March 12, 2025 • 44 mins
When it comes to intercontinental trade in the Middle Ages, the Silk Road seems to get all the love. But the movement of people and goods between kingdoms and continents was made possible in large part by water. This week, Danièle speaks with Amanda Respess about ships and shipbuilding in the medieval world, what we know about early global trade routes, and the fascinating bits of archaeology we’re still finding under the sea.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty
two of The Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabolski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. When it comes to intercontinental
trade in the Middle Ages, the Silk Road seems to
get all the love, but on this precious blue planet,
the movement of both people and goods between kingdoms and
(00:37):
continents was made possible, in large part by water. This week,
I spoke with doctor Amanda Respis about ships and shipbuilding
in the pre modern world. Amanda is an assistant professor
of pre modern world history at Ohio State University and
the author of many works on global trade and pre
modern shipwrecks. Her new book is Global Ships, Seafaring, Shipwrecks
(01:01):
and Boat Building in the Global Middle Ages. Our conversation
on the many ways pre modern ships were built, what
we know about early global trade routes, and the fascinating
bits of archaeology we're still finding under the sea is
coming up right after this. Well welcome, Amanda. It is
(01:21):
so nice to meet you. I really enjoyed your Cambridge
Elements on global ships, and I'm so excited to be
talking to you about this today. So welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank you so much for having me. It's really my
pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I am just looking forward to this conversation so much. Okay,
So the first place I think we need to start
is why do you need to write a book about
global ships in the first place, Like, don't don't we
already know about global ships? Why are we writing this book?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Exactly? Well, for me, you know, Global Ships has a
few origin stories. One of them is I'm really obsessed
with you know, as a premodernist, I'm really obsessed with
things people don't know about the Middle Ages, right the
same I think that we have a lot of assumptions
(02:07):
about what the world was like in the distant past,
and we have a lot of assumptions that make us
think it was radically different in certain ways than it
is today. And technology is a divide inline for a
lot of historians and for archaeologists. Sometimes we can imagine
that our technologies today are universally superior in every possible
(02:29):
way to what people were doing in the Middle Ages
or even in the Bronze Age. I actually go into
in Global Ships, and there's a political worldview behind that
that I think is important to critique and push back
against a bit. So the story of seafarers, you know,
at least if you go through public education in the
United States, is often very much framed around Christopher Columbus,
(02:52):
the voyages of Columbus across the Atlantic. You know, in
fourteen ninety two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, and we
sometimes fall believe that that is when a long distance
seafaring really began in earnest and that is just absolutely
not the case. I teach classes about maritime history, and
my undergrads usually come in to the class with that expectation,
(03:15):
and then we start looking at shipwrecks from the Middle
Ages and even from the Bronze Age, and you know,
the first part of the semester is just getting everyone's
jaw off the floor. Yeah, yeah, and we realize, okay,
you know what, there was intensive long distance connection and
trade in the pre modern world and really sophisticated ships
(03:36):
that pulled that off. And so I wanted to be
able to create something that would be accessible for my
students first of all, but I also, you know, I
work in a very interdisciplinary space, and I know a
lot of people in history and anthropology who are interested
in shipwrecks, right, who are interested every time there's a
(03:57):
news article that comes out about you know, you find
and they want to incorporate that in some way into
their thinking and into their teaching. And so I thought, well,
you know what, maybe I can produce something. I can
be an archaeology to history translator. And so that's one
of the goals of global ships.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
We do need those. We always need a baseline to
work with, and the easier that goes down, the better.
So the Cambridge Elements being short and in a lot
of ways comprehensive despite their size, I think it gives
us all a place to start. And so I think
one of the best things that you do is start
your element with talking about the fact that Earth is
(04:37):
mostly ocean. And when you start to look at ocean
instead of land, it changes everything.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
It changes everything. Yeah, yeah, it radically changes things. And
I was actually talking with my students yesterday in class
about mapping, right, how we see the world, how we
visualize the space that we inhabit. It's so shaped by mapping,
and we were looking at and talking about these really
cool woven maps that are used to teach navigation in
(05:07):
the Austronesian tradition, and instead of mapping land, they map water.
They map water currents and sensations you might expect when
you're out at sea, and their maps they're sensory maps,
but they're not visual and they're not based on land.
So yeah, I think it's important to shake up how
we see this world that we inhabit.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yes, and I mean we don't need to dive into
modern politics right away, or maybe not at all. We'll
see how it goes, but I think we do maybe
we too, you know, being Canadian, I'm thinking quite a
lot about the global melting of the ice caps and
how that's changing and making more ocean roots that weren't
even possible before. They weren't really part of the discussion
(05:50):
until things really started to melt. And so I mean
people looking for the Northwest passage, but you know what
I mean, it's not the same as sailing in other
parts of the globe, but now it's starting to become
a really important part of geopolitical discussion. So looking at
the oceans changes how we look at things for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, And the intersections right between the oceans and life
on land that our coastal areas right, are deeply impacted
by climate change. And the work I do in the
Indian Ocean right is framed by the monsoon season and
fluctuations and climate like we're experiencing now are really impacting that,
and that will have consequences that it's even hard for
(06:30):
us to imagine right now.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yes, Well, one of the sentences that really jumped out
at me, and we don't have to stick with again,
we don't stick with Mediterranean, but one of the sentences
that really jumped out at me was the wind is
a hidden driver of Mediterranean history. And so can you
talk a little bit about the way that currents and
wind really shaped global ships?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Absolutely, I thank you for that question. So we think
a lot about power, right when we think about history,
we think about what forces are making things happen, and
we usually think about that in political terms, but there
are environmental powers that absolutely structure human activity. And wind
direction is a really big one. When we go back
(07:12):
to the age, before having the luxury of a motor
that you can use to get yourself where you need
to be, your ship was going to be driven by
the wind primarily or rowing, you know, those were your
two options, or some kind of propulsion and wind direction
is the decider of where you can go. And there
(07:35):
are also factors like the season where it's actually safe
to sail. Right. There's terrible visibility in the Mediterranean for
a lot of the year, and historically it was really
safe to only go out around the summer, a little
bit before, a little bit after. So it's wind direction
in the sailing season, and at least in the eastern
half of the Mediterranean, the predominant wind was blowing sort
(07:57):
of towards the Levant and towards Egypt, and so the
trade routes that developed harnessed that. But I think it
really kind of privileged, you know, a lot of what
we see then happening politically and economically in Egypt. You know,
there's an environmental piece.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To that story, absolutely, And I'm thinking a lot about
somebody else who wrote a Cambridge element, which is James
Flexner who wrote on Oceana, and I had him on
the podcast couple years ago talking about that and wind
direction was so important for that part of the world
because you had to be able to come back right
exactly dependent on the wind very much.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and the Austronesians are such an incredible example of
a couple of things I talk about in global shifts.
You know, One is things we should know about people
we should know about that we often don't. I feel
like Austerronesian seafaring deserves a lot more airtime in our
history classes than it gets. But yeah, the power of
the wind in the Pacific that the entire I mean
(08:55):
talk about an age of discovery. The Austronesians, you know,
emerged out of the coast of China, went to Taiwan
thousands of years ago, and then the Philippines Southeast Asia,
and then populated the entire Pacific. And they were able
to do that because of their technology. But it was
technology that was specifically aimed at responding to the wind
(09:17):
direction and needing to sail against it, and then being
able to have the kind of life jacket of then
letting that wind give you a ride home.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Right, Yeah, I mean without it you are stuck. I mean,
I see people who are in landlocked places may not
consider how much the wind really affects how much you
can travel when it comes to the ocean. And I
think still this is still the case today, even with
motorized boats like yeah, yeah, we have to respect what
(09:49):
nature is getting us in terms of what we can
possibly do. So one of the things I found so
interesting about this discussion of global ships is you do
talk about technology, and I think when we think about
building a ship, it's got wood, it's got nails. This
is definitely not the case. So O, can you tell
us a little bit about some of the technologies people
(10:10):
were using to build their hulls?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Sure, So the type of watercraft that you find, you know,
in different parts of the pre modern world, are built
from the materials that are available and for the specific
needs of that maritime climate. Right, so things like the
shape of your hull is going to have to work
for what your coastline is. Like Junkumura has done, who's
a maritime archaeologist, has done some fantastic work about the
(10:36):
different shipbuilding styles that you see in East Asia and
how the coastline of Yellow Sea is much more shallow
water and there are shifting sandbanks, and so you tend
to see a more flat type of hull, whereas in
southern China and Southeast Asia you see much deeper halls
that can carry a lot of cargo. But not all
ships are made with nails. So we do see that
(10:59):
in many parts of the world. World, but the specialty
of shipbuilding, the dow tradition in the Indian Ocean are
soone ships. They're literally wooden planks that are fastened together
with cord, and there are some real advantages to that.
