The Papal Navy, Volume II: The Medieval Papal Fleet, 728-1499. This bilingual Warships & Navies edition preserves 561 original-language facsimile pages from Storia della marina pontificia, then frames the volume in English for collectors, researchers, and naval-history readers. The second medieval Papal Navy volume carries Alberto Guglielmotti's long narrative deeper into the age in which papal maritime policy intersected with crusading movement, Italian politics, and the struggle to secure vulnerable routes across the Mediterranean.
It also provides scholarly back-of-book indexes of persons, places, events, and ships, turning the facsimile into a practical research tool for tracing actors, theaters, campaigns, and vessels.
This edition also includes Most Important Passages Translated, a curated set of twenty substantial excerpts rendered into modern English with a trace of period flavor, so readers can enter Storia della marina pontificia through its decisive scenes, arguments, and descriptions before or alongside the facsimile.
Alberto Guglielmotti's Storia della marina pontificia stands as a monumental work of nineteenth-century naval scholarship. Its subjectâEUR"the maritime power of the Papal States from the early Middle Ages to the cusp of the RenaissanceâEUR"is a critical, yet frequently overlooked, dimension of Mediterranean history. For generations, this foundational chronicle of fleets, campaigns, and strategic geography has remained largely inaccessible to an English-speaking audience. The publication of this facsimile edition is intended to rectify that scholarly omission, placing a cornerstone of Italian naval historiography into the hands of a new readership of historians, specialists, and enthusiasts.
A core tenet of the Foreign-Language Naval Classics series is the preservation of the original historical artifact. To translate Guglielmotti's work would be to create an interpretation; our purpose here is to present the source itself, in its original form and language. This approach maintains absolute fidelity to the author's precise terminology, narrative voice, and the scholarly conventions of his era. By reproducing the 1871 edition page by page, we allow the serious reader to engage directly with the text as it was first conceived, ensuring an unmediated connection to the primary historical scholarship.
While the original Italian text remains inviolate, this edition is framed by a new English-language apparatus designed to render the work fully navigable for the modern researcher. A comprehensive analytical index, constructed from a carefully normalized digital text, unlocks the volume's contents, enabling targeted inquiry and cross-referencing that would otherwise be prohibitive for the non-fluent reader. This critical apparatus, alongside contextual bibliographic data, transforms a venerable but challenging source into a functional and indispensable tool for contemporary research without altering the integrity of the original.
