世界航海/海軍歷史 原汁生肉 Greco-Persian Navies - Sail me closer, I want to hit them with my xiphos!

Hello everybody and welcome to another Wednesday video Today we are going to go back even further in time than we have previously on this channel We are going back before the age of ship-borne artillery to the age of the good old ramming and boarding action in the ancient world And today's guest to talk about that is and apologies immediately if I get this entirely wrong Peter Freiherr von Dankelmann Is that vaguely in the ballpark of being correct? Yes, I do think so In German the pronunciation would be Peter Freiherr von Dankelmann But well, it's totally fine for you You at least know what I'm talking about Yes, definitely Right, so If you just give yourself a little bit of an introduction so we know who we're talking to for everybody else I am a PhD student in Classics at the Karl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg And since we are currently in coronavirus my boss decided that we should do an online class about the Persian Wars within which I came to do a lot of military stuff because my master thesis was about ancient military in Israel And so I did something for the Greeks as well And also I'm a part-time author of alternate history novels And that's the way how I found your channel OK, cool All right, so we'll get started on the questions themselves And obviously where there's odd random bits of audio we can obviously always edit them out, it's fine Just out of interest before we go on and obviously I'll edit this bit out Do you have a copy of your master's thesis that you'd be willing to share? Yes, but I feel it's in German so I can send it to you, no problem Yeah, I can give it a go either reading it or getting someone to translate it for me I retain some of it, but that would be really interesting I quite like reading about the ancient military of the Middle East Yeah, no problem, I can send you that Cool, OK, right, so onto the main questions then So first question is Since we're going back even further than the basic ship-borne artillery presumably this leaves us with the tactics of boarding, ramming and man-portable missile weaponry, archers and slingers and such as the primary methods of naval combat So for the period that we're talking about which is the Persian-Greek wars and that surrounding area Where did things stand with relation to ship-borne combat tactics around about when Persia starts to make serious moves on Greece? Well, yes, that's the interesting question here because you've got basically all three tactics interconnected, of course I would presume that your first and foremost choice would be ramming because, well, nearly every warship of that period is fitted with a ram and before you can board somebody you'll have to negotiate your way through the enemy's ram anyhow So the action would start with the ships trying to ram each other most of the time and then it comes down what kind of tactic the helmsman prefers like if you've got a very skilled crew with good oarsmen and a good helmsman you can try to ram the enemy's ship but then back away again like you wouldn't ram full speed but try to slow down before impact so that you can not have the difficulty of overextending your ram and getting stuck in the enemy hull If the hull gets tangled up you'll start boarding For boarding, you've got maybe ten marines on each ship on each major warship so not too many guys and it could cleanly happen that the ship that was rammed won the boarding engagement and, well, everybody climbed over to the new ship and sailed away happily ever after or the ship that won the ramming duel could capture the ship that was boarded With man-portable missile weapons well, we've got only archery and spear throwers, so to speak maybe three to four guys per ship and those, well, those could have quite a big impact For example, if one lucky shot managed to hit the enemy's helmsman then that might give you a very good chance to ram a ship that is out of control But mostly they would be used for preparing a boarding action Maybe to help in when an allied ship is in a boarding and you could give fire support from the sides Or a very gruesome thing If a ship was boarded most men on board would be unarmed like rowers would be nearly naked and carry no weapons at all so those guys would go overboard if necessary and if they knew that their guys were losing on deck And so you tended to have quite a lot of swimmers around in the water and you can presume that archers would have quite a happy time sniping those poor guys in the water off if they thought they were enemies Okay, so if a ship is taken then it wouldn't the galley, or I suppose they're not really galleys at this point but the rowers are not going to be necessarily willing to comply with the new ship's owners No, not in general Like there are times where people are taking prisoners, of course but most battles are fought in coastal waters So if you could at all swim you could just hop overboard and try to get away from them I suppose that makes a distinction between the rowers of this period and the rowers of some nations and some ships in later periods because presumably then these people are usually not slaves