They've been disparaged by a lot of European writers in
the past who've looked at it as a sign of
(11:21):
a lack of civilization, right, And it turns out no,
they actually have real advantages in the Indian Ocean. And
we also see the lashing together of hulls in Southeast Asia.
It's a different process and a different tradition, the lash
lug method. But yeah, there's a lot of variety of
even how you put if it is a wooden plank ship,
(11:43):
how you put these pieces of wood together changes from
place to place.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, I need to ask this question because I think
these sone planks are so fascinating. Yeah, so what are
the advantages. Is it just you get slightly more flexibility,
which is important for that environment.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, you get so, you get flexibility, and so a
great example of why that's important if you are caught
up in a storm and your ship is getting kind
of banged around. You can survive. You can take on
some damage to your ship if it's sewn together right.
It needs to be sewn together well. It might take
(12:21):
on some water because of that flexibility, but it's less
likely to just break. There's more give in a sewn
together boat than there is in one that's used nails,
and so it works well. It works well historically in
the Indian Ocean. And then the other advantage is the
ease of repairing it as you go, which you do
(12:41):
have to do. And some of the archaeological evidence we
have of these sown ships has puzzled researchers in the
past because they would say, you know what, we see
that like the Bailaitung ship, for example, the wooden planks
come from Africa. The cord seems to come from Asia.
You know what's that about? We have in the pen
I'm suran Rak in Thailand. The way that the ship
(13:03):
is put together, it's very clearly Western Indian Ocean shipbuilding plan.
But the materials right are from Southeast Asia. That's the norm.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
These ships are being made and being repaired on the
road using multiple materials from different places. And that's for me,
that's part of their magic. They're a great way to
think about what long distance connections are like. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Absolutely, And for people who have listened to this podcast
from the beginning, some of the ropes that are used
for lashing these together are made from coconut fibers in
the vapors. My first episode of this podcast was on coconuts.
I don't know if we talked about ships. I can't
remember at this point, but coconuts always important in the
medieval world, definitely. So one of the points that you
(13:49):
make in the book as well is that when we
talk about history and technology especially, we are concentrating a
lot usually on conflict instead of cooperation instead of right. Next,
and so, can you tell us a little bit about
what you mean by that and what that meant in
terms of building sure?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Sure, so I think that quite often the historical discipline, right,
we have organized our sub disciplines, We've organized our curriculum
by things that are conflict based, so that can be
you know, the history of war. We can have thinking
about different universities. I'm familiar with the courses you have
to take. If you're getting your history degree, you might
(14:27):
be taking courses on World War one, World War two.
You might also just be doing a nation state based history,
and that is also honestly a history of conflict. It's
a story about how we define belonging and othering, and
about territorial claims and all of that's very important. Right,
That's a real part of history, but it's only a
(14:48):
part of it. We have also, throughout human history been
connected to each other, and so I'm not making the
argument that the time history is without conflict, because it's
certainly a zone of conflict, but it is also a
zone of cooperation and because of its you know, fluidity, unintended,
it's a space that we can use to kind of
(15:09):
think beyond some of the boundaries that are inherent in
thinking with the nation state as essentialized.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Right, Well, I keep thinking about you'd be standing on
the dock, you're a mare and I are from a
certain part of the world, and then this weird looking
ship shows up and you're like, how are they doing that?
And the discussions that they'd have on the piers. I
think borrowing of ideas and curiosity and the way that
technology tends to shift. I think it's such a human story.
(15:38):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It is, right, It is a very human story.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So when you were putting together this book, how did
you organize this in your mind? Like, how where do
I start? Where do I start talking about this? Because
of that connectivity? What were you thinking when you were
trying to structure this book?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Sure, well, I was thinking about chronology for one, and
then I was thinking about wanting to start out kind
of as far away from Europe as I could get.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
That's fair, it is the Global Middle Ages series.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But I do think, you know, in a very real way,
if we look at you know, if we just take
a survey of the kinds of mobility on the sea
that we see during the Global Middle Ages, we do
have to start with the Austronesians, right, And so that's
what I did. I went from there and then sort
of branched out regionally from there.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, well you start with shipwrecks. I think that's where
you start the book, and that you're taking us into
your experience in cataloging things from a ship. Yeah, so
why don't you tell us about this first experience or
this formative experience stuff from a shipwreck? What did you
find on this ship?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Well?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, so in the intro of the book, I talk
about my own experience of like first discovering, you know, shipwrecks.
And I don't mean discovering them archaeologically, I mean personally.
I was an undergraduate student in Chicago and I was
very fortunate and had the opportunity to do an internship
at the Field Museum of Natural History, and it changed
(17:09):
my life. You know. I went into the internship thinking
I was already really focused on anthropology. I thought, I would,
you know, go into modern kind of health issues, and no.
I got to work in the anthropology department working with
this enormous shipwreck collection. It's the Java Sea shipwreck, and
(17:32):
the Field Museum has half of this cargo that was donated,
and it is a twelfth to thirteenth century wreck. It
is a Southeast Asian constructed vessel. Most of the wood
and everything is gone, but enough of it survived we
can still identify the tradition. But literally you would go
to work and then visually behold thousands of shipwreck objects,
(17:57):
so bowls, a lot of bowls, material from China, materials
from Thailand, and you know, our job in the beginning
was to do what we call vetting, where we're making
sure that what we have there at the museum corresponds
exactly with what's in the archaeology report, and so you're
literally looking at and this is what I describe in
the book. You're looking at one bowl at a time
(18:19):
and identifying it. You're studying the surface of the bowl,
its dimensions. So it's a very kind of mundane task
in one sense, but it was thrilling because you know,
I would realize, okay, I'm like one of the first
human beings that's handled this bowl for eight hundred years,
and you would see things occasionally you would see like
a fingerprint in the ceramic glaize, and just feel that
(18:42):
kind of electricity of you know, the connection we have
with other human beings who have gone before us, and
they're all these materials were covered in Marine Life, and
that's you know, that's also kind of mind blowing to
see how the things that we leave behind in the
ocean are then repurposed by the ocean right into habitats
(19:03):
for other species. So it was amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
It just it sounds amazing, and you describe it very
well in the book. Thinking something that is formative. You know,
it's one of those things where, of course they give
this job to an undergraduate because it is mundane, takes
a lot of oh yeahculous work, but still such fascinating objects.
So I think that what we haven't illustrated so far
(19:28):
is the distance that people could get. So maybe this
would be a good opportunity to tell us some of
the objects that we might find on a ship in
the Middle Ages and how far they go, just to illustrate,
you know, these connected trade routes, because if this is
the first episode of the podcast that people ever listen to,
it is time to tell people how far these objects
(19:49):
did go back in the day.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Wonderful. Okay, well sure, well, since we're talking about the
Java Sea wreck at the Field Museum, I'll just start
there that this wreck was found in Indonesian water in
the nineties. And you know, I mentioned the ceramic cargo
that came from different kiln sites in China and in Thailand,
but it also had other stuff. It had ivory, so
(20:12):
elephant tusks in this case, and it had quite a
few of them. And ivory was a very important trade
good in the global Middle Ages, and it could be
sourced from Asia or it could be sourced from Africa.
And the assumption had been that this must be from Asia, right,
because the wreck is found in Asia. But researchers at
the Field Museum, including Lisa Nijiolik, who is an incredible scholar,
(20:37):
were able to collaborate with all of the other scientists
and all of their equipment in the museum and actually
analyze the DNA from this ivory. The outer layers of
the ivory were contaminated by seawater, but they were able
to get deep enough that they could prove that this
was the ivory of African elephants. And how amazing is
(20:59):
that We're talking twelve to thirteenth century. This ivory has
traveled from Inland Africa right across land routes to the
coast and was then carried across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia.
