Morillo, Pavkovic, Lococo and Palmer, War in World History: Society, Technology and War from Ancient Times to the Present (McGraw Hill, forthcoming).

Chapter 10:

Predators and Police: Naval Warfare, 400-1100

Introduction

Naval warfare in the age of migrations and invasions reflected the patterns of the age.While most of the threats to Afro-Eurasian civilizations came from the horsed nomads of the Asian steppes, some migratory peoples moved by sea.As a result, the scope of naval warfare spread beyond the confines of the Mediterranean world, whose benevolent seas had fostered the ancient world’s only real arena of naval conflict.New patterns of trade in the more fragmented post-classical world also stimulated increased maritime activity.For both these reasons, naval warfare assumed greater importance globally than it had in the previous age.

Naval operations between 400 and 1100 may be analyzed in terms of two major types, or models: imperial defense; and the activity of predatory “sea peoples”.Most of the “naval powers” of the age fell into one of the two categories, but the models represent poles on a continuum, and some naval forces were hybrids of the two types.

Navies of imperial defense were parts of unified, centrally directed defensive strategies.They were supported by bureaucracies which saw to the recruitment of sailors and marines, the building and repair of ships, and logistical support for fleets.In other words, navies of imperial defense were under state direction.Naval defense in this model was thus linked to trade and general maritime activity through the government.Taxes on trade often funded the navy, and maritime resources of ships and experienced sailors moved from the merchant to the military sphere via government direction or appropriation.Technologically, navies of imperial defense tended to be sophisticated — imperial navies in fact tended to be among the technologically most advanced products of their civilizations — and to be well adapted to the particular marine geography and climate in which they operated.Finally, the tactical aim of such navies was, broadly, to sink enemy ships, a task for which their technology was also well developed.The Byzantine Empire is the dominant example of this model of naval activity.Near the end of the period, Song China also created such a navy.

The characteristics of predatory sea peoples contrast sharply in each case with imperial navies.Naval activity in this model was generated spontaneously from the socio-economic structure, rather than being a creation of government policy.It was mainly economic and offensive in its goals — that is, it was aimed at predatory plunder.Rather than the fleet or formal squadron, the “boatload” was the basic unit of military and indeed social organization in this model: a leader and his followers used their own boat for their own purposes.Naval activity among predatory sea peoples is tied to state formation and political structure, but in the context of weak central authority.Thus, much of the activity of such naval “powers” was private or semi-private, rather than under state direction in support of a clear policy.Technologically such naval forces were less sophisticated, and certainly much less specialized, than imperial navies.Though capable of impressive accomplishments, their ships did not press the limits of the age’s technical know-how.Finally, the tactical aim of predatory naval forces, if it came to a fight at sea (which was less likely than for imperial navies, which sought such encounters), was not to sink but to capture enemy ships.Ships were valuable prizes with significant economic worth in themselves and as tools for further raiding, and also were likely to contain rich booty in goods and in people who could be sold as slaves.But the more common tactical (and strategic) aim of such forces was to raid unguarded shores.The key examples of this model were the Vikings of northwest Europe, the Cholas of southern India, and Srivijaya in the Straits of Malacca.

Two important sets of naval powers in the Mediterranean, the Muslims and later the Italian city-states, were in varying ways hybrids of the two models.For them, naval activity was a combination of predation and imperial offensive (as well as defensive) strategy.For these powers, the state played a role closer to the imperial model, but often in a more fragmented and limited political context — that is, aside from the Caliphate at the height of its powers these were strong but small states.In some cases, such as Venice, they were in effect parasitic on an imperial power.Technologically, such powers proved to be skillful at adapting, adopting and innovating technologically, though with less of a specialized military focus than the imperial powers.The Muslim world, especially, with one oar in the Mediterranean and one oar (or sail) in the Indian Ocean, would become a breeding ground for maritime technological advances.The tactical aim of these naval forces varied with circumstances but was likely to lean to capture rather than sinking, since for small states, even strong ones, a ship was likely to be a valuable resource.

These models provide us with a framework for examining the naval powers of the age in more detail.But for all the “naval powers” of this age, naval activity was still, as in the ancient Mediterranean, essentially amphibious.Maritime technology kept fleets limited largely to coastal waters, and “control of the seas” was, in the modern sense, an impossibility.

Imperial Navies

Byzantium and the Mediterranean World

The Byzantine naval forces from the fifth through the tenth centuries were, like the Byzantine army, the heirs of Roman military organization, tactics, and traditions (see Chapter 8 for the Byzantine army).In the case of Byzantium’s navy, it inherited the main mission of the Roman fleet: to serve as an auxiliary arm to the army.The Byzantine navy would, however, be faced with new problems during the seventh and subsequent centuries that would force it to deal with a major maritime threat from Muslim naval forces, something the Romans had not really faced since the 1^st century BC.

The Roman Tradition.From the end of the 1^st century BC, the naval forces which Rome had developed over the previous two and a half centuries found themselves in what might seem to be an enviable position.The naval victory over Ptolemaic Egypt (as Augustus himself liked to frame it) meant that for the first time in her history, Rome had truly removed all of her major rivals from the Mediterranean Sea.For the next three centuries,the Roman fleet would be relegated to serving as an ancillary force to the army, used primarily for ferrying troops and providing logistical support, or for the protection of the grain supply that kept the city of Rome fed (see Chapter 5 for the role of the Roman fleet until the middle of the third century).Indeed, without a major threat Rome was virtually able to abandon her construction efforts of major warships, instead concentrating on smaller craft and transports.

By the middle of the third century, however, the various political and military crises that beset Rome opened the way for Germanic and Celtic raiders to raid the coastal regions of the empire, sometimes even attacking major urban centers such as Athens.This led to an effort to recreate a fighting navy, although the Roman navy from the late third century onward would no longer be a fleet of major warships, but rather more of a coastal defense force.These forces often combined squadrons of small, fast warships, reminiscent if the earlier liburnian galleys, with land forces quartered in coastal fortifications.One of the best known examples of this scheme, the Saxon Shore, was detailed to defend the coasts of Britain and Gaul from various groups of raiders.The Count of the Saxon Shore was a Roman military official who commanded both naval and land forces in an effort to combine preclusive security through the use of coastal fortifications with the more elastic defense provided by squadrons of warships.

