Galleys were extremely maneuverable. With the rowers on one side pulling normally and those on the other side backing water, the galley could almost swivel on the spot. Oars were arranged so the rowers could step over them and back up instantly. Rapid maneuvering was essential, because a galley captain aimed to ram the side of an enemy vessel while avoiding being rammed himself.
Another favorite tactic in galley fighting was to brush close to an enemy’s side, pulling your oars out of the way at the last minute. The intention was to catch the enemy’s oars still in rowing position and break them off. Galley crews threw fire pots on enemy ships to burn them, tossed jars of soft soap to make enemy decks slippery, and sometimes threw jars of poisonous snakes to distract enemy crews.
In Hellenistic and Roman times, galleys, which had grown quite large, were often equipped with catapults to hurl such missiles. And in the 7th century, the Eastern Romans came up with the ultimate weapon in galley warfare: Greek fire. That’s worth a separate chapter (see Chapter 8).
Chapter 5
To Foil All Weapons: Body Armor
According to George Cameron Stone in his classic A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and at All Times, “Armor has been worn by all nations with any pretensions to civilization… ” It has also been worn by many nations with few pretensions to civilization. Armor has been made of many materials besides metal. Among the types illustrated in Stone’s book are Aleut armor composed of Chinese coins sewn on a leather vest; the wood, steel, and leather armor of the Koryak tribe of western Siberia; the leather and wood armor of the Chukchi people of eastern Siberia; the armor of the Lolo barbarians of southeastern China; and the armor of the Gilbert Islanders of the South Pacific, consisting of coconut fibers and fish skin. Corselets made of many layers of linen have been worn in many places, including ancient Greece. Leather armor has also been popular. One of the earliest depictions of armor is on the “Royal Standard of Ur,” a box covered with figures carved from shell and limestone, found in the royal cemetery of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. It shows a phalanx of warriors wearing copper helmets and long leather cloaks covered with metal disks.
Armor, a defensive weapon, varies with the weapons it is intended to defend against. The thick layers of cord worn by the Gilbert Islanders would not have stopped a steel lance head, but they did deaden the impact of sling stones, one of the islanders’ principle offensive weapons. The Gilbert Islanders specialized in mobile missile warfare. They’d run up to stone-throwing range, fire their sling stones, run away, and attack again. To guard against enemy sling stones when they were retreating, their armor had a tall square piece behind the head, rising well above a fish skin helmet. The ancient Celts invented mail — armor composed of thousands of interlocking rings. Mail was more flexible than most armors, and it protected the wearer very well against sword cuts. It was less protective against thrusts with a sharply pointed sword, but Celtic warriors usually relied on the edge of the sword, rather than the point. Roman soldiers were taught to use the points of their short swords; “duas uncias in puncto mortalis est” (“two inches in the right place is fatal”) was a motto of the legionaries. That was one of the reasons the Romans conquered the Gauls. The barbarian tribes that overran the Roman Empire, however, were slashers, so mail became the uniform of European knights. The knights usually wore their mail over a padded garment called an aketon to soften the impact of blows. A stroke that could not penetrate the mail could still break a bone. During the crusades, Christian soldiers sometimes wore a jacket of felt over their armor. It must have been stifling in sunny Palestine, but its wearers thought its advantages outweighed its discomfort. Beha ed-Din Ibn Shedad, one of Saladin’s officers, wrote: “I have seen soldiers with up to 21 arrows stuck in their bodies marching no less easily for that.”
Slashing with the sword is a more instinctive action than thrusting, so mail became popular far from its Celtic homeland. The Arabs, Persians, and Indians adopted it early, but some of them also added small metal plates to the mail that would stop a sword or spear thrust. Warriors of such West African kingdoms as Bornu, Mali, and Songhai also wore mail. Mail-wearers in such hot places as Africa and Arabia covered their armor with cloth robes to keep the sun off the metal and keep from turning a suit of armor into an oven capable of literally burning flesh. European warriors who went on crusade adopted the surcoat from their enemies and brought it back to Europe. There, European knights found the surcoat ideal for displaying their heraldic arms.
The ancient Greeks favored bronze armor because bronze could be melted and cast in large pieces. No European furnaces at that time were hot enough to melt iron. Iron was extracted from the ore by a laborious process of heating and beating, and the smith was left with small pieces that had to be welded together to make a piece as large as a sword blade. So for centuries, iron armor was composed of small pieces. Mail, made of rings formed from bits of iron wire, was one example. Scale armor (overlapping bits of metal fastened to fabric or leather and arranged like the scales of a fish) was another. And yet another example was lamellar armor (bits of metal fastened to each other with cords or wires). Japanese armor is probably the type of lamellar armor most familiar to Americans, but the type was also extremely popular in Persia, Central Asia, and India. The Romans used a wide variety of armor, including solid breast plates and back plates of bronze, mail, scale, and a type with overlapping strips of iron called the lorica segmentata. In the later Middle Ages, when the crossbow began to make life dangerous for mail-wearers, European knights began to cover their mail with a “coat of plates.” This was a vest of strong fabric with small, rectangular iron plates riveted to the inside of it. The plates were usually lined with another layer of fabric. A century or two later, a similar garment was used by infantrymen, usually as their sole armor except for the helmet. It was called
“brigandine.” People at that time, during the Hundred Years War with its rapa-cious mercenary bands, saw little difference between infantrymen and brigands.
European smiths became more and more skilled in metal working and were able to produce large pieces of mild steel by the 14th century. That was fortunate for the knights, because they were just beginning to face three new missile weapons: the longbow, the crossbow with a steel bow that had a draw weight of more than a 1,000 pounds, and the handgun. Plate armor could be made proof against these weapons. In fact, the word proof comes from the practice of firing a crossbow or a gun at a finished breast plate. If the shot did not penetrate, it proved that the armor was safe. But guns got more powerful. Armor got heavier, but it finally got so heavy it interfered with fighting. It began to disappear. Leg armor was replaced by heavy “jack boots,” thick leather boots that covered the thighs, and by the 17th century much of the upper body armor was replaced by a “buff coat,” a coat of heavy buffalo leather that was worn under a steel corselet. Sometimes it was worn instead of the corselet.