And rather than that being an aberration, it seems to
be the norm.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
We often find things like frankinsense resin on Southeast Asian shipwrecks,
and that resin is coming from the southern coast of
the Arabian Peninsula. We find Chinese ceramics, broken Chinese ceramics
in places like Kilwa on the East African coast and
places like Siraf in the Persian Gulf. So these objects
(21:41):
got around.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, absolutely, And when we think about that, obviously the
trade just doesn't stop there. It goes overland, it goes
through rivers, it goes through the mediterrane it goes around
the coast, and all of these things are showing up
globally in ways that we were just never taught about,
or I was never taught about in school. I think
many of us weren't. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, I mean, for one thing, it's inspiring to think
about just what human beings are capable of accomplishing so
early on. And it's also it kind of disrupts for
me some of the ideas that I had about when
the world became a connected place.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
We think a lot about globalization, but I think that,
you know, there are historians that have made great arguments
about a kind of proto globalization that we see in
the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah. Well, I think that it's so important to bring
together the historical traditional looking at texts perhaps and the
anthropological tradition of studying bones and civilizations, and also the
archaeological tradition of looking at these shipwrecks, because without these
things together, you don't get the whole story. And it's
so so important to see the story played out as
(22:53):
it would have been, because otherwise we're missing out on
so much.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, we are, and it's a challenge, you know, it's
challenge to work across disciplines and languages and regions, but
it's such a fruitful thing when we managed to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Absolutely. And one of the things that I think, even
though we're talking about an elite person, that speaks to
the normalcy of things moving very far is you mentioned
you just kind of drop in that they found like
pepper in Ramsey's nose, Ramsey patcans nose, and it like
it's not from Egypt, it's not from where, it's not
from his back garden. But this is just so normal,
(23:31):
these these movements of people and things so far. So
one of the things that you talk about that is
apparently contentious and I did not know that, not being
a marine historian, is the triangular sale. Oh yeah, tell
us about the trivice.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
That's where to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, we're deepen up into the podcast. Now it's time
to throw down. Tell us about the triangular sale.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Sure, okay, So there are different kinds of sales that
you use for different things. Square sail is great for
letting the wind drive you in the direction it's going.
But sometimes you need to do something different, like we
see in Austronesia. Right, Sometimes you need to go against
the wind, but you can't go full force directly against it.
(24:16):
You have to be tricky and you have to do
things like do We call it tacking against the wind,
and the triangular sail is what makes that possible. And
so the first place we see this is in Austronesia,
and this is the sort of genius of Austronesian seafaring
technology is that if you were a person that sails,
or if there's some awesome you know, you can even
(24:36):
watch on YouTube what it's like to sail in different
parts of the world. If you're tacking against the wind,
you're in danger of the pushing you over and pushing
your ship over. And so the Austronesians figured out that
they could put external flotation supports on either or both
sides of their vessels and they could get around that problem. Right,
(24:57):
So they combined what they call the crab class sail
with these outriggers that provided stability, and that's how they
populated the Pacific. But we also see the triangular sale
in other contexts. We see it in the Islamic world,
we see it in the Middle Ages, right in the
Indian Ocean. Specifically, it's very much associated with the Doo tradition.
(25:19):
And so then the question is how and when did
it get to Europe. Some people ask how did it
get to the western Indian Ocean. I have some thoughts
about that, but this becomes politically high stakes because arguments
have been made that the ships that enabled the crossing
(25:40):
of the Atlantic right by Christopher Columbus, that enabled Basco
da Gama to finally enter the Indian Ocean, that there
was something special about those ships, there was something technologically
exceptional about them and different than everything that came before.
And that's actually not true. These ships, like other ships
(26:03):
in every other part of the world, had borrowed what
came before, right, They had borrowed technologies from other parts
of the world, from different parts of the Mediterranean, from
different parts of Europe, and absolutely from the Islamic world
via the Portuguese. And so there's something a concept of
invention chauvinism that we often see in the history of technology,
(26:27):
that we used what we think of as superior technology,
as a way to say that there's something superior about
our civilization, and you can trace this that you can
look at it and the space race I see it
in what I call the spice race, right in early
modern Southeast Asia and Europe. But it gets projected onto
(26:48):
ancient ships as well. Right, that we think nails are
better than soone boats, for example, which is not the case.
That we think that somehow the ships of Christopher Columbus
were inherently European, right, which is not the case, and
inherently superior, which is also not the case. So one
of the goals of my book Global Ships is to
give you the data, you know, give the reader the information,
(27:11):
and then you can put it together yourself. Right, you
can say, okay, here are the different shipbuilding traditions that
we can trace through the global Middle Ages, and that
we can then follow through the early modern period and
maybe have a little bit more of a nuanced understanding
of the meaning and the significance of these ships of
the so called Age of Discovery.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yes, those big capital letters and now quotation marks. Well,
it's important to talk about because the way that so
many of us were talking about Columbus back in the
day was like, ye, this boat was created for discovery.
It was like whole cloth does like get popped out
of Columbus's brain, And yeah, it was meant for this
(27:55):
where you're mentioning in your book. It's based on things
like phishing technology. You know, like these these boats were
made to help you fish, to help you feed yourself,
like they were not you know, fully formed popping out
of somebody's brain. And so it's important to trace these
things back, not only to understand what was this technology
maybe initially creative for, but where does it come from.
(28:18):
When we start to like put a pin in like
this was discovered by this particular person in this particular place,
it gets ugly and it gets complicated.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, And I think there's also a danger of making
the argument of you know, these ships and the ships
of Columbus, it was a sort of suite of ships, right,
There were different types of boats that were used together,
and that was part of how it worked. You could
make the argument of you know, oh, you know, European
technology isn't the best, this other technology is the best,
(28:49):
and that's not what I'm interested in, right, So I
think that the one really great thing about the physical
evidence is that it grounds us and no matter where
you're coming from around the world, it also humbles us.
That maritime technology over the course of history has been
a hybrid enterprise, and maritime archaeologists like Manguin have dealt
(29:11):
with that a lot. Kenoras has really been a great
advocate for this idea that ancient ships pre modern ships
are a place where we can see human collaboration, we
can see the contributions of different technologies from different parts
of the world, and it's a archive that has a
lot of potential to work with. Well.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah, and especially because when we're talking about great ships,
big ones that carry more than one person, that carry
a lot of cargo, nobody builds those alone exactly. Yeah,
it's going to be collaborations, it's going to be different ideas,
there's going to be changing ideas, probably a lot of
arguments as these ships. Yeah yeah, Okay, So coming back
around to technology, this is important to my own curiosity.
(29:53):
One of these early sales made out of because I
think we have these ideas of pirate ships with big
canvas sales, but it's not how they were all made.
How are they made?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah, so they were made of different materials depending on
kind of what was available where you were. So we
have some great written for you historians out there. We
have primary sources. We have written primary sources from the
tenth century in the Persian Gulf describing the weaving of
sales using coconut coconuts, again, coconut fronds, and there's also
(30:28):
some shipwreck evidence of the weaving from various materials that
aren't canvas of sales in Southeast Asia. And it's fascinating
to be able to kind of think through the technological
function of that, but also it's a readily available material
that if you need to replace your sale, you know,
while you're on the road, so to speak, you can
(30:50):
do it.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Mm hmmm. Because there are always going to be repairs
that need to be made. And I think, yeah, when
we're talking about the Austronesian voyages like the it just
just keeps spopping into my mind. And it's probably not
just me as Malana, right, yeah, yeah, you see that
right there. You need to have repairs done. And I
think that it's not a cheat to say, let's look
(31:11):
at this kid's movie, because we can see some of
that technology. What would you do in the middle of
the ocean if you have a problem, because there were
actual humans who had to solve these problems exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, there's a kind of you know, thinking on your
feet that has to happen when you're doing this. I
love that a lot of my students will always bring
it back to, you know, a Disney movie, and I
love it if that's how we've experienced this.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Wonderful because well I've said this so many times on
this podcast, but like nobody comes into the Middle Ages
from reading something dry and dusty. We come into it
because we're excited about it. Your own story is a
great example. Holding these bulls in your hand, yeah, eight
hundred years old, and show what the technology was and
these human fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Oh yeah. When you work in an interdisciplinary way, you
know you can and all kinds of additional things, right
that you can't see with the naked eye. And there's
a team that's been working on testing what's on the
inside of jars because a lot of storage jars survive
shipwreck and Tom Bosmer comes to mind, but there are
there's a whole team of people that have been working
on storage jars from the Middle East that show up
(32:18):
in Asia and they're aligned with bitumen, which is you know,
liquid asphalt, which is a unique resource available in the
Middle East, and you know in other places you're going
to see other materials. So again it's human ingenuity using
the resources we have available and then making adjustments as
we go exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
So there is one adjustment which is not as friendly
and nice, but that is adjustments for warfare. Because I
do think that this is important because one of the
things that really changes ships is of course the rise
of gunpowder weapons. So can you tell us a little
bit about how that changed ships as we move closer
to the modern world quote, I'm sure modern worlds.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, definitely. So you know, we have of an archaeological
record and a visual and textual record of warships in
antiquity right in the Mediterranean, so we know that structurally
warships need some different things and that continues to be
true in the early modern period in the Mediterranean and antiquity.
