War Galley

The war galley is an oared warship with a long, slender hull, shallow draft and low freeboard, built to move independently of wind and current under human muscle power even though most galleys also carried sails for use when conditions allowed, a design that developed in the Mediterranean world in antiquity and continued in active use, in successively updated forms, until the early nineteenth century. From the introduction of shipboard cannon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Mediterranean navies mounted heavy guns in the bow of the galley to fight alongside its traditional ramming and boarding tactics, producing the gunpowder-era war galley that remained the characteristic warship of Mediterranean fleets long after sailing warships had come to dominate the open oceans of the Atlantic, most famously at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, one of history's largest galley engagements. Naval powers including Venice, the Ottoman Empire, Spain and France maintained large galley fleets throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, before galleys were finally phased out as sail- and steam-powered warships rendered the type obsolete.