Michael Baizerman Author

  I'm not ready yet to unveil the outline of my current project titled " The Fright and Thrill of Navigation:  Seafaring in the Medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean,"  but I will disclose a few details. The first part will be "The Age of the Galley." It consists of the intro, A Tale of the Two Watercraft Brands, and two chapters, Early War Galleys and Late War Galleys.  The introduction is ready, at least as a magazine version, and I even uploaded it on the Academia site, not as one but as three articles: https://www.academia.edu/104456432/War_galleys_in_the_Medieval_Mediterranean https://www.academia.edu/107397680/Sailing_Ships_in_the_Medieval_Mediterranean https://www.academia.edu/109918628/Galleys_vs_Sailing_Ships_Comparison_and_Contrast I am currently editing Chapter 1: Early War Galleys, which I divided into portions for possible magazine publication.  I am also assessing the material collected for a new chapter based on the Battle of   Los Form...

 I want to share a bunch of encouraging news with you.  Since August 2019, I have been building my readership community on Academia.edu, a site for researchers. View https://independent.academia.edu/BaizermanMichael  I uploaded eight chapters from my first book, "Dawn and Sunset: A Tale of the Earliest Cities in the Near East." I started transferring the units from my second boon, "The Enchanting Encounter with the East." It was a slow start. By the end of my first year, I had about 1K views.  At this stage, Academia.edu ushered in a new rubric, Discussion. After sending a paper to publication, an author can discuss his report. It usually takes three weeks, with an option for an extension. You write an invitation, and the site sends it to around 1 K people in addition to your fans. I resolved to put my articles to the test. Suddenly, many people recognized my name and became familiar with my studies. One can encounter researchers, students, and graduates of many uni...

  I am still undecided about the plan to write a new book. Meanwhile, things are getting into a groove.  Whether a book in its virtue or a unit in a volume, it will be titled "The Anguish and Thrill of Navigation". I may add a subtitle emphasizing that the topic concerns plying the medieval Mediterranean. I have chosen an epigraph from Eustache Deschamps, a 14th- century French poem. His extract claims that landlubbers, no matter how they are proficient in globetrotting have no idea about the hardships of sea travel.  The prototype of the project is based on a string of articles written in 2014-2015 for my second manuscript, "The Enchanting Encounter with the East". However, these papers were excluded from the final draft since the book deals with land travels rather than seafaring. A new, extended version of these essays makes them awkward to use in my third project, which focuses on the Age of Discovery. On the other hand, my current project is too significant to ...

  Venetian War Galley, late sixteenth century https://www.pinterest.com/pin/511721576383894517/ Genoese Merchant Vessel https://www.pinterest.com/pin/313915036504583191/ The first chapter of a new unit compares and contrasts galleys and sailing ships negotiating maritime routes in the medieval Mediterranean. It discusses shipbuilding approaches and the diet of seafarers. The paper is based on my previous version penned about seven years ago but sustained major corrections. Due to personal reasons, I will keep the draft intact but I cannot help uploading the first page for you.  A curious landlubber gazing at the sea could discern with ease two broad types of watercraft hugging the coast: oared vessels (galleys) and sailing ships. These breeds epitomized the unabated contest between seaworthiness and speed. Oared vessels were born for speed and doomed to fight; not for nothing tags like "dromon" (Greek: "racer") in Byzantium and "sagitta" (Latin: "ar...