Levant had but two oars and men to a bench; but as it had been found that three oars and men to a bench could be employed with great advantage, after that date nearly all galleys adopted this arrangement, which was called ai Terzaruoli.* Moreover experiments made by the Venetians in 1316 had shown that four rowers to a bench could be employed still more advantageously. And where the galleys could be used on inland waters, and could be made more bulky, Sanuto would even recommend five to a bench, or have gangs of rowers on two decks with either three or four men to the bench on each deck. Change of 16th 26. This system of grouping the oars, and putting only one man to an oar, continued down to the 16th century, during the first half of which came in the more modern system of using great oars, equally spaced, System in and requiring from four to seven men each to ply century. them, in the manner which endured till late in the last century, when galleys became altogether obsolete. Captain Pantero Pantera, the author of a work on Naval Tactics (1616), says he had heard, from veterans who had commanded galleys equipped in the antiquated fashion, that three men to a bench, with separate oars, answered better than three men to one great oar, but four men to one great oar (he says) were certainly more efficient than four men with separate oars. The new-fashioned great oars, he tells us, were styled Remi di Scaloccio, the old grouped oars Remi a Zenzile,-terms the etymology of which I cannot explain.ț It may be doubted whether the four-banked and fivebanked galleys, of which Marino Sanuto speaks, really then. came into practical use. A great five-banked galley on this system, built in 1529 in the Venice Arsenal by Vettor Fausto, was the subject of so much talk and excitement, that it must "Ad terzarolos" (Secreta Fidelium Crucis, p. 57). The Catalan Worthy, Ramon de Muntaner, indeed constantly denounces the practice of manning all the galleys with terzaruoli, or ter sols, as his term is. But his reason is that these thirdsmen were taken from the oar when crossbowmen were wanted, to act in that capacity, and as such they were good for nothing; the crossbowmen, he insists, should be men specially enlisted for that service and kept to that. He would have some 10 or 20 per cent. only of the fleet built very light and manned in threes. He does not seem to have contemplated oars three-banked, and crossbowmen besides, as Sanuto does (see below; and Muntaner, pp. 288, 323, 525, &c.) † L'Armata Navale, Roma, 1616, pp. 150-151. evidently have been something quite new and unheard of.* So late as 1567 indeed the King of Spain built at Barcelona a galley of thirty-six benches to the side, and seven men to the bench, with a separate oar to each in the old fashion. But it proved a failure.† Down to the introduction of the great oars the usual system appears to have been three oars to a bench for the larger galleys, and two oars for lighter ones. The fuste or lighter galleys of the Venetians even to about the middle of the 16th century had their oars in pairs from the stern to the mast, and single oars only from the mast forward. ‡ 27. Returning then to the three-banked and two-banked galleys of the latter part of the 13th century, the number of benches on each side seems to have run from twenty- Some details five to twenty-eight, at least as I interpret Sanuto's of the 13th calculations. The 100-oared vessels often mentioned Galleys. (e.g. by Muntaner, p. 419) were probably two-banked vessels with twenty-five benches to a side. century The galleys were very narrow, only 15 feet in beam.§ But to give room for the play of the oars and the passage of the fighting-men, &c., this width was largely augmented by an opera-morta, or outrigger deck, projecting much beyond the ship's sides and supported by timber brackets. || I do not find it stated how great this projection was in the medieval galleys, but in those of the 17th century it was on each side as much as ths of the true beam. And if it was as great in the 13th century galleys the total width between the false gunnels would be about 224 feet. In the centre line of the deck ran, the whole length of the vessel, a raised gangway called the corsia, for passage clear of the oars. * See a work to which I am indebted for a good deal of light and information, the Engineer Giovanni Casoni's Essay "Dei Navigli Poliremi usati nella Marina dagli Antichi Veneziani," in "Esercitazioni dell' Ateneo Veneto, vol. ii. p. 338. This great Quinquereme, as it was styled, is stated to have been struck by a firearrow and blown up, in January 1570. † Pantera, p. 22. Lazarus Bayfius de Re Navali Veterum, in Gronovii Thesaurus, Ven. 1737, vol. xi. p. 581. This writer also speaks of the Quinquereme mentioned above (p. 577). & Marino Sanuto, p. 65. See the woodcuts opposite, and at p. lxvi; also Pantera, p. 46 (who is here, however, speaking of the great-oared galleys), and Coronelli, i. 140. The benches were arranged as in this diagram. The part of the bench next the gunnel was at right angles to it, but the other two-thirds of the bench were thrown forward obliquely. a, b, c, indicate the position of the three rowers. The shortest oar a was called Terlicchio, the middle one b Posticcio, the Gunnel. a Fore. Hull. Line of Bench. Bench. Aft. Corsia or Central Gangway. long oar c Piamero.