Seapower: The First Warships from Ancient Times to the Medieval World

In ancient times, the civilizations that grew up around it were the most important of their age. From Egypt through to Rome, it was Mediterranean nations who led the western world. Warfare was a vital part of their history. Naval warfare was no exception. It is no coincidence that the great nations of the ancient past were all familiar with the art of war at sea. Some of the battles they fought were amongst the most important in all history. Later on, in medieval times, the warship would also become a feature of the northern European world. This is the story of those distant days, the days of the first sea powers. In the history of the western world, the beginnings of sea warfare can be traced to Egypt. From earliest times, the Egyptians built boats for traveling up and down the great river Nile. By 3000 BC, Egyptian ships already ventured onto the waters of the Mediterranean. Surviving relief sculptures show the design of these early ships. They were powered both by the wind and by human muscle. Wind power was generated by a square sail on a bipod mast. Twenty or more oarsmen on either side of the vessel provided muscle power. When mast and sail were lowered. This was the basic design for seagoing Egyptian vessels for thousands of years. Relief sculptures also tell us how the Egyptians eventually modified their ships for the business of war. The earliest ever depiction of a naval battle can be found at the temple of the new kingdom pharaoh Ramesses III. Carved images show pharaoh's forces in action against an enemy described as northerners of the isles. Close examination of the relief shows that Egyptian warship designers introduced high washboards on either side of their vessels. These protected the rowers from enemy arrow and spear. The effectiveness of Egyptian archers and spearmen was improved by elevated decks at either end of the ship. The crow's nest structure on the mast may also have been for the benefit of the archers. The main enemies of ancient Egypt were first of all people who lived upstream further south up the river Nile and probably to a lesser extent Mediterranean peoples threatening the Nile delta. Most Egyptian warfare is directed upstream and here they'll have been attacking or fighting against people at a rather less developed level of civilization whose ships probably copied Egyptian ships. At best they were pale reflections of Egyptian ships perhaps smaller less mobile. The people who attacked ancient Egypt from across the Mediterranean seem to have come in boats which resembled Viking longships. Not built in the same way but that sort of arrangement single banks of oars with warriors in them. Here the Egyptians would have had the advantage of the space which they provide for the fighting men. Not strictly sailors but the sorts of fighting men that you would see in a land battle. Archers, javelin men. Egyptian warships provide more and higher space for these people and Egyptian bowmen were extremely good quality. They're renowned in the ancient world and so it's the conditions which allow these people to fight most effectively which mean that Egyptian warships were famous. Egypt was not the only naval power of its age. To the north the Minoans and then the Mycenaeans were known for their seafaring skills. For centuries Crete was the home base of a substantial fleet although our knowledge of the ships they used is limited. The Cretans were attributed with designing the first warships. Their ideas were certainly adopted by the next great sea power in the eastern Mediterranean the Phoenician. Based around the cities of Tyre and Sidon, Phoenicia was a grouping of independent city-states that flourished around the turn of the first millennium BC. They were primarily a nation of traders. In their pursuit of trade they became legendary seafarers. We know that Phoenician merchant ships traveled beyond the Mediterranean. It is even possible that they circumnavigated the African continent. It is virtually certain that they traveled as far as Cornwall to acquire the tin needed to produce bronze. The evolution of the Phoenician warship was linked to the merchant trade providing defense for the merchant shipping routes. The design adopted would profoundly influence the later development of battleships. As in Egypt, Phoenician ships were powered by both sail and oar. They were long slim vessels, war galleys built for speed and maneuverability with two steering oars for direction. Surviving images also prove that they were fitted with a bronze weapon that would feature again and again in ancient warship design, the ram. It's very difficult to determine exactly when the true ram developed. Early depictions of ships on phases show an extension of the keel beyond the main hull which may be an offensive ram or may just be a forefoot, just an extension. At some stage somebody obviously discovered that running into another ship with this forefoot could knock a hole in it and therefore got the idea of using that offensively. Once it's realized that one can fight in this way by destroying one's enemy by ramming them, this then puts a premium on the speed and maneuverability of one's ships. Because the ships are all powered, people then presumably start looking for ways of packing more men into the same length of hull and this is one reason why multiple level ships developed where you've got oarsmen not at a single level but at two and later three levels. So that same length