They needed to be able to ram stuff and survive,
(33:20):
and they needed to be able to get away quick
regardless of what the wind was doing. Right, so you
see banks of rowers. But once you bring gunpowder into
the story, things change rapidly. So first let's talk about gunpowder.
Gunpowder was invented in China. We have textual evidence where
we start to see recipes for gunpowder in Middle period China,
(33:42):
and then those recipes make their way to the Islamic
world and start showing up in texts. But originally it
was a medical recipe rather than a battle recipe. But
we do see actual gunpowder weapons show up. First. I
think that the oldest one, unless something has been found
very recently, is from the Takashima res So the Takashima recks,
(34:06):
they date from twelve eighty one and they are from
this failed, spectacularly failed attempt by the Mongols to invade Japan.
And among the things that have been recovered, and this
research is still ongoing, and again I refer you to
June Kumora's work on this, but you know, wooden planks,
pieces of ships, materials that would have been used by
(34:28):
the crew anchors, but also ceramic bombs, gunpowder bombs, and
so this is sort of a place we can put
on our timeline of maritime history twelve eighty one. But
then we start to see hand cannons like guns in
Southeast Asian ships, and of course it makes a lot
of sense that the first use of gunpowder weapons is
(34:49):
happening in Asia because this is where gunpowder came from.
This is where guns came from. So there are quite
a few ships where we find these. There's an example
of a Chinese smuggling ship from the Ming period that
has a lot of guns or cannons we could call them.
But they keep popping up, and they pop up more
and more frequently. And so Southeast Asia is a contact
(35:11):
zone between many parts of the world, and so when
you look at the archaeological record of ships, you see
overlapping different kinds of ships showing up at the same time.
So while we're seeing these Southeast Asian ships with their cannons,
their hand cannons, we then start to see the first
European ships showing up with their gunpowder weapons. And so
(35:32):
gunpowder and explosions and wooden ships is a combination that
leads to fire right, leads to a lot of destruction.
How big a cannon you can fire without completely you know,
knocking your shipovers also a problem. So there's kind of
a period of experimentation with this, but you see the
(35:53):
decks of European ships sort of adapting to having weapon,
you know, gunpowder weapons in addition to other kinds of
way weapons. And then you start to see the hull
of the ship actually changing so that you can shoot
people from below as well.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yes. Well, so when I was working on a different project,
working on conflicts between England and friends at the end
of the thirteenth Center, I'm like, what do we know
about ships at this time? Is before gunpowder really appears
in Europe in plays that we're talking about, But you
start to see castles rising on these sides and being adapted.
(36:29):
So tell us a little bit about castles on these ships.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Sure, so they have multiple functions, but part of what
they can do they give you. So it helps I
think to think about what was warfare like with ships
before gunpowder. And a big piece of that story is
you need a height advantage. You want to be able
to be taller than who you're shooting at. And if
you're using bows and arrows, if you're using other kind
(36:56):
of projectile weapons, which happened in many different ways, you
need to be able to kind of rain fire from above.
And so that's the beauty of a castle is that
it gives you this strong platform on which you can
do that, and so then we can continue to see that,
right as the weapons themselves change.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah. I think when I initially came across like seafaring
and ships as a kid, it was that tradition of
seventeenth century eighteenth century seafaring, and so I always imagine
the castles were just places to put the captain's cabin,
you know. But yeah, they have a different purpose.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, they're multifunctional though, and I think a lot of
things on ships have to be right. There's not a
lot of space. Yeah, you have having a studio apartment,
You've got to make everything have two jobs.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
That's right. That's right. And that again brings us back
to the idea of adapting technology, because if you have
a finite space and you have a certain climate that
you're going to be salient, you need to make everything
adapt to that. Okay, so we could be talking about
this forever, but we should probably wrap up. So let
me let me ask you that question. Having looked at
global ships in the way that you have and sort
(38:03):
of comprehensively taken these things together, what direction do you
think we should go in as scholars, as people with
interest Now that we've got a baseline, we've got more
archaeology than we had, say twenty years ago. Where do
you think we should go next when we're exploring global seafaring.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Oh wow, what a great question.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
So there are a lot of directions. I think one
of the emerging areas that I think is most significant
if you're listening to this in the States, for example,
is the maritime history the physical evidence of the slave trade,
slave ships. I think that there is incredible work that's
being done on identifying those ships and making them a
(38:44):
part of the teaching of public history. And I think
our understanding of the slave trade shifts radically when we
physically encounter what these ships were like during the Middle Passage.
You know, how human beings were physically stored like cargo,
and how absolutely horrific that was. And I think it's
(39:07):
a part of our history that is deeply painful, but
it is absolutely essential, especially in times like this, that
we you know, we reclaim that history. You know, I
could give some additional you know, for other parts of
the world, but I think that's what I'm feeling today.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Yes, and this is where you and your exploration of
global ships is moving into that technology, Like, how are
we using technology, we as citizens of the earth, how
are we using it to move people slaves, people who
are in slafe let's say that properly moving them across places.
And so yeah, I would absolutely agree with you that
(39:44):
that is a direction for people to take up the torch.
And I'm sure they are early modernists that are doing that,
whose names I don't know, but that is important work. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
But there's some great work that's happening.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yes, and may it continue. Well, Thank you so much.
I really hope that people will check out this element
because it is one of those works that I think
is foundational to our understanding of material culture that maybe
has it popped up in other places or hasn't been
as accessible as it is at this moment. So thank
you so much for coming on the podcast and telling
us all about global Ships.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Thank you so much, it was so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
To find out more about Amanda's work, you can visit
her faculty page at Ohio State University. Her new book
is Global Ships, Seafaring, Shipwrecks and boat Building in the
Global Middle Ages. Before we go, here's Peter from medievalis
dot Net to tell us what's on the website. What's
going on, Peter?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Hey, Hey, So it was International Women's Day this past weekend,
so I thought it was a good time to do
a post on twenty five medieval women who ruled.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yeah, and like ruled right, Like this women.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Rule on the empresses, the queens, those with actually had
a lot of political powers. We got like the familiar
names like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Castill. But
I've got women on this list that come from Yemen,
Indonesia and the Mongol Empire.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Nice because there were people outside of Europe. Strangely, right,
this is what we're talking about this week, global ships,
women who are ruling outside of Europe.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah, the medieval global world is very fascinating. So we've
got that. Plus, you know, Veronica Minaldi, she's about to
start a new course on ar Think Epic this month
on the three religions of Medieval Spain. But she has
for us this piece on games, TV shows and novels
set in medieval Spain, and I thought that was really fascinating.
(41:40):
I learned that there was a show on el Sid
on Amazon Prime in the last couple of years, Like.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
What, Yeah, it's weird. There's so many medieval things that
come out and like they can go really under the radar.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Indeed, indeed, I know like I used to like when
we started Medievalist and I was like very much all
I gotta find out everything, because you know, Game of
Thrones just kind of taking off at that time. I
was like, Hey, this is the way to go in
medievals dot net talking about talk about TV shows.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
So if people are interested in Spain, now you have
a whole bunch of stuff also listed out for people.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Right, indeed, indeed we have so check that out on
the website plus much.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Much more awesome. And before I let you go, I
want to mention to the people while we're here that
one of the things we're talking about was Cambridge Elements, right.
Amanda's work is one of the Cambridge Elements, and these
talk about global medieval history. And one of the episodes
that was really popular that I put out a couple
of years ago was with Dee Dee Fairchild Ruggles, who
does Islamikit environments, and she has a new Cambridge Element
(42:42):
out as well. So for all the people who are
interested in the global Middle Ages, these Cambridge Elements are
amazing and for those people who loved Dede's episode, She's
now got a Cambridge Element out and I wanted to
make sure I mentioned that because I love this series
and I think people should be reading it. So there,
I've said that, you've said, what's on the website. We
got this, We're out, we got this.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Thanks Peter for stopping by and telling us what's on
the website.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Thank you to everyone who continues to support this podcast
and all my work by not skipping the ads, by
telling your friends about your favorite podcast episodes, by buying
my books or taking them out of the library, and
by becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Patronage not only
bestowed good karma, but also lists of the latest online
(43:30):
resources in medieval studies and options to get both medievalist
dot net and this podcast ad free. To find out
more or to become a patron, please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from ships to chips. Follow
Medievalist dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue
sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sebowski across
(43:53):
social media at five min Medievalist or five minute Medievalist
and you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Gee Frog. Thanks
for listening, and have yourself a wonderful day.
