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The military revolution in warfareat sea during the early modern era:technological origins, operationaloutcomes and strategic consequencesJohn F. Guilmartin Jr. aa Ohio State University , Columbus, Ohio, USAPublished online: 19 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: John F. Guilmartin Jr. (2011) The military revolution in warfare at sea duringthe early modern era: technological origins, operational outcomes and strategic consequences,Journal for Maritime Research, 13:2, 129-137, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.2011.622890

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The military revolution in warfare at sea during the early modern era:technological origins, operational outcomes and strategic consequences

John F. Guilmartin, Jr.∗

Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

It has been over 125 years since Charles Oman referred to the developments that enabled thearmies of Habsburg Spain and Austria to halt the westward advance of the Ottoman Turksbetween 1529 and 1532 as the military revolution of the sixteenth century.1 The term was re-introduced into the historical lexicon in 1955 in Michael Roberts’s inaugural lecture atQueen’s University Belfast, ‘The military revolution, 1560–1660’ and the term came to beused in general history texts.2 The debate about whether or not Europe experienced a military revo-lution in the early modern era was initiated by Geoffrey Parker – tentatively in his 1976 article ‘Themilitary revolution, 1560–1660 – a myth?’3 and resoundingly in 1988 with The military revolution:military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500–1800.4 The ensuing debate has only recentlybegun to die down in a tacit agreement between believers and non-believers to disagree.

That having been said, use of the concept of a military revolution as an explanatory device toclarify our understanding of a series of developments that profoundly changed the course ofhistory, or to underline their importance, while not universally accepted is well established.Curiously, however, historians of the military revolution have generally ignored developmentsat sea. When Parker’s book appeared in 1988, it stood alone in military revolution literature inincluding naval developments, and naval historians have, with few exceptions – Jan Glete,Nicholas Rodger and me – have had little to say about the military revolution and its relevanceto their field.

That is not to say that naval and maritime historians have not chronicled revolutionary devel-opments. Although he did not use the term, Carlo Cipolla’s Guns, sails and empires addresseddevelopments that were clearly revolutionary.5 Similarly, much of Nicholas Rodger’s work chron-icles revolutionary change in warfare at sea.6 So does that of Jan Glete who, refreshingly, devotedconsiderable critical attention to the relevance of the concept to the study of maritime history.7 Noone, however, has until now picked up the challenge that Glete laid before us to explore system-atically the question of whether or not there was a military revolution at sea and, if so, of what itconsisted. This roundtable discussion will go a long way towards responding to Glete’s challenge.I believe, moreover, that we are not talking simply about definitional issues; rather, I am confidentthat we are exploring the causal mechanisms behind developments in warfare and commerce atsea that had profoundly important consequences.

That my last reference was not to warfare alone, but to warfare and commerce, suggests apartial reason for the dearth of attention to a military revolution at sea. Whereas the military revo-lution on land can be usefully addressed as a fundamentally military question with, to be sure,

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∗Email: guilmartin.1@osu.edu

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important social, economic and political dimensions and repercussions, the course of the militaryrevolution at sea is inseparable from changes in the economics of maritime commerce and, asNicholas Rodger underlines in his contribution to this discussion, the economics of governance.The problem, in short, is more complex. This is something that Frederic Lane, historian ofVenetian commerce and warfare at sea, understood very well: his concept of protection rentneatly connects the two.8 Jan Glete made good use of it in his Warfare at sea, 1500–1650,which, while primarily concerned with commercial and political change, especially state formation,addresses the consequences of the military revolution at sea. It is to that revolution that I now turn.

Between the turn of the sixteenth century and the final decades of the seventeenth, use of thesea for commerce and warfare by certain of the nations of Europe underwent a series of changesso profound in their effects and far-reaching in their consequences as to merit labelling the processa military revolution at sea. The term is not a perfect fit, for changes in commerce and war wereinextricably intertwined, but by and large military factors led the way, so military revolution willdo. The changes in question were driven and shaped by a variety of forces and impulses rangingfrom economic through political to cultural and religious. That said, the impetus for change moreoften than not revolved around technological considerations, defining technology broadly as theapplication of an idea to achieve a physical effect by means of an object, artefact or thing.

