distinguishable by its typical stem-head with trefoil crest, Ghanjah was formerly used in trading. having a capacity of 130 to 300 tons, this boat used to be built in Sur.

Length 70 - 125 Feet. Weight 125 - 300 tons

Very similar vessel to the Baghlah and difficult to distinguish, the major give away being the stem head. The Ghanjah has a protruding stem head with a round ornament carved at the end, there is also a distinctive tri fingered design on top of the round ornament. The Ghanjah tended to be narrower than the Baghlah and has been known to carry three masts.

Baghlah - Arab cargo vessel

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A baghlah, bagala or baggala is a large deep-sea dhow, a traditional Arabic sailing vessel.

Description

A baghlah is a type of dhow with one or more lateen sails. It is primarily used along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, Sindh, India, and East Africa. A larger dhow may have a crew of approximately thirty while smaller dhows have crews typically ranging around twelve.

History

Baghlahs were used as merchant ships in the Indian Ocean and the minor seas around the Arabian Peninsula. They reached eastwards up to the Bay of Bengal and the Spice Islands and southwestwards down to the East African coast.

The baghlah uses two to three lateen sails and supplementary sails can be added. It is a heavy ship that needs a crew of at least 18-25 sailors. In favorable conditions a baghlah can sail up to 9 knots.

LINK

Book Review: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.

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2009.01.06

Craig C. Felker

Review of Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. New York: Random House, 2008. Pp. xxi, 336. ISBN 978-1-4000-6624-7.

Readers familiar with the late Samuel P. Huntington's essay, "The Clash of Civilizations?" [1] may find Roger Crowley's narrative of war between the Christian West and Islamic East in the sixteenth century somewhat apocryphal. Eight years before the attack on the World Trade Center, Huntington argued that the age of nation states was giving way to the age of civilizations. Conflicts in the future, he predicted, would no longer be dominated by political ideologies. Instead, the fault lines along the tectonic plates of future conflicts would be cultural. The West, Huntington warned, could recognize the changed environment and adapt, or find itself immersed in conflicts that could easily escalate to a global scale.

Nearly eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have borne out Huntington's thesis, with Empires of the Sea providing the necessary context. But Crowley's book in fact point outs the danger of reductive interpretations. A former reader in English at Cambridge and author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West,[2] Crowley illustrates that culture was only one factor that influenced war and warfare in the Early Modern period. Seemingly obvious fault lines become blurred when examined against historical forces that point to similarities, not distinctions, between the combatants. The most important similarity between Christian and Ottoman emperors, Crowley argues, was an appreciation of control of the inland sea.

In 1453, the Ottoman emperor Mehmet II completed his siege of Constantinople, fueling the ambitions of his heirs to extend the conquest throughout Christendom in Europe. Seventy years later the task lay before Suleiman, great-grandson of Mehmet. One of a constellation of absolute monarchs emerging in the sixteenth century, Suleiman astutely concluded that the key to conquering Europe lay in controlling the Mediterranean Sea. Very systematically, the Ottoman emperor began by clearing the waters closest to the Levant.

Rhodes was the last stronghold of Christendom in the Aegean. Defending the island were the Knights of St. Johns, an order known as much for piracy as for piety. In July 1522, Suleiman laid siege to the island, with technology and techniques reflective of the broader military revolution then overtaking Europe. The island fell the following December, and over the next five decades the war spread throughout the inland sea. While Suleiman set his sights on the Italian coast, the war was spreading to the western half of the Mediterranean. The brothers Oruch and Hzir, skilled mariners who had been chased out of the Ottoman Empire, established strongholds along the north African littoral from which they ravaged European coastal towns for loot and slaves. Eventually brought back into the Ottoman orb, these early Barbary corsairs turned their predations in the western Mediterranean into a broader war, as much a clash of empires as of cultures.

The defense of Christian Europe fell to the Habsburg emperors Charles V and Philip II. But Crowley observes that the defenders of the faith had pragmatic objectives. The Habsburgs also had an empire to consolidate and defend. During the twenty years of Charles's reign as Holy Roman Emperor, the war between East and West was fought on the extremities. Neither emperor faced off in a decisive battle. Instead, war raged across the Mediterranean in the form of hit and run raids against coastal cities by both Ottoman corsairs and the seaborne equivalent of European condottieri. Crowley points out that the religious underpinnings of European unity proved too tenuous for any type of unified political and military effort. Venetians, for example, saw accommodation with Suleiman as a more practical way to temper his wrath, while Ottoman ships swung gently at anchor in the French port of Toulon.

By the time Charles turned over the crown to Philip in 1556, the Mediterranean was virtually an Ottoman lake. The only obstacle to complete mastery of the inland sea was Malta. Suleiman recognized that controlling the island was essential to blunting the growing power of the Spanish navy. He would also finally be rid of the Order of St. Johns, whose surviving knights once again found themselves serving as the shield of Christ. So, in 1565, the Ottoman emperor mobilized a fleet to carry an invasion force over eight hundred miles from Istanbul. The fate of Europe, Crowley argues, hung in the balance over the next five years.

