It may, however, from all the information we have been able to collect, be affirmed that, previously to the fifteenth century, practical or professed writers upon shipping were unknown; while those who incidentally refer to it are so inaccurate, that their works have little, if any, real value. Almost everything relating to shipping, and especially to merchant shipping, before that time is, therefore, in a great degree matter for conjecture. Nay, we are even inclined to think that, on the whole, we possess more accurate accounts of the ships of antiquity.
First great improvement in the Genoese ships.
Various causes and circumstances rendered the middle of the fifteenth century a remarkable epoch in the annals of marine architecture, and not the least of these was the competition for maritime supremacy between the great Italian republics. But when Genoa and Venice wisely gave up quarrelling, there was a still more marked improvement in the form and equipment of their vessels. The rivalry of commerce took the place of those foolish contentions which invariably resulted in war. Each nation then strove to produce, not the best fighting ship, but the one most suited to yield remunerative returns. From that period the improvement steadily increased, until vessels not unlike those of our own time were constructed towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
Genoese carrack.
The Genoese, though inferior in, perhaps, all other respects to the Venetians, then surpassed them in the art of ship-building; and they were, so far as can now be traced, the first to construct a ship approaching to the modern form and rig, of which any account and drawing has been preserved. The following, copied from Charnock,[688] affords an excellent and, we believe, accurate illustration of the large Genoese merchant carrack of the first half of the sixteenth century,[689] some of which are said to have been of no less than from fifteen hundred to two thousand tons burden.
A GENOESE CARRACK, 1542.
Their corsairs and pirates.
The most daring of the pirates, their terrible fate.
The Genoese, more especially in the early part of their history, had, as we have seen, their lawless cruisers as well as their peaceable traders. But her corsairs, once so renowned, must not be confounded with her pirates. The former resembled in many respects the privateers of our own time; while their pirates were chiefly under the control of men who had been banished from the republic either for some delinquency against the laws or for political offences. A number of these political exiles, belonging to what was known as the “Guelph faction,” having been banished from the republic in 1323, fitted out ten galleys armed as cruisers and infested the Mediterranean, pillaging indiscriminately the ships and the coasts of Genoa as well as those of other nations. In one cruise alone they took booty estimated at three hundred thousand golden florins. Their success, however, proved the means of their destruction. Pursued by a squadron of Genoese ships of war as far as the Black Sea, they sought shelter in Sinope, then under a Turcoman ruler, who, quickly learning the wealth they had on board their vessels, took short and effective means to secure it for himself. Inviting the pirate chiefs with their crews to a banquet, he surrounded them in the height of their revelry with his troops and massacred nearly all of them. No fewer than fifteen hundred persons, among whom were forty nobles, perished by this one deed of treachery, and only three galleys succeeded in making good their escape.