The Age of Byzantine Supremacy. By the end of the fifth century, the naval situation had changed dramatically.The western empire had fallen to the depredations of the barbarians (who incidentally made their major inroads overland rather than by sea).The Byzantine empire, the eastern remnant of Rome, survived and, with the possible exception of the Vandals, faced little in the way of a challenge to its control of the eastern Mediterranean.As a result, the Roman navy once again became of force of relatively few warships and a greater number of transports.

Consequently, many of the military operations that took place during the sixth and early seventh centuries saw the navy play a supporting role.Most often, the fleet provided transport of troops and logistical support to the army.Indeed, the Byzantines pioneered the role of amphibious warfare during this period.Specialized transports were developed to make the conveyance of horses easier than had been the case previously, as one of the major problems facing armies in the period before this was finding a manner in which animals could be transported easily and safely by sea.Byzantine naval skill was put to good use by Heraclius in his campaigns against the Persians: the fleet prevented the Persians and Avars from combining across the Bosporus to besiege Constantinople in 626, and then transported Heraclius’ army to the coast of Cilicia behind the Persian invasion, compelling their withdrawal from Asia Minor.

Byzantium and the Arab Challenge.Easy Byzantine naval superiority ended with the rise of the Caliphate (see below).The challenge posed by Arab raiding fleets reinforced the character of the Byzantine navy as an imperial defense force.The front line of defense rested with squadrons based along the coasts of western Asia Minor and southern Greece.By the 670s these forces were organized as a theme (the divisions of the Empire used to support the army; see Chapter 8) called the Karabisianoi, led by a strategos, just as army themes were.The theme provided rowers and marines instead of soldiers, but otherwise mirrored the somewhat localized, defensive organization of the provincial armies.Additions and administrative subdivision eventually created two more naval themes.

Just as a central professional army based in the capital backed up the provincial armies, a central imperial fleet in the capital remained a crucial element of Byzantine naval organization.The central fleet, which included the admiral in charge of the entire imperial navy (titled the droungarios of the ploimon), protected the capital, served ceremonial purposes (see Source Box below), provided the administrative heart of the navy, and controlled Byzantine ship building, which was concentrated in Constantinople.It was especially with regard to such technical matters as construction and administration that the Roman heritage of the Byzantine navy proved valuable, since Mediterranean galley warfare was a difficult, technically sophisticated business that could not easily be started up from scratch.

Tactically, the Byzantine navy relied on relatively small, light galleys known as dromons, powered by two banks of oars.Their offensive weaponry included the ram at the prow of the ship, Greek Fire (see Issue Box below), and marines who supplied both firepower with bows and the capability of boarding enemy ships.Strategically, the fleet benefited from the prevailing weather patterns of the eastern Mediterranean, which made raids from south to north more difficult to sustain, especially when the raiders lacked a secure base in the Aegean.But the strategic situation grew markedly worse around 827, when both Sicily and Crete fell to Arab sea-borne invasions.The latter, especially, gave Muslim raiders a base within easy reach of the Greek mainland, the coasts of Asia Minor, and the main lanes of Aegean shipping, and a century and a half of insecurity for those areas ensued.

Although acting mostly on the defensive between 650 and 900, the Byzantine fleet also launched occasional raids against the Syrian and even Egyptian coasts.Although militarily insignificant, such raids probably gave morale boosts to an Empire whose land forces struggled simply to stay intact while on the defensive during this period.

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Issue Box: “Greek Fire”

[Illustration here: halftone of Greek fire]

The Chronicle of Theophanes reports that “At that time [673/4] Kallinikos, an artificer from Heliopolis [in Lebanon], fled to the Romans.He had devised a sea fire which ignited the Arab ships and burned them with all hands.Thus it was that the Romans returned with victory and discovered the sea fire.”Later Byzantine historians and chroniclers elaborated on this account of the origins of what became known as Greek Fire to build a long accepted picture of a great “secret weapon”.According to this tradition, the formula for Greek Fire, a combustible substance made from some combination of petroleum, naphtha, and other ingredients that at the least could not be put out with water and perhaps was either spread or even ignited by contact with water, remained a closely guarded state secret.The substance itself, either pumped at high pressure out of bronze siphons mounted on the bows of galleys or lobbed, from on-board catapults, in earthenware pots that would shatter on impact, constituted a deadly weapon against wooden ships that the Byzantine navy used again and again to devastating effect, most decisively at the siege of Constantinople in 717.Only when the Turks discovered how to combat it in the late eleventh century (vinegar, rather than water, did the trick in dousing the flames) did Greek Fire lose importance as a Byzantine naval weapon; the formula was lost with the fall of the Empire, never to be recovered.

Subsequent European historiography has largely followed this account until recently, and it remains in popular circulation.This is perhaps not surprising, as the tale certainly has all the elements of a high tech spy thriller.Furthermore, it suited a Byzantine self image of Chosen people specially favored by God, and it may have continued to suit a western self image that has contrasted inventive, technologically adept westerners (with Byzantines in this instance counting as “western”) with tradition-bound, technologically backwards non-westerners.

The problem with this account is that investigation into Arab sources makes clear that Arab naval forces were not only familiar with Greek Fire – that is, it was not a very secret “secret weapon” – but that they used it themselves.Not only Arab but Byzantine naval handbooks, as distinct from court-generated propaganda, portray Greek Fire as a standard part of the weaponry of eastern Mediterranean fleets in the period 700-1100.It was, to be sure, an important and useful weapon, especially against more lightly built ships and against enemies trapped in confined waters or unprepared for its use, such as a Viking-Rus fleet destroyed on the Black Sea by the Byzantines in 941.But it was by no means sure fire, so to speak, as the siphons had limited range and catapulted pots had limited accuracy.This, as much as effective Turkish counter-measures and the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, accounts for the later disappearance of Greek Fire from Mediterranean naval arsenals.And its historical effect has been exaggerated: the fires that disrupted the Arab fleet at Constantinople in 717 seem, on closer reading of the sources, to have been set by fire ships: entire ships loaded with combustible material and launched into the midst of a closely confined fleet at anchor, a common trick used to good effect by the English against the Spanish Armada in 1588, for example (see Chapter 20).

The long emphasis on Greek fire has also tended to obscure the real reasons for Byzantine naval survival in the face of navies of the Caliphate that were probably larger and certainly better funded than Byzantine fleets.Inherited Roman traditions of organization, seamanship, and ship building continued to sustain the Byzantine naval effort against the Arabs, and would carry the Greeks back onto the offensive at sea by the tenth century.As in other cases, Greek Fire is an example of flashy weaponry that has overshadowed the essential nuts and bolts of military success in historical imagination.

