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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6512342" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I talked to people that have crewed actual sailing vessels of the size category being discussed here. The answer I got is "25 men would be a fairly standard crew for a small 3-masted vessel of 1-2 hundred tons, but such a vessel could be handled by as few as 4 people. Such a small crew would be problematic and not usual on a long journey, but ancient ships had proportionately much less rigging and apparently smaller crews were common." There aren't really solid sources that I could find in half an hour of research, so I agree that numbers are hard to come by. However, I see no reason to believe that late Roman vessels, which were as large and sophisticated in most respects as those of the 16th Century, required much different crew numbers. You can sale a good sized vessel with under 10 crew, put it that way. Well, I'm not going to argue with you. I never said that there was no trade in Medieval Europe, you've greatly exaggerated what I did say. I will restate however the point. If you went to say a town of 1000 people in Northern France in 1100 and expected to walk around and shop as if it was a shopping mall you would be utterly disappointed because it wasn't anything like that. There were nothing like retail outlets where you would go to buy things, they simply didn't exist. Yes, there were fairs, and that's WHY there were fairs, because people needed a place to exchange goods and that was how it was done.Certainly even small villages traded, yes, but almost no cash was involved and the trade was absolutely the few extra foodstuffs that were available. The local lord collected virtually 100% of surplus production (which was in any case rarely averaging more than 3% above sustenance) and it was traded for whatever couldn't be produced locally. Again, very little coin, nothing like retail trade as we would understand it today. If a peasant had some kind of surplus then he probably bartered it directly for whatever he needed to get for it. In any case it would be wrong to think that Western Europe was anything like as wealthy as the Middle East in that time period. Just because some, mostly unsuccessful, military expeditions were launched by the upper class in an effort to muscle in on trade doesn't mean what you are implying it does. Not all of Europe was dirt poor by any means, but don't confuse the situation in the earlier periods with later when trade and commerce had grown and changed greatly, or with that of the classical era which was quite different as well.</blockquote>

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