A migrant's story

Michael of Rhodes was a Greek sailor who joined a Venetian galley as an oarsman in 1401, at age sixteen, for three ducats a month, rowing an eight-meter, sixty-kilogram oar through calms, port entrances, and battle. Over six years of harsh conditions he built a career that would eventually see him sail forty-three voyages and rise from oarsman to armiraio, the highest rank open to a non-noble in Venetian service — commanding a dozen galleys and smaller vessels, fighting in five major sea battles under commanders such as Carlo Zeno, Pietro Loredan, and Andrea Mocenigo, fighting the Turks, escorting a papal delegation, and sailing as far as Flanders and England. He lost two wives and a son during his years at sea.

The Galley

In 1434 he began the manuscript for which he's remembered: a compilation of mathematics, navigation, and the earliest known treatise on shipbuilding. Its mathematical exercises include practical commercial problems, such as calculating that 142 kg of pepper — a luxury commodity moving through Rhodes as an intercontinental trade port — was worth 38 ducats, 23 denari, and 17 piccoli, scaled from a known price of 49.5 ducats for 181 kg. The manuscript itself is framed as a calculated career move: since ordinary people were largely illiterate and books were expensive and labor-intensive to produce, a self-made, non-noble mariner competing against native Venetian rivals for prestigious postings needed to prove both technical skill and the cultural literacy of the nobility. The book functioned as portable proof that education, not just experience, was his path upward — study he likely pursued at Venice's abacus school during winter breaks between voyages.

A Cargo of pepper.

After his last trip to London in 1443, Michael stopped sailing. Between 1443 and 1445 he copied part of his own text into a second manuscript, the Method for Mariners (now in Venice's Marciana Library), apparently hoping to sell it to investors and merchants. In January 1445 he was awarded a pension post as one of Venice's eleven Stadiera weighing-station officials, but died that same year from the cumulative toll of his career. His original manuscript then disappeared for four hundred years, resurfacing only in 1966.

Tools for making vessels

The Method for Mariners has its own twist: Michael's younger contemporary Pietro di Versi was impressed enough to scratch out Michael's name and write his own over it, and di Versi was credited as its author until 2004, when scholars examined the manuscript under ultraviolet light and found Michael's original name still there beneath the alteration.

The Book of Navigation by Michael of Rhodes

Information was extracted from: The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (Long, McGee, and Stahl, eds., MIT Press, 2009).

The question is, can such a story become the playground for transformational experience?

Europe is the story of migration after all!

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