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Tenth Century Naval Offensives.The shift in Byzantine military fortunes that followed the fragmentation of the Caliphate after 900 (see Chapter 8) was felt at sea as much as on the Empire’s land frontiers.The naval offensive focused on retaking Arab-held Crete.Invasions in 911 and 949 under Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus failed, but in 960 a third expedition under Nicephoras Phocas succeeded in retaking the island for the Byzantines and as a result in making Aegean shipping and the Anatolian coastline much more secure from Arab raids, which lost their only effective base of operations.

The details of the first two operations are preserved in an official collection of documents known as the De Ceremoniis, compiled by Constantine VII, and provide a window onto the size of such expeditions and the organizational problems that beset them.The sources themselves testify to the organizational difficulty of launching such expeditions, as the documents resulted from imperial inquests into who actually went on them (as opposed to who was called out to go on them) so that numerous claims for back pay and rewards could be settled.

The 911 expedition consisted of several hundred ships of all types, dromons as well as supply ships.Sailors and oarsmen for the ships numbered about 34,000; another 13,000 soldiers served as part of the naval units, presumably as marines used to naval combat.In addition, the fleet transported units of the central professional army and the provincial army which combined numbered around 4,000 men; at least 1000 of these, the professionals, were cavalrymen, whose horses also had to be transported.Thus, over 50,000 men, at least 2-3,000 horses, and all their attendant equipment and supplies sailed from Constantinople in an expedition that ultimately failed.The numbers in 949 were similar – regular army units came to about 5,400, but fewer marines are listed.Finally, we have no figures for the expedition of 960, but it must have been at least as large.They key to its success where the earlier expeditions failed seems to have been no the size of the forces involved, however, but the effectiveness of the leadership exercised over the combined naval and land forces.Political infighting and incompetence plagued the earlier expeditions, but Nicephoras Phocas was an experienced general, a charismatic leader, and perhaps most importantly an excellent administrator.Even so, it took a hard siege of Chandax, the capital of the island, over the winter of 960-61, ending with its storming in March, before the conquest could be completed.During the siege the fleet played a vital role keeping the besiegers supplied and preventing intervention by any relief forces.In many ways, the challenges facing Nicephoras were the tenth century equivalent of those Eisenhower faced in 1944, and demonstrate the sophisticated combined arms operations a well led imperial navy was capable of.

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Source Box: Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio

As imposing and sophisticated pieces of technology, imperial warships were good not only for conducting naval campaigns, but for conspicuously displaying imperial might and power.The following extracts from one of Emperor Constantine VII’s treatises on imperial administration exemplify both the symbolic and the administrative sides of the imperial navy.

Until the reign of Leo [886-912; Constantine’s father], the glorious and most wise emperor, there was no imperial galley (dromon) for the emperor to embark in, but he used to embark in a scarlet barge; except that, in the time of the Christ-loving sovereign Basil [867-86], when this same emperor visited the hot baths of Prousa, … he embarked in a galley and another galley followed behind.And the rowers who embarked in it were taken from the imperial barge and from the sailors of the Stenon.For of old the Stenon too had up to ten ships of war in the imperial navy.…But the glorious and most wise Leo, the emperor, who was rather more hospitably inclined towards magisters and patricians and familiars of senatorial rank, and who always wished them to share his pleasure in this, reckoned that the barge was inadequate for the reception of a larger number of nobles, and constructed a galley, and would invariably embark in it wherever he desired to go.And there would go with him whomsoever he might desire of the nobles, both of magisters and patricians.…For this reason, then, Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, constructed the galley, and, some while after, he constructed another galley as well, which was known as the ‘second’ and christened ‘Attache’.…

In the reign of Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, when the new galleys were constructed by the imperial mandate, [the] protospatharius of the basin [a chief naval officer] had beneath his authority the oarsmen of these galleys also.Now, the aforesaid protospatharius of the basin would go down every day in the afternoon and take his seat in the basin (for which reason he was called protospatharius of the basin), and would judge cases arising between the oarsmen, both of the barges and of the galleys, over whom he had authority, and would give sentence and administer according to the law.And whenever he found anyone acting beyond his competence or wrongdoing another or remiss in his own work, he would punish him with a sound cudgelling.…The protospatharius Podaron and the protospatharius Leo Armenius had been chief oarsmen of the patrician Nasar, the lord admiral (droungarios of the ploimon), and in the time of Basil, the Christ-loving sovereign, were promoted from the navy and became the chief oarsmen of the barge of the emperor; and in the reign of Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, when he constructed the galleys, he made them steersmen for their bravery and seamanship.And when a crisis arose, the emperor seconded the oarsmen of the two galleys, together with the two steersmen of the first galley, to ships of war in the navy, giving them much needful equipment, such as shields, leather targes, very fine coats of mail and everything else that naval personnel require to take with them; and the patrician Eustathius, the lord admiral, took them with the imperial fleet and went off against the enemy.^[1]

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Challenges to Byzantine Dominance

The Caliphate and Muslim naval forces.There was a long pre-Islamic tradition of Arab seafaring.But sailing was the occupation of those Arabs living on the southern and eastern coasts of Arabia, who conducted strictly merchant shipping – there was no Arab tradition of naval warfare – in the Indian Ocean, not the Mediterranean.Their ships, small craft constructed from planks sewn together with coconut husks, reflected both the small scale, private origins of Arab trading and the lack of cheap iron for nails, and would have been unsuitable for warfare in any case.Thus the Caliphate, created by Arabs from the northwestern interior of Arabia, really had no native resources of either men or material to draw on to create a combat navy in the Mediterranean.

