4 - Logistics and Strategies

Summary

The battle was hard and cruel between them […] at the first strike our galleys seized four of the aforementioned vessels of the Turks; of the rest they in fact had only their retreat. They all fled to the land of the island of Chios, with the exception of twelve ships, which our galleys could not overcome or seize at all in view of the fact that night had now come upon them; of the aforementioned vessels we finally overcame and seized twenty, on which we took more than two thousand Turks, living or dead, and this not through our own merits, but by divine grace. Indeed, the rest, who fled to the land, were all killed or captured, with the result that finally not a single one of them escaped.

Gerard of Pins, papal vicarius of the Hospitallers, letter to Pope John XXII reporting a naval victory against the Turks, 1 September 1319.

Now that an overview of the evolution of the naval leagues has been given, it is time to make some observations on the logistics and strategies adopted during the campaigns. This will help to place the leagues within the wider context of medieval naval warfare and also to explain the overwhelming supremacy which the Latins enjoyed at the time. Fortunately the communications preserved in the papal and Venetian archives between the Latin powers over the formation of a league contain enough detail to draw some conclusions regarding the assembly of the fleets and their activities in the East. This includes information on their composition, in terms of both vessels and manpower, the types of tactics they adopted in combat, and the numbers of the enemy they faced.

Ship Types

Since the time of the First Crusade, the shipyards of the Italian maritime cities were producing some of the largest and most technologically advanced vessels in the Mediterranean. These consisted of two basic varieties, which were often (but not always) utilized for contrasting roles: sail-powered ships for commerce and oar-powered ships for war. The most well-known versions of these two ship types were the navis and the galea, which were also regularly mentioned by authors reporting on naval conflicts in the Aegean.