The Mediterranean remained dominated by fleets of oared fighting ships. Galleys, with their large crews of rowers (almost exclusively free men in this period) who doubled as fighting men, efficiently performed several military functions (see below). But the same large crews tied the galleys close to shore and friendly ports and bases, as did their limited sailing characteristics. Large crews also made galley fleets sensitive to fluctuations in their economic and governmental support systems. Geography, commerce, and politics all shaped the shifting fortunes of the Mediterranean’s major naval powers.
Arab Decline
The south coast of the Mediterranean was at a disadvantage as a base for naval operations of any kind. It had fewer safe harbors than the north, and prevailing northwesterly wind patterns made it more dangerous and harder to get from there to the main trade routes. As the central islands of the sea, especially Crete and then Sicily and the Balearics of east Spain, fell to Christian powers, this geographic disadvantage became acute. As a result, up through the mid-fourteenth century, trade fell increasingly into Christian hands, and Muslim navies were more and more restricted in their size, scope, and effectiveness. A strong, centralized Arab state may have been able to hold the central islands and maintain a greater balance, but it was a fragmented Arab world that faced newly aggressive assaults by Normans, Italians, and Spaniards from the late eleventh century. Compounding Muslim problems, Arab lands began to suffer timber shortages. Higher prices for wood made Muslim shipbuilding less competitive commercially. Thus, though Muslim piracy and commerce raiding never disappeared, especially from the western basin while Muslims held on to parts of the Iberian Peninsula, Christian trade was fairly secure in most areas, and much Muslim trade ended up carried in Christian ships.
Byzantine Decline
As a Christian power with the advantage of the north shore, the decline of Byzantine naval power—once dominant in the eastern Mediterranean—after 1050 is more complex and essentially political.
In the first place, naval military forces suffered from the same internal power struggles that undermined the army in the half-century after Basil II’s death in 1025 (see Chapter 8). Briefly, rivalry between civil bureaucrats in the capital at Constantinople and military aristocrats in the provinces wreaked havoc on the Byzantine military establishment. The bureaucrats, anxious to undermine the powers of the provincial military families, disbanded the forces of the themes (military districts)—forces that included rowers and marines in the coastal themes of Asia Minor and Greece. The central, professional units of the military, the tagmata, were also both weakened and increasingly manned by foreign mercenaries; this undermined the central squadrons of the imperial navy as well as the army. The results of this civil-military rivalry showed up for the army in 1071 at Manzikert. But, in the same year, the Normans took Bari, the last Byzantine outpost in Italy, restricting Byzantine naval options and exposing the decline in Byzantine amphibious capability.
A deeper political dynamic also affected the imperial navy. The empire’s grand strategic posture had been essentially defensive for centuries, and even as it expanded in the tenth century, a “fortress Byzantium” outlook remained dominant. One consequence of this was that trade and commerce were viewed as part of imperial defense policy. Greek merchants were tightly regulated and prohibited from trading outside the empire, leaving long-distance commerce to be carried out by foreign merchants. With the loss of Byzantine possessions in Italy, this restriction increasingly undermined the Greek merchant marine. Given the close connection of all types of seafaring activity, this competitive disadvantage also undermined the financial and manpower bases of the Byzantine navy.
In the period of crisis after 1071, the Italians gained a decisive hold over Byzantine commerce. This proved profitable for Italy but damaging for Byzantium, as the tensions the arrangement created contributed directly to the redirection of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople and the sack of the city in 1204.
The Rise of the Italians and Iberians
Though Norman military power played a significant role in taking ports from both Arabs and Byzantines, the major contributors to and beneficiaries of these declines were Italian city-states, followed later by Aragon in Spain. Venice, nominally a Byzantine outpost, rose in its former protector’s place, while western Italian cities led by Genoa spearheaded the assault on Muslim power. A number of factors contributed to Italian success, including natural geography, political geography, and political structure.
First, Italian ports were well situated geographically. They lay at the center of the major trade arteries that followed the north shore of the Mediterranean, with easy access to the central islands and thence to all corners of the sea. At least prior to the mid-fourteenth century, supplies of timber and other raw materials were plentiful.