The final chapters of the book deal with the Suleiman's siege of Malta in the summer of 1565 and the climactic sea battle off Lepanto six years later. Drawing from an astonishingly rich cache of primary sources, Crowley weaves a detailed and vivid picture of the transformation of warfare in the age of gunpowder weapons. Arrayed against Suleiman's invasion force of twenty-four thousand soldiers was a Christina force of five hundred knights, three thousand Maltese militiamen, and four thousand other fighters. While Ottoman and Christian viewed the world through different cosmological lenses, as Crowley notes, their ways of war were nearly indistinguishable. Both sides used the emerging gunpowder technologies, such as grenades, incendiaries, and arquebuses. Suleiman's siege tactics were no more alien to the defenders of Malta than were their own defensive innovations to the Sultan's engineers. The Ottoman failure to take the island was not a consequence of divine intervention, but rather of logistic and command failures that could plague contemporary military commanders.

The bloody dénouement of the struggle for dominance of the inner sea occurred on 7 October 1571. A fleet formed from a Holy League of the Pope, Philip II, and the Venetians sailed to rid the Mediterranean of the Muslim scourge once and for all. In the Gulf of Patras on the west coast of Greece, six hundred ships and 140,000 men converged along a four-mile front. The tactics represented over a thousand years of galley warfare, as ships rammed together to enable soldiers to carry the fight to the decks. But the Europeans also made extensive use of cannon and sail, leading to destruction of a hundred Ottoman ships and twenty-five thousand of the Sultan's men.

Victory at Lepanto assured Christian Europe control of the sea. And yet Crowley observes that the victory was pyrrhic. While the Ottomans immediately set about rebuilding their fleet, the Holy League disintegrated amid squabbling over booty and the divergent individual interests of its members. The Venetians still had money to make, while Philip had coffers to refill and an empire to administer. The Pope might have seen the opportunity for another crusade, but Philip proved unwilling to continue the war. The pragmatic emperor signed a peace with his Ottoman counterpart in 1580, and the Mediterranean remained a divided sea.

Thoroughly researched and exquisitely written, Empires of the Sea is an extraordinary work of military history. Crowley combines sophisticated explanatory depth with a narrative that captures and holds the reader's attention. The book exemplifies the technological, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of war. The bibliography features many first-person accounts of fighting, though Crowley cautions that they were often accentuated to gain the gratitude or allay the wrath of the emperor. Yet, even under a skeptical eye, the magnitude of the sources establishes that war between the Europeans and Ottomans in the sixteenth century was a savage affair of abject cruelty. More broadly, Crowley offers a contextual challenge to the notion of a clash of civilizations. Both Christian and Muslim took advantage of the emerging technologies of warfare. Neither Christ nor Allah, but bureaucracy, logistics, organization, geography, and politics conditioned the mobilization of armies and fleets. Religious proscriptions failed to constrain the atrocities committed by both sides. The clash was as much about imperial ambitions as about culture, with constituencies like the Venetians ignoring cultural affinities while playing to economic self-interest. The lasting impression of this book is of an increasingly globalized world where fault lines between civilizations are less distinct than they appear. Culture may determine the boundaries of war, but war itself remains an ingrained part of a shared human condition.

U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis
felker@usna.edu

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[1] Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993) 22-49

[2] NY: Hyperion, 2005.

ISLAMIC NAVIGATION

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The Arabic term that denotes navigation is milaha, which signifies in a broader sense seafaring or in a narrower connotation the sailor’s act of determining the vessel’s position, location, and course to the destination. The sunna of the Prophet (his sayings and doings) and the Qur’an do not prohibit Muslims from sailing the seas. The Qur’an urges Muslims to consider navigating as well as exploiting the rich resources of the sea. Likewise, the sunna comprises hundreds of hadiths that exhort Muslims to organize maritime expeditions, to sail to Mecca on pilgrimage, to exploit marine resources, and to expand overseas trade. Regarding military operations at sea, Prophetic traditions give more credit to Muslim naval warriors and amphibious troops than to holy warriors who fight on land. One hadith says that ‘‘a maritime expedition is better than ten campaigns of conquest on land.’’ The Prophet also said that ‘‘a day at sea is equivalent to one month on land, and a martyr at sea is like two martyrs on land’’ and that ‘‘those who perish while fighting at sea will receive double the compensation of those fighting on land.’’ Al-Shaybani added that ‘‘any Muslim who takes part in a sea expedition would be doubly compensated (rewarded) and that once the soldier puts his foot on ship all his sins are forgiven as if he were born anew.’’ This emphasis on the double reward might reflect the legacy of a traditional fear of the sea and the necessity for encouraging recruitment for a religious war ( jihad) at sea. Maritime expeditions were regarded as very risky owing to unreliable weather and the naval power and maneuvers of the enemy, but these factors did not allow a soldier to flee the scene of the battle unless the Muslim admiral commanded his flotilla to withdraw collectively.

