IIRC I worked out it takes about a in-game ArM5 season of mundane sea travel to voyage from Marseilles / Genoa / Venice (the major pilgrimage / Crusader departure points) to Cyprus / Antioch / Acre in the Levant, which should provide plenty of opportunity for stories at sea if you don't allow any magical assistance.
I'll see if I can dig out my notes and post them here and/or on my blog.
(I recall working this out for my Cyprus Sub Rosa article idea).
I will not doubt the wording in the Southampton archives here, of course - and don't want to use an RPG forum to discuss proper naming of ship types. I would expect, that a lot of ships capable to be rowed would be 'galleys' to many British mariners, though.
Now, noting that the galleys arrived in the 1270s, so they are not yet being built (because great galleys first start being built in the...1250s?) I'd like to point out that we know what a Galley of Flanders looked like. I mean, if you are willing to skip ahead two centuries we have a shipbuilding manual from a guy who sailed on them for 40 years (Michael of Rhodes).
I know how silly galleys sound. I really do. Nonetheless, the Venetians used them for their state convoys. Now, private merchants? Different, surely. A heap of tiny sailboats doing little local trades. Sure.
You find a summary of this book - not a shipbuilding manual, but an early detailed description of ships, including measurements - now here on the Internet: brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/michaelo ... lleys.html .
Looking at the measures of the Galley of Flanders, we can see that these are not your typical crammed war galleys, and are made to be mainly sailed. But indeed also the Venetians called the ships of their 'mude' 'galee' - so the British can't be blamed here: see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_%28convoy%29 is not helpful). These have little to do with what today is usually described as a galley (though they were also built at the Arsenale), and are also not of the standard Ars time - so I did not guess that you meant these ships when speaking of galleys.
"A unique section of Michael’s notebook consists of an illustrated tract on shipbuilding and rigging.
Michael provides instructions for building five different ships—three galleys (long ships that
used both oars and sails) and two round ships (which used only sails). These ships would have been
familiar to any Venetian mariner and all would have been built in the Venetian Arsenal. Specifically
Michael discussed how to build a galley of the Flanders type (one that went on the annual voyage to
Flanders); a galley of the type used to go to Romania and Tana (on the Black Sea); a light galley; a
round ship rigged with a lateen sail; and one rigged with a square sail."
The translator and publisher also call it "the world's earliest shipbuilding manual", which I recall finding surprising when I heard about it, because I assumned Chinese ones were available.
No, I'm not using the term "galley" in the sense you are, but I'm not clear what that sense is, because you seem to be claiming that the modern use of the term is fixed to mean something other than the historical reality of galleys, and I find that confusing.
I am saying that the things which the Venetians sent to England, even to begin with, were vessels callled "galia", and they only used this term for galleys, not sailing ships, for which they used other terms based on sail configurations. Sailing ships were used for trade, sure, but not in the great state convoys of Venice. For those, they used galleys. I know how weird that sounds to people, but that's how it worked for them.
I'm not quite clear on why you are so insistent on the point that they were not galleys. Is there something fundamental I'm missing here?
This is probably the definitive book to answer this question (I borrowed it form my local library, great stuff if you're into galleys): amazon.com/Age-Galley-Medite ... The+Galley
The Venetians (and Genoese and others) did primarily use medieval galleys for their fleets (although they did have some sailing ships as well, the proportion of galleys was higher). One of the contributors to this was rowers = marines ie. combatants, so even though you needed >100 men for a galley compared to a comparative handful for a sailed ship (And many galleys could be sailed using only a fraction of their complement of crew), the extra men had other uses. Feeding and more importantly, watering, the crew necessitated sailing close to shore along well maintained routes to allow for replenishing supplies (see the Pryor book for discussion of this). That's not to say they didn't cross the open sea, just that they preferred to hug the coast as it was less risky.
The later "Great Galleys" of the Republics were primarily sailing ships with oars for maneouverability in port and in combat.
They did not appear until later than 1220 / canonical ArM5 but that's not to say an enterprising magus would not have thought of the concept!
This is confusing but discussed at length in the second book.
In period in 1220, the Venetians used traditional byzantine style galleys.
You just need to know where the fixed stars (and perhaps other constellations) should be relative to your ship. This is a technique known since antiquity. For example, Calypso gives Odysseus such star based navigational directions when he leaves her island http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.5.v.html
You don't need to look at long distance, isolated sailors like the Norse to get night-time sailing. There are major trade routes (both medieval and much older) that involve sailing across the Mediterranean for periods of a dozen or more days. Even crossing the English Channel is a trip that might take more than a day, depending on conditions.
This summarizes, how the book contains descriptions, dimensions and some designs together serving the purpose of the later admiralty models you find in Greenwich, Istanbul or Venice naval museums now, or today's blueprints. (see brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/michaelo ... esign.html). Beyond providing such 'blueprints', Michael of Rhodes does not attempt to teach shipbuilding: indeed, not being a shipbuilder, he would not be able to.
Ok, that's a blurb. :mrgreen:
Jarkman in https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/the-break-room/102/1 makes clear, what confused me about finding late medieval commercial galleys for the mude referenced without clarification as galleys, while discussing early 13th century mediterranean sea transport. Yes, you can call these galleys - but they are specialty ships of another time. So please accept that I could not understand you.