Second, they also benefited from their political geography. The north Italian cities that led the Latin Christian naval resurgence were effectively independent city-states. Venice was subject to a distant and weakening Byzantine emperor; much of the rest of north Italy was under a distant German emperor, whose attempts at closer rule were repulsed in the twelfth century. Lacking large hinterlands, these city- states depended on trade and piracy for their wealth and power, and so had a large stake in maintaining effective naval forces.
Indeed, given that much of their trade in eastern luxuries could profitably and safely be carried in galleys, there was often little distinction between each city-state’s merchant and war fleets. Success in piracy and raids on rival Muslim ports was good for business; thriving business financed the ships that conducted raids. Mediterranean commerce was always at some level a guerre de course, a little war against commerce, of corsairs and merchants, which exploded periodically into larger fleet actions, both between Christian and Muslim fleets and, at times, between Christian fleets in contests for commercial dominance. Venice and Genoa became particularly heated rivals. The independent political position of these city-states served well in this environment and contributed to their third advantage, political structure. Limited hinterlands not only made the city-states dependent on trade but reduced the power of landed aristocrats in government. Instead, merchant oligarchs often dominated city-state governments, ensuring trade-friendly policies and support for maritime defense. In most cases, “private” commerce and “public” military action were so entwined as to be almost inseparable. Large land-based states, Muslim or Byzantine, could not easily develop such a symbiotic relationship with their merchants because traditional landed interests predominated. In short, Italian city-states pioneered the proto-capitalist organization of naval force.
The key weapon in Mediterranean maritime struggles was, as noted above, the galley. Long and narrow, it was powered by oars set on two levels, on the model of the Byzantine dromon; by the twelfth century, an arrangement of three men to a bench on one level, each with his own oar, was more common. Rowing provided the galley with tactical maneuverability, the capability of short bursts of speed, and the ability to get in and out of harbors and to make progress in calm winds. For cruising, galleys had one or two large lateen-rigged sails on masts that could be lowered for tactical action. Galleys were not great sailers and had limited seaworthiness, and so kept close to shore, but they were made for the Mediterranean’s generally flat, tideless seas and predictable weather patterns between mid-March and mid-October.
Galleys by the eleventh century were no longer equipped with underwater beaks for ramming. Rather, the beak had moved above the waterline and become a combination grappling hook and boarding ramp, as the main galley battle tactic in this age was boarding. The primary reason for this was economic. Ships were expensive, not to mention the value of their cargo and the potential value of their crews as slaves. With the decline of Byzantium, no power in the Mediterranean was wealthy enough or sufficiently strategically focused on imperial defense to afford tactics based predominantly on sinking enemy ships. In addition, the Byzantines had given up ramming in favor of Greek Fire (see Chapter 10) as a more effective way of ship killing, but the formula for Greek Fire was gradually lost during this period. Boarding for capture was thus left as the dominant galley tactic. This tactic was also reflected in the rowers—skilled free men who added to a galley’s fighting manpower and often shared in the financial rewards of its success. The semiprivate, proto-capitalist organization of Italian naval forces especially reinforced this trend, with the galley functioning as a communal enterprise. The galley’s ability to reliably deliver large numbers of soldiers over and above its 120-150 oarsmen, as well as its tactical maneuverability, made it the perfect craft for amphibious raids and assaults on enemy coasts and ports, for commerce raiding and piracy, and for fleet actions.
The Crusades advanced the interests of the Italian maritime powers and showed the amphibious nature of sea power in this age. The capture of the ports of the Holy Land, after the First Crusade took Jerusalem, was facilitated by Italian fleets, which brought supplies to the Latin besiegers, prevented seaborne relief from getting into the ports, and carried new pilgrims and crusaders to the sieges. In exchange, the Italians received trading privileges in the new Crusader States. In addition, by pushing the nearest Muslim naval bases down into Egypt, the Latin conquest of the coast secured the safety of that trade, as the lack of watering stations between Egypt and Palestine put Muslim fleets at the end of their logistical rope by the time they reached Christian ports. This effect was magnified greatly when crusading forces carried on Italian fleets captured key islands: Richard the Lion- Hearted’s conquest of Cyprus in the Third Crusade was probably the most significant of these actions. The establishment of the Crusader States then stimulated expansion of the pilgrim trade, much of which was carried (at a profit, of course) on Italian ships. Likewise, major crusades came increasingly to depend on naval transport, which was quicker and easier than the overland route through Turkish Asia Minor. Thus, while trade with the Near East was growing anyway, the Crusades (including the Fourth against Byzantium) helped seal Italian dominance in the eastern Mediterranean, at least until the rise of Ottoman power in the fifteenth century. Meanwhile, the same crusading impulse was advancing the Christian reconquest of Iberia (Lisbon fell to English and Norman forces on the way to the Second Crusade in 1147, for example), raising the fortunes of Spanish naval power in the western Mediterranean. By 1350, the whole sea was virtually one big Christian lake.
