77. Rise of sea commerce. The Scandinavians.—We might suppose, in view of the difficulties and dangers of travel on land, that the trade of Europe would have been forced to the sea during the feudal period. In the last two centuries of the Middle Ages there was, in fact, a growth of maritime commerce which prepared the way for the great discoveries and the oceanic period of modern commerce. Before this period, however, the means of navigation were still so slight that regular and extended commerce on the sea was the exception rather than the rule.

In Northern Europe the Scandinavians were the leaders in the development of navigation. We get an idea of the ships that they used from one which was discovered a few years ago in a burial mound in southern Norway, where it had been preserved since the ninth century, it is supposed. It is an open boat, clinker built, and fashioned to go in either direction; it is about 75 feet long, and has places for 15 oars on each side, but no arrangement for a sail. Similar boats, with the addition of a rudder and hutch at each end, are still used in the Lofoten Islands. They are well suited to carry passengers along the coast, but have small cargo capacity, and, of course, are unfit for long sea voyages. The Scandinavian Vikings, indeed, used them mainly for raiding and piracy, and in them harried for centuries the coasts of western Europe, with a recklessness which accorded with their warlike character. A chronicle speaks of Danes who were tossed about for nearly a month before they made their landing in England. Along with these war vessels the Scandinavians must have had some cargo-ships, the details of which are unknown to us; a modern writer conceives them to have been clumsy and slow, “tub-shaped, round-bowed, and flat-bottomed.” Sailing ships were certainly used from a very early period.

78. Development of shipping in Northern Europe.—The Bayeux tapestry, which pictures the events of the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066, shows what was substantially the Viking type of vessel to have been used in that expedition; the boats were undecked, and several foundered at anchor before starting. A modern writer thinks that few were over 30 tons in size, and that none carried over 40 or 50 men. About two centuries later the seals of Sandwich and Dover show a ship still undecked, but provided with a rudder working over the side, fighting platforms at bow and stern, and a mast with a crow’s-nest at the top. It is doubtful how far we can trust representations such as these on the tapestry and seal, which were often executed by persons unfamiliar with the object and were sure to be conventional. We can, if we choose, follow the statements in the chronicles, which would make the ships much larger, holding a hundred men or even several hundred; the chronicles are notorious, however, for the constant exaggeration in matters of statistics, and the truth lies probably somewhere in between our two sources of information. Down to the fifteenth century the single mast with the square sail was the usual rig. Some vessels, however, carried two masts, one near the center and one toward the bow, and could spread six sails. For shorter trips and for the coasting trade smaller boats were used, sometimes propelled only by oars.

79. Development of shipping in the Mediterranean.—Navigation developed more rapidly in the Mediterranean, especially after the beginning of the Crusades, than in northern Europe. It is hard to believe the statements according to which the Mediterranean ships carried 1,000 or even 1,500 pilgrims, after all allowance is made for the crowding which would be permitted at this time, but the Mediterranean ships undoubtedly surpassed others in size and equipment. Venice presented to France in 1268 some ships which measured 110 by 40 feet, which were 11¹⁄₂ feet deep in the hold and had a height between decks of 6¹⁄₂ feet. These ships carried a complement of over 100 men, and must have measured 400 or 500 tons, while English ships of the period rarely exceeded 50 or 100. Mediterranean shipping regulations of about this date show advanced ideas concerning the construction, the equipment, and the loading of ships; all ships were inspected and none could sail which did not comply with the regulations.

The ship-builders of the Mediterranean ports retained the type of the classical galley, depending mainly upon oars for its propulsion. The hull was much longer than in the northern type of sailing ships and did not rise far above the water; both characteristics depended on the need of placing the oarsmen where they could work to advantage. The three square sails were a comparatively late improvement on the earlier rig, which consisted ordinarily of one sail; a fair wind was utilized for helping the boat on its course, but the chief reliance was placed on the oars.

