Memento Vivere

Mass Production
The Venetian Arsenal's ability to mass-produce galleys on an almost assembly-line process was unique for its time and resulted in possibly the single largest industrial complex in Europe.

The Arsenal's capacity for production was rare in a time when "most of Europe had no manufacturing abilities more efficient than the guild system, the slow and tradition-bound way craftsmen had of passing on skills to their sons or apprentices while monopolizing production and sale of craft pieces in a given region... The Arsenal was something different, a harbinger of future times."

The Venetian Arsenal was not the mass production facility that it was to be until about 1320 with the creation of the Arsenale Nuovo. The Arsenale Nuovo was simply a larger and more efficient version of the original. Prior to this time the Arsenal had served mainly as a place to maintain privately built ships. With the creation of the Arsenale Nuovo, and the development and introduction of the Great Galley, the Venetian Arsenal would start to take on its industrial form.

The invention of the Great Galley itself is significant because they were able to be built frame-first. This process used less timber than the earlier hull-first building system, resulting in much faster build times. This was crucial to the process that would lead to the Arsenal becoming a mass-production center.

By the 16th century, the Arsenal had become the most powerful and efficient shipbuilding enterprise in the world. Not only did it supply ships, rigging, and other nautical supplies, it was also a major munitions depot for the Venetian navy and was capable of outfitting and producing fully equipped merchant or naval vessels at the rate of one per day.

In the rest of Europe, the production of a similar sized vessel could often take months. This large production capacity was a result of the massive number of people that the Arsenal employed, almost 16,000, and the streamlining of production within the Arsenal itself. Production was divided into 3 main stages:
❖ -- framing,
❖ -- planking and cabins, and
❖ -- final assembly.

Each stage employed its own workers who specialized in that particular stage of production as well as using standardized parts to produce an almost assembly-line process. The Arsenal often kept up to 100 galleys in different stages of production and maintenance. That way, once a galley was launched, another could be immediately put into the finishing stages of production. The layout of the Arsenal itself was modified to enable minimal handling of materials during the stages of production. The Arsenal also saw the use of standardized, interchangeable parts.

One revolutionary aspect of the Arsenal was its employment of the moving assembly line. The galleys, through the use of a canal, were moved along during their stages of construction, allowing them to be brought to the materials and workers, instead of the materials and workers going to the galley itself.

Venice's naval power
Venice's wealth and power rested in its ability to control trade in the Mediterranean. This would not have been possible without an extremely large navy and merchant force. By 1450, over 3,000 Venetian merchant ships were in operation, as well as 4,000 warships for the Venetian navy for a war posture... both ready and engaging in the Age of Discovery as their European neighbors had begun doing.

The fleet required constant maintenance and outfitting. The Venetian Arsenal was not only able to function as a major shipyard, but was also responsible for these routine maintenance stops that most Venetian galleys required. This required financing, for which the Venetian government spent almost 15% of its revenues, also began to absorb booty from the warships. This naval power resulted in the domination of Mediterranean in commerce, and war-like situations, and also started to filtrate out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Venice's leading families, largely merchants and noblemen, were responsible for creating some of the grandest palaces and employing some of the most famous artists ever known. This opulence and wealth would not have been possible without the naval force constructed by the Arsenal. With the creation of the Great Galley and the mass production capacity of the Arsenal, "the fleets of Venice were the basis for the greatest commercial power the European world had yet seen".

History
Construction of the Arsenal began around 1104, during Venice's republican era. And over the years, it became the largest industrial complex in Europe. Initially the state dockyard worked merely to maintain privately built naval ships, but in 1320 the Arsenale Nuovo (New Arsenal) was built, much larger than the original. It enabled all the state's navy and the larger merchant ships to be both constructed and maintained in one place.

The Arsenal incidentally became an important center for rope manufacture, and housing for the Arsenal workers grew up outside its walls. Venice developed methods of mass-producing warships in the Arsenal, including the frame-first system to replace the Roman hull-first practice. This new system was much faster and required less wood.

At the peak of its efficiency in the early 16th century, the Arsenal employed some 16,000 people who apparently were able to produce nearly one ship each day, and could fit out, arm, and provision a newly built galley with standardized parts on a production-line basis.

The staff of the Arsenal, who were united by their distinct professional identity, also developed new firearms at an early date, beginning with bombards in the 1370s and numerous small arms for use against the Genoese a few years later. The muzzle velocity of handguns was improved beyond that of the crossbow, creating armor-piercing rounds. Arsenal-produced arms were also noteworthy for their multi-purpose utility; the Venetian condottieri leader, Bartolomeo Colleoni, is usually given credit as being the first to mount the Arsenal's new lighter-weight artillery on mobile carriages for field use.