of ship has twice as much power, propulsive power, without sacrificing any of the maneuverability of a shorter hull. For extra speed, Phoenician warships were designed with not one but two banks of rowers. The lower bank were seated along the main body of the galley, while the upper bank were positioned in extensions known as outriggers. In themselves, these outriggers provided valuable stability in a long narrow ship. The extra muscle power accommodated within them made the Phoenician warship a formidable opponent. Ships like this succeeded in protecting the merchant fleet. For a time, the city of Tyre became the richest in the world and the Phoenicians established colonies across the Mediterranean region. The Phoenicians had a very important impact on the design of warship. The Syrian palace reliefs of the late 8th century, that is to say about 700 BC, rather crudely depict Phoenician vessels of two banks of oars and with what I call a kind of proto ram, a small ram. The ram makes a major change to naval warfare and hence to warships because it means that ships are capable of fighting in a rather different way. Before the ram, you fight your enemies rather as if you're fighting a battle on land. You come alongside and you bombard them. You could do that on land. But with a ram, you've got a different way of knocking out enemy ships. The ram enables specifically naval tactics to evolve. It means that seamanship, the ability to row and steer skillfully, become very, very important. It's the great change in ancient naval warfare. As Phoenicia flourished, another group of city-states in the region began to prosper, the Greek city-states. Like the Phoenicians, the Greeks were traders and colonists for whom mobility at sea was vital. From the 8th century BC, they began to spread out into the Mediterranean. For trade, they relied on the pentaconter, an undecked, light-hulled vessel with square sail and 25 oarsmen either side. The pentaconter was strongly influenced by the merchant galleys. A fast ship, it was said it could overtake any other vessel on the Mediterranean. Often, this advantage would be used against the ships of other nations. Many a voyage would lead to a substantial booty of looted cargo. For a time, the Greeks with their pentaconters were the greatest buccaneers of the Mediterranean. Greek warships were also influenced by the Phoenicians. Early Greek examples were virtual copies of the Phoenician two-bankers. History has come to know these ships after the Latin phrase meaning two oars, birenes. The Greek birene is a striking example of a phenomenon that features repeatedly in the history of warship design, the theft of rival nations' ideas. The similarities between the Greek and Phoenician vessels are obvious, although some differences do occur. Primarily, the Greek birene was lighter. For ramming strength, a storming bridge or cacostroma ran the full 80 foot length of the vessel. The ship's keel was also designed to provide the strength needed for ramming. It's difficult to say who first introduced keels to boat design because we don't have the archaeological evidence to prove this. It's quite likely that keels were introduced in different parts of the ancient world at different times in parallel developments. The importance of the keel to the design of a boat is that it allows a larger, a stronger, a more stable structure to be built. In terms of warships, that means bigger, more men in it, it can move faster, it can have more missile men in it, it's a bigger thread. Despite these design innovations, the birene would soon be surpassed as the standard Greek ship of war. Around the 6th century BC, a new kind of vessel was introduced, as the Greeks sought a warship more powerful than ever before. Far and away, the most distinctive feature of this new kind of vessel was its additional bank of rowers. The two-banked birene now became the three-banked trirene. It would become the most famous warship of the ancient world. Contemporary images of trirenes are few, restricted to depictions on surviving Greek vases. From ancient writers, however, we can build up a reasonably clear idea of the ship's design. Like its predecessors, the trirene was powered by both sail and oar. A standard ship of its time was around 125 feet long and 20 feet wide. The crew totaled about 200. 170 of these were oarsmen. This concentration of muscle power produced remarkable results. The top speed of a trirene was around seven knots, all of it as a result of massive human effort. The working conditions for a trirene oarsman must have been extremely hard. The Greek oarsmen were not slaves, as is commonly believed. They were free citizens of their city states, and they volunteered to serve at sea rather than on land as a hoplite, the citizen warrior of the era. So they were well motivated, but they must have worked in very hard, cramped conditions, and effectively they had to be as fit and as strong as a modern international rower. The conditions in a trirene were cramped, unpleasant, and smelly. There's a passage in a comedy by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes which talks about rowers farting in each other's faces. You've got to imagine three rows of rowers. The people on the top have got their backside roughly at nose level with the people in the second row. The people in the second row have got their backside roughly at nose level of the people down below. So there's a lot of bodily odors wafting around in this ship. The positioning of