More precisely, Europe underwent four discrete military revolutions at sea that proceededsequentially at times and in parallel at others. In the final analysis, these combined in theireffects to create the first global maritime empires, to remake the political and economic map ofEurope, both in terms of national boundaries and in terms of internal organisation, and tocreate a global maritime economy run along European lines. The first of these revolutions wasIberian and had its wellsprings in a fusion of Mediterranean and Atlantic ship technology thatgot under way in the early fifteenth century, and produced the first truly trans-oceanic Europeansailing vessels, first the caravel and then the full-rigged ship. These developments, which trans-ported Portuguese mariners and merchants to the Indian Ocean and Spaniards to the New World,were given staying power by the simultaneous development of gunpowder weapons adapted to amaritime environment and shipboard use.

The developments in question can be traced back to the appearance of the Catalan forge inwestern Europe around the turn of the fourteenth century. In essence a self-sustaining blastfurnace, the Catalan forge made possible the manufacture of high-quality wrought iron in unpre-cedented amounts, not only in total production but in the size of the bloom, the pool of molten ironon the furnace floor. Wrought iron was the strongest structural material of its day in tensilestrength and is impressive even by today’s standards.9 In addition, it had the useful nautical prop-erty of being resistant to corrosion.10 Wrought iron was used for the fittings that secured back- andforestays to vessels’ hulls, for anchors and for rudder gudgeons, the parts of sailing vessels thatwere subject to the greatest stress. The bigger blooms of the Catalan furnace made it possible toproduce these items in larger sizes, facilitating both an increase in the scale of sailing vessels andtheir capacity for trans-oceanic navigation. It also made possible the manufacture of the wroughtiron breech-loading cannon firing stone projectiles that were the first practical sea-going guns.

Coincidentally, a decade or so later Europeans learned to make saltpetre, the essential ingre-dient of gunpowder, from potassium nitrate rather than calcium nitrate as had been the case pre-viously.11 This was relevant since calcium nitrate is highly hygroscopic, readily absorbingatmospheric moisture and rendering the resulting gunpowder unfit for service afloat. Perhapsthis was not so coincidental: the sophisticated use of high-quality charcoal was integral both togunpowder manufacture and to the operation of a Catalan forge. The two developments in com-bination made sea-going gunpowder ordnance a practical reality.

The take-off point of our first revolution came in the form of an Iberian fusion of Atlantic andMediterranean shipbuilding technology, with Portugal taking the lead. Mediterranean carvel-built

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hulls of plank on frame construction with multiple masts and lateen sails were combined with theAtlantic square sail and sternpost rudder. The first product of this process was the caravel, derivedfrom Atlantic fishing vessels. With a comparatively high length to beam ratio, caravels wereexceptionally seaworthy and stable for their size, typically from 30 to 100 tons’ displacement.12

They generally had three masts fitted with lateen sails, square sails or some combination thereof.Fitted with lateen sails, they could sail close to the wind and proved ideally suited for long runsout into the Atlantic and back, which were needed to make good progress down the west coast ofAfrica.

These developments were accelerated by a research and development programme mounted byPortugal’s Aviz monarchs which included the development of superior navigational techniquesand guns of a uniquely Portuguese design. Called camelos and cameletes, these were relativelylong muzzle-loading stone throwers with a powder chamber of reduced diameter. They couldbe made of wrought iron or cast bronze. Those mounted on caravels in the early 1500s seemto have fired balls of 12 to 18 pounds.13 Pound for pound and gun for gun, these were probablythe most effective naval ordnance of their day.14

The Portuguese breakthrough in gunnery afloat began with the appreciation that a large stoneball could do significant damage to the hull of a ship and that heavy shipboard ordnance had to bemounted near the waterline to avoid compromising stability. In practical terms that meant firing onthe broadside though open ports in the bulwarks of a low-lying caravel. When this was first doneis unclear, but before 1440 is a reasonable guess, and it is clear that the Portuguese had learned thedestructive effect on a ship’s hull of heavy shot fired ao lume do agua – at the waterline – longbefore they reached Asian waters.15

Useful as it was for exploration and as successful as it was in battle against Indo-Muslimforces in the Indian Ocean, the caravel was an evolutionary dead end in that its capacity forstores and cargo was limited and it could not be scaled up in size. It is indicative that caravelson Portuguese voyages of exploration were often accompanied by supply ships which were aban-doned after their stores were used to replenish the caravels.