Given their background, it is not surprising that the earliest Caliphs in fact had no interest in naval forces.Umar, the second Caliph, tried to prohibit naval raids on Byzantine islands (some took place anyway, drawing his wrath).When the Muslim governor of Syria asked permission to raid Cyprus, Umar reflected on advice that said “man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death”, and wrote back that “the safety of my people is dearer to me than all the treasures of Greece” and refused.Yet the necessity for naval forces became clear, first to local Muslim commanders, then to the Caliphs, when the Byzantine navy threatened Muslim holdings with impunity.The great Egyptian port of Alexandria proved crucial in this process in several ways.Captured by the Muslims in 641, its insecurity was exposed when a Byzantine fleet recaptured it in 645.Lack of support from Constantinople and the local Coptic population allowed the Arabs to recapture the city, but with any naval reinforcement it could have been held against almost any land force.Yet the recapture of the city also provided the solution, for Alexandria was not only a port but a major naval base with facilities and skilled Coptic workmen.Supplied with Syrian timber, it could build a fleet for the Caliphate and supply Coptic oarsmen and navigators to serve under Arab admirals, who had no experience of command at sea.The wholesale Muslim adoption of Byzantine naval infrastructure in the African provinces they captured is reflected even in the administrative divisions of the Caliphal navy, which retained their Roman names, while Copts continued to provide many of the sailors in Muslim naval forces for several centuries.

Arab armies thus took to the sea as marines aboard ships built and manned by recently conquered Egyptians.Success came remarkably quickly.In 655 a Muslim navy moved to invade Lycia, perhaps to secure supplies of timber for further shipbuilding.A major Byzantine fleet, said to have numbered 500 ships, moved to oppose the invasion, and a battle ensued off the coast of Lycia.In what seems to have been a standard battle for the times, the two fleets came together for a land battle at sea, focused on boarding and hand to hand combat between each side’s marines.The Byzantines probably counted on maintaining greater cohesion to give them the advantage, but the Copts apparently did well enough for their Muslim masters to allow Arab swordsmen to win the day.

The battle of Dhat al-Sawari opened the way for further Arab offensives at sea, and by the 680s Arab fleets were raiding Sicily and threatening Constantinople.Combined land and naval offensives against the Byzantine capital culminated in the unsuccessful siege of the city in 717-18.After that, major naval offensives tailed off, though 827 saw both Sicily and Crete fall to Arab invasions, as noted above.Coastal raiding, only nominally under the control of the Caliphate, came to dominate Muslim naval activity in the eastern Mediterranean.

Thus, though organizationally the naval forces of the Caliphate bore some resemblance to an imperial navy, their offensive doctrine and strategic aims more closely resembled those of predatory sea peoples.The tension, perhaps exacerbated by a continuing reluctance of many northern Arabs to take up seafaring, which was viewed as less than noble, resulted in a lack of full commitment on the part of the Caliphate to maintaining a true navy of imperial defense.This is reflected in the decline of Alexandria as a naval base in the 700s (a decline that also reflected shifts in trade routes brought about by Muslim conquests, emphasizing again the close connection of trade to military naval activity), and in the fact that much Muslim naval activity even at the height of the Caliphate remained small scale raiding in the hands of privateers who had the spiritual but not the material backing of the imperial government.

Sea Ghazis.With the decline of the Caliphate and the fragmentation of the Muslim world politically, Muslim naval activity especially in the western Mediterranean moved even more towards the predatory model.Political fragmentation was not the only factor that encouraged this development.The Muslim world had early on established a pattern of somewhat marginalized frontier warriors, ghazis or fighters for the faith, who carried the holy war to the infidel on a daily basis (see Chapter 8).This pattern proved easily adaptable to maritime frontiers as well, and Muslim corsairs in individual ships and small squadrons began to fight the jihad as a guerre de course against Christian shipping and as plundering raids against Christian coasts from early in the Caliphate, as we have seen.

Such raids intensified in the 9th century as Carolingian defenses crumbled in western Europe (see Chapter 7), and reached their height in the 10th century.Based ultimately on the north African coast west of Tunis, the raiders created and profited from Muslim control of the central islands of the western sea: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics, all of which put them athwart the major Christian shipping routes and within easy range of Christian ports.In fact, significant pirate forces established themselves for a time in bases in southern France, whence they raided well inland.Though nominally part of the larger struggle of Islam with Christianity, much of this activity was typical of predatory sea peoples: private, piratical sometimes even of Muslim shipping, and not centrally directed.It did, however, contribute to the economic disruption and political fragmentation of post-Carolingian Europe.

The raids were carried out in small, fast galleys that could slip into and out of sheltered beaches to take on water and provisions.The crews doubled as rowers and marines and were all free men sharing in the spoils of the raids.Such corsairs were very hard to contain once at sea because of their mobility.Byzantine defenses were more effective against such corsairs in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Empire had neither the inclination nor the resources to deal with Muslim piracy in the west, far from their own bases.Defense against this threat was left to be developed by the maritime cities of Italy in the later 10th and 11th centuries.

The Emergence of the Italians.Venice, in fact, as an outpost of Byzantium, might have contributed to Imperial defenses against Muslim corsairs, but Venice looked first to the Adriatic and then east.It was western Italian cities led by Genoa and Bari that led the Christian resurgence in western waters.Slowly reviving trade spurred in such cities a greater interest in maritime defense while providing greater resources for naval activity.

The Italian response was of necessity a primarily active defense.Ports erected walls and fortifications, but the tide turned when Christian ships took the offensive against Muslim shipping and above all when the pirate bases became the object of attack not just from Italian naval forces but from armies raised in southern France.That coast having been cleared, Genoese and also Spanish galley forces began to raid and then contest control of the islands crucial to Muslim access to shipping routes.Again, non-Italians played a significant role: the Norman conquest of Sicily in the mid-11th century seriously restricted Muslim shipping.The advantages that Mediterranean wind and current patterns gave to northern shores in any contest for the central islands and sea lanes magnified the effectiveness of the Christian revival.By 1050 Christian ships, led by the Italians, controlled the western Mediterranean well enough that they increasingly turned their attention to fighting each other for dominance (Genoa and Venice emerged as the crucial rivals) and to contesting the eastern Mediterranean with Muslims and Byzantines.

The Italian revival demonstrated the vital connection between trade and naval warfare.The governments of the cities reflected this.Increasingly dominated by merchant oligarchies, they took an active part in fostering trade and maritime defense.True hybrids between the imperial and predatory models, they would in the next age help develop a new, more mercantile model of naval force.

Song China

A Chinese imperial navy emerged as a result of the founding of the Song dynasty in 960; the Song had a very different character from the earlier Tang dynasty (618-907).The Tang had been land based in a number of ways.Its political center of gravity was in the north, facing central Asia.Its expansionist energies were directed westwards towards the steppes, following the route of its most important trade contacts, which were overland via the Silk Road.A strong sea borne trade in porcelain also developed out of the southern ports, but was carried almost exclusively by Persian and Arab merchants.Foreign domination of overseas trade was partly a result of official policy.Tang government and society were dominated by a militaristic aristocracy, hostile by inclination and philosophy to merchant activity, especially maritime trade.Great landowners looked to land for wealth and power, and the government regulated trade tightly and at times arbitrarily.In such an environment, a navy was very low on the government’s priority list.