the rowers responsible for this unprecedented performance remains the greatest mystery of the trirene design. There are two contending theories. The first suggests that the oarsmen were positioned in banks one above the other. The other theory argues that there were only two banks, with one oarsman on the lower level and two on the top. However the rowers were positioned, we know that their power resulted in an awesome instrument of war. The trirene's ram was a fearsome device, a three-pronged metal spur with the potential to cause catastrophic damage to enemy vessels. Just above it was the all-seeing eye, the most recognisable feature of any Greek warship. The all-seeing eye which features so prominently on Greek warships was used extensively by the Greeks but in fact went back to the Egyptians where it was seen as the eye of Horus, one of the Egyptian gods, and the idea of it being there was it helped the ship to navigate through difficult and dangerous seas. The trirene represented a new era in warship design, power and strength and it soon became famous throughout the known world. The trirene was the first, we think, the first three-level ship with rowers at three levels, 170 rowers packed into the hull, 62 on top, 54 in the middle, 54 on the bottom. This would appear to have been the optimal design for speed and manoeuvrability, so the optimal design for ramming. It was the type of warship which was the most common in the ancient world for about a thousand years, from the 6th century BC through to the 4th century AD. It was also the basic ship of the fleets of classical Athens at her height, so it really was the most important ship design of the ancient world and it was a design from which all subsequent board warships of the ancient world were developed. It can be reasonably suggested that had it not been for the development of the trirene, the world would now be a profoundly different place. In the early 5th century BC, the Greeks were at war with the Persians. In 480 BC, a huge Persian fleet commanded by King Xerxes took on a Greek fleet of trirenes commanded by Themistocles. The Persians were superior in number but the cunning of the Greeks would prove decisive in the Battle of Salamis. The two fleets engaged in the Bay of Eleusis on the Aegean island of Salamis. The Persians attacked from the south through the narrow channels leading into the bay. With Xerxes watching from his throne on an overlooking clifftop, one of the most important events in ancient history took place. The Persians were numerically superior but this was to prove their undoing. In the narrow waterways, they lacked room for maneuver in their tall bulky vessels. Hampered in their mobility, the Persian ships presented an easy target for the trirene's rams. 200 Persian ships were lost. Only 40 Greek vessels perished. The day belonged to Themistocles. Had the result been different, the immeasurable contribution made by later Greeks to western civilization may never have happened. How the world would have developed in that scenario can only be guessed. The success of the trirene led to the incorporation of still more oarsmen in later warships. The famous quadrirenes and quinquerines had four or five banks of rowers. It is highly unlikely that these banks of men were positioned one above the other. It is also unlikely that they all powered one oar. Probably some of the oars were pulled by more than one man. The desire for increased oar power led to a Mediterranean arms race. By the 5th century, the standard man of war was the trirene. The Greek word for that was trieres, meaning triply furnished. In other words, having three oarsmen. But as time developed in the 4th and 3rd century, there was actually an increase in the number of oarsmen used on the ships, though not in the banks of oars themselves, which were usually three on a large vessel. There was one particular ship built by a successor general to Alexander, a man called Demetrius Poliocates. He had a ship built in about 306, which was a septirene. In other words, it had seven rowers. There were about 350 of them, 200 marines. That's a very large vessel. It must have been about 40 metres long, with a very heavy bronze ram. It also carried protection. It was a sort of armoured vessel. It's been called the dreadnought of its age. Such vessels were very successful, but they were expensive to produce and maintain. You actually needed a very strong economy to enable you to do that. So if the economy of the supporting state was not strong, then such vessels could not be maintained. In Egypt, Ptolemy III built a ship known as Atesa Conteres, with 40 banks of oars and 4,000 rowers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this monster ship was never used. Soon afterwards, the fashion for enormous warships began to fade. In addition to ship design, the Greeks made other important contributions to the history of sea power. Tactically, they adopted two specific battle procedures. The first was known as the periplous, a manoeuvre intended to outflank the enemy and attack him in the stern. By contrast, the dieplous involved a direct assault on the enemy line of ships. Having pierced the line, a wheel manoeuvre, left and right, would be deployed to attack the unprotected rear of the broken line. Tactics like these proved remarkably successful in battles between warring Greek states and external enemies, such as Carthage. In weaponry too, the Greeks were innovators. The Macedonian Demetrius Poliorcetes is credited with