The Business of War in Europe. 1000–1600 101the amazingly rapid expansion of European dominion over American
(beginning 1492) and Asian (beginning 1497) waters. The easy Por
tuguese success off the port of Diu in India against a far more numer
ous Moslem fleet (1509) demonstrated decisively the superiority that
their long-range (up to 200 yards) weapons gave to European seamen
against enemies whose idea of a sea battle was to close, board, and
fight it out with hand weapons. As long as cannon-carrying ships could
keep their distance, the old-fashioned boarding tactics were utterly
unable to cope with flying cannonballs, however inaccurate long-range
bombardment may sometimes have been.
In the Mediterranean, the eclipse of ramming and boarding tactics
lagged considerably behind the rise of the new Atlantic style of naval
warfare. Until 1581, when a truce between the Ottoman Empire and
Spain ended more than a century of recurrent fleet actions, galleys
remained the mainstay of Mediterranean navies.^29 The fact that Spain
was accustomed to launching its main naval effort against the Turks
inhibited the Spaniards from accepting the logic of gunned warships as
wholeheartedly as English and Dutch interlopers upon Spanish and
Portuguese colonial empires were to do. When Charles V’s son, King
Philip II of Spain (r. 1556–98), at length lost patience and decided to
invade England, the fleet he assembled for the purpose (1588) was
better prepared for close-in fighting than for cannonading at a dis
tance, even though the galleons that constituted the backbone of the
Spanish fleet were stoutly built vessels, intended for Atlantic cross
ings, and carried an appropriate number of guns. But they were
clumsy to maneuver and could not successfully return the fire of the
nimbler English ships. The English, however, were unable to sink the
Spanish galleons by gunfire alone. Hence, the major disaster to the
Armada was due to storms encountered on the return trip around
Scotland.
Nevertheless, the defeat of the Spanish Armada deserves its tradi
tional fame, for King Philip’s failure demonstrated the inadequacy of
the Mediterranean style of naval warfare in oceanic waters. Neither
the Spanish nor the Ottoman governments, wedded as they were to
Mediterranean naval techniques and conceptions, could effectively
compete on the high seas with the new, Atlantic-based sea power of
Holland, England, and, ere long, of France as well. The consequent
transfer of supremacy at sea to northwestern Europe had much to
do with the general decline of the Mediterranean lands that became
- Cf. John F. Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys, for a very penetrating discus
sion of the rationality behind the conservatism of Mediterranean sea tactics.