160 ruthy gertwagen
2003: 215–216; Harpster, 2010: 52). Furthermore, there is ample evidence in the
first half of the fifteenth century of the Venetian Arsenal hiring Greek shipwrights to
oversee the construction of their light galleys. The Greek/Byzantine shipmasters
worked alongside but separately from Venetian shipmasters, each responsible for his
own type of vessel (Bondioli, 2009: 273–279; Gertwagen, 2012: 120–124).
Other scholars, on the other hand, insist on the western European origins of
shipping technology that arose in the context of the twelfth-century “European”
Renaissance. They disregard Byzantine archaeological and written evidence and adhere
to the peculiar and mistaken assertion of Byzantine lack of productivity in the fields of
mathematics and geometry. They sustain this claim by pointing to similar verbal for-
mulas found in mid-thirteenth century Genoese notarial contracts and bills for fitting
galleys and in the late thirteenth-century documentary corpus of the registers of the
royal chancellery at Anjou, as well as in the aforementioned Venetian texts (Bondioli,
2009: 261–266). Since, however, Byzantine and Venetian shipmasters worked at the
same time in the Venetian Arsenal, one could safely maintain that this industrial com-
pound was a melting pot of both traditions, Byzantine and western European.
Another change in technology is that medieval hulls lost the Roman wine-glass
cross-section. Some became flat, squarer, and more box-like in section, allowing more
cargo space. Others became rounder, as attested by iconography. Both these hull
designs would have made much leeway.
An innovation that accompanied the transition in hull design was the adoption, at
the turn of the sixth century, of the lateen/settee sail, which originated in small mer-
chant craft of the pre-Christian period. It has been demonstrated that the lateen/
settee sail provided sailing performance comparable to that of the square sail. The
lateen/settee was adopted, in parallel to the adoption of frame-based hull design,
because of its lower cost. It required less than the square sail to build and maintain
(Whitewright, 2012).
The transition to frame-based hull design had two main consequences. One was
social and professional: the growth of the caulker, required to caulk and re-caulk the
vessel at regular intervals to overcome the solid sealing of the hull, provided before by
the mortise- and-tenon joinery (Pryor, 1994: 66; Pryor and Jeffreys, 2006: 148–152).
The second related to warfare, and was due to the abandonment of the Greco-Roman
waterline ram designed to operate against hull constructions based on mortise-
and-tenon joinery. The waterline ram was eventually replaced by the above-water
spur, depicted by a graffito on a fourteenth-century galley wreck found at San Marco
in Boccalama in the Venice lagoon (Pryor and Jeffreys, 2006: 134–146, 152;
McManamon, D’Agostino and Medas, 2003: 25, figs 6–7; Mor, 2012). This led to
new battle tactics, however, later modified by involving firearms and cannon, that
remained unchanged until the seventeenth century, when the days of galley warfare in
the Mediterranean were over.
The sixth century also witnessed a radical change in the oarage system of war
galleys from the previous Roman liburnia; it produced a new type of ship, faster and
with great maneuverability: the dromōn, a monoreme full decked, with 50–54 oars
beneath deck. By the tenth century it evolved into the bireme with 100–108 oars
superimposed (Pryor and Jeffreys, 2006, 128–134).
Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the medieval Mediterranean
witnessed several changes starting with an increase in ship size, both commercial and