Uomini da remo: galee e galeotti del Mediterraneo in età moderna (review)

Galleys and their workforce have been objects of increasing scholarly attention in the last three decades. The vision of ships rowed by individuals chained to a bench has often been used as evidence of the "harsh and inward looking" early modern Mediterranean — to borrow Fernand Braudel's words. Others have linked the reliance on human powered vessels, with technological and economic backwardness. Over the years there have been a number of studies on galley "engines" in the early modern age, but Lo Basso's book is the first comprehensive work on the subject. Although the book's approach is primarily socioeconomic, it contains much useful information for military and political historians.

The author has done an impressive amount of research, his findings covering thirty different repositories, some of them obscure, from all over Europe. The bibliography takes up nearly twenty-five pages, listing nearly every published work on galleys and their propulsive force. The appendix is particularly useful, including weights, measurements, coinages, and exchange rates used in the Mediterranean between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

The book is structured in three parts. The first includes a short history of the galley as a ship, accompanied by a lexicon essay. The nearly one hundred and fifty pages of the second section are dedicated to the Venetian maritime system, while the third part analyzes the other Mediterranean navies. The recruitment (whether voluntary or not) and management of galley crews is described in detail, the text accompanied by numerous statistical tables and graphs. The picture that emerges is complex and varied, much more than what the much-repeated division between the Ponentine and Levantine galley organization would lead us to believe. While it is true that the various navies followed one of the two abovementioned systems (involving a greater or lesser use of forced rowers, and the direct participation, or not, of galley commanders in the financial running of their ships), the composition of galley crews was the direct result of the different social, political, and economic conditions of the various Mediterranean states. In addition, for the first time to this reviewer's knowledge, the author examines in full the organization of the private fleets of the various Genoese naval entrepreneurs, calling into question much of what has been written on this subject. Possibly the least original part of the book is the one dedicated to the Ottoman navy, based (one suspects because of logistic and linguistic difficulties) exclusively on Western sources.

In this groundbreaking study, Lo Basso pulls few punches, as demonstrated by his criticism of Cristoforo Da Canal's Della Milizia Marittima. Usually — and uncritically — accepted by many as a legitimate historical source, skillfully using archival evidence the author demonstrates instead how Da Canal's work was by and large a fraudulent piece of propaganda. Uomini da remo also corrects the accepted image of a generalized "infernal galley life" propagated, among others, by Benedetto Croce. The Venetians, for instance, more often than not crewed their galleys with free oarsmen; and while the Lagoon city devised a number of dirty tricks to transform its rowers into indentured laborers, their lot was not all that bad compared to that of other workers. Other navies also employed volunteer rowers in large numbers, although they appear to have fared worse than their Venetian colleagues.

With all its merits, however, Lo Basso's work is not without flaws. The most glaring is the volume itself, shoddily produced and badly edited. The inclusion of a two-page preface by Gino Benzoni has been done in disregard of the indexes, putting all the page references out of place — something easily amended, had the publisher been a bit more careful. The book also lacks a proper historiographical introduction, something that would have helped all those not particularly versed in galley literature. In addition, the author's belief about the Ottomans relying heavily on servile crews for their galleys (21) is somewhat...