The maritime world of the North Atlantic, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea saw less armed conflict than the Mediterranean. In large part, this was because nature was more hostile there: The seas of the north are rougher, the tides significant, and the shores often treacherous with shallows and strong currents. Thus, the battle was not among ships, but between ships and the seas. Mediterranean-style galleys could not survive in such waters, and so there was much less differentiation of warships from merchant vessels—a condition that was, globally, the norm.
There was conflict involving ships, and, as in the Mediterranean (and as earlier in this world with the Vikings), it was essentially the amphibious warfare of coastal and river raids. Oared ships in the Scandinavian shipbuilding tradition continued to play a limited role in such warfare. Ships played a significant role in the Latin Christian advances into Baltic lands, acting as supply and troop transports. It was this capacity that focused German colonization first along coasts and rivers, and it was this capacity also that helped make the new colonies economically viable by tying them to existing waterborne trade networks.
Medieval Cog
This drawing shows a cog—a deep, round merchant craft driven by a single square sail. Temporary wooden “castles” could be added at the bow and stern to convert it into a warship.
The apparent exception to this rule was the English Channel, which did see periodic battles between fleets. In 1088, King William Rufus’s fleet (possibly of Anglo-Saxons) defeated an invasion fleet sent by his brother Robert of Normandy off Rochester, reportedly sinking many ships. In 1217, the followers of the late King John defeated a French fleet off Sandwich. And the Hundred Years War saw intensified conflict in the Channel, including the major battle of Sluys in 1340 (see the Sources box “The Battle of Sluys, 1340”). But all these actions were fought close to shore, and control of the sea was again not possible in a modern sense. Though northern ships, especially by the time of Sluys, theoretically had greater logistical range than Mediterranean galleys ever could, their still-limited sailing and navigational abilities prevented their staying at sea for any length of time. Even more, the limited administrative and financial resources of northern kingdoms meant that fleets were temporary creations made up largely of requisitioned merchant vessels. Neither their governments nor their economies could yet afford to maintain such fleets permanently.
The key advances in ship design were, in fact, driven by commerce, as it was during this period that the cog emerged as the workhorse of northern waters. The cog was an excellent cargo ship due to its large capacity, and with a single square sail and a sternpost rudder, a significant advance over sideboard rudders, it sailed well enough to be a very profitable vessel. It formed the backbone of the northern merchant fleets of the Hanseatic League, the Netherlands, and England.
The cog also proved to be readily and effectively adaptable to wartime use: Substantial cargo capacity meant that it could carry large numbers of armed men, horses, or military supplies as a transport ship. And loading a cog with soldiers also instantly made it a formidable warship, since boarding was the primary tactic in northern naval warfare. The cog offered a further advantage as a warship: a high freeboard. This feature contributed to the cog’s improved sea-keeping ability and increased cargo space and also made it a superior fighting platform, especially when wooden “castles” were added fore and aft. Such structures could be added on temporarily but were increasingly incorporated into the hulls from the start. They gave archers and crossbowmen a height advantage in firing down at their opponents. Archers could be stationed in fighting tops on the mast for the same reason.
Naval battles, when they occurred, were thus mass melees fought ship to ship. A fleet might also be trapped in port and burnt. Such decisive actions were rare, however. The meeting of two relatively equal fleets seldom came about, and the limitations of maneuverability of vessels rigged with a single square sail meant that, if one fleet wished to avoid combat, it almost always could. Small coastal raids and amphibious actions were more common and, as in the Mediterranean, crossed the already blurry lines between piracy, commerce, and war.