Although the Arabs had long been acquainted with the sea and had sailed for centuries through the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean using different types of ships and nautical techniques, it seems that they emerged as a global sea power after the Islamic military advents on the eastern and western fronts. Within less than a century of the emergence of Islam in Arabia, the Prophet’s followers dominated more than half of the maritime possessions of their former neighbors. The eastern, western, and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea were entirely under Islamic dominion, as were the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and parts of the coast of the Indian Ocean. The Islamic expansions in the east and west united the former Persian and Byzantine territories that had been split by the successors of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). Owing to this new political unity, commercial activity between the Far East and the Mediterranean greatly expanded. As evidence, al-Biruni reports the following:

‘‘... the power of the Muslim state and its extension from the al-Andalus in the west to the outermost reaches of China and Central India in the east, and from Abyssinia and Bilad al-Zinj (East Africa) in the south to the Slav and Turkish land in the north enabled many nations to live together in intimacy, without allowing outsiders to bother them or to interrupt traffic. Other peoples who were non-Muslims and still pagans came to regard the Muslim state and its people with respect.’’ (Nazmi, Commercial Relations, p. 54)

Muslim caliphs, especially the Umayyads, maintained all dockyards and naval bases and the former administrative system of Rome and Byzantium in the southern shores of the Mediterranean as well as the marine system in the former Persian provinces; they also established new maritime installations. In AH 18/640 CE, when a severe famine spread in Arabia, Caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab ordered a cleaning of Trajan’s canal, which connected Babylon with Clysma (sixty-nine miles in length), for the transport of sixty thousand irdabbs of corn from Egypt to Jar, the port of Medina. The real age of Islamic navigation began from the reign of ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan. During the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid periods, many port cities on the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Arab, Red, and Mediterranean Seas flourished. Among these cities were Basra, Siraf, Aden, Suhar, Shihr, Qais, Bahrain, Hurmuz, Jedda, Jar, Qulzum, ‘Aydhab, Tarsus, Ladhiqiyya, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre (Sur), Acre, Alexandria, Rosetta, Damietta, Tinnis, Babylon, Barqa, and Tunis.

Over the course of time, Islamic societies contributed to the art of navigation. Their contributions are reflected in manuals of seafaring, nautical instruments, and the introduction of the lateen sail (a triangular sail suspended from a long yardarm at an angle to the mast) to Mediterranean navigation. Among the oldest Islamic manuals of navigational science that have come down to us are Kitab al-Fawa’id fi Usul ‘ilm al-Bahr wa-l-Qawa‘id, which was composed by Ahmad ibn Majid in 895/1490, and the works of Sulayman ibn Muhammad al-Mahri (d. 917/1511). This should not be interpreted to mean that Muslim navigators did not produce and use portolan charts (sing., qunbas) before the days of Ibn Majid. By contrast, Ibn Majid names two Persian navigators, Ahmad ibn Tabruya and Khawsshir Ibn Yusuf al-Ariki, who sailed during the early years of the eleventh century and who wrote navigational works. Another major instrument that Muslim astronomers and mathematicians developed as early as the seventh century was the astrolabe, an instrument for observing or showing the positions of the stars. On the astrolabe, latitude was determined by the height of the sun or the pole star, which was measured by the qis figure system (science of taking latitude measurements). A third nautical instrument that Muslim sailors transferred from China was the compass. This magnetic instrument was known to Muslim seafarers before the tenth century and probably was not considered very important in the East, because the skies over the Indian Ocean were usually very clear, especially during the times thatMuslimmariners sailed with monsoons. The earliest documented Arab use of the compass in the Mediterranean dates to the 1240s. In brief, Muslim navigators mastered astrology; the science of latitude and longitude; the nature and directions of winds; the seasons; the knowledge and locations of coasts, ports, islands, dangerous shoals, and the narrow maritime lanes; the use of various terrestrial instruments; and the art of calculating solar months and days. Most of the Islamic literature about the science of navigation was translated into Latin. For instance, the population of the Balearic Islands—especially the Mallorcan Jewish cartographers—played a vital role in translating Arabic nautical charts, instruments, and books into Latin. By doing so, Western European commercial ships could sail toward the Canary Islands and other destinations along western African coasts.

Islamic ships sailed to every part of the known world, including the major ports on the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Aegean, Marmara, Black, and Caspian Seas, in addition to the western African coasts on the Atlantic Ocean; their ships also sailed as far north as Denmark in 844. In the East, Muslim seafarers navigated the Red and Arab Seas, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. Their merchant ships sailed from Near Eastern ports to India and Sri Lanka, Malay, the Philippines, Indonesia, and China in the Far East as well as Zanzibar, Mozambique, and even Madagascar in east and southeast Africa. Certainly the seasons and art of navigation differ for each one of the seas and oceans mentioned above. For instance, the sailing season in the Mediterranean had been observed from the Classical Hellenic period to the late medieval period. Ships habitually set out from the eastern basin of the Mediterranean during the early spring and returned from the west during the Feast of the Cross (‘id al-salib), which was celebrated on the 26th or 27th of September, whereas the return journey of ships heading eastward took place between the end of July and the beginning of September. However, sailing during inappropriate times was probably limited to military expeditions and instant transport of food supplies. As for the seasons of navigation in the Indian Ocean, navigators took advantage of the seasonal winds (monsoons) that blow in one direction for about six months and in the opposite direction for the rest of the year. With regard to the art of navigation on these waters, Muslim geographers (e.g., al- Mas‘udi [d. 346/956]; author of Muruj al-Dhahab) point out that navigating on each one of these seas required the previous personal knowledge and expertise of sailors.

