The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (65 page)

For all the commercial, cultural, and political power Lübeck and Hamburg wielded, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries the most important port in northern Europe was
Bruges, the center of administrative and political power in the county of
Flanders and home to a great number of foreign communities. Bruges owed its identity as a port to a storm in 1134 that scoured the
Zwin
River and opened the city to the North Sea, about fifteen kilometers away. This allowed shippers to off-load in the center of town, where there were markets, a weigh house, and a fixed crane for shifting goods. Yet dredging equipment of the time was inadequate to maintain the channel in the heavily silted river, and eventually none but the smallest vessels could reach the city, and downstream ports opened at Damme and Sluys.

Part of Bruges’s appeal lay in its accessibility to merchants from southern Europe, the Baltic, and the British Isles, but it was also at the center of a vibrant industrial economy in its own right. In the twelfth century, Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant produced the best luxury textiles in northern Europe, which is what attracted Genoese and Venetian merchants to sail there directly. In addition, Bruges manufactured armor, illuminated manuscripts, and, later, printed books. Thanks to its commercial networks, by the fourteenth century almost any product available in Europe
could be found in Bruges. A list of unknown authorship enumerates the scores of products imported directly
from more than thirty places in northern and southern Europe, North Africa, the Levant, Asia Minor, and the
Black Sea. These include foodstuffs like
herring, grain, cheese, bacon, honey, wine, spices, dates, almonds, and sugar; textiles such as wool, cotton, and silk; animal by-products from furs, skins, and leather to tallow, grease, and beeswax; metals and minerals both precious and base (copper, iron, tin, lead, pewter,
coal, and
alum); and hunting
birds. Bruges remained the center of northern Europe’s international commerce until the end of the fifteenth century when ships outgrew the shallow waters of the Zwin altogether and the focus of trade shifted due east to the Scheldt River port of Antwerp.

Hanseatic and Flemish mariners were well placed to dominate the
trade of England, which produced few
exports apart from wool, tin, coal, and lead, and which relied on continental sources for iron, salt, naval stores, and wine. The Anglo-Norman aristocracy had turned their backs on the sea to concentrate on consolidating political power in England, but a more intractable problem was the legacy of cross-Channel dynastic politics, under which En-glish kings ruled substantial
French territories.
When Henry II ascended the English throne in 1154, he brought with him the French counties of Anjou and Maine (his birthplace), and the duchies of
Aquitaine and
Gascony. At the nadir of their fortunes the French kings had only limited access to the English Channel, but between 1203 and 1259 they retook
Rouen and Normandy, as well as
La Rochelle on the
Bay of Biscay; built a port at Aigues-Mortes on the Mediterranean; and compelled England’s Henry III to renounce his claims to all his continental holdings save Aquitaine. With its
rich vineyards around
Bordeaux and the
Gironde estuary, this was an especially lush prize and such a mainstay of England’s overseas trade that
the tun—a barrel with a capacity of 252 gallons (1,270 bottles) of wine—became the standard by which a ship’s capacity was determined. (Though the unit of measure has changed, ships’ sizes are still given in terms of their tonnage.) This had both commercial and military applications, and in the early 1200s ships with a capacity of eighty tuns were considered suitable for naval operations and had to be registered with the crown.

This made sense in the context of medieval naval warfare because fleet encounters were rare in northern European waters and there was a far greater need for ordinary merchant ships to serve as auxiliaries and transports, notably in the English campaigns against the Welsh and Scots, as well as during the
Hundred Years’ War with France (1337–1453). Influenced by the Angevin experience in the
War of the Sicilian Vespers, the French had taken a theoretically more aggressive approach to naval warfare. In 1293, Philip IV employed Genoese advisors for the construction of the
Clos des Galées at
Rouen, the first such arsenal
in northern Europe, and Philip hired Genoese squadrons and their crews to supplement and even lead his forces against the English. The French were not always willing followers, notably at the
battle of Sluys in 1340, where they lost 200 of 230 ships and seventeen thousand men, partly because French commanders ignored their Genoese advisors. But naval engagements were rare—there were only four in the Hundred Years’ War—and even when losses were considerable they were decisive only to the extent that they hindered or facilitated the transportation of men and matériel.