* I do not find any information as to how the oars worked on the gunnels. The Siena fresco (see p. lxii) appears to show them attached by loops and pins, which is the usual practice in boats of the Mediterranean now. In the cut from Tintoretto (p. lxvi) the groups of oars protrude through regular ports in the bulwarks, but this probably represents the use of a later day. In any case the oars of each bench must have worked in very close proximity. Sanuto states the length of the galleys of his time. (1300-1320) as 117 feet. This was doubtless length of keel, for that is specified (“da ruoda a ruoda") in other Venetian measurements, but the whole oar space could scarcely have been so much, and with twenty-eight benches to a side there could not have been more than 4 feet gunnel-space to each bench. But as one of the objects of the grouping of the oars was to allow room between the benches for the action of crossbowmen, &c., it is plain that the rowlock space for the three oars must have been very much compressed.† * Casoni, p. 324. He obtains these particulars from a manuscript work of the 16th century by Cristoforo Canale. + Signor Casoni (p. 324) expresses his belief that no galley of the 14th century had more than 100 oars. I hesitate to differ from him, and still more as I find M. Jal takes a like view. I will state the grounds on which I had come to a different conclusion. (1) Marino Sanute assigns 180 rowers for a galley equipped ai Terzaruoli (p. 75). This seemed to imply something near 180 oars, for I do not find any allusion to reliefs being provided. In the French galleys of last century there were no reliefs except in this way, that in long runs without urgency only half the oars were pulled (see Mém. d'un Protestant condamné aux Galères, &c., Reimprimés, Paris, 1865, p. 447). If four men to a bench were to be employed, then Sanuto seems to calculate for his smaller galleys 220 men actually rowing (see pp. 75-78). This seems to assume 55 benches, i. e., 28 on one side and 27 on the other, which with 3-banked oars would give 165 rowers. (2) Cassoni himself refers to Pietro Martire d'Anghieria's account of a Great Galley of Venice in which he was sent ambassador to Egypt from the Spanish Court in 1503. The crew The rowers were divided into three classes, with graduated pay. The highest class, who pulled the poop or stroke oars, were called Portolati; those at the bow, called Prodieri, formed the second class.* Some elucidation of the arrangements that we have tried to describe will be found in our cuts. That at p. lxii is from a drawing, by the aid of a very imperfect photograph, of part of one of the frescoes of Spinello Aretini in the Municipal Palace at Siena, representing the victory of the Venetians over the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa's fleet, commanded by his son Otho, in 1176; but no doubt the galleys, &c., are of the artist's own age, the middle of the 14th century. † In this we see plainly the projecting opera-morta, and the rowers sitting two to a bench, each with his oar, for these are two-banked. We can also discern the Latin rudder on the quarter (see this volume, p. 111). In a picture in the Uffizj, at Florence, of about the same date, by Pietro Laurato (it is in the corridor near the entrance), may be seen a small figure of a galley with the oars also very distinctly coupled. Casoni has engraved, after Cristoforo Canale, a pictorial plan of a Venetian trireme of amounted to 200, of whom 150 were for working the sails and oars, that being the number of oars in each galley, one man to each oar and three to each bench. Casoni assumes that this vessel must have been much larger than the galleys of the 14th century; but, however that may have been, Sanuto to his galley assigns the larger crew of 250, of whom almost exactly the same proportion (180) were rowers. And in the galeazza described by Pietro Martire the oars were used only as an occasional auxiliary (see his Legationis Babylonicae Libri Tres, appended to his 3 Decads concerning the New World; Basil. 1533, f. 77 ver.). (3) The galleys of the last century, with their great oars 50 feet long pulled by 6 or 7 men each, had 25 benches to the side, and only 4′ 6′′ (French) gunnel-space to each oar (see Mém. d'un Protest. p. 434). I imagine that a smaller space would suffice for the 3 light oars of the medieval system, so that this need scarcely be a difficulty in the face of the preceding evidence. Note also the three hundred rowers in Joinville's description quoted at p. lxix. * Marino Sanuto, p. 78. These titles occur also in the Documenti d'Amore of Fr. Barberino referred to at p. 110 of this volume :— "Convienti qui manieri Aver, e forti e dotti." (Quoted in the l'ocab. Ital. Universale.) † Spinello's works, according to Vasari, extended from 1334 till late in the century. A religious picture of his at Siena is assigned to 1385, so the frescoes may probably be of about the same period. This is engraved in Jal's Archéologie Navale, i. 330; as are some other medieval illustrations of the same circumstances. VOL. I. e |