The duration of maritime voyages depended on the seaworthiness of the vessel, the professional behavior of the sailors, the distances between ports of origin and destinations, cargo’s volume and weight, weather conditions, and the human hostilities that the ship could encounter. After the embarkation and debarkation ports were specified, captains and shipmasters could fix the ship’s course, whether it had to cross the high sea, hug the coast, or sail on inland waters (e.g., rivers, artificial canals).

This discussion cannot be concluded without saying a few words about navigation for military purposes. One of the few—but most important— sources about the subject that still survives is Al-Ahkam al-Mulukiyya fý Fann al-Qital fi l-Bahr wa-l-Dawabit al-Namusiyya, by Muhammad Ibn Mankali (d. 784/1382). His treatise, which contains explicit references to and fragments of an Arabic translation of Leo VI’s Tactica, is a mine of information about the technology of Islamic warships and ‘‘Greek fire’’; rights and duties of sailors, marines, and commanders; navigation under various climatic conditions; and, most importantly, how to plan, manage, and coordinate the battle at sea.

Cyclades

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Clay frying-pan vessel with incised decoration of a ship. Found at Chalandriani on Syros island. Early cycladic II period (Keros-Syros culture, 2800-2300 BC)

The Cyclades, because of their central location to trade in the eastern Mediterranean, have a rich and long history. They are a part of the vast number of islands that constitute the Greek archipelago in the Aegean Sea. The name was originally used to indicate islands that formed a rough circle around the sacred island of Delos.

The Cyclades are comprised of around 220 islands, with the major ones being Amorgos, Anafi, Ándros, Antiparos, Delos, Ios, Kéa, Kimolos, Kynthos, Mílos, Mykonos, Náxos, Páros, Pholegandros, Serifos, Sifnos, Sikinos, Síros, Tínos, and Santorini (Thíra). While ancient maritime trade made the region important strategically and geographically, a reliable agricultural base made life on the Cyclades archipelago possible. The Cyclades may have been one of the earliest sites of the worship of the Mother Goddess cult, which became widespread throughout the eastern and western Mediterranean.

All Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures including ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and later on, Greece, would feature prominent goddesses. When the Minoan culture flourished in the islands from about 3000 to 1450 b.c.e., frescoes on the walls of the palace, excavated by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, featured a bare-breasted goddess with snakes. Snakes figured in many of the Mother Goddess cults in antiquity and had its parallel in the story of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament. Settlement of the Cyclades was sporadic. The Phoenicians were most likely the first settlers, while around 1000 b.c.e. the island was inhabited by the Ionians. In the case of Síros, ancient ruins, statuettes, and skeletons indicate the island had been settled by the Bronze Age.

The very dispersion of the islands made seafaring a necessary part of survival, as islanders learned that they could gain by trading with—or raiding—other islands in the archipelago. It is in these early boats that one can find the beginnings of the oared galleys that would be a feature of Mediterranean warfare until the 18th century at least, when the Knights of Malta used huge galleys in their wars against the Barbary pirates. Cycladic ships were the prototypes with which ancient Greece would plant its colonies, beginning around the sixth century b.c.e., and with which Rome would become the mistress of the Mediterranean.

The Cycladic culture peaked during the Minoan period, which was brought to life by the work of Arthur Evans with his reconstruction of the royal palace at Knossos. The story of European civilization begins on the island of Crete with a civilization that probably thought of itself as Asian (in fact, Crete is closer to Asia than it is to Europe). Thus, the Cyclades and Cretan Minoan civilization provided the first known fusion of Western and Asiatic culture. With the rise of Alexander the Great around 320 b.c.e., this would become the great Hellenistic civilization, which Alexander’s armies would carry to the very frontiers of India.

Further reading: Bent, J. Theodore, ed. The Cyclades, or Life among the Insular Greeks. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2002; “Tinos.” Available online. URL: http://www.tinos.com.gr (November 2005); Warry, John. Warfare in the Classical World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Mongol Fleets in Southern China

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China’s enemies also came overland during this period. However, as the Mongols pressed southward across the Yangzi (Yangtze) River and encountered Chinese resistance along the coastal waterways, they, too, ordered their Chinese prisoners to construct a fleet. The last Song (Sung) emperor drowned at sea after suffering final defeat at the hands of the Mongol navy. In 1274 and 1281, Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan launched two invasions of Japan with a huge armada of Korean and Chinese built ships that carried 140,000 soldiers during the second expedition. The ships were no match against typhoons, and both invasions failed.

Chinese ships, navigated by the compass (first used by Chinese navigators around 1100), with capacity between 200 and 600 tons, dominated the seas, carrying Chinese ceramics and other goods to Japan, Southeast Asia, and southern Asia. Taxes on trade produced the revenues needed to pay the annual tribute to Jin and to pay for the army.

