"...for you live like sea birds... you do not hesitate to oppose so frail a bulwark to the wildness of the sea...Be diligent to repair your boats." -- Cassiodorus, in a letter to the 'maritime tribunes' [of the Venetian Islands], AD 523

After the collapse of Roman naval power (described in an earlier column), multiple invasions of southern Europe by Goths, Huns, and Lombards caused people from the northern Italian mainland to flee for refuge to the marshy islands off the Adriatic coast of Italy. Protected by the sea and a lagoon, these islands were counted too sandy and low-lying to be worth the effort of conquest or plundering, so marauding armies mostly passed them by. Charlemagne's son Pepin attempted a conquest in 810, and got his butt handed to him.

While the rest of Europe was engulfed in petty wars among petty kingdoms, the Venetians created the longest-lasting republic in Europe, and developed a reputation as skilled sailors capable of handling ships safely along unforgiving coastlines. If you had a valuable cargo to send, Venetians were your shippers of choice. As early as the mid 500s, little marshy Venice had twice sent its fleet to assist mighty Constantinople, and by the 880s, Venice had earned the gratitude of maritime nations at both ends of the Mediterranean by putting down the pirates infesting the Dalmatian coastline. By that time, Venice was already the leading clearing port for goods in the Med, especially precious metals, and her prestige was further enhanced when she fought off an attack by the Magyars who had been devastating Eastern Europe and northern Italy. A Venetian fleet was clearly not something to mess with.

Trade encouraged Venice's cosmopolitan outlook, creating a spirit of cohesion and cooperation in the Most Serene Republic. Pragmatic in adopting new ideas from their trading partners, Venetians (at least for most of their history) encouraged tolerance in their democracy. Tolerance was good for business, and business was good for everyone. Unique among European city-states, the Venetian Republic never burned a single heretic throughout the entire middle ages. When the Inquisition attempted to ban certain books in Venice, the open-minded Venetians simply ignored it.

The Venetians institutionalized rowing on a scale not seen before, or since. The famed Arsenale could lay down the keel of a galley (built to standard design with stock parts) in the morning, and launch it -- fully-rigged and ready to put to sea -- that same evening. The Venetians also developed a practical version of the first on-board electronics: the magnetic compass ("bussola nautical"). Tradition holds that Flavio Gioia of Amalfi adapted a Chinese device (used for divination) into a navigational tool. Early compasses pointed away from the pole, by the way.

Compasses freed Venice's helmsmen from relying on the stars. Fleets could now sail even during seasons when the weather was too overcast for the stars to be visible, instead of being restricted to the summer months. The expansion to year-round trading, plus improvements in ship design, made Venice wealthy - both from carrying cargoes on its own account, and from chartering its ships out to others. The Venetians -- and their cross-peninsular rivals, the Genoans -- were probably the last people to make serious money from rowing; they picked up the tab for a large slice of the Renaissance.

It was possible to work one's way up through the ranks in the Venetian fleet. Michael of Rhodes enlisted as a rower aboard a Venetian war galley in 1401. His journeys took him to Bruges, London, Cyprus, Beruit, Constantinople, and Alexandria. His 42 years at sea raised him from oarsman, "to chief oarsman, steersman, boatswain, adviser, captain of a small galley, mate and finally captain of a vessel." (This information thanks to MIT's Dibner Institute, which is sponsoring research on the 180-page manuscript he wrote collecting his knowledge of shipbuilding and seamanship.)

The Venetian galley inherited part of its design from its Roman ancestor, but the ever-flexible Venetians soon converted the square sail into a much more maneuverable triangular lateen rig, also revising the oar spacings on their ships.

Venetians often rowed standing, facing forward so they could lean their weight on the oars (a sort of reverse layback). A painting of 1324 shows a warship with 13 oars on each side. Originally, the ships had two steering oars aft. The adoption of a center-mounted rudder came more slowly than in northern Europe, perhaps because of the Mediterranean practice of beaching ships stern-first (then as now, bad for the skeg) made center-mounted rudders a disadvantage. A painting of Marco Polo's departure from Venice in 1400 AD shows one of the ships in his fleet (the long black-hulled one -- the Millennium of its day) with the "new-fangled" single stern rudder. Its oars were grouped in triplets. Catch timing must have been particularly crucial in such an arrangement.

A design manual for Venetian shipbuilders -- Arte de far Vasselli -- shows the plans of a typical mid-1400s galley. She had a sharp bow and a transom (squared) stern. Extra-long bow sweeps were used to maneuver the bow across the wind (in the same way a modern crew shell would ask bow or two seat to "touch it"). Whether under oar or sail -- or combination of both -- she must have been fast and graceful. She had a stern rudder plus two auxiliary side-mounted rudders. (O coxswain joy! To have THREE rudders to play with! Just the thing for head race season.)

Venice's dominance of trade began to wane after Vasco da Gama's voyages around Africa opened new long-distance trade routes. Lightly-constructed Mediterranean galleys with narrow hulls and large crews could not compete economically with the larger cargo capacity of sailing ships over open ocean routes. The annual Venetian trading fleets to the Netherlands continued for a while, but Portugal and Holland became the new trading powers. By the end of the 16th century, the age of commercial rowing had come to a close.