or prisoners They're presumably free crew Yes, indeed We have very scarce evidence of some Athenian crews of the Peloponnesian Wars that they're partially slaves like maybe a third or so of a crew but normally in a warship of that era you would have three people on the rows, on the orsp like the majority of a ship 170 out of 200 people would be rowers And you couldn't really control that many people on an ancient warship that were slaves and unwilling to comply So you needed to have people that were there for their own sake and knew what they did for the thing, the city or whatever they fought for Okay, yeah I suppose that's a big contrast then as opposed to later periods when the number of slaves and such tended to increase and it became a lot less of a prestige job Well, definitely I know in the 15th or 16th century you'd have galley slaves and presumably every time a galley was captured you could just free the guys which were on your side or had been on your side and put the enemy right onto the ore again but that would very rarely happen for an ancient fleet Fair enough So speaking of the ancient fleets what were the primary ships involved on both sides at this point in time and who is sailing or manning them in terms of sort of is this kind of if it's the Athenian navy is it Athenians who are manning them or the Persian navy is it Persians or are they using vassals and such like So for the ships we can differentiate quite a few types of warships that were used like there are a few little ships like pentacores so 50 oarships with 50 rowers and byreams so two-story ships where there are two stacks of rowers one above the other but the primary fighting ship of the day is the triere or trireme in English so that's three decks of rowers stacked one on top of the other and well that's the standard ship for nearly the whole of the eastern Mediterranean for doing battle You would use the smaller ships maybe for raiding actions for reconnaissance or stuff like that but it's the trireme for battle and in terms of manning well that's quite the distinction between the Athenians and the Persians like in Athens we are in the process of building up really that large fleet because Athens only recently had acquired the money to build quite a lot of triremes and they would simply use the poor population of the city the so-called tetes that would be people who were previously unable to do any military service because in ancient Greek you had to provide your own equipment and a hot-blooded panoply is awfully expensive for the time so you would need to be at least middle class to be in the phalanx formation but for rowing well you only need the muscles and those poor land-working classes had the muscles so they were in for the rowing action then you would have a corps of sailors like maybe ten or so guys who would manipulate rudder and if you had the weather, the sails so that might have been professional sailors from the merchant navy of the day and the marines would be taken from the hoplite guys from the land army, if you like so maybe just adjust your armor a little bit don't wear too much bronze, I guess and then you're good to serve there and the top upper class guys like the very, very rich guys would actually form the guys called trierachs like commander of the ship who would give a certain amount of money to keeping it up and therefore you would get to sit in a throne on the stone of the ship and act as if you are the commander of the whole thing well since your helmsman is the guy who is already doing the maneuvers and he basically would have to know very much more about the ship than you did it's more like a position of honor but not so much one of command ah, fair enough if you go up to the Persians the picture changes somewhat like Persians and Medes themselves are basically no seeding people at that time at all but they would send in some marines to help and to control some unwilling crews maybe but mostly the crews and the ships would be from Basel states on the Mediterranean coast basically you can take a map and go up from Egypt via Cyprus the whole Levant with the Phoenicians in it and then what's today Turkey with Carians and Unions so that would be the people who would man the ships of a Persian fleet in that time mostly with a few Persian marines and some Persian admirals so to speak like the one odd brother or cousin of a great king who would be sent with them to, well, act as if he knew what he did at command and hopefully he'd listen to the people who actually knew what they were doing well, yes, and we know that the great king himself did sometimes do, like, big sitting-ins with all naval commanders and then asked them for what they think he should do and then listened to their words, more or less but, yeah, normally the single files within the Persian fleet would be commanded by local noblemen or even the king himself of that region and those guys typically knew what they were doing quite well because if you're a Phoenician king well, that's basically what you have to do and if you do not know that well, you won't be king very long Fair enough So I just noticed a sudden drop in the computer's performance and it was Steam trying to download an update