The already active Song era of Chinese maritime history intensified in 1127, when the Song court abandoned its northern capital and retreated south of the Yangzi River. The river, the canal system to the west, and the sea to the east became the Song line of defense against the nomads and northern kingdoms. The government depended initially on requisitioned merchant vessels, much as kings raised fleets in northern Europe. But the centralized Song administrative machine, drawing increasingly on revenues from newly encouraged trade, rapidly established a standing navy that was a classic of the imperial defense model. This included fleets of flat-bottomed junks and paddle wheelers that guarded the rivers, lakes, and canals inland in conjunction with the Song army (see Chapters 9 and 14), and a seagoing fleet. Superior Chinese ships came to dominate the China seas and extend Chinese influence into the Indian Ocean. Chinese navigators borrowed knowledge from Persian, Arab, and Indian sources, creating detailed maps and charts of common trade routes, and added to their navigational technology by inventing the floating magnetic compass. Government support stimulated creativity; trade revenues and an active shipbuilding industry supported the navy. At its height, the Song navy deployed twenty squadrons of ships and over 50,000 conscripted sailors and marines, dwarfing any other navy of the time. The sea-keeping abilities of Chinese ships and the empire’s wealth and defensive strategic orientation gave the Song navy a tactical emphasis on ship killing as opposed to capture, much like the Byzantine navy in its heyday.
In 1161, the Song navy defeated a major invading fleet launched by the Jin kingdom, making use of tactical mobility and gunpowder bombs to defeat the more numerous foe. But after 1200, a change in the navy’s command structure and adverse court politics led to a decline in standards and efficiency. Though still large, the fleet was in poor condition when the Mongols renewed the threat from the north in the mid-thirteenth century. Showing the adaptability that made them so formidable, the Mongols met Song naval power by building their own fleet, making heavy use of captured or subverted Song merchants and ships. Mongol naval forces were instrumental in the conquest of the Southern Song under Qubilai Khan in the 1270s. The last Song emperor was actually captured at sea by Mongol ships in 1279.
The Yuan (Mongol) dynasty saw a shift in the basis of Chinese naval power. The aggressive, outward- looking foreign policy of the Mongols, their foreign contacts, and their vigorous promotion of commerce created an atmosphere in which Chinese merchant activity flourished. The Mongols also decreased the influence of the Confucian bureaucracy, traditionally hostile to merchant activity. The biggest oceangoing junks of the Mongol period were huge, with watertight bulkheads (not to be seen in Europe for centuries yet) and vast cargo space. They were driven by fore-and-aft-rigged sails stiffened with bamboo battens, often on multiple masts, and were steered with large sternpost rudders. Chinese merchants came to dominate the spice routes of the Indian Ocean, and Chinese goods regularly reached Africa, while coastal trade within China, especially the grain trade that supplied the new capital at Beijing, reached new heights.
On this commercial foundation—the Chinese version of the new model of naval power—the Mongols could build a vast fleet of specialized warships designed for transporting troops, horses, and supplies and equipped with catapults and increasingly sophisticated gunpowder bombs. Under the Song and Yuan, government support allowed experimentation with new designs and weapons. This navy projected Chinese power into Vietnam and Southeast Asia and dominated the seas between China, Korea, and Japan.
It was the latter that drew the largest Mongol naval effort, but the invasions were skillfully opposed and proved disastrous. In 1274 and again in 1281, Qubilai Khan launched massive invasion fleets at Japan. The first is reported to have had over 900 ships and 40,000 men, and the second—the largest war fleet launched in the world to that time—over 4,000 ships and 150,000 men. They faced no real opposition on water, as Japanese naval activity was of the piratical- predatory type. The small, swift Japanese boats were clearly no match for the big Chinese ships at sea. The Japanese therefore left open the passage into waters of southwest Japan, luring the Mongol fleet into an area of shoals, treacherous currents, and unpredictable weather, where Japanese soldiers in small skiffs made some successful guerrilla attacks on Mongol junks at anchor. The Kamakura government then opposed both landings on the beach, hitting Mongol forces as they came ashore—which, as any Mediterranean admiral knew, was the most vulnerable moment for both landing force and fleet. The Mongols did manage to get landing parties ashore, but both invasions were ultimately undone by sudden typhoons that caught the fleets in the shallows and destroyed them—the kamikaze (divine winds) the Japanese believed were sent from the gods.