Edward I’s immediate response to the establishment of the Clos des Galées was to order twenty-six English towns to contribute twenty galleys to the defense of the realm; but impressed ships made up the bulk of the English fleet, with the balance comprised of vessels contributed by the
Cinque Ports and foreign hires. Established sometime between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Cinque Ports—Hastings, New Romney, Hythe,
Dover, and Sandwich—originally regulated the annual herring fair at
Yarmouth, but their strategic location by the
Dover Strait made them the ports to which the crown turned to defend the shipping lanes to the continent. The exercise of royal prerogative should not be mistaken for royal authority. The crown depended heavily on the expertise of the Cinque Ports shipowners, but the royal charters that stipulated how many ships they were required to loan the king gave the Cinque Ports extraordinary privileges, including the right of wreck and freedom from taxes, which they routinely abused.
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For much of the
medieval period English merchant shippers were a law unto themselves. When Edward I sailed to Sluys in 1297, more than 165 men died in a riot between crews from the Cinque Ports and their rival, Yarmouth. Eight years later, the king commissioned a Cinque Ports ship called
Le Snak
to patrol the English Channel against pirates, only to have
Le Snak
’s crew steal £300 from ships belonging to London merchants. By the same token, the crown was frequently in arrears for crews’ wages and offered shipowners nothing for the use of their vessels until parliamentary pressure in 1380 required
payment of a modest sum for wear and tear on ships’ gear.

The English did not establish a naval base and shipyard until 1420 at
Southampton. But this was a tentative effort and soon abandoned. Rather than
attempt to develop a formal naval establishment, Henry VI began issuing
letters of marque to captains of armed merchant ships. Technically, a shipowner who had been robbed on the high seas by the subject of another ruler could seek compensation by taking his case to court in the country of his robber. If this was not possible, or the verdict’s partiality was suspect, the victim could appeal to his own sovereign for a
letter of marque entitling him to seize property from the compatriots of the original robber, up to the value of what he had lost, although such niceties were readily ignored. Yet privateering, as sailing with letters of marque came to be known, was not simply a peacetime system of alternative justice; kings and princes also used privateers to augment their fleets in time of war. To fund his campaigns against the Angevins,
Roger of Lauria issued letters of marque for a 20 percent cut of the prizes taken, and in 1292 revenue from raiding accounted for half his fleet’s budget. An English letter of marque issued in 1400 spells out what the bearer could and could not do—or at least to whom he could and could not do it:

In other words, William Prince was an agent of the crown with the authority to seize Scottish vessels and their cargoes, but not those of any other country. Whether Prince respected the limits suggested by the king is unknown, but many commissioned privateers exceeded their writ and plundered allies and even their fellow countrymen. This lack of discipline was a major flaw in the privateering system. Another was that even if commissioned privateers were scrupulous about targeting only specified enemies, they were under no obligation to serve the king. So although letters of marque did disrupt enemy trade and provided some income to merchants whose opportunities for normal trade were limited by hostilities, as naval auxiliaries privateers were of negligible strategic benefit to the crown.