Right, that's sorted Right, so I'll obviously edit this little section in OK, so when we've got these fleets going on both sides some of the histories of the period often talk about vast armies and fleets So when Xerxes invades Greece they talk about a million men coming in and such like and commensurately the fleet is described as being equally large Are these numbers that are portrayed on both sides for the navies actually realistic and whether or not that is the case what was the actual true size of the fleets on both sides We definitely can say that those numbers are quite unrealistic Like, that this counts for the fleet of Xerxes in 480 round 1,200 triremes and an addition of 3,000 lighter ships to, well, do some other things And, well, if we can just add up the numbers up that would be 200 guys per trireme No, it's not very likely that the Persian army and navy combined would even approach this size in pure manpower In terms of how big the fleet actually was we are, well, in a bit of a conundrum because the only reference point we do have are the Greeks, the free Greeks, so to speak and at Salamis we can guess they were around 300 ships strong Like, we've got references from the play The Persians by Aeschylus And since Aeschylus was at Salamis and nearly all of his viewers were also veterans of that battle we can assume that he got that number right So I would guess that at the start of a campaign the Persians may have had around 600 ships per battle then lost quite a lot of them in some storms and other actions So that at Salamis maybe it's 400 Persian ships around that number against the 300 around that Greeks It's still a large number of ships but obviously we've got to remember that even with the high crew numbers these ships are not large as we might conceive of them in later eras of wooden warships Not really, I mean It's trireme, maybe 36 to 40 meters long So, and 4 or 5 meters broad So you can still manage to get a trireme up a beach every night because, well, you can't sleep on that damn thing not with 200 people But, well, still it's also quite the ecological impact to build that many ships in, well, short time And you already had to see where your supplies came from Like in a bit later times the woods of Maxton played a very important role for Athens to supply the timbers and also the oars So, well, it did their toll on the local woods to build triremes because those damn thing also rot away quite quickly So, unless like the victory which you could take into battle for 50 years with some refits in and out you'd be very happy to find any trireme that lasts longer than 25 years OK, so just because say one generation of a particular nation has a fleet of a given size that doesn't necessarily mean that's going to hold true even 40, 50 years down the line because they will have all rotted away unless they've been steadily replacing them Yes, replace them get them out of the water and then find the money to actually do the repairs you need to do And even then you would always have in the later Athenian navy several classes of ships like the first class would be the fastest then there would be like regular bunch of ships to do the fighting and then there would be some old ships in reserve and you wouldn't want to use them unless you needed to OK It was slightly more fragile at that point Yes So how did naval combat evolve during the Persian Wars? Did it kind of was it the same at the end as at the beginning or were there advanced tactics and techniques that were developed during the various encounters that the fleets had during that sort of arc of conflict? Well, in terms of ship building well, we knew so little about the ships themselves so that's not something we can answer very well In terms of tactics and other things we can see some advancement For example, well in terms of naval combat actually crossing bigger spaces of sea like the Hellespont would actually be very much advanced after the Persian Wars because the Persians built two or three large bridges with pontoon bridges with ships in them presumably over the Hellespont and the Danube so that definitely helped their skill in that regard We also can see some very clever strategic thinking from the Persian side during that time For example, once an expeditionary fleet of Darius actually, well, was wiped out at the coast of the today's peninsula of Arthas in the Chalkidiki region So when Xerxes started his invasion he actually ordered to duck a candle across that peninsula so that when his fleet came along they could just simply avoid going around the peninsula but rather used the candle for that And we can also at least assume that there were some tactical mutinies like at the Battle of Artemisium that's the action for peril to the Battle of Thermopylae we see the Greeks deploying in a formation called Kyklos that's ring, translated and it basically means that if you've got quite a smaller fleet than the enemy you would form up your triremes in a circle with ramps facing outwards so that the enemy couldn't win you a flank and rule you up So that would be quite the innovation for smaller fleets And we can also see some kind of innovation in not in direct sea battle but in fleet engagement nevertheless