Around 1200 the situation in northern China was dramatically changed by the rise of Mongols under Genghis Khan. After uniting the Mongol tribes under him, Genghis began attacking Jin in 1210. His forces took and destroyed Jin Central Capital (modern Beijing) in 1215 and many other cities in northern China. Genghis left the Jin campaign unfinished to turn westward, destroying Xixia in 1227. In 1232 Song repeated the mistake that Huizong had made in 1118 when he made a treaty with Jin against Liao—it made an alliance with the Mongols against Jin, which was destroyed in 1234. However instead of regaining parts of northern China, Song was faced with the formidable Mongols in 1245. Song forces resisted desperately, both sides using gunpowder and firearms.

Mongol forces were initially stymied by the strongly fortified Song cities and had problems fighting in the river- and canal-intersected terrain of southern China. The great Song fortress Xiangyang (Hsiang-yang) in modern Hubei (Hupei) province north of the central Yangzi valley held up for four years in 1273. Finally Persian siege engineers and starvation forced Xiangyang’s surrender, which opened up the route to conquer the south. The Mongols also built a navy. The last adult Song emperor died in 1274; two years later Hangzhou surrendered without a fight. Three infant emperors succeeded one another until 1279 when the last one drowned near Guangzhou (Canton) in 1279 as his remnant navy was overwhelmed by the Mongol fleet.

Further Reading Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 125–1276.

Alfred the Great’s defence against the Vikings

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A reasonable attempt at illustrating the larger sized English ships and therefore their crew’s advantage in battle. Alfred responded to the threat by constructing a fleet of large longboats, each of which could carry a hundred men, to meet and fight off the invaders before they landed. This navy’s first battle was against four Danish ships in the Stour Estuary in 882, but it was his victory over the invading forces in the Thames estuary and off the coast of Essex in 897 that won Alfred the epithet ‘the Great’. King Alfred is now considered to be, in a way, the founder of the Royal Navy.

The treaty with Guthrum gave Alfred the breathing space he needed to fortify and revitalize Wessex. As the last outpost of independent England, it was essential for Wessex to have an efficient military.

Throughout his realm, Alfred built strongholds known in Anglo-Saxon as burhs (the origin of the modern English word "borough"). Each held a garrison of about 160 men, plus an undetermined number of servants to do all the cooking, cleaning, and tending of horses. Traditionally the English army moved on foot, but Alfred realized that given the speed with which the Vikings struck English targets, the English must be able to respond quickly, too. The burh garrisons, therefore, were all cavalrymen. For the same reason, the king established his burhs in close proximity—none was more than 20 miles away from another.

The expense of maintaining the burhs fell upon the local lords, even if that lord was a bishop. (High churchmen had always insisted that they ought to be exempted from such obligations, but in times of crisis English kings compelled the bishops to assume their share of the cost of defending the realm.)

Alfred also reorganized Wessex's army, keeping half of the men on duty at any given time. And although Alfred is famous as the father of the English Navy, kings before Alfred had used war ships. Nonetheless, recognizing that swift ships were just one more advantage the Vikings held over the English, Alfred brought over from Frisia (modern-day Holland) skilled shipwrights to build his new navy.

Responding to the sad state of religious and intellectual life in England, Alfred refounded ruined abbeys and convents, brought over learned monks from France to reestablish schools, and set the example for the revival of literacy in the land by personally translating religious and secular books from Latin into English.

Guthrum gave Alfred seven years to rebuild his kingdom, but then the double-dealing Viking broke the treaty and invaded Wessex in 885 and laid siege to Rochester. But Alfred's new military defensive measures worked. Mobilizing his standing army, his burh garrisons, and his navy, he broke the Danish siege easily, then sent his fleet up the River Thames to capture London.

In 886, after seventeen years of occupation under the Vikings, London was in English hands again. Alfred pressed his advantage by requiring, in a new treaty with Guthrum, that English Christians under Viking rule in the Danelaw enjoy the same legal protections as the settlers from Scandinavia; beaten and humiliated, Guthrum agreed. Four years later, Guthrum, apparently without giving Alfred any more trouble, died in Hadleigh.

The Invasions Continue

In spite of Guthrum's defeat and death, the Vikings continued to mount sporadic raids on Alfred's territory. But a serious invasion with eighty ships was mounted from France in 892, led by a Viking chief named Hastein who had been terrorizing the inhabitants of the Loire Valley. He ordered part of his force to disembark in Kent, then beached his ships at Benfleet in Essex. Danes from East Anglia and York joined Hastein's army, but once again Alfred's military proved its worth. The infantry harried the Vikings, while Alfred's navy destroyed many of Hastein's long ships in a battle off the coast of Devon in 893. After several more reverses on land, Hastein and most of his army retreated up the old Roman road, Wading Street, to Chester.

Bad luck pursued Hastein's army for another three years. The Vikings abandoned Chester in 894 and invaded northern Wales, but the ferocious resistance of the Welshmen and the lack of supplies forced the Vikings to retreat. The next year they attempted to establish a base on the River Lea north of London, no doubt positioning themselves to take the city back from Alfred, but the English hit them so hard that the Vikings had to retreat for safety into the Danelaw, leaving their dragon ships behind. In 896, the Vikings were encamped along the Severn when Alfred attacked again. The Vikings scattered: Some went north to York, and others sailed back to France in hope of easier plunder.