By contrast the ship, the definitive product of the Iberian fusion of Mediterranean and Atlanticnaval technology, had ample stowage capacity. Ships, ‘naos’ in Spanish and Portuguese, hadshorter hulls than caravels relative to their beam and fuller lines. Like caravels they were ofcarvel construction. Their design was amenable to increases in size. The evolved design hadthree masts, four counting the bowsprit: foremast, main mast and mizzen, with the largestships having two or even three mizzens. A square sail was carried beneath the bowsprit; thefore- and main masts carried two square sails of which the topsail was the larger. The mizzenmast carried a lateen sail, used as much for steering as for propulsion. The multiplicity ofmasts and sails gave ship-rigged vessels superior manoeuvrability in a wide variety of windand sea states. A product of their high freeboard, ships were at first armed with relatively lightordnance, small bombards and breech-loading swivel guns, carried high in the hull, particularlyin bow and stern castles. Large ships, fitted with a high overhanging forecastle to permit plungingfire on lower-lying vessels and to support boarding, were called carracks. These were for a timethe premier armed merchant vessels. Getting ahead of our story, carracks would be the first ocean-going vessels to mount heavy guns. This took place in the final years of the fifteenth century withthe development of the watertight gun port and involved ordnance mounted at the stern on thelowest deck above the waterline. This was an inherently defensive arrangement with onlymodest tactical impact.

The final stage of the beginning of this first revolution was marked in the western hemisphereby the appearance off San Salvador in 1492 of Christopher Columbus’s flotilla, appropriately oftwo caravels and a nao, and the return of the two caravels to Spain. It was marked in the east byVasco da Gama’s victory in February 1503 off Calicut over an Indo-Muslim force of some

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60 local prahus and 20 Red Sea dhows. Da Gama organised his fleet in two squadrons, the first offive broadside-armed caravels and two or three weatherly naos and the second of six carracks andone or two naos. Broadsides from the caravels holed many of the Indo-Muslim vessels and threwtheir squadrons into confusion, preventing attempts to board, while plunging fire from the follow-ing carracks and naos wrought havoc on the survivors.16 There ensued a century and a half ofPortuguese dominance of the Indian Ocean and such of its commerce as the Portuguese soughtto control.

The second of our revolutions began with the development in the early 1510s of a means tofuse the tactical mobility under oars of an ordinary Mediterranean war galley with the firepower ofheavy gunpowder ordnance, a fusion first achieved by Venetian shipwrights towards the end ofthe Ottoman War of 1499–1503.17 The stimulus for the fusion lay in an Ottoman victory inAugust 1499 over a Venetian fleet at Zonchio, off the south-western coast of the Morea. Thebattle marked the failure of an attempt by a Venetian fleet to block the passage of an Ottomanfleet bearing an invading army and siege train, leading to the surrender of the fortified Venetianport of Lepanto. The contending fleets consisted of a few very large carracks, in the Ottoman casearmed with a small number of large muzzle-loading, stone-throwing bombards; naos or the equiv-alent; and heavy galleys and light galleys. In numbers and size of vessels, the Venetians were out-numbered about two-and-a-half to one. In addition to the Ottoman bombards, the carracks on bothsides were armed with swivel guns, some firing from the tops; small bombards firing throughports in the fore- and stern castles; and a wide array of individual missile weapons rangingfrom composite bows, to firearms, to gads (steel javelins) and stones thrown from the tops.Both the heavy and light galleys seem to have been armed with nothing heavier than swivelguns.18

The battle was marked by the reluctance of many of the Venetian captains to bring their shipsto close quarters with the enemy, deterred by the impact of 150-pound stone bombard balls;19 bythe inability of light galleys to overcome the height advantage of heavy galleys and sailingvessels; and by the dramatic destruction by fire and explosion of two Venetian carracks andthe largest Turkish carrack.20 The Venetians had been unable to bring their superior seamanshipeffectively to bear. Superior Ottoman numbers, equivalent technology and adequate seamanshiphad prevailed. The following summer saw another face-off at the same place with the same result.Modon and Coron, Venice’s last remaining positions in the Morea, fell.

