Medieval ships questions.

[Leet Eriksson]

Was there something like an armoured warship in medieval times? After reading about the korean turtle ships it made me wonder why no one ever thought of this invention before. Discounting of course the rows of shield placed on antiquity ships like roman or greek ships.

The only thing close was the "taboot" the arabs placed on their ships to not expose archers to enemy fire, but then again the arabs derived their designs from the byzantines, the first arab navy was built in syria and egypt, so it leads me to think byzantine engineers were involved in helping them build it.

[edyzmedieval]

Well there were many types of ships...

There were:

Trireme(the last greek type of warship)
Quinquireme(Roman type)
Dromons(Byzantines used them)
Fire Galleys(extensively used by the Byzantines, see Greek Fire)
Galliots(smaller galleys)
Galleys(the most used warship in Medieval times)
Caravels, Cogs, Carracks(improved Galleys, used especially by Catholics)
Galleon(improved Galley)
Galleas(the most powerful Galleys)
Longboats(Viking ship)

That's what I know...

Apart from the Koreans, I don't know nothing about armoured warships

[The Wizard]

Triremes, quadriremes and quinquiremes in medieval times had a single big difference that set them apart from their ancient namesakes. That was the fact that instead of having the amount of oars per row as their name implied (three for the trireme, four for the quadrireme, five for the quinquireme), they simply had a single oar per row, but they had a certain amount of oarsmen depending on their name (three for trireme... etc).

So, a medieval trireme as, for instance, deployed by Mehmed II had a third of the oars of a Greek trireme, but the same amount of oarsmen.



~Wiz