As the sole English king of the old stock, Alfred became an inspiration and arguably even a rallying point for the English, especially for the English in the Danelaw. He had come back strongly from almost certain annihilation, smashed his enemies, reclaimed his kingdom, and made that kingdom so strong it could drive off or defeat every Viking invasion for the rest of his life.

But Alfred also realized that there was more to a nation than military strength. So he revived learning and literature, reformed the English legal code, founded new monasteries to replace the ones destroyed by the Vikings, and brought over monks from the Continent to get the new communities off to a strong start.

Rarely has a country teetered so closely on the brink of destruction than did England in 878. Rarer still has it fallen to one man to bring his nation back from near-disaster. Yet that was the destiny of King Alfred; without him, England as we know it would not exist.

Book Review: The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript.

2010-04-20T11:54:00.000+08:00

Pamela O. Long, David McGee, Alan M. Stahl, eds. The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Vol. 1, 732 pp.; Vol. 2, 732 pp.; Vol. 3, 384 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-13503-0; $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-19590-4; $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-12308-2.

Reviewed by Veronica Della Dora
Published on H-HistGeog (March, 2010)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew

A Rediscovered Venetian Mariner’s Notebook
Michael of Rhodes is certainly not the most popular of fifteenth-century writers. A Greek émigré who moved to Venice in 1401 as a humble oarsman, fought several sea battles, and managed to advance to the highest ranks in the Venetian navy, "only with difficulty could [he] be considered an intellectual" (vol. 3, p. 101). Yet the manuscript this "adoptive hero" of the Serenissima started to compose in 1434 (probably as a way to advance in his career) represents a true treasure of information for early Renaissance scholars and, more generally, for historians of early modern science and technology. A 241-folio quarto manuscript, the "Book of Michael of Rhodes" includes treatises and practical exercises in commercial mathematics, a beautifully illuminated section on astrology, extended notes on time reckoning, and a rare portolan, Greek prayers transliterated in Latin characters, officers' rules, and nothing less than the world's first extant treatise on shipbuilding. The manuscript, which is being published for the first time, marries medieval encyclopaedism with early fifteenth-century technical knowledge, late Byzantine religious beliefs with Venetian culture, and science and art with everyday practice. Its varied, if not eclectic, character is enough to make Michael's manuscript a unique object of study.

The history of the manuscript is itself interesting. It is a saga no less compelling than the adventurous life of its author. Parts of Michael's book were known in seventeenth-century Italy, but since then the manuscript had been deemed lost, until it "miraculously" surfaced in 1966 at a Sothebys auction. Purchased privately, it once again vanished from the scene, until it suddenly reappeared on auction almost forty years later. Conscious of its historical value, this time the new owner not only gave scholars full access to the manuscript but also allowed its integral reproduction--hence this MIT facsimile edition.

The Book of Michael of Rhodes is a lovely three-volume hardcover set. The first volume is a faithfully reproduced facsimile of the actual manuscript and other original documents related to the life of Michael (including his and his wife's wills). All the folia (comprising a vast number of blank ones) are entirely reproduced in color on glossy paper in the same size as the original, making visible different types of ink, margin lines, water stains, and the various marks of time. The quality of the reprint makes it possible to read the original text and fully appreciate the wonderful illuminations in their brilliant colors. The second volume contains the transcription of the manuscript faced by the English translation on the left page, in order to facilitate comparison and assist readers unfamiliar with medieval Venetian. The text is complemented by comprehensive indexes of Venetian general and proper names and of their respective translations, which makes the volume easier to navigate. The third volume comprises studies of the manuscript by nine international experts in different aspects of the early Renaissance, including a paleographer, a mathematician, an art historian specializing in medieval astrological imagery, a historian of Venetian cartography, historians of science and medicine, and an expert in medieval ship construction.

A companion to the facsimile edition, this last volume is meant to investigate and contextualize the figure of Michael of Rhodes and different aspects of his work and make the manuscript "more comprehensible and accessible" to scholars and the general public (vol. 3, p. ix). Pamela O. Long's detailed introductory chapter certainly fulfills both goals. Here, the coeditor effectively sets the manuscript and its author within the broader context of nautical writing and the Venetian maritime world. Long lucidly presents key aspects of Michael's life and career and links them to main historical and cultural events, such as famous battles he fought and, more notably, the Council of Ferrara-Florence of 1438, to which Michael's ship escorted the Byzantine imperial convoy. Details from accounts of other mariners and travellers who journeyed on the convoy are used to shed light on Michael's experience and immerse the reader in a fifteenth-century mariner's world. The last part of the chapter links the contents of the manuscript to the hybrid cultural context in which Michael operated. It sheds further light on cultural and religious aspects of the Rhodian officer's life and discusses various questions presented by the manuscript and further tackled by other contributors in the following chapters. In this sense, Long's introduction nicely sets up the scene for the following more specialized studies. I personally found this chapter carefully researched and annotated, yet at the same time accessible, compelling, easy to read, and full of illuminating insights, parallels, and links with other Renaissance figures, ranging from obscure late Byzantine travellers to famed Italian humanists, such as Nicholas of Cusa.