The Song found themselves in a very different situation from the Tang.Hemmed in to the north and west by resurgent Asian nomads, the Song adopted a defensive strategy and looked much more actively to the sea for foreign contact and trade.Ports were refurbished, lighthouses built along the coast, and government assistance flowed to merchants willing to challenge the Arab and Persian monopoly at sea.Social change opened the door to the policy shift.Many of the great aristocratic families had killed each other off in the fighting that brought down the Tang.The gentry, still traditional but less hostile (if only because less militaristic) to economic development, emerged in their place, and merchants assumed a new social importance as well.

The government therefore became more supportive of trade, including providing for an imperial navy to protect Chinese merchants and guard the coasts.A more active Chinese merchant marine not only encouraged this move, but provided the resources in money, ships, and skilled sailors to create the navy.Consistent with an imperial defensive force, the tactics of Chinese warships developed towards ship-killing.Ships with heavy prows for ramming opponents complemented the development of gunpowder bombs launched from shipboard catapults.

All of these trends would be intensified and the imperial navy would take on a new importance in guarding the rivers that shielded southern China when the northern Song capital fell to barbarians in 1127 and the dynasty retreated south of the Yangzi.With the loss of the cavalry lands of the north, the navy became in effect the second arm of Chinese defense alongside the infantry, and special river going paddle wheel ships with rams joined the Song naval arsenal.These developments are considered further in Chapters 9, 14 and 15.

Predatory Sea Peoples

The Vikings

In contrast and sometimes in direct opposition to the great defensive naval establishments of the Byzantine and Chinese Empires stood the decentralized but devastating sea borne raiders of the age of migrations.The Vikings are undoubtedly the prototypical popular image of a predatory sea-going folk.

Origins.The reasons for the sudden irruption of Viking raiders out of Scandinavia in the late 700s have long been a matter of scholarly dispute, complicated by arguments about how large the emigration actually was.Given the limits of even the best Viking maritime technology, the total numbers of explorers and settlers was probably fairly small.This casts doubt on population pressure as a major factor in the rise of Viking activity.

Rather, two factors seem most important.First, Scandinavian naval technology improved in the mid-700s.Sail power now complemented the traditional oars, and hulls got larger and more seaworthy.Neither change was revolutionary and probably only brought Viking technology up to the prevailing Baltic-North Sea standard, but together they made possible voyages that were longer, over more open seas, and above all more profitable.Second, political developments in Scandinavia probably provided the most important motive for the raids.As kings began to attempt to assert greater control over their kingdoms, local aristocrats and their followers decided that foreign adventure was preferable to restricted opportunities at home.Plunder was an attractive source of income not subject to royal taxation, and gave the raid leader the wealth and prestige to attract followers.Exile could also be an escape from legal trouble.Christianity was often supported by and favorable to centralizing monarchs; abroad, missionaries need not be respected and churches in fact provided a rich source of booty.In other words, centralization and aristocratic competition at first pushed the most troublesome elements of Scandinavian society onto the outside world.Later, as kings gained greater power, they launched their own expeditions of plunder and conquest which served to harness and direct the warlike energies of the aristocracy and, through the distribution of plunder, bind their loyalties to the monarchy.

Thus, Viking warfare fell into several different categories: small scale fights and feuds, mostly internal to Viking society; small private raids with the “boatload” as the basic military unit; larger, more extended raids of a dozen to several hundred ships, sometimes under royal or pseudo-royal leadership (the leader of a major and successful excursion might claim the title “king”); and full royal expeditions of conquest.Generally, the smaller raids and larger but still non-royal campaigns took place from the late 700s to the early 900s.Such forays were as likely to be defeated as not, and saw little permanent conquest.Then from about 900 to the mid-1000s, expeditions were increasingly royal and saw greater success in conquest.

Viking military forces.Viking boats came in a variety of shapes and sizes, with a definite difference between deep, round, merchant sailing ships and the famous longboats — narrow, shallow-draught ships with oars as well as sail — used for war.The difference is similar to, though not quite as pronounced or specialized, as in Mediterranean ships of the day, for similar reasons.Warships’ chief advantage was tactical maneuverability and speed, and for battle they carried a large crew relative to their cargo capacity.

A “typical” warship might be 18 to 20 meters in length with room for 24 to 30 oars.Loaded for battle it could conceivably carry as many as 100 men, but as few as 30 would be more common for sailing any distance, as a large crew was logistically difficult to sustain and made the boat far less seaworthy.A similar tradeoff applied to ship size.Some warships reached 29 meters in length and 52 oars, and might carry up to 300 men in battle.The size of the crew and the size of the boat, especially the height of the gunwales, made such monsters formidable in a sea fight, but their strategic range was much more limited because of their crew size.

[illustration here: halftone of Viking ship]

Despite a formidable modern reputation, Viking navigation was not terribly advanced.Longboats were shallow, open vessels with little cargo space, so almost all Viking voyages were coastal, or at best short one or two day hops between known islands and landfalls.Only the trip to Iceland required significant sailing out of sight of land (even the Iceland to Greenland crossing is visible from both ends because of the height of the mountains on each); the Iceland voyage was not made by huge numbers of settlers and the island remained fairly isolated once settled.But Europe’s long coastline and many navigable rivers, for which Viking boats were also well suited, put nearly the whole continent from Russia to Spain and into the Mediterranean within reach.

Given the limits of ships size and navigation, Viking armies never numbered more than a few thousand at their largest, and a typical raiding party might range from a few score to a couple hundred.Viking warriors were armed with spears, axes, swords and bows, and carried round shields.Some wore chain mail shirts, but many did not, especially at sea.They were too expensive for many Vikings, and they made rowing difficult and swimming impossible.Thus, Viking armies ashore had no particular advantage over their enemies in arms or armor, and indeed were often at a disadvantage in the latter; the situation is indicated by the Frankish origin of many Viking swords.Nor were Viking armies unusually formidable in terms of organization, tactics or morale.It was their ships, and thus their strategic mobility, that made them terrible.Finally, as engineers Viking forces were capable but limited, inventing little. Good at creative ways of moving ships overland, they proved far less successful at building siege engines.

