The Cost of a Man's Life in Sixteenth-Century Naples: Galley Rowers on the Early Modern Mediterranean

Abstract

Convicts made up an important segment of the labor pool in early modern Europe. This essay first focuses on a claim of compensation for the services of convict rowers on a private galley serving in the Naples fleet in the sixteenth century and follows contemporary calculations attempting to determine the “cost” of such labor. It then examines the supply side of those relations by analyzing sentences to the galleys from the 1560s to the 1660s.