The Venetians sued for peace in 1502, and concluded a treaty with the Ottomans that restoredVenice’s all-important commercial privileges. The tactical portents for the future were clear: theOttoman bombards had had their effect but had not been decisive in themselves; Venice could nothope to prevail over the Turks in fleet actions dominated by swivel guns, small bombards andindividual missile weapons.

Seeking a means to counter superior Turkish numbers, the Venetians turned to heavy gunpow-der ordnance. Guns had been mounted on the bows of galleys since the early fifteenth century, butthe vessels in question were heavy galleys, neither fast nor very manoeuvrable under oars; theguns were relatively small.21 Just how and when the shipwrights and gun founders of the VenetianArsenal arrived at the solution we cannot say, but the first unequivocal evidence of a really power-ful gun being mounted on the bow of a galley involves a basilisk – the generic term for a long gunof exceptional power firing a ball of 50 pounds or more and weighing in the order of 7–8000pounds – mounted on a Venetian heavy galley in 1501.22 It must have been mounted on the cen-treline on a non-traversing forward-firing mount: there would have been no other place to put itthat made sense. It must also have had a recoiling mount, otherwise it would quickly have doneserious damage to the hull. The arrangement was clearly an experiment, for a heavy galley wastoo slow and sluggish under oars to be an effective gun platform. It must have been a technicalsuccess, providing a test bed for what would become the standard mount for the Mediterranean

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war galley’s main centreline bow gun: a box, resembling an eighteenth-century truck carriage butwithout the wheels, in which the gun was suspended on trunnions, sliding in a trough, restrainedand run out by heavy tackle.

The next step was a major redesign of the hull of a light galley, up to this point a narrow vesselwith parallel sides and roughly equal taper at bow and stern.23 The solution was to fill out theunderwater lines forward to support the considerable weight of ordnance at the bow, resultingin a fish-like shape.24 That took time, though how much we cannot say.25

The result was the main centreline bow-gun-armed Mediterranean war galley or ordinarygalley. Squadrons and fleets of such galleys, particularly when manoeuvring in line-abreast for-mation, could defeat cannon-armed caravels and effectively engage coastal fortifications, produ-cing a fundamental shift in the strategic calculus in waters where they could operate. Thismanifested itself in two ways. Strategically, from the 1510s squadrons of these ordinarygalleys provided the wherewithal for the expansion of the Spanish Habsburg and OttomanEmpires, leading to the effective division of the Mediterranean between them and their lesserclient states, with the Venetians using galley squadrons to sustain their chain of fortified portcities which provided shelter for merchant ships. On an operational and tactical level, the ordinarygalley quickly ousted the great galley from the line of battle and progressively reduced the tacticalviability of the carrack. By the 1570s none were left in the Mediterranean.26

Ultimately, the Mediterranean system of warfare and trade – revolving around the symbioticrelationship between fleets and squadrons of armed ‘ordinary’ war galleys and the port cities andfortified anchorages that supported them – collapsed under its own weight. An important causalfactor was the wave of inflation that swept the Mediterranean from west to east in the sixteenthcentury, in large part a product of our first revolution in the form of an outpouring of gold andsilver from Spanish mines in the New World, sharply increasing the cost of paying and maintain-ing soldiers, mariners and oarsmen that was to result in the replacement of free, salaried oarsmenwith slaves and convicts in the western Mediterranean from around 1550. That accelerated theweight increase; since servile oarsmen were less efficient than free ones, more had to be used.

To survive tactically, galleys had to mount greater numbers of heavier guns, but with increasedweight came reduced speed under oars. To maintain dash speed under oars, another essential oftactical survival, the size of rowing gangs had to be increased. That worked, but at the cost ofsharply reducing the amount of stowage space per man for provisions and water, thus further cur-tailing strategic radius of action. Finally, and critically, the progressive increases in manning,combined with inflation, drove the operating costs of a war galley sharply upwards. By thetime of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, these costs had become almost prohibitive, making the stra-tegic utility of large galley fleets increasingly problematic, especially in light of the reduction intheir radius of action. By the 1580s, squadrons of Mediterranean war galleys, though still tacti-cally viable on their home grounds, were small in size and few in number. Still, the war galleysporting heavy ordnance at the bow had dominated warfare and trade at sea in the Mediterraneanfor some three-quarters of a century, leaving its imprint on the political boundaries and economicorganisation of the region.

