How did the greco-roman era galley evolve over time? From what Ive heard the late medieval galleys were rather different/improved compared to them?

So I’ve written a bit about it here and here.

From what I’ve read, the galley transformed in a number of ways:

Size: galleys tended to get longer and have deeper drafts, which allowed them to hold more cargo (which was important for ensuring that galleys could offset their operating and repair costs) and lots of oarsmen (150-180 on the great galleys of the Venetian Republic).
Decks: galleys shifted from half-decks to full decks, which means you can put more people on the deck to board/repel boarders/launch missiles. Also, galleys tended to add on fore and/or aft-castles, which were very useful for protecting your ranged marines from boarders and giving them the ability to drop missiles on the enemy deck from above. Also, later galleys tended to have higher sides to help deal with very low-in-the-water vessels like the ubiquitious longship.
Sails: galleys tended to acquire more masts and shifted from square to lateen sails, which allowed them to move faster and more flexibly (as it’s much easier to tack against the wind with that setup).

How did ancient and medieval armies get their horses off their ships?

Great question!

One of the problems that had to be dealt with in medieval warfare was that you had all of these armies where the mounted knight dominated, but if you have to attack somewhere from the sea, you need to take your horses with you.

And so a variety of strategies were used. For example, the Norman Invasion of 1066 involved a flotilla of longships which would land, and then horses would be led off the side of the ship and into the shallows/beach, as seen in the Bayeux tapestry:

And that works well as long as you control the beach-head and have time to get your horses off the ship, get them saddled and so forth, and then distribute them to their waiting riders. It’s not so good if your enemy are right there on the beach and able to disrupt your preparations.

So by the time of the Fourth Crusade, we see specialized horse transports where knights could mount their horses on deck and charge straight off the side of the ship, presumably either via a ramp or gunwales that could be lowered:

And they were quite successful, allowing the Crusaders to surprise the Byzantines with their speed and mobility and seize the vital fortress of Galata, which guarded the northern end of the boom chain that protected Constantinople’s Golden Horn. With the boom chain down, Venetian galleys could sail into the Golden Horn and launch amphibious attacks against the city’s less formidable northern walls.

Do you think Highgarden ever tried to build a fleet of its own to be stationed at the mouth of the Mander or the Shields? To lessen its reliance on the Arbor and Oldtown for a navy

It does have a fleet on the Shield Islands:

The most telling blow was struck by King Garth VII, the Goldenhand, King of the Reach, when he drove the ironmen from the Misty Islands, renamed them the Shield Islands, and resettled them with his own fiercest warriors and finest seamen to defend the mouth of the Mander…

Soon after, he turned his attention to the sea and drove the last ironmen from their strongholds on the Shield Islands. Thereafter he resettled the islands with his fiercest fighters, granting them special dispensations for the purpose of turning them into a first defense against the ironborn, should they return. This proved a great success, and to this day the men of the Four Shields pride themselves on defending the mouth of the Mander and the heart of the Reach against any and all seaborne foes…

Most seagoing vessels dared not sail beyond Highgarden, but longships with their shallow draughts could navigate as far upstream as Bitterbridge. In ancient days, the ironborn had boldly sailed the river road and plundered all along the Mander and its vassal streams … until the kings of the green hand had armed the fisherfolk on the four small islands off the Mander’s mouth and named them his shields.

Two thousand years had passed, but in the watchtowers along their craggy shores, greybeards still kept the ancient vigil…Warhorns would echo across the waters, from Greenshield and Greyshield, Oakenshield and Southshield, and their longships would come sliding out from moss-covered stone pens along the shores, oars flashing as they swarmed across the straits to seal the Mander and hound and harry the raiders upriver to their doom.

They’re longships rather than galleys, but there’s 50 or more of them. Perhaps not enough to take on the Iron Fleet, although they did a fine job against Quellon Greyjoy, but enough to slow it down and allow the Redwyne Fleet to mobilize…if Euron hadn’t tricked them.

Follow up to the Royal Fleet question: Would you characterize the 200+ ship royal fleet under Stannis as being exceptionally well-maintained and centralized then, or do you think that most of that is holdovers from the build-up following the War of the Usurper and Greyjoy’s Rebellion?

More the latter.

Consider that the Royal Fleet was destroyed in that big storm when Dany was born and Stannis had to build a new one. That highly unusual circumstance meant that, for once, the royal fleet would not be a patchwork but rather a unified cohort of ships with the same longevity, which would be running out around the start of the ASOIAF timeline. This provides unusual opportunities to maintain a steady number of ships through rationalized maintenance and repair schedules and other procedures.

Now, an open question is to what extent the Greyjoy Rebellion offered an opportunity to overhaul the Royal Fleet – after all, the ships would be about halfway through their normal lifespan and here you have a war where naval power is absolutely necessary; likewise, the voyage around Westeros to link up with the Redwynes, the subsequent Battle of Fair Isle, and the various amphibious landings that followed it would put a good deal of wear-and-tear on the fleet. So it’s possible that the Royal Fleet got a refresh before or after the Greyjoy Rebellion.

All of that Watsonian explanation aside, I think GRRM doesn’t want the headache of tracking ship counts over time – he’s trying to tell a story, and it’s not a Patrick O’Brien story where that kind of nautical pedantry sells.

