Galley in the context of "Lord of the Isles"

The Battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement that took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states arranged by Pope Pius V and led by the navies of the Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras. The Ottoman forces were sailing westward from their naval station in Lepanto (the Venetian name of ancient Naupactus – Greek Ναύπακτος, Turkish İnebahtı) when they met the fleet of the Holy League which was sailing east from Messina, Sicily.

Lepanto marks the last major engagement in the Western world to be fought almost entirely between rowing vessels, namely the galleys and galleasses, which were the direct descendants of ancient trireme warships. The battle was in essence an "infantry battle on floating platforms". It was the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity, involving more than 450 warships. Over the following decades, the increasing importance of the galleon and the line of battle tactic would displace the galley as the major warship of its era, marking the beginning of the "Age of Sail".

The Mary Rose was a carrack in the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. She was launched in 1511 and served for 34 years in several wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany. After being substantially rebuilt in 1536, she saw her last action on 19 July 1545. She led the attack on the galleys of a French invasion fleet, but sank off Spithead in the Solent, the strait north of the Isle of Wight.

The wreck of the Mary Rose was located in 1971 and was raised on 11 October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive maritime salvage projects in history. The surviving section of the ship and thousands of recovered artefacts are of significance as a Tudor period time capsule. The excavation and raising of the Mary Rose was a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable in complexity and cost to the raising of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa in 1961. The Mary Rose site is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 by statutory instrument 1974/55. The wreck is a Protected Wreck managed by Historic England.

Marine propulsion is the mechanism or system used to generate thrust to move a watercraft through water. While paddles and sails are still used on some smaller boats, most modern ships are propelled by mechanical systems consisting of an electric motor or internal combustion engine driving a propeller, or less frequently, in pump-jets, an impeller. Marine engineering is the discipline concerned with the engineering design process of marine propulsion systems.

Human-powered paddles and oars, and later, sails were the first forms of marine propulsion. Rowed galleys, some equipped with sail, played an important early role in early human seafaring and warfare. The first advanced mechanical means of marine propulsion was the marine steam engine, introduced in the early 19th century. During the 20th century it was replaced by two-stroke or four-stroke diesel engines, outboard motors, and gas turbine engines on faster ships. Marine nuclear reactors, which appeared in the 1950s, produce steam to propel warships and icebreakers; commercial application, attempted late that decade, failed to catch on. Electric motors using battery packs have been used for propulsion on submarines and electric boats and have been proposed for energy-efficient propulsion.

Arnaut Mami or Mahomed the Albanian (fl. 1572–76) was an Ottoman Albanian commander and admiral of the Ottoman fleet and the squadron admiral and the supreme commander of all Islamic vessels in North Africa and Pasha Algiers, known as the most formidable corsair of that period for his terrorizing of the narrow seas. He was also captain general of Ottoman galleys in Algiers. He was called Arnaut after his Albanian origin.

On the morning of 26 September 1575, Arnaut's ship attacked the galley Sol on the Catalan coast, with Miguel de Cervantes aboard. After significant resistance, in which the captain and many crew members were killed, the surviving passengers were taken to Algiers as captives. After five years as a slave, Cervantes was released when his family paid the ransom.

A galleass was a warship of the Renaissance that combined the sails and armament of a galleon or carrack with the propulsion and maneuverability of the oared galley. While never quite matching up to the full expectations for its design, the galleass was widely employed by the navies of the Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Distinct types of galleasses were developed concurrently under vastly different needs. Mediterranean galleasses were invented by Venice during the Ottoman–Venetian wars with the aim to overpower galley fleets, a model also adopted by Spain and other nations after their notable role in the Battle of Lepanto. In comparison, Atlantic galleasses were designed by Spain to outmaneuver sailing ships and protect their treasure fleets, eventually evolving into rowless galleons and frigates.

A trireme (/ˈtraɪriːm/ TRY-reem; from Latin trirēmis 'with three banks of oars'; cf. Ancient Greek: τριήρης, romanized: triḗrēs, lit. 'three-rower') was an ancient vessel and a type of galley that was used by the ancient maritime civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians, ancient Greeks and Romans.

The trireme derives its name from its three rows of oars, manned with one man per oar. The early trireme was a development of the penteconter, an ancient warship with a single row of 25 oars on each side (i.e., a single-banked boat), and of the bireme (Ancient Greek: διήρης, diērēs), a warship with two banks of oars, of Phoenician origin. The word dieres does not appear until the Roman period. According to Morrison and Williams, "It must be assumed the term pentekontor covered the two-level type". As a ship, it was fast and agile and was the dominant warship in the Mediterranean from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC, after which it was largely superseded by the larger quadriremes and quinqueremes. Triremes played a vital role in the Persian Wars, the creation of the Athenian maritime empire and its downfall during the Peloponnesian War.

Karamürsel is a municipality and district of Kocaeli Province, Turkey. Its area is 262 km, and its population is 59,676 (2022). It is on the south coast of the Gulf of İzmit. Before its conquest by the Ottomans it used to be called by the Greek name of Praenetos (Πραινετός in Greek). The modern name commemorates Kara Mürsel who founded the Ottoman navy and designed distinctive galley ships, called kadırgas, for it.

Karamürsel holds special significance for the Turkish Navy, as it was here in 1323 that the Ottoman Empire first established an outlet to the sea, thus laying the foundations for the Ottoman Navy which would go on to dominate the eastern Mediterranean for several centuries.

The penteconter (alt. spelling pentekonter, pentaconter, pentecontor or pentekontor; Greek: πεντηκόντερος, pentēkónteros, "fifty-oared"), plural penteconters, was an ancient Greek galley in use since the archaic period.

In an alternative meaning, the term was also used for a military commander of fifty men in ancient Greece.

Bharuch (listen) is a city at the mouth of the Narmada River in Gujarat in western part of India. Bharuch is the administrative headquarters of Bharuch District.

The city of Bharuch and its surroundings have been settled since times of antiquity. It was a ship building centre and sea port in the pre-compass coastal trading routes for trading with the Occident and the East, perhaps as far back as the days of earliest trade connections. The route made use of the regular and predictable monsoon winds or relied on galleys. Many goods from the Far East and Far West (the famed Spices and Silk trade) were shipped there during the annual monsoon winds, making it a terminus for several key land-sea trade routes. Bharuch was known to the Greeks, the Parthian Empire, in the Roman Empire, the Chinese, and in other Western and Eastern centres of civilisation through the end of the European Middle Ages and other the middle ages of the world.