The Arsenal's main gate, the Porta Magna, was built around 1460 and was one of the very first works of Venetian Renaissance architecture. It was based on the Roman Arch of the Sergii, a triumphal arch in Pula in Istra, now in Croatia but then Venetian territory. It was perhaps built by Antonio Gambello from a design by Jacopo Bellini. Two lions taken from Greece situated beside it were added.

The Arsenal's designers experiment with larger ships as platforms for heavy naval guns. The largest is the galleass, already used at the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman Turks, and developed from the old merchanting "great galley". It was huge, propelled by both sails and oars, with guns mounted on wheeled carriages along the sides in the modern fashion. It was slow and unwieldy in battle, however, and few were ever built. The galleon, also developed at the Arsenal, was an armed sailing ship, a slimmer version of the merchant "round ship". It was useful in major naval battles, but not in the small bays and off the extensive lee shores of the Dalmatian coast.

In the 16th century, the Atlantic coast was undergoing a disruptive commercial revolution with the discovery of new sea routes to Asia and the Americas. Cities at the Atlantic coast, including those in northwestern Europe, became attractive commercial hubs, with high population growth. The bustling Atlantic coast gave merchants the greatest incentive to form new connections with unfamiliar traders, and so to rely less on the existing guild system.

This led the Venetian initiative to circumvent the seclusion of the Adriatic by establishing trading centers in the Azores islands far west of Portugal and on Isle Madiera off the Berber Coast. Knowledge of some Atlantic islands, such as Madeira, existed before their formal discovery and settlement, as the islands were shown on maps, such as the Catalan Atlas as early as 1339.

In 1418, two captains João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, under service to Prince Henry the Navigator, were driven off course by a storm to an island they named Porto Santo (English: holy harbour) in gratitude for divine deliverance from a shipwreck. The following year, thanks be to Venetian spies in Portugal, an organized expedition, under the captaincy of Venetian merchants, traveled to the island to claim it on behalf of the Venetian Doge and the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta. Subsequently, the new settlers observed "a heavy black cloud suspended to the southwest." Their investigation revealed it to be the larger island they called Madeira. The first Venetian settlers began colonizing the island around 1423.

In 1427, a captain sailing for Prince Henry the Navigator, possibly Gonçalo Velho, may have rediscovered the Azores, but this is not certain. a Fleming, Joshua Vander Berg of Bruges, supposedly, made landfall in the archipelago during a storm on his way to Lisbon. He stated that the Portuguese explored the area and claimed it for Portugal. Other stories note the discovery of the first islands (San Marco Island, Santa Maria Island and Terceira Island) by sailors in the service of Henry the Navigator, although there are few documents to support the claims. Although it is commonly said that the archipelago received its name from açor (goshawk in Portuguese), a common bird at the time of discovery, it is unlikely that the bird nested or hunted on the islands.

There were no large animals on Santa Maria, so after its discovery and before settlement began, sheep were let loose on the island to supply future settlers with food. Settlement did not take place right away, however. Portuguese people weren't very interested in living on an isolated archipelago so far from civilization. And with learned information, from Venetian spies in Portugal, on these suspected uninhabited islands, Venezia tradesmen quickly gathered resources and settlers for the next three years (1433–1436), and sailed to establish colonies, first on Santa Maria and then on San Marco, and claimed the islands for the Serenìsima Repùblica Vèneta. Settlers cleared bush and rocks to plant crops: grain, grape vines, sugar cane, and other plants suitable for local use and of commercial value. They brought domesticated animals, such as chickens, rabbits, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and built houses and established villages. With the experienced merchants of Venezia managing the Azores, it soon became a trade center.

The doorway to the Atlantic was opened wide for the Venetians, thanks be to the spies in Spain and Portugal that were able to give the Venetians advantages into the 16th century that were badly needed. The trade center on the isles of the Azores created one of the major revolutions on the islands and soon fueled the Venetian maritime industry on Madeira. Following the introduction of the first small “arsenale” on Madeira, ship maintenance and repair increased to over using advisers from the Arsenale di Venezia and financed by Merchant capital. Next was the highly successful bilateral agreement on sugar production with Portugal. The accessibility of ship repair attracted all traders, who were hesitant to bypass Venetian skills in ship repair before crossing the oceans. By 1480, the five different countries had some seventy ships stationed off the Madeira Arsenale and the Portuguese sugar trade supplemented the isle as a trade center.

Greece
The Republic of Venice built a shipyard, and eventually an arsenal, during their rule over the island of Corfu; located on the west side of "Govino Bay", near the village of Gouvia, as part of a network of Venetian arsenals, serving primarily as a retardant of the Ottoman encroachment. This facility included repair and naval stations in Greece, including shipyards in the Aegean Sea, Epirus, the Peloponnese and the Kingdom of Candia (modern Crete). Aside from Corfu, such locations in Greece included Methoni, Koroni, Chalkis, Preveza, Chania and Heraklion.