Viking warfare.The aim of Viking warfare was economic gain.War could serve to enhance a warrior’s prestige.If the warrior were a king, his success could help strengthen the state — certainly the distribution of plunder bound the ruling class together more tightly.But that again comes back to economic gain.Vikings could therefore be traders, pirates, raiders or conquerors interchangeably, depending on the opportunities and the capabilities and strength of any opposition.In any of these roles it was their ships and thus their mobility, as noted already, that was their key capability.Any place within reach of a beachable coastline or navigable river was vulnerable to sudden attack.

Viking raiders recognized the need for mobility on land, as well, and took to seizing herds of horses when they established a beachhead, so that they could then roam farther over the countryside in search of loot. The aim, whether by land or water, was to hit soft, rich targets and avoid a major fight.Monasteries were ideal targets, and the fact that monks wrote the only chronicles of the times accounts in part for the pagan Vikings’ reputation for brutality and the perhaps exaggerated picture of the extent of their depredations.

Battles with local defense forces could not always be avoided, however, and major Viking armies sometimes sought battle to further territorial conquest, or at least accepted it when defending armies moved to relieve a city or fort under Viking attack.But success or failure in battle was a less important limitation on Viking strategies of conquest than was their weakness in siege warfare (see highlight box below).Siege engines could not be carried aboard ship, and proved difficult to improvise on the spot, nor were Vikings enthusiastic miners.Viking forces most often resorted to sudden surprise attacks, treachery, or failing all else, blockade to take fortified cities.It is not surprising that the most successful Viking conquests came in areas where fortifications were either few in number (Anglo-Saxon England) or virtually non-existent (Ireland, Russia).

Given Viking weakness in siege warfare, systematic programs of fortification were the best defenses against their raids.Charles the Bald of France ordered the construction of fortified bridges to restrict the mobility of Viking fleets.But none of the powers facing the Vikings managed to sustain such a campaign very long, save for England under Alfred, whose system of fortified burghs and field armies turned the tide in his wars with the Danes (see Chapter 7).

When it came to battle, Viking land tactics were unexceptional for their age.They fought in a shield wall sometimes divided into one to three divisions or lines, with warriors grouped around their immediate chiefs — groupings probably carried over from shipboard to land.The formation in defense might offer refused flanks or even all around defense, and in attack the Vikings at times used a sort of wedge formation, with the best armed and most enthusiastic warriors leading the way.But Viking armies were capable of little in the way of tactical maneuver once a battle was underway.The only other tactic of note among Viking armies was “berserking” — a battle frenzy which could carry a warrior to seemingly superhuman feats of strength and endurance even in the face of major wounds.Again, Viking berserkers have a fearsome modern reputation, but similar sorts of behavior are attested not just in other ancient and medieval armies from heroic societies (the Iliad offers fine examples) but in modern wars as well, where it is seen as a form of temporary insanity often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which can also be seen in Viking accounts of strange warrior behavior after battles.What seems most unusual about Viking berserking is not the behavior itself but the degree to which the culture celebrated and even encouraged it.But even berserking did not make Viking armies invincible.Viking forces lost battles more frequently than they won them.

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Highlight Box: The Siege of Paris, 885

[map here of Great Army in N. France and England]

Between 865 and 895, Viking forces in western Europe concentrated into a “great army” of several thousand men supported by several hundred ships.The Great Army operated initially in England, successfully pursuing a strategy of conquest and eliminating every Saxon kingdom save Alfred’s Wessex.After a crisis in the mid-870s, Alfred defeated the Great Army and its king, Guthram, at Eddington in 878.Contained by the Saxons, the Great Army received reinforcements and moved to the Continent, where growing political chaos after Charles the Bald’s death in 876 beckoned.For several years from 879, the Vikings ravaged in the valleys of the Scheldt, Rhine and Meuse, seizing or establishing fortified bases each winter from which to plunder the surrounding territory on horseback.But by 885, the area had been picked bare, and the Army briefly split up in early 885, with part of the fleet going to Kent.

The West Frankish ruler Carloman had died without an heir in December 884, and the Great Army reunited in July on the Seine, whose valley had been untouched for nearly 20 years.Sailing upriver, the fleet forced a passage past the weakly held fortified bridge at Pont de l’Arche and arrived at Paris in the late fall.The city stood on an island in the middle of the river, connected to the banks by two bridges guarded by unfinished forts.Frankish forces were led by Count Odo of Paris and probably numbered several hundred.The Great Army was estimated at 40,000 men and 700 ships by Abbo, an eyewitness who memorialized the siege in a long poem, but was undoubtedly at least an order of magnitude smaller.

On 26 November the Vikings attempted to storm the northern fort, but were repulsed.With winter approaching, they established a fortified camp from which to blockade the city and ravage the surrounding territory.Active siege operations resumed in the spring.Rogue Frankish engineers helped the Vikings build siege towers and catapults.At one point, the Vikings sent a fire ship against the bridge.But the attempt to burn the bridge was unsuccessful, and through the summer every assault on the forts failed.Furthermore, the Vikings were unable to maintain a complete blockade of the city.Several times, small relief forces and fresh provisions made it into the city either by river or land.But larger relief efforts led by Henry of Saxony and Charles the Fat were both defeated by the Vikings, who remained secure in their own fortified camp.

They kept the pressure on into the following fall.Charles the Fat, facing another winter of plundering in the heart of his kingdom, finally ended the stalemate by paying a huge bribe to the Great Army to move on, offering them passage past the fortified bridge at Paris.This opened up Burgundy, Champagne and the upper Loire valley to the raiders.The fortifications at Paris thus saved the city but failed strategically to guard the territories upriver, which suffered several years of raiding that led to the deposition of Charles.

The Great army operated until 892 in parts of Frankia.It met increasing resistance and more numerous fortifications, but only left because of famine.Returning to England, it met further effective resistance from Alfred’s reorganized kingdom, and finally broke up in 896.The Siege of Paris was probably the high point of the first phase of Viking activity.The campaign and the history of the Great Army show clearly both the strengths and weaknesses of Viking warfare.

