Urbanism Under Sail: an archaeology of fluit ships in early modern everyday life

cannon, but also 15 anti-personnel guns, an unusually high proportion of the latter. Pirates wanted to capture ships, not sink them, and swivel guns could be very useful in achieving this aim. Various pieces of the crew’s personal possessions and Italian kitchen pottery were found, but among the most striking smaller artefacts was a collection of luxurious wares made in İznik in Turkey, an inland town that lies about 30 km south of the Sea of Marmara. The Sveti Pavao wreck is the only vessel found so far in the Mediterranean with a cargo of İznik fritware, and the discovery has important implications for the study of this pottery. The report includes colour photographs of this lavish and very attractive ware. Brief consideration is given to the wider historical context of the wreck, but the one major lack in this book is that the documentary history of 16th-century Adriatic shipping and trade is not explored more fully. In this reviewer’s opinion, historical research needs to be an integral part of any study of a wreck that dates from a period for which documentary sources exist. As I am an historian, the response might be ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’, but the combination of the two kinds of evidence can provide a much richer and informative outcome to a project than is possible in either purely archaeological or purely historical studies. Given the number of Venetian-style artefacts found in the wreck, and its cargo of Turkish pottery, the authors reasonably conclude that this was a Venetian ship, on its way home from trading with the Ottoman Empire and probably lost no later than about 1580. Documentary sources, however, reveal that the question of a ship’s ‘nationality’ could be a complex matter: one sometimes finds that a vessel built and equipped in one place was later owned and operated by several different people in other countries. For example, could the Sveti Pavao ship have been Venetian-built but Ragusan-owned? One hopes that the discovery of the wreck will stimulate some archival work to see if there is a possibility of putting a name to this interesting find. The English of the report is sometimes a bit uneven, but one should not underestimate the challenges of translating a text written by 17 contributors from three different countries. The decision to publish in English is certainly a good one, and will give the book a wider audience, but it is to be hoped that the complete work will also be available in Italian and Serbo-Croat (each chapter has brief summaries in these languages). The Sveti Pavao Shipwreck is easy to read, well-illustrated and produced to a high standard. The authors and publishers deserve to be congratulated on this work, which is an important contribution to the understanding of the seafaring world of the Mediterranean in the second half of the 16th century.