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the richest, and probably the most populous, cities of the Western world – inspiring the contemporary poet Petrarch to refer to them as ‘the twin torches of Europe’. Yet they would pay dreadfully for their involvement with the Orient, suffering much higher mortality rates than other trading cities. According to the historian Christopher Hibbert, writing of Venice, ‘In all there were some seventy-two thousand deaths in a population of about a hundred and sixty thousand.’ Genoa is said to have suffered a 60 per cent loss of population.
    If this were not bad enough, Venice would be stricken by lesser outbreaks of the plague at least once a decade throughout the last half of the fourteenth century. Despite this, the city’s trade quickly revived in the wake of the Black Death. The main engine behind this revival was the Arsenale, the city’s ship-building centre. This formidable enterprise had been founded as early as 1104 by the city authorities, its name deriving from the Arabic dar sina’a , meaning ‘place of construction’, strongly suggesting that, like several European innovations of the medieval period (such as negative numbers and double-entry bookkeeping), this was based on an Arab original. The Arsenale was soon producing galleys of the highest standard, which were leased to private merchants for commercial enterprises. It also began producing armed galleys for the city’s defensive fleet and to protect the bullion convoys to the eastern Mediterranean. The industry and efficiency of the Arsenale would soon become legendary. Here, for the first time, assembly-line production was introduced (nearly 600 years before Henry Ford adopted this method for his car-building plants). Once the bare hull was complete, it would be launched, then towed up a canal overlooked by a wall. As the ship passed along the canal, through windows in the wall would be passed in succession equipment, sails, armaments and dry-goods supplies (culminating in barrels of hard tack), until the ship emerged at the other end of the canal, entering the lagoon fully constructed, rigged and stored-up, ready for manning by a crew of sailors and oarsmen. Utilising sail-power, and disciplined rowers at close quarters, meant that these galleys were highly manoeuvrable (prior to the sixteenth century Venetian galley-oars were powered by highly motivated, well-fed young Venetians). Besides rapid production, this assembly-line manufacture would also enable standardised ships’ parts to be transported to Venetian depots throughout the Mediterranean, available for immediate replacement of faulty or damaged equipment as soon as a ship put into port.
    This massive state-run enterprise also enabled the introduction of necessary modifications across the fleet, such as powerful rudders, streamlined hulls and compasses to assist in the reading of charts. Soon merchant ships – formerly cumbersome vessels powered by sail alone – had evolved into massive galleys, capable of transporting 150 tons of cargo. These were powered by 200 oarsmen, so that they could keep up with the naval galleysthat protected them against pirates on the increasingly large convoys to the Levant. These would soon be leaving Venice at the rate of one every two months and consisted of as many as 200 ships. At its height, the Venetian fleet would have 36,000 sailors manning 3,300 ships.
    The Arsenalotti , as the workers became known, would over the coming centuries hone their assembly-line production to a fine art. When the young Henry III of France visited Venice in 1574, he was shown the Arsenalotti laying down the keel of a galley, and was then taken for a meal. When he had finished his dinner, he marvelled to see that an entire galley had been assembled, rigged out and armed in just two hours. Conditions in the Arsenale were more like those in a factory of the Industrial Revolution than a craftsman’s workshop of the medieval era. During the early years of the fourteenth century