Piracy
ROMAN NAVY
The powerful, efficient fleets built and men trained by the Romans in order to maintain their world dominance. Unlike the Etruscans, the Romans were not a great seafaring people and maintained an aversion to such activities right until the last years of the Empire. For this reason the development of the navy was delayed in favor of the LEGIONS until…
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Book: Medieval Ships and Warfare
Edited by Susan Rose, Open University, UK The International Library of Essays on Military History This collection of essays and articles from a wide range of journals is intended to make more accessible to students and scholars some of the most important writing in English in this field from the…
ROMAN NAVY
The powerful, efficient fleets built and men trained by the Romans in order to maintain their world dominance. Unlike the Etruscans, the Romans were not a great seafaring people and maintained an aversion to such activities right until the last years of the Empire. For this reason the development of…
The Evolution of the Roman Imperial Fleets
D. B. Saddington Introduction Like the ancient Israelis, who felt concern for those “who went down to the sea in ships” (Ps 107.23), the Romans, especially by comparison with the Greeks, have often been regarded as reluctant seafarers. Before the Battle of Actium Plutarch (Ant. 64) has a centurion…
Malta Knights
If in 1523 Charles V already looked towards the Turkish menace in offering Malta to the knights, within a few years the need for their presence there had been redoubled in urgency. The area of mounting danger was North Africa, whose political division at that time was very different from…
MAHDIA CRUSADE (1390)
A Franco-Genoese crusade, sometimes known as the “Barbary Crusade,” that attacked the port of Mahdia (mod. al- Mahdiya, Tunisia) in North Africa, but was abandoned after a siege of some nine weeks. The crusade originated as a Christian response to the piratical activities of the Barbary corsairs of the North…
VENETIANS, GENOESE AND TURKS: THE MEDITERRANEAN 1300–1500
galia grosse late Fourteenth Century By Susan Rose In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the sources of evidence for naval warfare in the Mediterranean are both more copious and more reliable than those for the earlier period. Not only are there chronicle sources but also two of the major players…