Ordinary merchants were willing to seek such commissions in part because
medieval sea trade was a rough-and-tumble business to begin with, and partly because their ships required little or no modification to ready them for more
belligerent pursuits. Even as ship design, rigging, and construction techniques evolved, the distinction between warships and merchantmen remained slight. Outwardly, the most pronounced transformation in ship design was in the north, where the sleek lines characteristic of the Viking-influenced double-ended ships gave way to the
cog, a relatively squat, boxlike vessel of heavy shell-first construction reinforced by frames and transverse crossbeams that protruded from either side of the hull. Cogs were characterized by a relatively flat bottom with high sides and straight rather than curved stem- and sternposts. The sternpost probably assumed this form first in order to accommodate the
centerline rudder, which dates to about 1200 in Europe. Despite its long pedigree in China, and tenth-century allusions to them in the Indian Ocean, the centerline rudder developed independently in northern Europe, where it was mounted with a hinged “pintle-and-gudgeon” system rather than lashings.
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Cogs were powered by a single square sail on a mast stepped amidships and many were fitted with elevated castles fore and aft, and a topcastle fitted to the mast. The stern- and forecastles were initially independent structures mounted on deck but eventually became fully integrated into the hull. As the name suggests, castles offered protection against attack and an advantage in height when attacking, and they were not limited to cogs.
A survey of sealings depicting ships from 1150 to 1300 shows that nearly half carried a castle of one sort or another, and the unfinished
Bremen cog of 1380, which was excavated in the
Weser River in the 1960s, had a complete sterncastle and the structural members for a forecastle. In addition to providing cover in combat, the sterncastle offered shelter for the helmsman, who manned the tiller on the main deck, and the one on the Bremen cog enclosed a windlass and capstan for weighing anchor, stepping the mast, loading heavy cargo, and trimming the sail.
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Although the commercial and technological initiative for regular trade between the Mediterranean and the ports of France, England, and Flanders lay with the Italians at the end of the thirteenth century, cogs first appeared in the Mediterranean as early as the Fifth Crusade (1217–21). Mediterranean shipwrights began to adopt the cog as a model for their own designs in the early 1300s.
Giovanni Villani, a Florentine chronicler, attributes the change to the economic advantage they offered:

Villani’s
navi grosse
were wide, high-sided vessels with ample room for low-value bulk goods like grain and wine. Built for capacity and economy, those of ordinary size were easy prey for galleys, although the larger ones were built with high castles. The relative advantages of the galley and
navi,
or round ships (as medieval sailing vessels are known), can be seen in the report of a battle fought between Venetian and Genoese ships in 1264. Ordinarily, Venetian convoys bound for the Levant were escorted by galleys, but that year a convoy of round ships consisting of the
Roccaforte
, a large state-owned
buss
built for combat and commerce, and a number of smaller hundred-ton round ships called
tarettes
sailed for
Syria unescorted. The
Roccaforte
was an exceptional vessel for her time, thirty-eight meters long, fourteen meters across, and more than nine meters from the keel to the top of the stern- and forecastles, and likely rigged with three masts. Her capacity of perhaps five hundred tons was more than twice that of the average large merchantman such as the
tarettes
in her convoy. A Genoese fleet of sixteen galleys under
Simone Grillo ambushed the
Roccaforte
and her consorts off the island of Saseno (Sazanit,
Albania). Although they could do little against the towering
buss,
the galleys were more than a match for the
tarettes.
The Venetians transferred the more valuable goods from the
tarettes
to the
Roccaforte
before scuttling three of the smaller vessels and setting the rest adrift to be plundered of their oil, honey, and other cargo.

After looting the
tarettes,
Grillo offered the Venetians in the
Roccaforte
safe quarter, but the Venetian ship was all but impregnable to an assault from the low-slung Genoese galleys, and her commander offered the taunting reply “
that if they [the Genoese] were stout fellows, let them come on, and that the ship was all loaded both with gold and the richest merchandise in the world.” Leaving the unscathed
Roccaforte
to proceed to
Ragusa, Grillo’s galleys sailed off with the captured
tarettes
. There may have been no more than half a dozen ships as large as the
Roccaforte
in the Mediterranean at any point in the thirteenth century. Consequently, the ordinary merchantman was at the mercy of galleys, which could be even longer than the
Roccaforte
. One of the earliest and most complete
specifications for war galleys comes from the chancery records
of Charles I, the Angevin king of
Naples ousted in the
War of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. These vessels were forty meters long and nearly four meters in beam and carried 108 oars. Unlike in antiquity or the early medieval period, when rowers were aligned in vertical files or more than one man was assigned to an oar, rowers now sat on benches angled toward the stern—a seating configuration called
alla sensile
(from the Spanish
sencillo,
meaning simple)—with one oar for each rower. In addition to the
oarsmen, these Angevin galleys carried two masters, four helmsman, two ship’s boys, and thirty-six marines; a total complement of 152 people.