The third revolution concerned the galleon. Both the origins of the galleon and the timing ofits appearance are uncertain. All that can be said with certainty is that it was intended to combinethe forward-firing firepower of the Mediterranean war galley with the sea-going capabilities of thefull-rigged ship, and that it was around for a considerable time before its users realised its fullpotential.27 Galleons were solidly built, sufficiently so to allow their gun decks to accept a con-siderable weight of guns firing on the broadside, and their recoil as well, although these qualitieswere, for a considerable time, neither appreciated nor fully exploited (the issue has been cloudedby a persistent tendency to view the galleon as a pre-incarnation of the ship of the line when itsusers saw it very differently).28 Finally, galleons had sufficient stowage capacity to permit

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genuine trans-oceanic operations. That capacity could be devoted to men, ordnance andammunition, provisions, cargo or some combination thereof as circumstances required. Galleonswere the first vessels capable of deploying heavy gun power across trans-oceanic distances.

Their strategic impact was considerable: English galleons played a dominant role in therepulse of the Spanish Armada of 1588. Dutch galleons, raiding and trading to the limits of theSpanish Habsburg Empire from 1598, played a major role in determining the outcome of theEighty Years’ War, giving the Netherlands, for a time, world hegemony. The second of thesedevelopments in itself merits the use of the term revolution. Squadrons of Dutch galleons, oper-ating far from home, not only interdicted Spanish and Portuguese trade, they took much of it forthemselves, enriching the Dutch and, in the process, defeating and helping to bankrupt their Habs-burg enemies.

The fourth and final revolution rested on the development of the ship of the line and – pivo-tally – tactics that harnessed its capabilities. The ship of the line was a descendant of the galleon,although the process of development was anything but straightforward. The first steps revolvedaround the progressive increase in the size of war galleons and the tendency to mount moreguns on them as such weapons became available. Since the free space on board was on the broad-side, this is where they went. Still, sea captains clung to traditional galleon ship-to-ship tactics:gaining the wind; bearing down and firing the bow chasers; pulling parallel and firing the leebroadside; bringing the stern chasers to bear; then tacking to fire the weather broadside beforepulling clear to reload.29 If there was an opportunity to board, it would be taken. To board andcapture for prize money and captives was, after all, a prime objective.

The first ships of the line, though they were not called that, were ‘prestige’ ships: large extra-polations of the galleon given exceptionally heavy armament to burnish the reputations of royalpatrons. Since there was only so much room at the bow, the additional ordnance was mountedalong the broadside for the reasons mentioned above. The first of these was the Danish TreKroner, shortly followed in 1610 by the English Royal Prince of some 1900 tons’ displacementcarrying 55 guns on two full gun decks and a partial third – galleons only had one.30 Royal Princewas followed in 1637 by the even larger Sovereign of the Seas, with 100 guns on three full gundecks and 2700 tons’ displacement. The French Couronne, launched in 1638, was even larger at2900 tons, though she carried only 88 guns.31 Sovereign, like Royal Prince before her, was cri-ticised by experienced English sea captains, Sir William Monson among them, as impossiblyunwieldy. Such vessels, they argued, could fight only one side and would be outmanoeuvredand outshot by smaller, more nimble warships.32 Given the tactical precepts of their day,Monson and his colleagues were quite right.

But the big ships were a reality. The question was how to use them in battle; their firepowerwas on the broadsides and attacking sideways is counter-intuitive. The solution – used in Indianwaters by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, as mentioned earlier, then abandoned – was line-ahead tactics. The departure from the status quo came in 1639 in the first phase of the Battleof the Downs when a heavily outnumbered Dutch squadron under Maarten Tromp fought in aclose line ahead with spectacular success. Still, it was well into the first Anglo-Dutch War(1652–4) before first the English and then the Dutch adopted the line ahead as standard. Theresult was a fundamental shift in the strategic role of battle fleets. Whereas squadrons of galleonshad been highly effective in disrupting overseas empires, as much by trade as by combat, fleets ofships of the line proved able to defend them. Moreover, while Dutch galleons had partly paid forthemselves in the Eighty Years’ War, fleets of ships of the line were in no way self-sustainingeconomically, a major departure. To the contrary, ships of the line were exceedingly expensiveto build and operate, requiring an extensive – and costly – infrastructure of dockyards, rope fac-tories, cannon foundries and access to large quantities of high-quality timber. That, in turn,required sophisticated fiscal machinery capable of raising large amounts of money through the

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sale of long-term debentures, a process pioneered by the Dutch, then imitated and improved bythe English.