that the later battles of the Persian Wars most notably that of Mikala and of Eurymedon comprised not only of sea battles but only of also of land battles but like one enemy fleet could be entrenched on the beach so you'd land your marines and conquer them from land if they didn't want to come out for battle I see So that is a a key difference between this period and later periods because obviously if you catch an enemy fleet in port in the later periods they're still physically afloat so it might be confined waters but it's still going to be a fight whereas at this period if their version of in port is literally our vessels are up on a beach somewhere or if your vessels are afloat you can't actually do anything to them but if you land troops you can then set fire to them or something like that Exactly We also have some battles in port like in the Peloponnesian Wars when Athens tried to conquer the Greek city of Syracuse on Sicily there was great fights in the harbor itself so in quite confined waters but that was after both sides basically agreed yes, we have one that's coming out for battle let's do that also but if one side refused and well you could still row up to a beach and try to tow some ships away or something or set fire to them otherwise by landing parties but mostly you had to land troops if the other guys didn't want to come up to fight you at sea OK so OK sorry again, I'll just edit this little bit out so when so try again so in the context of these evolving tactics and the fleet sizes that we mentioned and probably more realistic for something like Salamis was a battle like Salamis where you've got this sort of smaller Greek force overcoming a substantially larger Persian force was that the exception or in the course of these wars would you generally expect smaller Greek forces to overcome the Persian navy well you have to see Salamis within the broader strategy of the free Greeks of that time they tried to fend off that big invasion of Syracuse by always combining land forces and sea forces so they looked for confined situations on both land and sea like at Artemisium you've got quite the small passage for water and then obviously you've got Thermopylae as a very narrow path to block the Persians off and if one position was turned the other half of the strategy would have to withdraw as well so at Salamis we can see that strategy employed again because one of the narrows of the Salamis Strait are the last confined waters to confront the Persian fleet and to protect the Isthmus of Corinth which in turn was the last confined area where the Greek army could hope to fend off the Persian forces so the Greek knew that if when they got out of confined waters into open water they would be annihilated pretty soon because one they were outnumbered and that's always bad and second the Phoenicians were awfully good at their job so it seems and if you're in very fast ships like the Phoenicians obviously were since they won a race after the crossing of the Hellespont which ship in the Persian fleet is the fastest the ship of Sidon's king won that so well you've got skill and numbers against you in open water so you do not like that so that's why even the Phoenicians agreed to leave Attica and go over to Salamis and fight their action there instead of sailing away or trying their luck from some position at the Isthmus of Corinth OK so yeah so effectively the Greeks are they know they're kind of but the I guess the they're on the back foot navally in general and so that they're trying to exploit the I guess the home field advantages that they've got exactly and also well we can debate whether Herodotus makes that up or not so much but also we've got some some quite clever tinkering there ongoing from the Athenian commander Temistocles who first had to deal with the problems that every Greek fleet of that period is awfully tampered by the fact that there's no real central command and nearly every polis commander will have a say and if one polis doesn't agree it can simply sail away or go over to a Persian so Temistocles had to actually use some clever rhetorics to actually keep the Greeks in place and then send over the teacher of his kids to Xerxes to announce that a. the Greeks wanted to run away the next morning first thing and b. he Temistocles himself would like to negotiate a settlement with Persians and maybe switch sides so Xerxes actually thought well last time at Artemisium the Greeks got away from me in the dark so this time I'll deploy my fleet during the night so I can catch up any little Greek ships that tries to escape during the night and then well next morning they will all go up and desert and maybe some Athenian triremes which will be the bulk of the enemy's fleet will actually switch sides and well that will be a very great day for my navy without actually doing any serious fighting and then it doesn't yeah and then it doesn't quite work out for him the way he thought it would not really no ok so then well in that regard I would guess that triremes are the bulk of the battle fleet from every location regardless where we can see some difference or at least presume some differences is maybe some kind of building techniques like you might