Naval Organization

For most of the period considered here, it is not easy to distinguish between commercial and strictly military vessels. While light galley squadrons regularly patrolled the northern Adriatic from the early fourteenth century onward, war fleets also included civil shipping vessels, either leased or requisitioned by the state.

In wartime, the fleet could be increased to three or four times its peacetime strength. In the first year of the War of Cyprus (1570-1573), Venice was able to equip 140 galleys. And though some were destroyed or damaged by the weather, at Lepanto in the following year there were 110 ships flying the standard of St.

As to the seventeenth century, data concerning the navy are unfortunately rela­tively scanty. We know that there were certainly two fleets in use: the light Armata, formed of light galleys, and the great Armata, which deployed large round ships driven only by sail and carrying a considerable number of cannon.^[1631] Venice appears to have been unable to adapt quickly to the naval innovations that some northern European navies were developing. It was slow to adopt ships of the line, which came to dominate battles on the high seas, and continued to rely mainly on the light galley that had proved so effective in earlier centuries of Mediterranean naval warfare. From the early seventeenth century on, the Venetian government bought Dutch warships, thus acknowledging the technological limits of the state shipyards, and only in the 1670s was a ship of the line actually constructed in Venice itself.

It would, however, be wrong to argue that Venice was never able to adopt techno­logical innovations. It did experiment with new types of ships (for example, the fa­mous quinquereme built in the sixteenth century by Vettor Fausto), while measures were taken to improve the firepower of light galleys. It is well known that European and particularly Venetian artillery was of higher quality than the Ottomans'. The arsenal stocked several cannon of different caliber suitable for mounting on the galleys, and the navy as a whole provides an interesting example of the standardi­zation of gun calibers. Sailors' individual arms comprised longbows and especially crossbows until the late fifteenth century. In 1518, the government decided to re­place crossbowmen with arquebusiers.

The role played by the Venetian galleys at Lepanto was crucial, and it is worth noting that, during the long war for Crete in the mid-seventeenth century, the fleet won important battles against the Ottomans. It is nonetheless true that the tech­nological gap between Venice and the major northern European navies widened between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a development signaled by the government’s purchase in the seventeenth century of Dutch and English ships. With respect to the merchant navy, there was an even greater gap in relation to northern competitors, for a variety of reasons. In Venice, technological and mate­rial resources were reserved for the war fleet, and the availability of raw materials such as oak and hemp had fallen from the sixteenth century onward.^[1633] The mer­chant fleet consequently made do with less. There was also a cultural element at play. The galley had proven to be an excellent naval tool, highly suitable for the char­acteristics of the Mediterranean Sea: it provided those qualities of speed and ma­neuverability necessary for naval war often fought close to coastlines. And as long as manpower was widely available, it represented the optimal balance between mil­itary and commercial needs. While the galley showed its limits in comparison with the ships of northern Europe, it was difficult for Venice to abandon a vessel that had proved so decisive.