The results of the Anglo-Dutch Wars strongly hinted at the possibility of dominance of theworld’s oceans by the nation that could best build and maintain fleets of ships of the line, butthat capability was not definitively manifested until British victory in the Seven Years’ War –or was it Trafalgar?

Much in the way of technical development went down between the end of the Anglo-DutchWars in 1674 and the turn of the eighteenth century. Notably, the monster first- and second-ratesof the seventeenth century gave way to the 74-gun ship of the line. Seasonal naval campaigninggave way to fleets, particularly British, that could remain at sea throughout the year, maintainingat least a loose blockade in the dead of winter. The developments in ship technology, while impor-tant in cumulative effect, were refinements, evolution rather than revolution. The essence of therevolution lay in the emergence of the ship of the line fighting in line ahead – a fusion of tech-nology and tactics – as master of the seas.

And that demanded the creation of a massive fiscal and productive infrastructure. FirstEngland and then Britain did that best, and in so doing frustrated France’s bid for global hege-mony, a matter of no small importance. Yet the development of the ship of the line and appropriatemeans of using it had other, still more important consequences. It is a commonplace in somecircles to argue that war and the creation of the wherewithal to wage war are inherently destructivein nature, and inevitably so. To me, certainly in this case, the evidence suggests otherwise – thatthe creation of the cannon foundries, shipyards, dockyards, rope factories, methods of resourceextraction and management, and all the rest needed to create and sustain sea power laid the foun-dations for the Industrial Revolution in the British Isles.33 The argument was first advanced byWilliam McNeill34, then refined in this discussion by Nicholas Rodger. The result was whatNicholas Rodger refers to here as the fiscal administrative revolution in warfare at sea. Heargues that this revolution had profoundly important consequences.

I agree, but would point out that Rodger’s fiscal administrative revolution depended upon, andwas the end product of, the four revolutions in warfare at sea outlined above. In particular, thefiscal administrative revolution and the revolution in operations and tactics associated with theappearance of fleets of ships of the line were opposite sides of the same coin. The question ofwhich came first is probably unanswerable and it is in any case irrelevant: neither could havetaken place without the other.

Notes1. Oman, The art of war, 162.2. A slightly revised version of the lecture is republished in Rogers, ed., Military revolution debate, 13–35.3. Republished in Rogers, Military revolution debate, 37–54.4. Parker, The military revolution.5. Cipolla, Guns, sails and empires.6. Notably, many of the passages on developing ship technology in Rodger, Safeguard of the sea and

especially – though he might not agree with my characterisation – his ‘Development of broadsidegunnery’.

7. See Glete, Navies and nations and Warfare at sea, especially chaps 6–7.8. Lane’s Venice is a compendium of his most important work.9. Modern wrought iron has a yield point of 31,000 lb/in2 and an ultimate strength of 51,000 lb/in2.

Modern hard-worked structural steel has a yield point of 38,000 lb/in2 and an ultimate strength of60,000 lb/in2; Eschbach, Handbook of engineering fundamentals, Ch. 12, pp. 20–21, 26, 26 Table4. The qualities of modern and pre-modern wrought iron would not have been appreciably different.

10. This was because silicates in the iron worked their way to the surface during the forging process, creat-ing a corrosion-resistant coating. From the author’s observation of cannon recovered in 1978 from thePortuguese galeao Santıssimo Sacramento, sunk in 1668, wrought iron structures used to centre the

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bores of cast bronze cannon survived over 300 years of salt water immersion; Guilmartin ‘The guns ofthe Santıssimo Sacramento’.

11. Hall, ‘Corning of gunpowder’, 51–2.12. Elbl, ‘The caravel’, especially 92. Elbl gives a range of 18–60 tons’ burden (carrying capacity) which I

have converted to displacement tonnage using the 1:1.5 ratio given by Glete, Navies and nations, II,529, rounding up to account for the volumetric inefficiency of smaller vessels.