have different ways to put together the hulls and you might have slightly different materials like in Egypt well I think they must have imported the wood for their hulls presumably from Phoenicia and the Phoenicians themselves they would presumably use cedar trees for example from the mounts of Lebanon to build their ships that would be a slight difference to Greek ships built by Athens where pine and oak would be primarily used and also we've got some very crude rudimentary differences mentioned by Herodotus for the Battle of Salamis for example he mentions that the Persian ships would have been a little bit higher whereas the Greek ships would have been heavier so that could be explained for different reasons first the Greek ships might have been in action for longer without drying out so if your trireme isn't dried out properly you will naturally be heavier so slower to row then the Athenians especially didn't have that much experience in building triremes so maybe they well just didn't build them as good as some Phoenician guys and that way they came out heavier in terms of why the Persian ships are said to be higher could be that quite a lot of them still preferred boarding actions instead of maneuver tactics so you're a little bit of an advantage where if you're higher and maybe also they carried more marines than pre-Greek counterparts but I doubt that there were very distinguishable differences between those fleets because we've got also the story from Salamis that the commanding officer for the fleet from Halicarnassus on the Persian side was the Queen Artemisia and during the battle of Salamis she was pursued by an Athenian ship and decided my neighbor she didn't like that guy anyhow well I'll ramp him so that the Athenians will think oh she's on our side and she got away with that not only from the Athenians that the Athenians will not proceed 24公里的距離 而沒有眼鏡或任何其他東西 比人類的耳環還要遠 我認為會非常困難 甚至難以看到任何可以靠近的証明 是的 我估計這是正確的 是的 所以 當你有一艘船 在旋轉 在互相攻擊 當然 俄羅斯的攻擊 他們會搬遷軍人到希臘 至少他們會搬遷船橋 這對他們來說是很好的 但是 我們說過 這些船可能搬遷 通常會搬遷少數艘海軍 所以那些船會用來搬遷軍人 如果他們要做一個正確的抵達 或者是搬遷軍人 他們會用專用的運輸船 或是他們會搬遷軍人 用短距離運輸船 其實都會搬遷 例如 後來 亞非尼亞海軍的航行 我們有提到 奇曼 一名軍人 其實嘗試搬遷 亞非尼亞海軍的船 搬遷更多的海軍 例如 40艘船 而不是10艘船 這會提升你的能力 你可以搬遷船 或用舊船 搬遷少數艘海軍 或用艦艇 例如 如果你是艦艇 你不需要搬遷這麼快 希望你有船 幫助搬遷敵人的船 如果你想搬遷船 也需要搬遷專用運輸船 So for the campaign of Darius against Athens, which led to the Battle of Marathon, we know that he ordered the building of Kai-Ipagoga Ploiei, that's horse transport, and that needed to be specially constructed. We do not know how that ships looked like, but since he specifically ordered his vassal cities to build them, and we know that he landed cavalry at Marathon, or at least tried to before the Athenians came. That must have been a thing. For the Greeks, they rarely deployed cavalry, and I do not think that they ever tried to do a full-scale invasion by sea, using both cavalry and infantry in that numbers. But yeah, you could presumably also turn older triremes to hold some horses if you like to, and you found some poor guys to row their damn things, but those are fragile ships, and you even do not want your marines to move about too much on top in battle, so I wouldn't want to see a horse trampling around such a deck. Yeah, they're not the world's most stable craft. Definitely not. So once the Persians had kind of been seen off, you have this sort of interwar period I guess, between the Persians giving up on their main attempts to invade Greece, and then obviously later on when Alexander the Great decides it would be really nice to return the favor. But in that intervening period, the Greeks decided it would be a really good idea to fight each other, with various leagues being formed. So how did they end up turning the expertise that they gained in the Persian Wars on each other, and did that hand a particular advantage to perhaps the Greek city-states that had done most of the naval fighting, or did the others also kind of absorb the lessons pretty quickly? Well, at first it's a full advantage to Athens really, because Athens comes out of the war not only with the biggest navy of its day, at least for a Greek city, but also it forms its core league, the Delian-Attican League. And within that league, they would either compel the member cities to send ships, or to send money. And pretty damn sure they made clear that they preferred money, because when Athens got the money, they could control the ships directly, no risk of deserting allies. And they also needed the money to pay for the democracy, basically, because Teutis is now a full-fledged citizen of Athens with full political rights, which means he can sit in court. But if you sit in court for a day with 500 other Teutis, you can't work, so you need to be paid for that damn thing. So Athens' democracy pretty soon depends on the cash inflow from the Delian-Attican League, so that intermingles with the Athenian theory, like we need the sea to keep democracy and vice versa. And for Sparta and its League of Corinth, it's pretty much not that they discard the lessons, but Sparta only deployed like 10 warships for Salamis or so, so they didn't learn that awfully much, and relied on the land armies more. But in the Peloponnesian Wars, you've got that very interesting conundrum that