Until he read Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea, Matt Ridley knew little about the struggle to dominate the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century:
It was a time of such horror that much of southern Italy, Greece and north Africa ended the century severely depopulated by the slave raiders in search of galley fuel. The cruelty of both sides defies belief, as does both sides’ complete conviction that they were acting in the name of a virtuous God.
For example:
Everyone employed chained labour — captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short.
It gets worse:
Bragadin’s end was lingering and dreadful. He was kept alive until August 17, a Friday. The wounds on his head were festering; he was crazed with pain. After prayers, he was processed through the city to the sound of drums and trumpets…More dead than alive, he was tied in a chair and hoisted to the top of a galley’s mast, ducked in the sea, and shown to the fleet with jeers and taunts…Then he was hustled into the square beside the church of Saint Nicholas, now converted into a mosque, and stripped naked. The butcher ordered to commit the final act — and this would not be forgiven in Venice — was a Jew. Tied to an ancient column from Salamis still standing to this day, Bragadin was skinned alive. He was dead before the butcher reached the waist.
Ridley finds it easy to blame chiefs, priests and thieves who plundered the fruits of commerce for their own enrichment and glory:
Now I understand better how Spain squandered the riches of south America. (Charles V built a fleet with a Peruvian windfall and lost that fleet and most of his men in a single abortive attack on Algiers.) Now I understand how the Ottoman empire destroyed its own prosperity. (The sultan requisitioned vast quantities of men, food, weapons and supplies then destroyed them all in long sieges of Rhodes, Malta and Cyprus.) Now I understand how the trading city states of Italy got sucked into the pursuit of war rather than business.
His examples don’t strike me as serving the narrow interests of the sovereigns involved. Did the trading city-states of Italy get sucked into the pursuit of war by witnessing numerous military failures?
I’ve read that the war galleys of ancient Greece were crewed by volunteers. Given that Greece was very much a slave society, this must imply a consensus that free warriors would row better, when the time of maximum urgency came, than would slaves.