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Viking tactics at sea are better documented than their land tactics, despite the fact that sea battles were far rarer than land battles.Like Mediterranean galleys, longboats’ striking power was most effective in their bows, with their mobility used to pick a vulnerable target and aim the ship at it.As a result, when faced with battle the defenders (often the weaker or smaller fleet), if they were unable to avoid the fight, would try to lash their ships together in line abreast, bows to the attackers, presenting as solid a target as possible.Creating one large fighting platform out of a line of ships also allowed reinforcements to be moved most easily to threatened spots in the line.Where possible, one end of the line would be anchored to rocks, protecting that flank.

The attacking ships, operating individually, rowed to the attack, attempting to pick off isolated defending ships, if any, or to concentrate their attack on the weakest point in the line and get around the flanks.As the ships came in range of each other, missile fire opened the battle followed by attempts on the part of the attackers to grapple and board the defenders.When the battle reached this stage of hand to hand fighting, the architecture of the ships themselves played a crucial role in the outcome.It was here that big ships had a definite advantage.For one, their larger crews could wear down the less numerous contingent of a smaller ship.For another, their higher gunwales provided better protection against enemy arrows and an advantageous platform for firing and boarding.(Shields were hung over the sides of the ships only for ceremonial entrances and exits from harbor, and so would not have added to the defensive value of the gunwales.)Warriors on a small ship might have trouble boarding a very large ship at all.Finally, larger ships could stand rougher conditions.As a result, the number of ships in a fleet or even the number of men in a fleet might not be an effective measure of its strength: at Roberry in c. 1044 30 large ships defeated 60 smaller ones, for example.Especially large and strong boats might even be “barded”: sheathed in iron at the bow, increasing the strength of the ship at that vital spot even further.But like larger crews, barding was a tactical device that entailed strategic penalties in terms of range and seaworthiness, as well as being quite costly.

Viking sea tactics were designed to capture ships, not to sink them.A ship was valuable in itself and was likely to be carrying valuable cargo. Viking tactics were effective in their home waters, mostly against other Vikings.But when Viking fleets, admittedly of smaller ships, reached the Black Sea in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Byzantine navy was capable of dealing with them without much trouble (see above).Scandinavian warriors were useful enough to the Greeks to form the backbone of Basil II’s Varangian Guard, which drew Vikings and Anglo-Saxons to imperial service for a century after the 980s, but their utility was as much in their lack of political connections as their fighting ability.

Impact.The Vikings certainly wreaked havoc through much of Europe for almost 200 years.But the extent of their depredations is easy to exaggerate.They conquered only in areas that were politically weak or disorganized, and left only minor cultural imprints in areas they ruled or settled.Their lasting influence was much more in the creation and expansion of a vast maritime trade network stretching from Ireland through Russia to Byzantium.The Baltic and North sea ships that continued this trade past the Viking age would contribute significantly to later European naval development.

Srivijaya

[map here: the Chola Empire and Srivijaya, c.1000]

The major maritime power in southeast Asia for much of this period was Srivijaya.The Srivijaya state was centered on the east coast of Sumatra and the port of Palembang, and flourished from the 600s into the eleventh century.Its broad influence over the coasts of the region and the maritime trade that flowed through it, the profits of which were essential to Srivijaya’s existence, have led historians to refer to it as a thalassocracy.Unfortunately, the sources for Srivijayan history are scant, unclear, and have at times been subject to over-interpretation in anachronistic terms.The image of a thalassocracy may contain such problems.Srivijaya was almost certainly not a centralized naval empire on the model of classical Athens.But as a looser polity it did exercise naval power effectively for several centuries.

The rise of Chinese-centered maritime trade under the Tang stimulated the formation of port-states along the route from the Mediterranean, Arabia and Persia to Canton, especially in the area of the Straits of Malacca, an important layover and transshipment point because of the monsoon weather patterns.The ports also served to link their own hinterlands into the international trade routes.Competition among such states resulted in the triumph of a center around Palembang which then brought the other ports into a hierarchical confederation and focused trade on a few favored ports; the resulting polity became known as Srivijaya.

The military power of the Srivijayan ruler resulted from his ability to integrate soldiers from the hinterland under the command of regional warlords and aristocrats with the naval resources of the nomadic sea peoples of the area.Careful alliance making backed by powerful religious sanctions helped create and maintain the system.Srivijaya’s ability to suppress piracy and provide a safe haven for merchants allowed it to extend its influence over coastal entrepots from Java to the Malay Peninsula.Once established, Chinese recognition and the resulting prestige of the Srivijaya name reinforced the ties binding the state together, as did the distribution of profits from the center to the component parts of the state.

Unfortunately, little can be said of the details of Srivijayan military methods.Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean ships were well but relatively lightly constructed, so that ship to ship action was unlikely to have played a major role in Srivijayan warfare.Amphibious operations were more the norm, especially as control of a port brought economic control, or at least influence, over the port’s hinterland, and so raids and military operations could be focused on concentrated targets.

As long as management of coastal competition and suppression of piracy were its chief military responsibilities, Srivijaya thrived.But from the middle of the 10th century, the spreading influence of overseas trade brought increasing competition for its riches at the same time that it helped stimulate the growth of new land-based powers in the region.This exposed the weaknesses of the Srivijaya polity.In the 11th century, Srivijaya would prove incapable of containing the threats to its naval hegemony.

The Cholas

Origins.The crucial challenge came from the Coromandel coast of south India, home of the expanding Chola Empire.Initially the focus of Chola activity was land-based, as it carved a place for itself between hostile established powers starting in the 700s.The state that emerged was not especially strong or centralized.Chola kingship had significant ritual elements: influence over outlying provinces and regional elites was often fairly nominal and was exercised through religious symbolism.There was little in the way of a royal bureaucracy.As a result, the state was held together by its expansionism.Raiding expeditions brought in plunder to the royal house, which distributed it to its followers as a demonstration of the kings’ wealth and prestige.Permanent conquests provided not just plunder but lands.Thus, Chola warfare was politically motivated and primarily economic in its aims, even though it was mostly advertised as religiously based: raiding expeditions whose benefits were obscure to the larger population were justified as “quests for relics”, the successful capture of which was advertised as the result of such raids.

The economic aim of Chola warfare became important in maritime terms because of the nature of the empire’s mercantile links with the wider world.Local production was tied to regional and overseas trade routes through temple centers where merchant associations operated.These merchant associations were virtually independent powers, maintaining operations around the Bay of Bengal.As Chola power expanded, both the royal government and the merchants saw advantages in an aggressive assertion of Chola power along the main trade routes.