13. Barker, ‘Gun-list’, especially 56–60.14. Guilmartin, ‘Earliest shipboard ordnance’, especially 665–6.15. Barker, ‘Gun-list’.16. Correia, Lendas da India, I, 269–70; Padfield, Tide of empires, I, 47–52; Parker, ‘The Dreadnought

revolution’, 276; and for an analytical narrative, see Guilmartin, Galleons and galleys, 77–89.17. Galley terminology is inconsistent and can be misleading. The terms light galley and heavy galley

(generally meaning merchant galley) apply most accurately to the pre-gunpowder era. I have usedthe term ordinary galley to designate a main centreline bow-gun-armed war galley.

18. Chelebi, Maritime wars of the Turks, 20–1; Lane, ‘Naval actions’, 149.19. Lane, ‘Naval actions’, 155.20. For an account of the battle, see Guilmartin, Galleons and galleys, 72–7.21. The royal galley of Alfonso Vof Aragon mounted two bombards in 1418 – Vigon, Historia de la Artil-

leria Espanola, I, 84–5. These were almost certainly small pieces in fixed, forward-firing mounts oneither side of the galley’s beak or spur. The Venetians used galley-mounted bombards during the Siegeof Chioggia, 1379–81, but there is no evidence that they were used outside the Venetian lagoons,almost certainly because they used gunpowder made with highly deliquescent calcium nitrate that dete-riorated rapidly on exposure to moist air. Guilmartin, ‘Earliest shipboard ordnance’, 658.

22. I Diarii de Marino Sanuto, vol. 3, 510, 968, 1221, cited by Pedrosa, ‘A Artilharia Naval Portuguesa noSeculo XVI’, especially 329.

23. See, for example, Whitwell and Johnson, ‘The “Newcastle galley”’.24. For the lines of a 1598 Dutch galley, see Lehmann, Galleys in the Netherlands, 107ff. The fish-shaped

underwater lines would have been essentially the same for all main centreline bow-gun-armed Med-iterranean ordinary galleys.

25. That is my supposition based on the logic of structural and hydrodynamic considerations, supported byRodger, ‘Development of broadside gunnery’, 302–3. We know that an increase in the weight of ord-nance carried on ordinary galleys combined with the disappearance of free oarsmen to force majorchanges in Mediterranean galley design from around 1550 – Guilmartin, Gunpowder and galleys,282–3; the addition of several thousand pounds of ordnance on a galley’s narrow prow must havehad at least equivalent impact.

26. Glete, Navies and nations, I, 140; Rodger, ‘Development of broadside gunnery’, 303.27. Ibid., 306.28. For instance, Barker, ‘Gun-list’, lists 21 galeoes serving in Indian waters in 1525, 11 without mention

of their armament and 10 with a detailed list of the armament ‘that is found to be necessary’ for them.Leoes (lions) firing a 50-pound cast iron ball are the heaviest pieces on the list and the only guns speci-fied as bow chasers. The heaviest broadside guns were 18-pound camelos. Clearly, the Portuguese con-sidered forward firepower to be the galleon’s principal tactical strength. Barker’s interpretation,emphasising the heavy weight of broadside ordnance on several of the ships without regard to thesize of individual guns mounted as bow chasers, differs from mine.

29. Rodger, ‘Development of broadside gunnery’, 307.30. Displacement figures are from Glete, Navies and nations, II, app. 2.31. Landstrom, The ship, 166; Rodger, Safeguard, 386–8; displacement figures from Glete, Navies and

nations, II, Appendix 2.32. Lavery, The ship of the line, 16.33. This is true even down to the intellectual underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of

the ballistic pendulum by Benjamin Robins, published in his 1742 treatise on ballistics, led to thedevelopment of the science of ballistics and the first direct impingement of science on design engin-eering in the form of, first, improved gunpowder and, later, improved cannon design. It was true in themechanical arts as well. Cannon boring machinery, developed in Switzerland in the early eighteenthcentury and used with considerable success at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich in the late eighteenthcentury, provided the inspiration for the development of the turret lathe which, in turn, made possiblethe construction of the high-pressure steam engine, all in Britain. See Beer, ed., Art of gunfounding.

34. See McNeill, The pursuit of power, 185–261.

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