Unlike Long's introduction, most of the following chapters are unlikely to sustain the continued attention of the "general public." The casual reader will probably feel overwhelmed by the degree of detail provided in Alan M. Stahl's meticulous biography of Michael of Rhodes (currently, the most complete source of information about this author), by parts of Raffaella Franci's accurate study of the mathematics in the manuscript, or by the technicalities of shipbuilding detailed in David McGee and Mauro Bondioli's chapters, and so on. By contrast, specialized scholars will find all these contributions reliable sources of precious information.

Historical geographers and map historians will find Piero Falchetta's chapter on the manuscript's portolan of particular interest. The portolan contains instructions for the coastal navigation of Atlantic Europe, the Gulf of Salonika, and the Adriatic--coasts Michael had more or less extensively sailed. Having contextualized Michael's portolan within a much broader (yet rather understudied) tradition of periploi (ancient Greek and Byzantine lists of ports, villages, and cities as encountered during a coastal journey), Falchetta shows how Michael's portolan had been copied from another source (like most of the rest of the manuscript). He also shows how the portolan contains a number of technical errors, which go beyond mere transcription and would have made the portolan totally impractical, if not deceitful, for navigational purposes. Falchetta concludes that the utility of the portolan was symbolic, rather than practical. It was the possession of certain "work instruments" (such as the portolan and other sections of the manuscript), rather than their actual content, that "certified the nautical experience of their proprietors, as the proof of the fact that they could have access through their libro (book) to specific knowledge" (vol. 3, p. 205). In other words, Michael's manuscript was less of a practical aid than an object used to instruct and impress potential patrons and employers who were not necessarily familiar with the art of navigation and its technicalities.

As the other studies in the volume show, this thesis seems to be confirmed by other parts of the manuscript. For example, the place of mathematics in Michael's manuscript, Franci suggests, often appears to be more "recreational" than practical (in the literal sense). Copied from contemporary abbaci (or school textbooks), problems, exercises, and much of Michael's mathematical writing have nothing to do with his own personal needs as a sailor (vol. 3, p. 145). Similarly, the manuscript's section on the zodiac, Dieter Blume shows, contains some basic astrological mistakes, whereas the treatise on shipbuilding, we read in chapters 7 and 8, was not all Michael's work. Here, Michael once again reveals his importance as a collator and transmitter, rather than as an authority on the matter (it is worth noting that did not himself build ships).

Overall, the companion volume offers valuable insights into maritime practices and technologies and Venetian commerce, as well as into a variety of aspects of popular knowledge and culture in the broader world of the fifteenth-century Mediterranean: from religious piety to popular medicine and astronomy. Besides providing the reader with detailed commentaries on different aspects of the manuscript, the studies also shed light on its overall purposes, both collectively and individually. While this gives the companion volume coherence and encourages nonspecialist academic readers to venture beyond their area of expertise, it also (and perhaps inevitably) generates a number of repetitions and slight overlaps throughout the volume. To a certain degree, each chapter could read as a self-contained essay directed to a specific category of specialists.

The price of the set does certainly justice to its publishing standard and the quality of the writing (both in terms of translation and research). Beyond the sheer delight of a high-quality facsimile, the book is a pleasure to read simply for its rigorous accuracy and careful detail. The editors' work has been truly commendable. Long, McGee, and Stahl certainly succeeded in "fixing" the contents of this extraordinary unedited manuscript for posterity, preventing them from getting lost a third time. May The Book of Michael of Rhodes serve as an inspiration and example for publishers, private collectors, and scholars.

MISENUM - Portus Julius

2010-03-04T14:34:00.000+08:00

A small promontory jutting into the Tyrrhenian Sea from the coast of Campania in Italy on the Bay of Naples. Misenum was situated in the region of Cumae, Bauli, Baiae and Puteoli. Its name was derived supposedly from Misenus, the trumpeter of Aeneas, who drowned in the waters of its bay. For many years the Campanians were threatened by pirate sorties out of the Tyrrhenian Sea. These attacks were a leading reason for Pompey's brilliant campaign of 67 B.C. against the pirates in the Mediterranean.

Conference of Misenum

Meeting held in 39 B.C. between the Triumvirs Marc Antony and Octavian (Augustus) on one side, and Sextus Pompey, the pirate son of Pompey the Great. Sextus had proven a surprisingly successful pirate chief, whose ships commanded much of the Mediterranean, threatening all of the Italian coast as well as the provinces, and wielding the power to cut off vital shipments of grain from Africa to Rome. Following the Treaty of Brundisium in 40 B.C., both Antony and Octavian had recognized the need to deal with Sextus Pompey. They were, however, not in a position to hound him from the seas and consequently agreed to a discussion. The first encounter at Puteoli ended in nothing, but in the spring of 39, real progress in negotiations led to the Treaty of Misenum. By the terms of this agreement, Sextus promised to leave the corn supply unmolested, to respect the integrity of Italy, return all seized property and to engage in no hostile actions. In return, he received Corsica, Sardinia, Achaea and Sicily, along with vast sums of money as recompense, and a position in the triumvirate. He was also promised eventual augurship and consulship. His status was thus strengthened militarily and politically, although both of his opponents knew that the treaty would not remain intact.