introducing shipboard catapults for firing heavy darts at enemy vessels. He is also credited with the invention of the ballistae, a device for bombarding rival ships with bowlers. The Greeks were as innovative in naval warfare as they were in every other aspect of life. There is no doubt that the Trireme was the greatest warship of the ancient Mediterranean. However, by the third century BC, a new power began to rise in the west, Rome. Spreading out from central Italy, Roman ships would eventually come to dominate the whole of the Mediterranean. They were not originally a seagoing people, but by adopting the best ideas of their rivals and applying them with their customary genius and courage, they became masters of the sea for centuries. The story of Roman naval power begins with the first Punic war against Carthage. At the beginning of the third century BC, Carthage was the dominant power of the western Mediterranean, a seagoing trading nation of Phoenician descent. Her quadriremes and quinqueremes were especially famed in the region. When war broke out with Rome over the island of Sicily in 264 BC, the Carthaginian navy looked likely to prevail against a nation with no seafaring experience. However, Rome now determined to make herself a naval force to be reckoned with. Unfortunately for the Carthaginians, one of their quinqueremes was beached and abandoned early in the conflict. Finding it, the Romans decided to copy its design wholesale. A fleet of 100 quinqueremes was constructed along Carthaginian lines, but with one significant innovation. The Romans were always keen to fight the way they knew best, as they did on land. This meant a strong role for marine troops in Roman naval tactics. The key to Roman success in naval warfare was the complement of fighting men, marines, on board their ships. The Romans build a navy. They're not expert sailors, they're not trained rowers, they're not going to be able to match the skill of the Carthaginian navy. So the way that the Romans set about fighting their naval battles is by transforming the sea into land, by counteracting the superior naval ability of the Carthaginians, and allowing the Roman strength with their foot soldiers, their infantrymen, to dominate. What they do is develop a special boarding bridge, which makes them particularly efficient at boarding tactics. And this is the so-called corvus, the crow, which is a sort of boarding plank with a big spike on the end, which they drop on the opposing ship as they come nearby, and locks the two ships together, and allows the Roman legions to pull across this boarding bridge and sweep away their opponents and capture their enemies. And this is so effective initially that the Carthaginians have no answer to it. The disadvantage of the great boarding bridge is that it makes the Roman ships horribly unwieldy and unstable, and whenever they're caught in the storm they lose hundreds of ships at a time. So the development doesn't last for very long, but it does introduce Rome to naval power. It forces them to create a navy, and it sets Rome up as the major naval power of the first Western and later the Eastern Mediterranean. In 260 BC, at the Battle of Mali northeast of Sicily, the new Roman fleet destroyed 44 Carthaginian ships and killed or captured 10,000 men. It was a sign of things to come. By 241 BC, another great naval victory at the Aegetes Islands marked the end of the first war with Carthage. Less than a hundred years later, Roman victory in the Third Punic War resulted in the complete destruction of its enemy forever. Rome was now the master of the Western Mediterranean. It takes the Romans time to become a naval power. They don't initially know how to do it. They're not terribly good at weather. They allow their ships to get blown against headlands. There's one spectacular case of a bluff Roman commander. He wants to get stuck into the Carthaginians. He wants to fight their fleet. And before you go into battle in the ancient world, you have to consult the gods. You're not going to win unless God is on your side. And so this man, Clodius, consults the gods. He gives some food to the sacred chickens who are kept on board the flagship and he observes. Will they eat? Won't they eat? He's observing the response of the gods and the chickens refuse to eat. So no deal, no battle is the message from the gods. And Clodius, he wants to fight. He thinks it's a good opportunity. And so he kicks the chickens over the side and says if they won't eat, let them drink. And he leads his fleet into battle and they're destroyed. He ignored the warning of the gods. In fact, he lost the battle because he put his fleet in a bad position off a lee shore with the wind likely to blow his fleet onto rocks. Bad leadership. Inexpert leadership. But the Romans become a naval power by sheer determination and by numbers. The Romans are not troubled by the loss of a hundred ships, a few tens of thousands of men. They replace them. They've got almost unlimited manpower resources at this time and they use them. Soon, the whole of the greatest European sea was under Roman control. In 67 BC, Pompey led a three year naval campaign against pirates in the eastern Mediterranean. In three years, his fleet of 500 ships achieved its purpose. The pirates were cleared from the sea. The Mediterranean was divided into 13 administrative regions and Rome was now unchallenged as the dominant naval power of the age. By Pompey's time, the Roman method of sea warfare had subtly changed. The