John Francis Guilmartin

A semi-popular history of naval warfare from the later Middle Ages to about 1650. The sections on galleys largely repeat in less detail the story of Guilmartin's earlier (and more academic) Gunpowder and Galleys; the sections on galleons and other sailing ships were accordingly more interesting to me. The main focus is on Europe and its nascent transoceanic empires, because that's were the technology of naval warfare was primarily advancing (and Guilmartin is at heart a historian of military technology), but there's a section on the Sino-Koreo-Japanese wars of the 1590s, where the Koreans proved adept at using gunpowder at sea.

A good quick read, with lively battle accounts, and splendidly illustrated.… (mehr)

Alternating narrative chapters focusing on particular battles with topical ones, Guilmartin seeks to explain how gunpowder technology first transformed galley warfare, leading to ever larger fleets of ever bigger and more powerful galleys, then consigned it to irrelevance. After Lepanto large-scale galley operations faded away, partly because the Spanish and the Ottomans became embroiled on other fronts - the Netherlands and Persia respectively - but also, Guilmartin argues, because major galley fleets had become too expensive and unwieldy to justify any results they could realistically achieve. The broadside-firing sailing ship took over as the main warship even in the Mediterranean, about a century after it had conquered the oceans.

This evolution, in Guilmartin's argument, was not due primarily to narrowly technological reasons - the tall ship was not simply better than the galley in some platonic military sense - but mediated by a range of social and economic factors. Most importantly, throughout the sixteenth century the relative cost of cannon and gunpowder fell compared to that of labour and food. Accordingly, the cost-effectiveness of a galley with few guns and many crewmen inexorably declined relative to a sailing ship with many guns and a comparatively small crew.

Highly interesting and broadly convincing, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in naval history. Galley warfare is quite different from "classical" Age of Sail naval warfare, and might be an interesting eye-opener to those used to it.

Something that would have been worth an excursion or appendix is the revival of galleys in the eighteenth century Baltic Sea. Whatever factors made galleys viable here didn't include spiking artillery costs - indeed the Swedish "Archipelago Fleet" supplemented galleys with specialist artillery ships that sported enormous firepower by sixteenth century standards.… (mehr)