The destruction of the invasion fleets in Japanese waters slowed down Mongol efforts at sea. By the mid-fourteenth century, the dynasty was far less vigorous, was preoccupied with internal revolts, and was no longer expansionist. In addition, Confucian scholars in the bureaucracy again began to assert control over trade policy, imposing new regulations and making travel abroad by Chinese merchants more difficult. Even coastal shipping declined as the grain trade shifted to the safer inland routes of the rebuilt canal system. The navy again was allowed to decay. Naval power played little role in the overthrow of the Yuan dynasty by a peasant-born rebel leader who would become the first Ming emperor in 1368. But the first century of Ming rule would see the last great era of Chinese naval assertiveness, with the issues of the Mongol period intensified and concentrated at the Ming court.
While the Mediterranean and Chinese waters saw major naval wars, the Indian Ocean, like the North Sea, was more peaceful and trade oriented. Three sets of powers shared south Asian waters: Arabs, Indians, and small kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelagos. In all cases, the use of naval power was closely connected with the protection of maritime trade, but this function was largely defensive and so was rarely a cause for conflict.
Arabs were the major traders from the Persian Gulf to western India and often beyond, to the spice islands and China. Their ships were lightly built dhows, fairly small ships with lateen-rigged sails that were efficient coastal traders. The major source of Muslim sea power in the area was Egypt, which could easily send its war fleets down the Red Sea to guard the western trade routes. But while Mediterranean galley fleets could dominate the Red Sea, they were again not seaworthy enough for, nor logistically capable of, long voyages into the ocean beyond.
The Indian kingdoms of the subcontinent had a thriving merchant marine tradition. Indian shipbuilding skills and techniques were excellent, and India benefited from being the source of many raw materials that were not only trade goods but also shipbuilding materials, especially timber and cotton, the latter for sails. Given the importance of trade, many Indian rulers especially in the south maintained small war fleets to protect their merchant interests, but after the decline of the Chola Empire, no Indian state made maritime power the basis of its military strategy. The Vijayanagara Empire, the major power in south India in this period, was firmly land based and looked north to the similarly land-based Delhi Sultanate for its biggest defense challenge. Only in Bengal around the mouth of the Ganges were major naval forces regularly necessary for transport of armies across the numerous branches of the river in the delta. In such conditions, oared vessels played as big a role as sailing ships, but the field of play was too small, and the game too infrequently played, for specialized fighting ships to emerge as they did in the Mediterranean or on the Yangzi.
In the islands and straits of Malaysia and Indonesia, a variety of small kingdoms rose and fell in the vacuum created by the decline of Srivijaya. The power of such kingdoms was limited, as they were at once dependent on not killing off the trade that enriched them and vulnerable to shifts in trade routes and to domination by a larger power. China, especially, asserted itself in these waters periodically on behalf of Chinese merchants and managed the political competition in the area to its benefit.
Like the Indian Ocean, the Pacific during this period was not the scene of true naval warfare. But it did witness the climax of a long period of amazing seamanship by Polynesian peoples. Originating in Taiwan sometime in the first millennium BCE, Polynesians settled the islands of the western Pacific in the first millennium CE and from there settled all the remaining islands of the central Pacific as far as Easter Island to the east and Hawaii, the most isolated piece of land on the planet, to the north by the middle of the period covered by this chapter.
These explorations represented stunning feats of navigation. The voyages took place in seagoing outrigger canoes, often double-hulled with a platform in between where passengers, water, food, and the plants and animals that supported Polynesian settlement were carried. Experienced Polynesian navigators not only used the sun and stars but were expert at reading wind, weather, currents, and waves—by dangling their feet off the front of the boats, they could feel echo waves bouncing back from unseen islands, against the prevailing swells.
In the areas of greatest island density, regular maritime contact was maintained between islands, ranging from trade and tribute to raiding and warfare. But the fighting seems to have been almost exclusively on land, with war canoes serving simply as transport, and we have few details. The same could be said of the maritime activity along the American coast of the Pacific, where trading and raiding played important but poorly documented roles in the development of coastal cultures from Alaska to Peru.