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty
two of The Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabolski, also known
as the five Minute Medievalist. When it comes to intercontinental
trade in the Middle Ages, the Silk Road seems to
get all the love, but on this precious blue planet,
the movement of both people and goods between kingdoms and
(00:37):
continents was made possible, in large part by water. This week,
I spoke with doctor Amanda Respis about ships and shipbuilding
in the pre modern world. Amanda is an assistant professor
of pre modern world history at Ohio State University and
the author of many works on global trade and pre
modern shipwrecks. Her new book is Global Ships, Seafaring, Shipwrecks
(01:01):
and Boat Building in the Global Middle Ages. Our conversation
on the many ways pre modern ships were built, what
we know about early global trade routes, and the fascinating
bits of archaeology we're still finding under the sea is
coming up right after this. Well welcome, Amanda. It is
(01:21):
so nice to meet you. I really enjoyed your Cambridge
Elements on global ships, and I'm so excited to be
talking to you about this today. So welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Thank you so much for having me. It's really my
pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
I am just looking forward to this conversation so much. Okay,
So the first place I think we need to start
is why do you need to write a book about
global ships in the first place, Like, don't don't we
already know about global ships? Why are we writing this book?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Exactly? Well, for me, you know, Global Ships has a
few origin stories. One of them is I'm really obsessed
with you know, as a premodernist, I'm really obsessed with
things people don't know about the Middle Ages, right the
same I think that we have a lot of assumptions
(02:07):
about what the world was like in the distant past,
and we have a lot of assumptions that make us
think it was radically different in certain ways than it
is today. And technology is a divide inline for a
lot of historians and for archaeologists. Sometimes we can imagine
that our technologies today are universally superior in every possible
(02:29):
way to what people were doing in the Middle Ages
or even in the Bronze Age. I actually go into
in Global Ships, and there's a political worldview behind that
that I think is important to critique and push back
against a bit. So the story of seafarers, you know,
at least if you go through public education in the
United States, is often very much framed around Christopher Columbus,
(02:52):
the voyages of Columbus across the Atlantic. You know, in
fourteen ninety two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, and we
sometimes fall believe that that is when a long distance
seafaring really began in earnest and that is just absolutely
not the case. I teach classes about maritime history, and
my undergrads usually come in to the class with that expectation,
(03:15):
and then we start looking at shipwrecks from the Middle
Ages and even from the Bronze Age, and you know,
the first part of the semester is just getting everyone's
jaw off the floor. Yeah, yeah, and we realize, okay,
you know what, there was intensive long distance connection and
trade in the pre modern world and really sophisticated ships
(03:36):
that pulled that off. And so I wanted to be
able to create something that would be accessible for my
students first of all, but I also, you know, I
work in a very interdisciplinary space, and I know a
lot of people in history and anthropology who are interested
in shipwrecks, right, who are interested every time there's a
(03:57):
news article that comes out about you know, you find
and they want to incorporate that in some way into
their thinking and into their teaching. And so I thought, well,
you know what, maybe I can produce something. I can
be an archaeology to history translator. And so that's one
of the goals of global ships.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
We do need those. We always need a baseline to
work with, and the easier that goes down, the better.
So the Cambridge Elements being short and in a lot
of ways comprehensive despite their size, I think it gives
us all a place to start. And so I think
one of the best things that you do is start
your element with talking about the fact that Earth is
(04:37):
mostly ocean. And when you start to look at ocean
instead of land, it changes everything.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
It changes everything. Yeah, yeah, it radically changes things. And
I was actually talking with my students yesterday in class
about mapping, right, how we see the world, how we
visualize the space that we inhabit. It's so shaped by mapping,
and we were looking at and talking about these really
cool woven maps that are used to teach navigation in
(05:07):
the Austronesian tradition, and instead of mapping land, they map water.
They map water currents and sensations you might expect when
you're out at sea, and their maps they're sensory maps,
but they're not visual and they're not based on land.
So yeah, I think it's important to shake up how
we see this world that we inhabit.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yes, and I mean we don't need to dive into
modern politics right away, or maybe not at all. We'll
see how it goes, but I think we do maybe
we too, you know, being Canadian, I'm thinking quite a
lot about the global melting of the ice caps and
how that's changing and making more ocean roots that weren't
even possible before. They weren't really part of the discussion
(05:50):
until things really started to melt. And so I mean
people looking for the Northwest passage, but you know what
I mean, it's not the same as sailing in other
parts of the globe, but now it's starting to become
a really important part of geopolitical discussion. So looking at
the oceans changes how we look at things for sure.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, And the intersections right between the oceans and life
on land that our coastal areas right, are deeply impacted
by climate change. And the work I do in the
Indian Ocean right is framed by the monsoon season and
fluctuations and climate like we're experiencing now are really impacting that,
and that will have consequences that it's even hard for
(06:30):
us to imagine right now.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yes, Well, one of the sentences that really jumped out
at me, and we don't have to stick with again,
we don't stick with Mediterranean, but one of the sentences
that really jumped out at me was the wind is
a hidden driver of Mediterranean history. And so can you
talk a little bit about the way that currents and
wind really shaped global ships?
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Absolutely, I thank you for that question. So we think
a lot about power, right when we think about history,
we think about what forces are making things happen, and
we usually think about that in political terms, but there
are environmental powers that absolutely structure human activity. And wind
direction is a really big one. When we go back
(07:12):
to the age, before having the luxury of a motor
that you can use to get yourself where you need
to be, your ship was going to be driven by
the wind primarily or rowing, you know, those were your
two options, or some kind of propulsion and wind direction
is the decider of where you can go. And there
(07:35):
are also factors like the season where it's actually safe
to sail. Right. There's terrible visibility in the Mediterranean for
a lot of the year, and historically it was really
safe to only go out around the summer, a little
bit before, a little bit after. So it's wind direction
in the sailing season, and at least in the eastern
half of the Mediterranean, the predominant wind was blowing sort
(07:57):
of towards the Levant and towards Egypt, and so the
trade routes that developed harnessed that. But I think it
really kind of privileged, you know, a lot of what
we see then happening politically and economically in Egypt. You know,
there's an environmental piece.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
To that story, absolutely, And I'm thinking a lot about
somebody else who wrote a Cambridge element, which is James
Flexner who wrote on Oceana, and I had him on
the podcast couple years ago talking about that and wind
direction was so important for that part of the world
because you had to be able to come back right
exactly dependent on the wind very much.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and the Austronesians are such an incredible example of
a couple of things I talk about in global shifts.
You know, One is things we should know about people
we should know about that we often don't. I feel
like Austerronesian seafaring deserves a lot more airtime in our
history classes than it gets. But yeah, the power of
the wind in the Pacific that the entire I mean
(08:55):
talk about an age of discovery. The Austronesians, you know,
emerged out of the coast of China, went to Taiwan
thousands of years ago, and then the Philippines Southeast Asia,
and then populated the entire Pacific. And they were able
to do that because of their technology. But it was
technology that was specifically aimed at responding to the wind
(09:17):
direction and needing to sail against it, and then being
able to have the kind of life jacket of then
letting that wind give you a ride home.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Right, Yeah, I mean without it you are stuck. I mean,
I see people who are in landlocked places may not
consider how much the wind really affects how much you
can travel when it comes to the ocean. And I
think still this is still the case today, even with
motorized boats like yeah, yeah, we have to respect what
(09:49):
nature is getting us in terms of what we can
possibly do. So one of the things I found so
interesting about this discussion of global ships is you do
talk about technology, and I think when we think about
building a ship, it's got wood, it's got nails. This
is definitely not the case. So O, can you tell
us a little bit about some of the technologies people
(10:10):
were using to build their hulls?
Speaker 3 (10:12):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Sure, So the type of watercraft that you find, you know,
in different parts of the pre modern world, are built
from the materials that are available and for the specific
needs of that maritime climate. Right, so things like the
shape of your hull is going to have to work
for what your coastline is. Like Junkumura has done, who's
a maritime archaeologist, has done some fantastic work about the
(10:36):
different shipbuilding styles that you see in East Asia and
how the coastline of Yellow Sea is much more shallow
water and there are shifting sandbanks, and so you tend
to see a more flat type of hull, whereas in
southern China and Southeast Asia you see much deeper halls
that can carry a lot of cargo. But not all
ships are made with nails. So we do see that
(10:59):
in many parts of the world. World, but the specialty
of shipbuilding, the dow tradition in the Indian Ocean are
soone ships. They're literally wooden planks that are fastened together
with cord, and there are some real advantages to that.
They've been disparaged by a lot of European writers in
the past who've looked at it as a sign of
(11:21):
a lack of civilization, right, And it turns out no,
they actually have real advantages in the Indian Ocean. And
we also see the lashing together of hulls in Southeast Asia.