Athens had used to be evacuated against invading forces by land, like they did against Persians, but now they have built a connection wall to the harbor, and could defend that wall, and basically act like an island on land, so that the Spartans would march to Attica, raid the countryside, and couldn't do anything against the Athenians behind the walls, while the Athenian fleet would happily sail around the Peloponnesian Peninsula, raid every coastal city they liked, and set up some forts as anchor points to attract fleeing slaves, Pelots from Sparta. That thing changed through two things mainly. First, Athens for some reason thought, well,brilliant idea, we are fighting already with the League of Corinth, let's sail our fleet all the way to Sicily and invade Syracuse, which is basically as big as we are, but if we conquer them, we will definitely have the upper hand against Sparta. Didn't turn out that well, because the Spartans also had the Corinthians as allies, those guys were pretty big in sailery as well, and helped Syracuse to fend off the Athenian navy, also by applying a little bit of innovation, like, before that time, you had to ram an enemy's ship on the broad side or the stern. Bow on bow ramming would simply lead to both ships sinking, because you caved in your ship as well. But the Corinthians strengthened their ships, so that they can ram bow on, the Athenians don't. Pretty soon the Athenians learned that trick as well, but that's a rare bit of innovation that you can see, and still trace down for that time period. And well, I talked a lot about money from the Athenians coming in, and that's also the trick that does it at least for their dawnfall, because the Spartans, which are thought to be very rich guys, in the first place, decide to talk to the Persians. And well, the Persians still have quite the grudge against Athens, for some reason. Shockingly,yes. And well, the Persians say, OK, infighting in Greek is just what we want, and finance a fleet for Sparta. And when Sparta gets that money in, they can have both the army and that nice little big fleet, and well, then that's actually conundrum for Athens, and everything ends in turmoil. Athens gets back from the loss of the Polynesian War quite well, and quite quickly, while Sparta just decides, oh yes, we've won, the fleet really wasn't our thing, let's let that war away, and we'll do battle on land, that's better for us. So it kind of, yeah, so the advantage shifts away from Athens, but then by the end of the war, it's kind of, it's gone back to Athens, mainly through apathy from everybody else before. No, that's after the war, like, Sparta wins that war, actually, and for a short time, Athens isn't a democracy any longer, but then, well, that goes away pretty quickly, and we've got the second fleet of Attica and Delhi province. OK, so, obviously, we've mentioned that the Syracuse campaign, and the Corinthian advances in how to ram head on. Were there any other differences with the intercity fighting between the Greek states that was different to fighting the Persians? And you kind of get the impression, at least on the surface, that fighting the Persians was kind of these sort of large fleets poking around, hoping that one or the other would make a critical mistake. Was there kind of this big fleet engagement in the various wars between the Greek states, or was it more sort of squadrons and flotillas of ships and sort of smaller-scale fighting? both, actually, you've got quite large engagements, like in the harbour of Syracuse, where we are talking, maybe 10, 20, 25,000 people on each side, so that's quite the big battles, for ancient times, at least. But since the Peloponnesian wars, at least, are quite longer than, well, the odd invasion of some big Persian army, we also have quite a lot of squadron fighting on smaller scale, so like maybe 10, 20, 25 ships on each side. And that would be where the Athenians, at least in the first parts of the war, would excel, because they had more experience in doing naval battles. And so that's the first thing. The scale would be different. The second, well, we can at least assume, or we would like to assume, that there was a little difference in actually the conduct of fighting, because, well, you don't have an invasion force from a foreign country, but, really, if the Athenians learned something from the Persians, then that, if you want to keep your allies your allies, you'll have to threaten them awfully good, so that they remain your allies, instead of going over to the other side. they're just equally as brutal as any Persian army would have been, and the Spartans don't give in that way also. So, no, you can't really say that there is a difference there. I already mentioned the bow and bow ramming, and, well, later, a short time before Alexander, we'll see some ship-borne artillery coming in, at least for defending cities, if not for stationing on board warships, but, that's really it. So the bulk of the fighting of Salamis would have looked pretty convincing to an admiral who sailed into the harbor of Syracuse a few decades later. So that brings us, I guess, to the last question in this particular video, which is, what happened to the Greek fleets