80. Backwardness of the art of navigation.—The control of a ship is as important as its construction, if it is to serve commerce, and the growth of maritime commerce in the last centuries of the Middle Ages was due as much to improvements in the art of navigation as to superior ship building. During the early Middle Ages, as in ancient times, ship captains took their lives in their hands when they ventured out of sight of a familiar coast. The only means they had for determining their position at sea was “dead-reckoning,” i.e., estimating the distance that they had traveled from a known point, and the course that they had steered; and to know their course they had to rely upon the stars, which of course were obscured in stormy weather, when their help was most wanted. It was customary, on voyages in the open sea, to sail due north or south to the parallel of the destination, then to turn at right angles and sail due east or west; errors in the course of 8 or even 10 degrees were not uncommon. The means of fixing the course in any weather, the mariner’s compass, which was discovered by the Chinese, and is supposed to have been known to the Arabs at this time, was still unknown in Europe.

81. Introduction of the compass, and of navigators’ directories.—The first documentary evidence of acquaintance with the compass in the West dates from a little before 1200; and within fifty years we find it mentioned in nearly a dozen different places, both in the North and South of Europe. It has been suggested that Mediterranean sailors may have been the first to learn of the compass, from the Arabs, but that they could not use it in its early form of a magnetized needle floated on water by a rush or cork, because of the choppy seas; later the needle was balanced, as at present, on a point. In 1300 the compass was in general use. It is possible to exaggerate its importance as a cause of the great maritime explorations; for without it the Northmen had made their distant expeditions to the North and West, and with it the Portuguese crept along the west coast of Africa only slowly and timidly for a considerable period. As a means to regular navigation, however, it was indispensable; and the great extension of commercial voyages in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages is inconceivable without it. Medieval types of “sailing directions” now came into use; these were manuals telling the sailor about the coast, the tides, the bottom, and other features of the route he was to traverse. One of them, written probably before 1400, covered the whole West of Europe from Spain to the mouth of the Finnish gulf, enabling the mariner who was provided with a compass (used for determining the time of tides) to navigate the coast with a fair degree of safety.

82. Limits of early trading voyages.—Maritime voyages were made to suit the conditions of the time. In the first part of the period under discussion (say before 1300), they were attempted only for short distances and in the part of the year when severe storms were rare. “To sail after Martinmas (November 11) is to tempt God,” writes an old chronicler; and in the early days of the Hanseatic League there was a regulation by which ships were not to sail after November 11, and were to be in port if possible before that time. Some time afterwards an amendment was adopted which allowed ships laden with beer, herrings, or dried cod to sail as late as December 6, because the cargo was perishable or was needed for the Lenten market. The extent of the voyage was at first short. The sailors of Bordeaux would go as far as the coast of Brittany and Normandy; the Normans would go as far as England and Flanders; and so the chain of voyages was kept up.

83. Medieval seaports; contrast with modern.—Vessels were so small that they needed no great depth of water in their harbors, and could ascend rivers for a considerable distance. So the English town of Bawtry, lying on the little river Idle, which flows into the Trent, which flows into the Humber, which flows into the North Sea, was called in an official document “the port of Bawtry”; and the town of York, situated on the river Ouse, another branch of the Humber, claimed the right to share in wrecks at sea, as though it were on the seaboard. Ports of this kind were actually preferred to those on the coast which form the great harbors of modern times, for they gave access to the interior markets without the expense of land transportation, and they offered better security not only against tempests but also against pirates. Towns like Rouen on the Seine, Nantes on the Loire, Bordeaux on the Garonne, Narbonne and Aigues Mortes (“Dead waters”), on lagoons of the Mediterranean coast, were the great French ports of the early period.

84. Decline of medieval seaports in later times.—Occasionally a medieval port would keep its importance later; from the list above we can select Bordeaux, and there are a number of other examples in Europe—London, Antwerp, and Hamburg, for instance. Often, however, the port was superseded by another on the same river but nearer the sea; the trade of Rouen went to Havre; the trade of the Humber river system has gone to Hull; the commerce of Bremen has gone to Bremerhafen. The town of Bruges, in Flanders (modern Belgium), once the most important port in Europe, is situated at a distance of seven miles from the sea, and this might be seven hundred as far as its present oceanic commerce is concerned. Its trade has been taken by seaports giving easy access to large vessels; in the same way the trade of Narbonne and Aigues Mortes has passed to Marseilles.

