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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
ON MEDIEVAL WAR-GALLEYS 33
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.*
It may be doubted whether the four-banked and five-banked
galleys, of which Marino Sanudo speaks, really then carne 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 evidently
have been something quite new and unheard oft 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 i3th 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 Sanudo's °é1; ury3th
calculations. The zoo-oared vessels often mentioned Galleys.
(e.g. by Muntaner, p. 419) were probably two-banked vessels
with twenty-five benches to a side.
The galleys were very narrow, only 15-1- feet in beam.HH
* L' Armata Navale, Roma, 1616, pp. 15o-151.
t See a work to which I am indebted for a good deal of light and information, the Engineer Giovanni Casoni's Essay : " Dei Navz° li 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 fire-arrow, and blown up, in January 157o.
Pantera, p. 22.
§ Lazarus hay ius de Re Navali Veterum, in Gronovii Thesaurus, Ven. i 737, vol. xi. p. 581. This writer also speaks of the Quinquereme mentioned above (p. 577). llfarinus .San uti us, p. 65.
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