It's a different process and a different tradition, the lash
lug method. But yeah, there's a lot of variety of
even how you put if it is a wooden plank ship,
(11:43):
how you put these pieces of wood together changes from
place to place.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Well, I need to ask this question because I think
these sone planks are so fascinating. Yeah, so what are
the advantages. Is it just you get slightly more flexibility,
which is important for that environment.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, you get so, you get flexibility, and so a
great example of why that's important if you are caught
up in a storm and your ship is getting kind
of banged around. You can survive. You can take on
some damage to your ship if it's sewn together right.
It needs to be sewn together well. It might take
(12:21):
on some water because of that flexibility, but it's less
likely to just break. There's more give in a sewn
together boat than there is in one that's used nails,
and so it works well. It works well historically in
the Indian Ocean. And then the other advantage is the
ease of repairing it as you go, which you do
(12:41):
have to do. And some of the archaeological evidence we
have of these sown ships has puzzled researchers in the
past because they would say, you know what, we see
that like the Bailaitung ship, for example, the wooden planks
come from Africa. The cord seems to come from Asia.
You know what's that about? We have in the pen
I'm suran Rak in Thailand. The way that the ship
(13:03):
is put together, it's very clearly Western Indian Ocean shipbuilding plan.
But the materials right are from Southeast Asia. That's the norm.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
These ships are being made and being repaired on the
road using multiple materials from different places. And that's for me,
that's part of their magic. They're a great way to
think about what long distance connections are like. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Absolutely, And for people who have listened to this podcast
from the beginning, some of the ropes that are used
for lashing these together are made from coconut fibers in
the vapors. My first episode of this podcast was on coconuts.
I don't know if we talked about ships. I can't
remember at this point, but coconuts always important in the
medieval world, definitely. So one of the points that you
(13:49):
make in the book as well is that when we
talk about history and technology especially, we are concentrating a
lot usually on conflict instead of cooperation instead of right. Next,
and so, can you tell us a little bit about
what you mean by that and what that meant in
terms of building sure?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Sure, so I think that quite often the historical discipline, right,
we have organized our sub disciplines, We've organized our curriculum
by things that are conflict based, so that can be
you know, the history of war. We can have thinking
about different universities. I'm familiar with the courses you have
to take. If you're getting your history degree, you might
(14:27):
be taking courses on World War one, World War two.
You might also just be doing a nation state based history,
and that is also honestly a history of conflict. It's
a story about how we define belonging and othering, and
about territorial claims and all of that's very important. Right,
That's a real part of history, but it's only a
(14:48):
part of it. We have also, throughout human history been
connected to each other, and so I'm not making the
argument that the time history is without conflict, because it's
certainly a zone of conflict, but it is also a
zone of cooperation and because of its you know, fluidity, unintended,
it's a space that we can use to kind of
(15:09):
think beyond some of the boundaries that are inherent in
thinking with the nation state as essentialized.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Right, Well, I keep thinking about you'd be standing on
the dock, you're a mare and I are from a
certain part of the world, and then this weird looking
ship shows up and you're like, how are they doing that?
And the discussions that they'd have on the piers. I
think borrowing of ideas and curiosity and the way that
technology tends to shift. I think it's such a human story.
(15:38):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It is, right, It is a very human story.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
So when you were putting together this book, how did
you organize this in your mind? Like, how where do
I start? Where do I start talking about this? Because
of that connectivity? What were you thinking when you were
trying to structure this book?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Sure, well, I was thinking about chronology for one, and
then I was thinking about wanting to start out kind
of as far away from Europe as I could get.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
That's fair, it is the Global Middle Ages series.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
But I do think, you know, in a very real way,
if we look at you know, if we just take
a survey of the kinds of mobility on the sea
that we see during the Global Middle Ages, we do
have to start with the Austronesians, right, And so that's
what I did. I went from there and then sort
of branched out regionally from there.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, well you start with shipwrecks. I think that's where
you start the book, and that you're taking us into
your experience in cataloging things from a ship. Yeah, so
why don't you tell us about this first experience or
this formative experience stuff from a shipwreck? What did you
find on this ship?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Well?
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, so in the intro of the book, I talk
about my own experience of like first discovering, you know, shipwrecks.
And I don't mean discovering them archaeologically, I mean personally.
I was an undergraduate student in Chicago and I was
very fortunate and had the opportunity to do an internship
at the Field Museum of Natural History, and it changed
(17:09):
my life. You know. I went into the internship thinking
I was already really focused on anthropology. I thought, I would,
you know, go into modern kind of health issues, and no.
I got to work in the anthropology department working with
this enormous shipwreck collection. It's the Java Sea shipwreck, and
(17:32):
the Field Museum has half of this cargo that was donated,
and it is a twelfth to thirteenth century wreck. It
is a Southeast Asian constructed vessel. Most of the wood
and everything is gone, but enough of it survived we
can still identify the tradition. But literally you would go
to work and then visually behold thousands of shipwreck objects,
(17:57):
so bowls, a lot of bowls, material from China, materials
from Thailand, and you know, our job in the beginning
was to do what we call vetting, where we're making
sure that what we have there at the museum corresponds
exactly with what's in the archaeology report, and so you're
literally looking at and this is what I describe in
the book. You're looking at one bowl at a time
(18:19):
and identifying it. You're studying the surface of the bowl,
its dimensions. So it's a very kind of mundane task
in one sense, but it was thrilling because you know,
I would realize, okay, I'm like one of the first
human beings that's handled this bowl for eight hundred years,
and you would see things occasionally you would see like
a fingerprint in the ceramic glaize, and just feel that
(18:42):
kind of electricity of you know, the connection we have
with other human beings who have gone before us, and
they're all these materials were covered in Marine Life, and
that's you know, that's also kind of mind blowing to
see how the things that we leave behind in the
ocean are then repurposed by the ocean right into habitats
(19:03):
for other species. So it was amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
It just it sounds amazing, and you describe it very
well in the book. Thinking something that is formative. You know,
it's one of those things where, of course they give
this job to an undergraduate because it is mundane, takes
a lot of oh yeahculous work, but still such fascinating objects.
So I think that what we haven't illustrated so far
(19:28):
is the distance that people could get. So maybe this
would be a good opportunity to tell us some of
the objects that we might find on a ship in
the Middle Ages and how far they go, just to illustrate,
you know, these connected trade routes, because if this is
the first episode of the podcast that people ever listen to,
it is time to tell people how far these objects
(19:49):
did go back in the day.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Wonderful. Okay, well sure, well, since we're talking about the
Java Sea wreck at the Field Museum, I'll just start
there that this wreck was found in Indonesian water in
the nineties. And you know, I mentioned the ceramic cargo
that came from different kiln sites in China and in Thailand,
but it also had other stuff. It had ivory, so
(20:12):
elephant tusks in this case, and it had quite a
few of them. And ivory was a very important trade
good in the global Middle Ages, and it could be
sourced from Asia or it could be sourced from Africa.
And the assumption had been that this must be from Asia, right,
because the wreck is found in Asia. But researchers at
the Field Museum, including Lisa Nijiolik, who is an incredible scholar,
(20:37):
were able to collaborate with all of the other scientists
and all of their equipment in the museum and actually
analyze the DNA from this ivory. The outer layers of
the ivory were contaminated by seawater, but they were able
to get deep enough that they could prove that this
was the ivory of African elephants. And how amazing is
(20:59):
that We're talking twelve to thirteenth century. This ivory has
traveled from Inland Africa right across land routes to the
coast and was then carried across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia.
