A Painting of Medieval Galley Combat

It might surprise you to learn that historians know very little about pre-cannon naval combat. One supposes that triremes, galleys, or longships tried to ram each other but otherwise came together and the crews fought. But how did they do that? Did they have some way of coming together without breaking all their oars, or did they just accept that battles meant breaking lots of oars? Were there special troops who stood in the bow and started the fighting, as certain Viking poems suggest?

Sadly, nobody bothered to write any of this down, so we are mostly reduced to guesswork.

Which brings to a fresco that resides in Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. It was painted by Spinello Aretino in 1407-1408. It depicts the naval battle of Punta San Salvatore, supposed to have been fought in 1177 between Venice and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. There is no remotely contemporary evidence that this battle was ever fought, and the consensus seems to be that it was made up by some Venetian "historian." But for our purposes that is neither hear nor there, because what we are looking for is a depiction of galley combat in the age before artillery.

And here we have one. What does it show?

Well, for one thing we see that much of the fighting is done by soldiers who are clearly marked out from the oarsmen by their armor, shields and weapons. The soldiers include swordsmen and archers. The ships are depicted lying alongside each other, which may just have been to fit them into the painting, but anyway the are not shown meeting bow to bow. No ramming or fancy maneuvers, just coming together and fighting it out.

 It is not the best evidence, but given how little we have, it counts.