Naval raiding furthered the royal government’s search for sources of mobile wealth, already established as the source of their prestige; trade goods and centers were particularly suitable targets in this way.Naval raids also provided, perhaps in even better form, the political advantages of land raids.By drawing local elites and their military forces into such activity, Chola kings both integrated the elites more tightly into their own power network and displaced their aggressive, predatory tendencies to areas outside the kingdom.Overseas expeditions had the additional advantage of creating concentrations of such forces far enough away to reduce the threat of internal discord or revolt.Finally, reasonable calculations of political advantage recommended some expeditions of plunder or conquest as an offensive defense: carrying war to Sri Lanka, for example, forestalled Sri Lankan raids on Chola lands.To all of these “push” factors impelling Chola naval forces outwards was added the pull factor of political instability or weakness in the main target areas, especially Sri Lanka.

Chola naval activity reached its peak between 985 and 1070, under the kings Rajaraja and his son Rajendra.Rajaraja was the innovator, initiating the naval strategy and forging the internal alliances and collections of force necessary to carry out this new aggressive strategy.His son Rajendra reaped much of the glory from his spectacular exploitation of the system his father created, but also inherited the growing problems the strategy created.It is an exaggeration of both Chola power and the naval technology of the time to say that during this time the Bay of Bengal was a Chola lake, but the sense in terms of prestige and impact is not far off the mark.

There were twomajor landmarks of Chola naval activity in this period.The conquest of northern Sri Lanka was the more conventional: ships ferried troops to the island, where they waged a campaign of conquest.Of greater regional significance were a set of raids clear across the Bay of Bengal into the heart of the Srivijayan sphere of influence.In 1025 Rajendra launched a major expedition that ravaged along the northeastern Sumatran coast, finally sacking the Srivijayan capital.Cholas inscriptions memorialize the “conquest” of Srivijaya; the Cholas did not take over and administer the Srivijayan state, but did become significant political players in the straits for another 50 years.More importantly, the blow to Srivijayan prestige and their reputation for securing trade routes and centers was devastating, and trade patterns began to diffuse more widely through southeast Asian waters as competition for the lucrative business intensified.A further Chola raid in 1067 on the Srivijayan-influenced coast of the Malay Peninsula completed the work and the Srivijaya thalassocracy collapsed completely.Political and economic patterns in the area would remain fragmented until the rise of Malacca in the 15th century with the assistance of the great Ming treasure fleets under Zheng He (see Chapter 15).

But despite the 1067 expedition, Chola activity had decreased after Rajendra’s death in 1044, and for the rest of the century the Chola rulers attempted to shift from an exploitive raiding strategy to regular administration of their conquests, especially in Sri Lanka.But continued guerrilla resistance on the part of the islanders created a steady drain on Chola resources, exactly the sort of outflow of treasure the Chola polity was unable to sustain for long.By the 1070s Chola forces were already withdrawing from Sri Lanka, and the empire thereafter went into decline.

Chola warfare.We have much less information about the details of Chola warfare than we do for the Vikings.The campaigns are well chronicled, though the sources are heavily biased, the “conquest” of Srivijaya being typical of the presentation of Chola feats of arms by official sources.But they provide little detail of the everyday nuts and bolts of military organization and technique.Nonetheless, the broad outlines are discernible.

The army consisted of a combination of forces.At the core was the body of royal troops maintained permanently by the king as a body guard, ceremonial corps and personal war band.This small force was supplemented by mercenaries and by the war bands of powers subordinate to the king.The bulk of such forces came from the landed elites, but a significant number of soldiers were maintained as mercenary war bands by the merchant associations, and these too joined royal expeditions, emphasizing the economic aims of Chola warfare.Almost all the troops were infantry armed with spears and bows.South India was poor country for raising horses or for cavalry operations, and on overseas campaigns horses would have been difficult and expensive to transport.Chola forces, in common with armies throughout the subcontinent in this period, included war elephants.But their use in naval or amphibious warfare was out of the questionThe army as a whole was thus a composite force assembled for particular campaigns, not a standing force except for a small core of royal household troops.Likewise there was no royal navy, only ad hoc armadas drawn from the maritime experience and trade resources of the south Indian merchant community.

Chola strategy was straightforward: pick a convenient or symbolically significant target, and make the raid.That there was little planning to the “strategy” behind Chola naval activity is demonstrated by the difficulties the empire got into in trying to manage the transition from raiding to conquest to administration in Sri Lanka — the weakly centralized Chola state was not built for careful planning and systematic assimilation of new territory.

Tactically, the Cholas were similar to the Vikings in that there was nothing particularly innovative or effective about their methods of waging war.What made their raids effective was the sea borne mobility that gave them the element of surprise.As for naval tactics, ship-to-ship encounters were even rarer than for the Vikings — the navy was essentially an amphibious landing force.The ships of the Indian Ocean tradition were usually sewn together with coconut husks rather than nailed to frames, a lightweight but effective method for cargo carrying but one which made the ships unsuitable to be used as weapons themselves.The economic motive behind Chola warfare would in any case have tended towards the capture rather than the sinking of shipping, just as for the Vikings and the Srivijayans.

Comparisons.Like the Vikings and Srivijaya, Chola military techniques were conventional, and the political and military impact of their raids and conquests was transient.The limited naval technology at their disposal did not allow much more.The main impact of Chola naval operations was on patterns of trade, not on patterns of warfare.The decentering and diffusion of southeast Asian trade stimulated by the Chola raids on Srivijaya had consequences as important and lasting as the Viking impact on trade in northern Europe.What the operations of all the predatory sea peoples show is the connection through maritime activity of world trade and state building.The wealth generated as goods flowed between the Mediterranean and China, and beyond in every direction, often proved decisive in bringing a higher level of political organization to areas that tapped into that wealth, whether through plunder, piracy or participation in trade.This connection would continue to tie trade, piracy and naval war closely together, and would help generate a new model of naval power in subsequent centuries.

Conclusion

Though the period 400-1100 saw significantly more global naval activity than the classical age, the scope and impact of naval warfare was still limited and acted essentially as an adjunct to land warfare in strictly military terms.This was because naval technology still placed severe constraints on the capabilities of sea borne military forces.Land based powers remained far vaster and more influential than sea powers.Yet the globalization of naval warfare itself was important, as it reflected, followed and drew upon the growing scale of world maritime trade, a trend that would continue in the following age and become decisive after 1500, creating in the process a new model of naval power.