between this last period of intercity fighting, and the rise of Alexander the Great, but when you see his campaigns, again, at least on a surface reading, you get the impression that an awful lot of the fleet that follows him down and around and all over the place, is made up of Phoenician vessels and other Persian satrapies that he's conquered. So were the Greek fleets kept? Was there a Greek fleet that he used, at least at first, or was it kind of just left to get all brought away? Okay, so in the beginning, when his father, Philip II of Macedon, really laid the foundations for a Macedonian state in northern Greece, which could lead to the conquest of his son, he had to deal with Athens, and Athens still had its navy, so Athens could threaten the Macedonian coast and resupply colony cities on the coast. That would be the main goal for the Athenian navy. There was also, during that time, established a small Macedonian navy, but that really didn't see any major battles, because, well, the other Greek city-states had better and larger navies at their disposal. We see, at some point, that Macedon captures an entire grain fleet of ships from the Greek city-states that tried to carry in grain from the Black Sea down to Athens and other cities, but that might have been an encounter, like the fleet was rounded up somewhere in the Bosporus region, more or less near shore, and the Macedonians just rode out and got their ships off them. When we are talking about Alexander's campaigns themselves, we can see some use of his fleet during his first Balkan campaign up north, for crossing the Danube and getting in contact with some guys who were trapped on an island, and later for his big voyage or conquering tour to the Persians, he has a fleet, supplied by his own fleet of ships and Athenian vessels and some other Greek states, so they were still active, but not used very much. And at some point during his stay in Asia Minor, Alexander decides that this fleet is awfully, awfully expensive to keep up, and he could use that money elsewhere, and,well, they wouldn't be as strong as the Persians anyhow, so he just tells them to go home, and does the rest of the trick with his army, by simply conquering the Persian strongholds which could resupply the Persian fleet. That is,well, a quite surprising encounter, because in theory, the Persians could have done all funny things with going around the Aegean with their naval supremacy, and just conquering Greek islands and city-states in Alexander's rear, but that doesn't happen too much, partly because the Persian commander who would have done such things dies, unfortunately for Alexander, and then he conquers quite a lot of Phoenician cities, as he mentions, and they supply him with a new fleet to do the Siege of Tyre. Later, we also see one, at least two new building, ship-building programs from Alexander. The first is in the Indus region, when he constructs a new fleet, mends it, and,well, leads, or at least orders, an expedition into the Arabian Sea, and following his cause on land. And then the second one is shortly before his death in Mesopotamia, so on the Euphrates and Tigris River. Also, a fleet was in construction there, presumably to conquer Arabia later on, but that didn't really catch up. But here, the Greek city-states still kept their navies, and it's only in that period that we see the switch from three road warships to four or five rowers, and,well, after that, it gets to a period that you've got some smaller city-states with their navies, Athens, for example, or Rhodes, but also the big Hellenistic empires, like the Seleucids or the Ptolemies, which built very large fleets of large ships, but that's when the territory ends for city-states, because,well, your typical city-state isn't even Athens, but more like a thousand guys bunched up on some hill near the sea, and,well, you can mend two, three triremes, but that's it, you can't compete with that numbers any longer. OK, so,yeah, there's a fair bit more naval development going on then, than just your, let's say, the standard narrative that you might read in a brief history of the period. OK, well, that's a very interesting little section that we've done there about... I'll try that last bit again. I didn't know where I was going with that. OK, so, that's quite an interesting section there on the naval combat in the Greco-Persian Wars, and,well, then the, I guess, Greco-Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, which helped fill in some of the naval development from the period way back in, well, not pre-history, but even further back in ancient history, and then getting up towards the period where you'd start to have naval artillery involved. So, thank you very much for lending us your expertise in this particular field, and, hopefully, we will talk again at some point about other ancient naval battles, and I hope everyone else has enjoyed it as much as I have. Certainly. Glad that you had me, and, well, get in contact if you'd like to talk about more stuff. Sure. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching. If you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review, let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry-doc questions.