Naval Base

Misenum's strategic value was clear, and when Augustus reorganized the armed forces of Rome, he chose the spot and its bay to build an excellent harbor.

Misenum was the largest base, Portus Julius, of the Roman navy, since it was the base of the Classis Misenensis, the most important Roman fleet. It was first established as a naval base in 27 BC by Marcus Agrippa, the right-hand man of the emperor Augustus.

Misenum emerged, with Ravenna, as one of the major ports for the Roman Imperial Navy in Italy.

Portus Julius (alternately spelled in the Latin "Iulius") was the home port for the Roman western imperial fleet, the classis Misenensis, named for nearby Cape Miseno. (The eastern fleet was in Ravenna.) The port was located at the western end of the gulf of Naples and other than the waters of the bay, itself, consisted of three bodies of water in the area: Lake Lucrino, Lake Averno, and the natural inner and outer harbor behind Cape Misenum. The port was named for Julius Caesar.

In preparation for the epochal naval battle of Actium, the Romans constructed a ship-building and training facility in the area. After the successful outcome of the battle, the facility was expanded by Caesar Augustus in 37 BC. The various lakes were linked by canals and the area was also joined to nearby Cumae by an underground passage 1 km (0.6 mile) long and wide enough to be used by chariots.

The Romans built new breakwaters and a freshwater reservoir, the Piscina Mirabilis, of unparalleled size. The outer harbor behind Cape Misenum served the active vessels of the Roman navy and provided room for training exercises, while its inner counterpart (to which it was connected by a canal crossed by a wooden bridge) was designed for the reserve fleet and for repairs, and as a refuge from storms. Because of its location, the area controlled the entire Italian west coast, the islands and the Straits of Messina.

Command of the fleet at Misenum was considered a very important step upward in a Roman career. Often marines and sailors could be transferred from Misenum to Rome for special imperial duties or as rigging operators at the Colosseum.

As was true with much of Campania, the community that developed around the bay was a favorite retreat for the most powerful people in Rome. Marius owned a villa there, which passed into the hands of Tiberius. There, in 37 A.D., Gaius Caligula looked on as the aged emperor either died of natural causes or was murdered.

Roman Navy

The royal galley of Juan de Austria

2010-03-03T18:49:00.001+08:00

To mark the fourth centenary of the battle of Lepanto, a replica was built at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona of the royal galley of Juan de Austria. The vessel was the flagship of the fleet of the Holy League (comprising Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Papal States and Malta), which fought the Turkish navy at Lepanto on 7 October 1571.

A very large vessel, the royal galley had a length of 60 metres and a breadth of 6.2 metres. Propelled by 59 oars operated by 236 oarsmen, the vessel was also rigged with 2 masts, specifically a mainmast and a foremast with respective heights of 22 metres and 15 metres, and lateen sails with a surface area of 691 square metres.

One of the galley’s characteristic features was its decoration, the work of Seville’s most highly renowned artists of the age. Juan de Mallara, a humanist and a counsel of the Spanish court, was responsible for the design of the decoration, the selection of themes and the iconography used. He actually left a detailed written description thereof, on the basis of which it was possible to reproduce those elements on the replica. The features on the stern are a highlight of the overall decorative work. The sculptures and paintings which appeared on that part of the original vessel were produced by Juan Bautista Vázquez and Benvenuto Tortello, portraying mythological figures and scenes along with symbols of the Catholic doctrine, such as faith, hope and charity, represented by the awning’s lamps.

Rowing means Rowing Well!

2010-03-03T18:45:00.000+08:00

The Athenian fleet developed muscular bonding among a larger proportion of the total population than ever fought in Sparta's phalanx. In 483 B.C., when Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to build a fleet of triremes, the citizens who manned the oars found themselves in a situation that required prolonged and precise movement in unison. The three tiers of oars had scant clearance. Every oarsman had to keep pace with those in front and behind, while also keeping his oar out of the path of those banked above or below him. Deviation of more than a few inches, and mistiming by a fraction of a second, meant a tangle of oars and loss of momentum. Precision was absolutely vital, and it took considerable practice for a crew to settle into a smooth, effective rhythm.

Rowing flexes the same arm and leg muscles as marching and dancing, and a seated posture may not diminish the emotional effect of keeping together in time that results from such exercises when people stay on their feet. Unlike contemporary rowers, ancient trireme crews pulled their oars in unison by conforming to the beat of a mallet on a special sounding board; and this may have strengthened their visceral response to keeping together in time. If so, the Athenians, too, were in a position to provoke the same sort of emotional solidarity that the Spartans did, with the difference that the upwelling of common feeling among the Athenians concentrated among citizens too poor to equip themselves for the phalanx, and who, instead of fighting on land, rowed in the fleet almost every summer between 480 and 404 B.C.