85. Development of maritime commerce; persistence of medieval ideas.—After about 1300 the distances covered by sea voyages grew much greater. Galleys were sailed and rowed from Venice all the way to Bruges, and met there vessels from the far North and East of Europe; English sailors traded regularly with southern France, Spain, and the Scandinavian countries. The expense of transportation by sea, however, was still great. The price of spices was in Bruges two or three fold what it was in Venice; and English wool transported to Florence sold there for two to twelve times as much as it brought at home. It is hard for us, in modern times, to realize such facts, but the student should note them carefully, for they go far toward explaining the slight development of commerce even in the latter part of the Middle Ages.

The high cost of transportation is itself a fact demanding explanation. Inefficient ship-building and navigation would account for it in large part, but other factors are still to be considered. These distant voyages were carried on in the face not only of real dangers serious enough, but also of far greater dangers imagined by ignorant and credulous men. An English chronicler says that in 1406, when English ships were going to Bordeaux, they entered an unfrequented sea, and four vessels from Lynn were engulfed in a whirlpool which swallowed up the flood and vomited it forth again three times a day. The Arabian Nights have been called sober and realistic in comparison with the ideas held by the medieval mariner of the wonders and dangers of the unknown parts of the world.

86. Piracy.—At sea, as on land, the merchant faced dangers of violence which were probably as serious an obstacle to the growth of commerce as the physical difficulties of navigation. Ships went always armed, and sailed when possible in fleets for better protection. Sometimes one that had ventured out alone could beat off its enemies, as in the case of a trading ship from Stralsund which was attacked in 1391 but won a complete victory, and brought back (it is said) 100 pirates, packed in casks with only the heads sticking out, for a bloody punishment. Pirates came from every source. An ordinary merchantman would turn pirate if it met a weaker vessel from some town which was so far distant or so weak that reprisals need not be feared. A mariner of Winchelsea in England, who had seized and plundered a vessel owned by Dorsetshire merchants, became mayor of Winchelsea a few years later, and in the fifteenth century a Canterbury abbot was convicted of plundering a wine ship and was forced to make restitution. Even ships sent out by the public authorities for protection against pirates attacked and plundered ships not only of other nationalities but of their own too. Six ships which had been organized in 1316 to protect Berwick from freebooters harried the English coast to the south, and the fleet of the Cinque Ports (five towns on the English Channel), used its spare time in preying on English commerce and attacking English towns.

87. Organized piracy; privateering.—Piracy became a regular profession, in which partners organized for greater efficiency. The “Victual Brothers” formed an organization, modeled after that of the Knights Templars, for carrying on piracy; their motto was “God’s friend and all the world’s enemy.” They had a stronghold at Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, and were long a terror to traders and fishermen; their power was broken in 1394 only by a fleet of thirty-five ships sent against them. A fleet of Venetian galleys on their way north were attacked off Lisbon in 1485 by a piratical expedition of six ships, which killed and wounded over four hundred men and took enormous booty; it is said that the discoverer Christopher Columbus was one of the corsairs. War at sea was carried on even more barbarously than war on land. Crews and passengers of captured merchant vessels, whether taken after resistance or not, were frequently tossed overboard, sometimes with their hands tied behind their backs, or were hung to the yards, or murdered on the deck in cold blood.

An appearance of legitimacy was given to the attack on merchant vessels in time of war; “letters of marque” were not considered necessary to justify attacks by private vessels against merchant vessels of the enemy, and as war was the rule rather than the exception in Europe privateering was nearly constant. During the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, in spite of booms and chains, watches and beacons, almost every town on the south coast of England was sacked and burnt by French privateers. Even at London the streets which opened on the river were defended by chains, to hinder a landing within the city, and the people thought of building high stone towers on both sides of the river, with a chain stretched between them, to defend the shipping from night attacks.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS

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