The second half of the fourteenth century saw the developments that would significantly affect maritime trade and naval power. Perhaps most important but hardest to see clearly was the Eurasian epidemic of bubonic plague that killed off so many people between roughly 1330 and 1430. Population dislocation on this scale seriously disturbed traditional patterns of production and consumption, which, in turn, disrupted trade patterns and routes. Given the rising importance of world trade in the equation of naval power, this development had important consequences. Reductions in the scale of trade affected merchant and government revenues alike, which had lasting impacts on labor markets and technological developments that varied depending on the balance of political and economic factors in any given area.
The second change was the rise of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman success in steadily extending their rule over the eastern end of the Mediterranean (see Chapter 11) had two effects. First, and most directly, it began to heighten the intensity of naval conflict in the Mediterranean, as Turkish fleets challenged the hegemony of Christian galleys at sea. Second, the increasing Ottoman monopoly over the western end of the great Eurasian trade routes connecting China with the eastern Mediterranean raised a problem for the Europeans dependent on those routes for eastern goods. The problem became acute when Mamluk Egypt fell to the Ottomans shortly after 1500, just as a potential solution appeared.
That solution derived from the third area of change, new technology. Developments in ship design, navigation, and naval weaponry—above all, gunpowder—began by 1400 to hold revolutionary potential for the shape and scope of naval power globally. But the actual trajectory of technological change and naval development, concentrated in two areas of the world, shows that technology, far from being an independent factor, responded sensitively to the social, political, and economic contexts into which it was introduced.
In these excerpts, the chronicler and poet Jean Froissart gives a vivid account of a contemporary sea battle.
On 22 June 1340, [King Edward III] set sail from the Thames Estuary with a large fleet of fine ships and steered straight towards Sluys. . . . [The French fleet] was made up of close on a hundred and fifty big ships, without counting the barges, and carried a good forty thousand men—Normans, light infantry, Genoese and Picards. This fleet was drawn up at anchor, on orders from the King of France, to await the English, who they knew must pass that way, and prevent them from reaching the coast.
The King [Edward] then redisposed his whole fleet, putting his most powerful ships in the van and placing vessels filled with archers on all the sides, and between every two shiploads of archers there was one of men-at-arms. In addition, he detached a flanking squadron made up entirely of archers, which was to give support wherever needed to the most heavily engaged. . . .
When King Edward and his Marshal had completed the disposition of their fleet, they had the sails hoisted to catch the wind on their starboard quarter, in order to avoid the glare of the sun, which was shining straight in their faces. Considering that this would be a disadvantage, they fell away a little and came around until they had all the wind they wanted. . . . [The French] put their ships in readiness, like the skilled seamen and good fighters they were, and set the big ship Christopher, which they had taken from the English that same year, in the van with a big company of Genoese crossbowmen on board to defend it and harass the English. Then they sounded scores of trumpets, horns and other instruments and bore down on their enemies to engage them.
Fierce fighting broke out on every side, archers and crossbowmen shooting arrows and bolts at each other pell-mell, and men-at-arms struggling and striking in hand-to-hand combat. In order to come to close quarters, they had great iron grappling-hooks fixed to chains, and these they hurled into each others’ ships to draw them together and hold them fast while the men engaged. Many deadly blows were struck and gallant deeds performed, ships and men were battered, captured and recaptured. The great ship Christopher was recovered by the English at the beginning of the battle and all those on board were killed or taken prisoner. This capture took place in the midst of tremendous clamour and shouting, at which more English came to the scene and immediately re-manned her with a force made up entirely of archers, before sending her forward to confront the Genoese.
It was indeed a bloody and murderous battle. Sea-fights are always fiercer than fights on land, because retreat and flight are impossible. Every man is obliged to hazard his life and hope for success, relying on his own personal bravery and skill. . . . Thus the battle continued to rage furiously from the early morning until afternoon, during which time there were many notable feats of arms and the English were hard put to it to hold their own, since they were opposed by hardened soldiers and seamen, who outnumbered them four to one. . . .
But they performed with such courage that, thanks to a reinforcement from Bruges and the surrounding district that came to their support, they at last obtained the victory. The Normans and all who were with them were utterly defeated, killed or drowned, not a single one escaping in the general slaughter. . . . The next day the King entered the harbour and disembarked with all his men.
source: Jean Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton (New York: Penguin Books, 1968).