spiked gangway fell from favor and the use of the ram grew more widespread. To give the ram real power, Roman galleys were built large and heavy. Against external enemies, the heavy galley proved itself effective, notably during a campaign against Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. However, another type of Roman warship then began to be deployed. This was the Liburnian, a faster, lighter vessel than the traditional heavy galley. Originally a uniream, Roman designers later added a second bank of oars. This resulted in a highly maneuverable warship, one that would dominate the first millennium AD. The Liburnian proved itself at the Battle of Actium. Following the death of Julius Caesar, Rome was ridden with internal dispute. This led to war between the forces of Octavian and the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. On September the 2nd, 31 BC, on the northwest coast of Greece, the Roman-Egyptian fleet met in battle the ships of Octavian commanded by Agrippa. Antony's ships were traditional heavy galleys, while Agrippa's vessels were the new, lighter Liburnians. It was these vessels that won the day. Their mobility enabled them to avoid ruin from enemy ramming. In addition, Agrippa adopted the devastating tactic of ramming the enemy's oars. The speed of his ships meant that Antony's crews were unable to pull the oars aboard in time. With Agrippa winning the day, first Cleopatra, then Antony withdrew. Agrippa's victory was of massive importance to the history of Rome. Soon, Octavian became Augustus Caesar, and Rome became an empire. The sea power of Rome extended far beyond the Mediterranean. By the time of the Battle of Actium, Roman warships had already ventured into northern European waters. Off the coasts of Gaul, Julius Caesar led a fleet of ships against the sailing vessels of the Veneti tribe. Here you have a Mediterranean power from a tidal landlocked sea facing up to the problems of sea warfare on the open tidal Atlantic, and it's clear that the battle was a fairly even one. The problem the Romans had was the ships of the Veneti were clearly extremely different. They were made of oak and the scantling of the timbers, that is their dimensions, was extremely large. So much so that the rams at the front of traditional Roman warships were ineffective against the Venetic fleet. The one advantage which the Romans had was that the Veneti were absolutely dependent on sail for moving their ships anywhere. The Romans took advantage of this in two ways. First of all, they constructed for themselves essentially a series of very long-handled billhooks with which they caught and eventually cut through the halyards which held the yard arms of the Venetic ships in place, thus bringing down the yards and sails and immobilising the ships, allowing the Romans then to board them. After a bit the Venetic fleet broke off the engagement and started to retreat, and here Caesar had enormous good fortune. His ships of course were powered by oars in the traditional Mediterranean fashion, and what happened was the wind dropped. So the Venetic fleet was totally becalmed and simply couldn't move, whereas Caesar's ships could still. So they were able to catch up with the Venetic fleet and because the Veneti could do little to manoeuvre or avoid the Roman fleet, the Romans were able to board them, capture their ships and destroy this extremely powerful fleet. In the centuries that followed, Rome had no rival as a sea power. In the Mediterranean, the Empire remained master of the seas long after it split into East and West. For 11 centuries, the Eastern Empire, based at Constantinople, continued to maintain a substantial fleet of ships. In that time, warship design hardly altered at all. Well into the second millennium AD, ships built to the basic Libernian design continued to patrol the Mediterranean. Not even the rise of Islam could dent the Roman domination. In the 8th century, Muslim sieges of Constantinople were repeatedly repelled by Roman sea power. This was partly due to the introduction of a terrifying new weapon, Greek fire. In use from the 7th century, Greek fire was an incendiary mixture, probably a combination of naphtha, sulphur and pitch. In battle, it was thrown like a grenade or blown through copper tubes onto an enemy ship. Contemporary writers relate how the end of these tubes were decorated to look like monster's heads to enhance the terror generated by the new weapon. Greek fire's effectiveness stemmed from the fact that water could not extinguish its flames. In fact, it simply made matters worse. Only sand, vinegar or urine could tame its destructive power. When used effectively, Greek fire could cause devastation in an enemy fleet. For centuries, its exclusive use by the Romans enabled them to continue their mastery of the Mediterranean. As Byzantine Rome battled the Muslims off the coasts of southern Europe, in the north, a completely new sea power prepared to announce itself. The age of the Vikings was about to begin. By 800 AD, this Scandinavian warrior race had succeeded in designing a completely new kind of warship, the longship. With the Western Roman Empire having long broken up, the opportunities for conquest available to a developing naval power were substantial. Over the next centuries, it was the Scandinavian Vikings who took advantage of the seas of northern Europe. Their ships remain their most memorable achievement. We know from archaeological discoveries that Scandinavian ship design developed