[Sidenote:  Change of System in the 16th century.]

26.  This system of grouping the oars, and putting only one man to an oar, continued down to the 16th century, during the first half of which came in the more modern system of using great oars, equally spaced, and requiring from four to seven men each to ply them, in the manner which endured till late in the last century, when galleys became altogether obsolete.  Captain Pantero Pantera, the author of a work on Naval Tactics (1616), says he had heard, from veterans who had commanded galleys equipped in the antiquated fashion, that three men to a bench, with separate oars, answered better than three men to one great oar, but four men to one great oar (he says) were certainly more efficient than four men with separate oars.  The new-fashioned great oars, he tells us, were styled Remi di Scaloccio, the old grouped oars Remi a Zenzile,—­terms the etymology of which I cannot explain.[5]

It may be doubted whether the four-banked and five-banked galleys, of which Marino Sanudo speaks, really then came into practical use.  A great five-banked galley on this system, built in 1529 in the Venice Arsenal by Vettor Fausto, was the subject of so much talk and excitement, that it must evidently have been something quite new and unheard of.[6] So late as 1567 indeed the King of Spain built at Barcelona a galley of thirty-six benches to the side, and seven men to the bench, with a separate oar to each in the old fashion.  But it proved a failure.[7]

Down to the introduction of the great oars the usual system appears to have been three oars to a bench for the larger galleys, and two oars for lighter ones.  The fuste or lighter galleys of the Venetians, even to about the middle of the 16th century, had their oars in pairs from the stern to the mast, and single oars only from the mast forward.[8]

[Sidenote:  Some details of the 13th century Galleys.]

27.  Returning then to the three-banked and two-banked galleys of the latter part of the 13th century, the number of benches on each side seems to have run from twenty-five to twenty-eight, at least as I interpret Sanudo’s calculations.  The 100-oared vessels often mentioned (e.g. by Muntaner, p. 419) were probably two-banked vessels with twenty-five benches to a side.

[Illustration]

The galleys were very narrow, only 15-1/2 feet in beam.[9] But to give room for the play of the oars and the passage of the fighting-men, &c., this width was largely augmented by an opera-morta, or outrigger deck, projecting much beyond the ship’s sides and supported by timber brackets.[10] I do not find it stated how great this projection was in the mediaeval galleys, but in those of the 17th century it was on each side as much as 2/9ths of the true beam.  And if it was as great in the 13th-century galleys the total width between the false gunnels would be about 22-1/4 feet.