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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6512523" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no doubt that a vessel could be sailed with less than its usual complement, particularly for a short while, particularly under ideal conditions, and particularly - in the case of later warships - if you were not to put it into battle.   A Frigate generally carried a complement of about 280 men, but only 20-30 made up a prize crew and as little as 10 could sail it for a short period.  The extra crew allowed for greater efficiency in battle, allowed guns to be manned, provided spares in the event of sickness, death, and injury (or the need to sail captured vessels). I've little doubt that a 40-70 ton cog could be sailed by a crew of 2-3, but I doubt that they were regularly crewed by less than twice that.  By the time we get up to 100 tons for a great cog or roman grain transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of about twice that (8-10).  By the time we get up to the 200+ tons for a large hulk or roman olive oil/wine transport, we are probably talking about a regular crew of at least twice that again (16-20).  Hard numbers are hard to come up with, but equivalent 16th century ships generally had crews of 20-30.  The The Mayflower was 180 tons and we know that ships of its class generally carried a crew of about 30.  Frankly with block and tackle the romans lacked, stern rudders the Romans lacked, and better sailing characteristics generally, I'd be surprised if the Hellenistic era ships got by with fewer crew than the later ones.  That would be rather counterintuitive, because if the later ships required much higher outlays of crew for the same cargo, then it implies that efficiency is actually going down as technology improves.  In any event, the OP identified his ship as a Bermuda Sloop.  On the basis of that alone, I don't feel I have to tell him anything about ship characteristics.  Anyone that pulls out as an answer 'Bermuda Sloop' already has sufficient knowledge to answer the question for himself.You said, "Truthfully our modern notions of trade and economics are very foreign to pre-modern times."  That's a very broad statement.  It's hard to know exactly what you mean by it, but you seem to mean by it that trade is a relatively recent idea.  You stated for example that there would be nothing for sale at all in an average medieval village, which I think vastly underestimates the productive capacity of a medieval village or the industry and sophistication of the average cottagers.  And that's at the scale of a village.  You extend that notion up to the level of the medieval town!Again, it's hard to know what you mean by that.  You keep stating what the town wasn't like - "It wasn't like a shopping mall."- but not what the town was actually like.   Of course it wasn't like a modern shopping mall, but it's hard to know what you mean by that - obviously it didn't have electric power, indoor plumbing, The Gap, air conditioning, and large parking lots for cars.  But if you mean by that that towns weren't actually hubs of economic activity were lots of buying and selling and trade was going on, then I have to ask what in the world you think a town was for?Well, yes, obviously, but doesn't that just utterly undermine your point?   Because if you were walking around a medieval fair, you would see lots and lots of buying and selling.  In fact, most of the economic activity you'd be seeing would be what we would call wholesale trade.  A local brownsmith from a village 8 miles away would be trying to buy six months worth of copper and tin from a seller who bought the stuff at a port last month from a merchant who bought the copper in France from a trader that had brought the copper from a mine in Sweden and the tin from (modern) Turkey by way of Italy.  That was normal as at least as early as 1000 AD, because that's when we first start getting written records of the transactions but it was probably going on all the way through the middle ages.   Local what we'd now call retail trade didn't require a big fair and would have been done in weekly markets.  The whole point of a big fair is you could essentially advertise to the international traders that on a given day buyers and sellers would be getting together and it would be worth your time to come around.Cash lubricates trade but it doesn't create it.  If I'm an Italian merchant and I'm in England in 1000 when England is chronically cash short, I'll be perfectly happy to trade bundles of silk for bundles of English wool and work out some exchange rate between the two that profits both the buyer and seller.   Barter is still trade, and still works over long distances if you have merchants that are conversant in the markets at both end points.  In fact, because coin was just another commodity, failure to realize that coin was just another sort of barter often resulted in really bad trades.  Ask Japan about its exchange rate between gold and silver after it opened up for trade in the 19th century.   It got raped by not realizing the value on both ends of the market.The Doomsday Book (1086) shows that, at least for England, this was not in fact true.  There are serfs listed in the Doomsday book with holdings comparable to the Manorial Lord, and we know for a fact that in some cases serfs were able to negotiate more favorable contracts with their feudal Lord by way of giving the Lord loans of cash on favorable terms.   I would not by any means suggest that the serfs of Europe weren't slaves and weren't therefore subject to all the potential abuses that station could see, but it would be a mistake to imagine the serfs of the middle ages as belong to a single caste of invariably impoverished farmers.   The biggest economic challenge facing a serf is that his taxes weren't based on a percentage of income, but on a fixed annual rent.  Most years a serf could pay the rent with a sizable profit, particularly during the 'medieval warm period' were crop failures were rare.  The problem was that rent was still due when the crops were bad.  Those were the years the serfs would starve.  The problem was more acute the further east you went, with the climate getting worse and the rights of the serf decreasing.  But no medieval peasant was as bad off as the serfs of say 19th century Russia, where in reverse of what you say in the West serfs lost rights over time rather than gained them.Wait, what?  The Normans and their allies ruled the Middle East for between 120 and 200 years.  I would by no means classify the first Crusade (1096-1099, just before your reference year of 1100) as 'mostly unsuccessful'.   Nobody in 1100 would have called the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 'mostly unsuccessful'.   It was spectacularly successful, and though later crusades were increasingly less successful over time, the fact is that Northern Europe of 1100 though relatively poor was sophisticated enough to launch a combined naval and land military expedition that was considerable even by Roman standards - the equivalent of transporting 6 Roman legions by sea and launching a 3 year campaign while at same time the Franks were simultaneously routing the Moors on the Iberian peninsula.  It was the most spectacularly successful military campaign since the early Islamic armies had raced across the Byzantine Empire four centuries before it, and treated at the time as a very miracle of God.  It was the shot heard round the world that announced the status of Western Europe as a superpower.  Hindsight that the conquest was not permanent and would end in spectacular failures some century in 1100's future shouldn't obscure that.  By the time that the crusades fell apart, one city in Europe (Venice) was by itself rich enough to oppose the entirety of the Islamic world by itself while the rest of Europe went about it's affairs.By 1100 technology had been developed or adopted in Northern Europe that had solved the historical problem of feeding oneself in the harsh climate with a short growing season.  Combined with a period of relatively mild weather, this allowed for the rapid and spectacular emergence of wealth in Northern Europe which had previously been one of the world's backwaters.  That technology included widespread reliance on machine power the result of the population shortage that had made traditional slavery impossible, crop rotation, deeper till iron plows, stirrups, hay and silage, sophisticated cheese making, sophisticated brewing processes, and a sophisticated trading network that had comparatively low reliance on any centralized organization.   The combination of an independent trading network with mechanized production (via waterwheels and windmills) would prove to be revolutionary.  Your fundamental idea is that medieval Europe had almost no modern notion trade.  The opposite is true.  The modern world has an idea of trade that mostly would only be recognizable in 1100 AD in medieval Europe.  (To be fair, the Moslem traders were doing something very similar in the Indian ocean.)   But trade itself is so human as to occur everywhere.</blockquote>

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