And rather than that being an aberration, it seems to
be the norm.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
We often find things like frankinsense resin on Southeast Asian shipwrecks,
and that resin is coming from the southern coast of
the Arabian Peninsula. We find Chinese ceramics, broken Chinese ceramics
in places like Kilwa on the East African coast and
places like Siraf in the Persian Gulf. So these objects
(21:41):
got around.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Yeah, absolutely, And when we think about that, obviously the
trade just doesn't stop there. It goes overland, it goes
through rivers, it goes through the mediterrane it goes around
the coast, and all of these things are showing up
globally in ways that we were just never taught about,
or I was never taught about in school. I think
many of us weren't. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
Yeah, I mean, for one thing, it's inspiring to think
about just what human beings are capable of accomplishing so
early on. And it's also it kind of disrupts for
me some of the ideas that I had about when
the world became a connected place.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
We think a lot about globalization, but I think that,
you know, there are historians that have made great arguments
about a kind of proto globalization that we see in
the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah. Well, I think that it's so important to bring
together the historical traditional looking at texts perhaps and the
anthropological tradition of studying bones and civilizations, and also the
archaeological tradition of looking at these shipwrecks, because without these
things together, you don't get the whole story. And it's
so so important to see the story played out as
(22:53):
it would have been, because otherwise we're missing out on
so much.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Yeah, we are, and it's a challenge, you know, it's
challenge to work across disciplines and languages and regions, but
it's such a fruitful thing when we managed to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Absolutely. And one of the things that I think, even
though we're talking about an elite person, that speaks to
the normalcy of things moving very far is you mentioned
you just kind of drop in that they found like
pepper in Ramsey's nose, Ramsey patcans nose, and it like
it's not from Egypt, it's not from where, it's not
from his back garden. But this is just so normal,
(23:31):
these these movements of people and things so far. So
one of the things that you talk about that is
apparently contentious and I did not know that, not being
a marine historian, is the triangular sale. Oh yeah, tell
us about the trivice.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
That's where to do it.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
Well, we're deepen up into the podcast. Now it's time
to throw down. Tell us about the triangular sale.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Sure, okay, So there are different kinds of sales that
you use for different things. Square sail is great for
letting the wind drive you in the direction it's going.
But sometimes you need to do something different, like we
see in Austronesia. Right, Sometimes you need to go against
the wind, but you can't go full force directly against it.
(24:16):
You have to be tricky and you have to do
things like do We call it tacking against the wind,
and the triangular sail is what makes that possible. And
so the first place we see this is in Austronesia,
and this is the sort of genius of Austronesian seafaring
technology is that if you were a person that sails,
or if there's some awesome you know, you can even
(24:36):
watch on YouTube what it's like to sail in different
parts of the world. If you're tacking against the wind,
you're in danger of the pushing you over and pushing
your ship over. And so the Austronesians figured out that
they could put external flotation supports on either or both
sides of their vessels and they could get around that problem. Right,
(24:57):
So they combined what they call the crab class sail
with these outriggers that provided stability, and that's how they
populated the Pacific. But we also see the triangular sale
in other contexts. We see it in the Islamic world,
we see it in the Middle Ages, right in the
Indian Ocean. Specifically, it's very much associated with the Doo tradition.
(25:19):
And so then the question is how and when did
it get to Europe. Some people ask how did it
get to the western Indian Ocean. I have some thoughts
about that, but this becomes politically high stakes because arguments
have been made that the ships that enabled the crossing
(25:40):
of the Atlantic right by Christopher Columbus, that enabled Basco
da Gama to finally enter the Indian Ocean, that there
was something special about those ships, there was something technologically
exceptional about them and different than everything that came before.
And that's actually not true. These ships, like other ships
(26:03):
in every other part of the world, had borrowed what
came before, right, They had borrowed technologies from other parts
of the world, from different parts of the Mediterranean, from
different parts of Europe, and absolutely from the Islamic world
via the Portuguese. And so there's something a concept of
invention chauvinism that we often see in the history of technology,
(26:27):
that we used what we think of as superior technology,
as a way to say that there's something superior about
our civilization, and you can trace this that you can
look at it and the space race I see it
in what I call the spice race, right in early
modern Southeast Asia and Europe. But it gets projected onto
(26:48):
ancient ships as well. Right, that we think nails are
better than soone boats, for example, which is not the case.
That we think that somehow the ships of Christopher Columbus
were inherently European, right, which is not the case, and
inherently superior, which is also not the case. So one
of the goals of my book Global Ships is to
give you the data, you know, give the reader the information,
(27:11):
and then you can put it together yourself. Right, you
can say, okay, here are the different shipbuilding traditions that
we can trace through the global Middle Ages, and that
we can then follow through the early modern period and
maybe have a little bit more of a nuanced understanding
of the meaning and the significance of these ships of
the so called Age of Discovery.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yes, those big capital letters and now quotation marks. Well,
it's important to talk about because the way that so
many of us were talking about Columbus back in the
day was like, ye, this boat was created for discovery.
It was like whole cloth does like get popped out
of Columbus's brain, And yeah, it was meant for this
(27:55):
where you're mentioning in your book. It's based on things
like phishing technology. You know, like these these boats were
made to help you fish, to help you feed yourself,
like they were not you know, fully formed popping out
of somebody's brain. And so it's important to trace these
things back, not only to understand what was this technology
maybe initially creative for, but where does it come from.
(28:18):
When we start to like put a pin in like
this was discovered by this particular person in this particular place,
it gets ugly and it gets complicated.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Yeah, And I think there's also a danger of making
the argument of you know, these ships and the ships
of Columbus, it was a sort of suite of ships, right,
There were different types of boats that were used together,
and that was part of how it worked. You could
make the argument of you know, oh, you know, European
technology isn't the best, this other technology is the best,
(28:49):
and that's not what I'm interested in, right, So I
think that the one really great thing about the physical
evidence is that it grounds us and no matter where
you're coming from around the world, it also humbles us.
That maritime technology over the course of history has been
a hybrid enterprise, and maritime archaeologists like Manguin have dealt
(29:11):
with that a lot. Kenoras has really been a great
advocate for this idea that ancient ships pre modern ships
are a place where we can see human collaboration, we
can see the contributions of different technologies from different parts
of the world, and it's a archive that has a
lot of potential to work with. Well.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah, and especially because when we're talking about great ships,
big ones that carry more than one person, that carry
a lot of cargo, nobody builds those alone exactly. Yeah,
it's going to be collaborations, it's going to be different ideas,
there's going to be changing ideas, probably a lot of
arguments as these ships. Yeah yeah, Okay, So coming back
around to technology, this is important to my own curiosity.
(29:53):
One of these early sales made out of because I
think we have these ideas of pirate ships with big
canvas sales, but it's not how they were all made.
How are they made?
Speaker 3 (30:03):
Right?
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Yeah, so they were made of different materials depending on
kind of what was available where you were. So we
have some great written for you historians out there. We
have primary sources. We have written primary sources from the
tenth century in the Persian Gulf describing the weaving of
sales using coconut coconuts, again, coconut fronds, and there's also
(30:28):
some shipwreck evidence of the weaving from various materials that
aren't canvas of sales in Southeast Asia. And it's fascinating
to be able to kind of think through the technological
function of that, but also it's a readily available material
that if you need to replace your sale, you know,
while you're on the road, so to speak, you can
(30:50):
do it.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Mm hmmm. Because there are always going to be repairs
that need to be made. And I think, yeah, when
we're talking about the Austronesian voyages like the it just
just keeps spopping into my mind. And it's probably not
just me as Malana, right, yeah, yeah, you see that
right there. You need to have repairs done. And I
think that it's not a cheat to say, let's look
(31:11):
at this kid's movie, because we can see some of
that technology. What would you do in the middle of
the ocean if you have a problem, because there were
actual humans who had to solve these problems exactly.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, there's a kind of you know, thinking on your
feet that has to happen when you're doing this. I
love that a lot of my students will always bring
it back to, you know, a Disney movie, and I
love it if that's how we've experienced this.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Wonderful because well I've said this so many times on
this podcast, but like nobody comes into the Middle Ages
from reading something dry and dusty. We come into it
because we're excited about it. Your own story is a
great example. Holding these bulls in your hand, yeah, eight
hundred years old, and show what the technology was and
these human fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Oh yeah. When you work in an interdisciplinary way, you
know you can and all kinds of additional things, right
that you can't see with the naked eye. And there's
a team that's been working on testing what's on the
inside of jars because a lot of storage jars survive
shipwreck and Tom Bosmer comes to mind, but there are
there's a whole team of people that have been working
on storage jars from the Middle East that show up
(32:18):
in Asia and they're aligned with bitumen, which is you know,
liquid asphalt, which is a unique resource available in the
Middle East, and you know in other places you're going
to see other materials. So again it's human ingenuity using
the resources we have available and then making adjustments as
we go exactly.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
So there is one adjustment which is not as friendly
and nice, but that is adjustments for warfare. Because I
do think that this is important because one of the
things that really changes ships is of course the rise
of gunpowder weapons. So can you tell us a little
bit about how that changed ships as we move closer
to the modern world quote, I'm sure modern worlds.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, definitely. So you know, we have of an archaeological
record and a visual and textual record of warships in
antiquity right in the Mediterranean, so we know that structurally
warships need some different things and that continues to be
true in the early modern period in the Mediterranean and antiquity.
They needed to be able to ram stuff and survive,
(33:20):
and they needed to be able to get away quick
regardless of what the wind was doing. Right, so you
see banks of rowers. But once you bring gunpowder into
the story, things change rapidly. So first let's talk about gunpowder.