gradually in the early centuries AD. At the start of that period, their vessels were unsophisticated. However, the Scandinavians soon began to make advances in design. The oar was introduced, sail was also discovered and Scandinavian vessels began to be fitted with a genuine keel. By AD 800, they had developed a ship that would enable them to dominate Europe for an age. This was the legendary longship. I think the Viking longship comes across as a revolutionary instrument of war. It allowed its users a strategic mobility and the ability to land forces almost anywhere that they chose. Fighting at sea was actually quite rare in the 10th and 11th century, which was the high point of the longship, although there was a great battle in 1030 where King Olaf, Saint Olaf as he's known, was defeated by his enemies. That was very much like a land battle at sea. The ships got locked together and then the Vikings had at one another with axes, spears and arrows in the traditional saga manner. And what you have to say about the longship was that its importance was really that it was so manoeuvrable in strategic terms rather than in tactical encounters. Detailed evidence for the design of the longship is not extensive. It is limited to accounts in ancient Norse sagas and some priceless archaeological finds. Despite this, a clear picture of the longship does emerge. By AD 1000, the design had become established in Scandinavia. By then, it was already terrifyingly familiar to people across northern Europe. The classic longships were built in three different sizes, all of them narrow in the beam. The largest of them were 150 feet in length, 20 feet wide and carried a crew of 180. Power was generated by the old combination of square sail and muscle power. Smaller longships carried 40 rowers or less. The largest carried over 60. In terms of their construction, the most distinctive feature of the longship was that it was clinker built. The hull was made up of overlapping planks, riveted together and secured against the water or caulked with tarred rope. The unusually high bow and stern were constructed from a single piece of timber, as was the keel. It was on ships like these the Viking warriors set out on their missions of conquest in the Europe of the Middle Ages. The Viking longship was a substantial advance in boat design because it enabled the Vikings to move in pretty hostile waters. The oared warships of the ancient Mediterranean were pretty flimsy constructions, even the big ones, and they could only function in relatively calm seas. They fought in summer, they couldn't cope with heavy weather, serious waves. Whereas the Viking longship had the flexibility through its special construction to ride with the waves of the North Sea of the North Atlantic. They enjoyed very considerable successes because their boats are capable of traveling upriver and downriver across Russia to the Black Sea, but they're also capable of sailing around the North Sea, through the Channel, around the coasts of France and Spain, into the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar, delivering Viking warriors on their pillaging expeditions. Viking warships are primarily means of transporting fighting men to a place where they will then engage in typically Viking habits of raping, pillaging, plundering, burning, killing, what they enjoy doing. The longship was a superb instrument of war. The medium-sized vessels in particular were especially effective. No tribe or nation in Europe would construct anything to match it for speed and mobility. In the early Viking raids on northern Europe, they encountered no seaborne opposition whatsoever. Theirs were the only effective warships in the whole region, and they carried the fearsome Viking warriors as far south as Spain. Soon, the natives of lands visited by the Viking raiders began to construct their own warships in an attempt to meet the Scandinavian menace. For their design, they simply copied the sleek contours of their enemies' great vessels. Scotland, England, and France, amongst others, built ships to the Viking design. According to ancient chronicles, Alfred the Great built a fleet of ships, some of which had more than 60 oars. It is likely that these vessels were also built to the design pioneered by his Viking enemy. This fashion for imitation is confirmed by the tapestry. In depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the tapestry includes an image of the Mora, William the Conqueror's flagship. The Viking influence in its design is obvious. However, by 1066, the Scandinavians were already responding to this wholesale theft of their great ship design. Notably, they added additional horizontal planks to their later ships. This increase in the freeboard enabled the Viking crews to fire weapons such as arrows and darts down at their enemies, and undoubtedly increased their ability to fight. As late as 1300 AD, the warships of medieval northern Europe were virtually all built to the longship design. With the later Middle Ages, however, the history of seapower moves towards a new age. The longship would be the last great ship of war whose strength derived from the power of the oar. The invention of the rudder and radical improvements in the design of sails would result in a new kind of warship, more powerful than anything seen before. The discovery of gunpowder would also have radical implications for the ship of war as the Middle Ages drew to a close. A new chapter in the history of naval warfare was about to begin.