Compared with medieval warships and navies, modern ones are
obviously superior on all counts. h e vessels employed in warfare
in the Middle Ages were small and dii cult to maneuver. h ey
were also incapable of navigating reliably when out of sight of
land, so “battles in the open sea were a near-impossibility,” Michael
Prestwich points out. “When l eets did engage, it was normally in
a harbor, or close in-shore. h e concept of ‘control of the sea’ is
one that is hard to apply to the medieval period. Ships could not
remain at sea for lengthy periods, and were too much at the mercy
of tides and winds to exercise really ef ective control.”33
Yet despite these many drawbacks of medieval ships, the role
they played in warfare was at the least signii cant and sometimes
vital. Whatever the individual physical limitations of these vessels,
they could travel faster than any land army. h is made them
extremely valuable for transporting soldiers and all the horses,
weapons, and food they required along either rivers or the coastlines
of the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Seas and Atlantic
Ocean. By building a l eet of ships, therefore, a European nation
could rapidly bring a large, well-supplied army to bear against
most national enemies. Oxford University scholar Felipe Fernandez-
Armesto says, “European naval superiority enabled military
expeditions to operate successfully, far from home, against
adversaries better endowed in every other kind of resource.”34
World History