Gunpowder was invented in China. We have textual evidence where
we start to see recipes for gunpowder in Middle period China,
(33:42):
and then those recipes make their way to the Islamic
world and start showing up in texts. But originally it
was a medical recipe rather than a battle recipe. But
we do see actual gunpowder weapons show up. First. I
think that the oldest one, unless something has been found
very recently, is from the Takashima res So the Takashima recks,
(34:06):
they date from twelve eighty one and they are from
this failed, spectacularly failed attempt by the Mongols to invade Japan.
And among the things that have been recovered, and this
research is still ongoing, and again I refer you to
June Kumora's work on this, but you know, wooden planks,
pieces of ships, materials that would have been used by
(34:28):
the crew anchors, but also ceramic bombs, gunpowder bombs, and
so this is sort of a place we can put
on our timeline of maritime history twelve eighty one. But
then we start to see hand cannons like guns in
Southeast Asian ships, and of course it makes a lot
of sense that the first use of gunpowder weapons is
(34:49):
happening in Asia because this is where gunpowder came from.
This is where guns came from. So there are quite
a few ships where we find these. There's an example
of a Chinese smuggling ship from the Ming period that
has a lot of guns or cannons we could call them.
But they keep popping up, and they pop up more
and more frequently. And so Southeast Asia is a contact
(35:11):
zone between many parts of the world, and so when
you look at the archaeological record of ships, you see
overlapping different kinds of ships showing up at the same time.
So while we're seeing these Southeast Asian ships with their cannons,
their hand cannons, we then start to see the first
European ships showing up with their gunpowder weapons. And so
(35:32):
gunpowder and explosions and wooden ships is a combination that
leads to fire right, leads to a lot of destruction.
How big a cannon you can fire without completely you know,
knocking your shipovers also a problem. So there's kind of
a period of experimentation with this, but you see the
(35:53):
decks of European ships sort of adapting to having weapon,
you know, gunpowder weapons in addition to other kinds of
way weapons. And then you start to see the hull
of the ship actually changing so that you can shoot
people from below as well.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Yes. Well, so when I was working on a different project,
working on conflicts between England and friends at the end
of the thirteenth Center, I'm like, what do we know
about ships at this time? Is before gunpowder really appears
in Europe in plays that we're talking about, But you
start to see castles rising on these sides and being adapted.
(36:29):
So tell us a little bit about castles on these ships.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Sure, so they have multiple functions, but part of what
they can do they give you. So it helps I
think to think about what was warfare like with ships
before gunpowder. And a big piece of that story is
you need a height advantage. You want to be able
to be taller than who you're shooting at. And if
you're using bows and arrows, if you're using other kind
(36:56):
of projectile weapons, which happened in many different ways, you
need to be able to kind of rain fire from above.
And so that's the beauty of a castle is that
it gives you this strong platform on which you can
do that, and so then we can continue to see that,
right as the weapons themselves change.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah. I think when I initially came across like seafaring
and ships as a kid, it was that tradition of
seventeenth century eighteenth century seafaring, and so I always imagine
the castles were just places to put the captain's cabin,
you know. But yeah, they have a different purpose.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, they're multifunctional though, and I think a lot of
things on ships have to be right. There's not a
lot of space. Yeah, you have having a studio apartment,
You've got to make everything have two jobs.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
That's right. That's right. And that again brings us back
to the idea of adapting technology, because if you have
a finite space and you have a certain climate that
you're going to be salient, you need to make everything
adapt to that. Okay, so we could be talking about
this forever, but we should probably wrap up. So let
me let me ask you that question. Having looked at
global ships in the way that you have and sort
(38:03):
of comprehensively taken these things together, what direction do you
think we should go in as scholars, as people with
interest Now that we've got a baseline, we've got more
archaeology than we had, say twenty years ago. Where do
you think we should go next when we're exploring global seafaring.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Oh wow, what a great question.
Speaker 1 (38:20):
Thanks.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
So there are a lot of directions. I think one
of the emerging areas that I think is most significant
if you're listening to this in the States, for example,
is the maritime history the physical evidence of the slave trade,
slave ships. I think that there is incredible work that's
being done on identifying those ships and making them a
(38:44):
part of the teaching of public history. And I think
our understanding of the slave trade shifts radically when we
physically encounter what these ships were like during the Middle Passage.
You know, how human beings were physically stored like cargo,
and how absolutely horrific that was. And I think it's
(39:07):
a part of our history that is deeply painful, but
it is absolutely essential, especially in times like this, that
we you know, we reclaim that history. You know, I
could give some additional you know, for other parts of
the world, but I think that's what I'm feeling today.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Yes, and this is where you and your exploration of
global ships is moving into that technology, Like, how are
we using technology, we as citizens of the earth, how
are we using it to move people slaves, people who
are in slafe let's say that properly moving them across places.
And so yeah, I would absolutely agree with you that
(39:44):
that is a direction for people to take up the torch.
And I'm sure they are early modernists that are doing that,
whose names I don't know, but that is important work. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
But there's some great work that's happening.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Yes, and may it continue. Well, Thank you so much.
I really hope that people will check out this element
because it is one of those works that I think
is foundational to our understanding of material culture that maybe
has it popped up in other places or hasn't been
as accessible as it is at this moment. So thank
you so much for coming on the podcast and telling
us all about global Ships.
Speaker 2 (40:17):
Thank you so much, it was so nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
To find out more about Amanda's work, you can visit
her faculty page at Ohio State University. Her new book
is Global Ships, Seafaring, Shipwrecks and boat Building in the
Global Middle Ages. Before we go, here's Peter from medievalis
dot Net to tell us what's on the website. What's
going on, Peter?
Speaker 3 (40:39):
Hey, Hey, So it was International Women's Day this past weekend,
so I thought it was a good time to do
a post on twenty five medieval women who ruled.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Yeah, and like ruled right, Like this women.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Rule on the empresses, the queens, those with actually had
a lot of political powers. We got like the familiar
names like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Castill. But
I've got women on this list that come from Yemen,
Indonesia and the Mongol Empire.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Nice because there were people outside of Europe. Strangely, right,
this is what we're talking about this week, global ships,
women who are ruling outside of Europe.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah, the medieval global world is very fascinating. So we've
got that. Plus, you know, Veronica Minaldi, she's about to
start a new course on ar Think Epic this month
on the three religions of Medieval Spain. But she has
for us this piece on games, TV shows and novels
set in medieval Spain, and I thought that was really fascinating.
(41:40):
I learned that there was a show on el Sid
on Amazon Prime in the last couple of years, Like.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
What, Yeah, it's weird. There's so many medieval things that
come out and like they can go really under the radar.
Speaker 3 (41:53):
Indeed, indeed, I know like I used to like when
we started Medievalist and I was like very much all
I gotta find out everything, because you know, Game of
Thrones just kind of taking off at that time. I
was like, Hey, this is the way to go in
medievals dot net talking about talk about TV shows.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
So if people are interested in Spain, now you have
a whole bunch of stuff also listed out for people.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Right, indeed, indeed we have so check that out on
the website plus much.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Much more awesome. And before I let you go, I
want to mention to the people while we're here that
one of the things we're talking about was Cambridge Elements, right.
Amanda's work is one of the Cambridge Elements, and these
talk about global medieval history. And one of the episodes
that was really popular that I put out a couple
of years ago was with Dee Dee Fairchild Ruggles, who
does Islamikit environments, and she has a new Cambridge Element
(42:42):
out as well. So for all the people who are
interested in the global Middle Ages, these Cambridge Elements are
amazing and for those people who loved Dede's episode, She's
now got a Cambridge Element out and I wanted to
make sure I mentioned that because I love this series
and I think people should be reading it. So there,
I've said that, you've said, what's on the website. We
got this, We're out, we got this.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
Hey.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
Thanks Peter for stopping by and telling us what's on
the website.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Thank you to everyone who continues to support this podcast
and all my work by not skipping the ads, by
telling your friends about your favorite podcast episodes, by buying
my books or taking them out of the library, and
by becoming patrons on patreon dot com. Patronage not only
bestowed good karma, but also lists of the latest online
(43:30):
resources in medieval studies and options to get both medievalist
dot net and this podcast ad free. To find out
more or to become a patron, please visit patreon dot
com slash Medievalists for everything from ships to chips. Follow
Medievalist dot net on Instagram at medievalist net or blue
sky at Medievalists. You can find me Danielle Sebowski across
(43:53):
social media at five min Medievalist or five minute Medievalist
and you can find my books at all your favorite bookstores.
Our music is Beyond the Warriors by Gee Frog. Thanks
for listening, and have yourself a wonderful day.
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