I think you may have written a post about this, but I couldn’t find it. I always thought that the royal fleet’s administration was out-of-sync with the rest of the continent’s medieval political development in the sense that it is much more centralized and permanent than any land force. Is this correct?

Discussed here.

Navies were historically always more centralized and permanent than armies, because of the fiscal and administrative complexities of ship-building.

That being said, “more” is not the same thing as “entirely.” Medieval kings would “borrow” merchant ships to bulk up their navies, they sometimes required port-cities to maintain auxiliary navies, they hired mercenaries, etc. Likewise, while royal navies had more longevity administratively, the realities of irregular warfare and the lifetime of wodden ships meant that their size fluctuated drastically – so technically it would be a series of fleets rather than a permanent fleet.

These naval questions are great! Was there something preventing medieval navies from adding a few ships each year so that you didn’t have huge swings in available forces? It’d seem like it’d be good for both the navy and your shipbuilding industry to have a steady amount of new vessels being ordered rather than huge boom and sink cycles. Thanks!

Glad you like them!

Basically, it comes down to questions of state capacity – could the monarch tax enough on a regular basis to keep a standing navy and a shipbuilding industry around in peace-time? Usually, the answer was no, because the taxing powers of the monarch tended to be too fixed by tradition, and the revenue service too undeveloped, to collect the necessary funds…in peace time. War, it was generally understood, was an exception to the normal rule, and the powers of the monarch were greatly expanded.

To use England as an example, the monarch was supposed to fund both their household/court and the government out of their personal incomes plus their “ordinary incomes” (namely, revenue from excise taxes on imported wines, plus incomes from various monopolies) which Parliament traditionally voted them for life. Anything more than that required a vote of Parliament to impose taxation…but during war, the King could impose “ship money” on ports, coastal towns, and coastal shires – in essence, a feudal requirement to provide ships for the navy or enough cash for the king to build or hire additional ships.

But ship money was only supposed to be imposed in times of war, and when Charles I tried to use it in times of peace to avoid having to call Parliament, it led to a huge legal controversy, a massive campaign of tax refusal, and helped to build up the Parliamentary coalition against Charles I which would lead to the English Civil War.

So with those kind of institutional structures, you’re not going to get a steady ship-building programme.

Adding to the ship questions: where do dromonds fit on, and is Aurane Waters’ treachery plausible?

Dromonds were a Byzantine improvement on the Mediterranean galley. They had an above-water spur rather than an underwater ram, lateen (triangular) sails which are easier to use to tack into the wind, providing superior mobility in adverse winds, and had a full rather than partial deck, which provided additional protection for the rowers from missile fire.

As for Aurane, yes it is. For example, Warwick the Kingmaker was the Captain of Calais and Lord High Admiral of England, which gave him control over England’s largest standing military and its navy. Warwick repeatedly used the navy to conduct pirate raids against the Castillians and the Hanseatic League, which made him very popular with the London merchants he fenced the booty to (and who were competitors of the Castillian and Hanseatic merchants).

(A cool animatronic at Warwick Castle, which I visited when I was a youngun…)

And when fighting between York and Lancaster broke out, Warwick used the navy both defensively (allowing him and the Duke of York and his family to escape into exile) and offensively (his invasion of June 1460 which led to the Battle of Northampton where he captured Henry VI). The garrison stayed (mostly) loyal to him because Warwick was the richest man in England and offered them pirating loot to boot.

Moral of the story: make sure your admirals are loyal, because ships are a very mobile asset.

Long ask sorry! I know you’re kinda covering the special cases of naval warfare with Constantinople and Blackwater, but I was just wondering how these battles normally occurred. It’s obviously before pre-gunpowder so was it mostly based on ramming like with classical triremes? Was the intended effect more immobilization or sinking? Additionally, what was the composition of navies? I know the Chola and Song dynasties had large standing navies, but what about Europe? Was it more merchant marines?

You’re more or less on-point – at least in the Mediterranean, where galleys were dominant and combat was pretty similar to classical Greece and Rome, focused on either ramming or boarding or disabling your opponent’s sails and/or oars.

However, in the North Sea, the Channel, the Baltic, and the Atlantic, sailing ships predominated over galleys because of the rougher waters – yes, the Viking longship had both oars and sails, but they didn’t really use galley tactics due to their smaller size and number of oarsmen. Hence, boarding was the whole game.

One thing that did distinguish medieval from classical naval warfare is that you essentially had the importation of the castle onto the sea. Hence, you get ships like these:

The forecastle and aftcastle got their names for very straightforward reasons – they were basically big wooden castles on either end of the ship that let you shoot your enemy from above and made it more difficult for boarders to come to grips with you. That, plus the fact that in order to support these castles you had to build bigger and taller ships which could just ride down the very low-lying longships, made these ships dominant in combat (although less seaworthy).

In terms of composition, it varied. To take the English as an example, there was both a royal navy, but also localities like the Cinque Ports and Portsmouth were also required to maintain ships, and mercenary fleets were hired, and merchant marines were impressed, at various times. Likewise, at times the royal fleet consisted of only two ships (in the reign of Richard II) and at other times as many as 700 ships (in the reign of Edward III). The thing to keep in mind is that wooden ships don’t have a very long lifespan, so unless you’re consistently putting money into maintenance, repair, and replacement, you can build an entire navy only to have it vanish, requiring a new navy to be built – which is one of the reasons the numbers and composition varied so much.