Sovereigns of the Sea: The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship

By Angus Konstam

Savor the story of the ultimate warship in Sovereigns of the Sea: The Quest to Build the Perfect Renaissance Battleship, which chronicles the history of Sovereign of the Seas, an immensely powerful floating fortress. You will enjoy this gripping tale of an arms race that created and ruined empires, changed the map of the world, and led Europe out of the Renaissance and into the Modern age. Understand how the Sovereign of the Seas became the model for a whole new generation of warships that would dominate naval warfare until the advent of steam power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781620458747

Angus Konstam

Angus Konstam is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has written widely on naval history, with well over a hundred books in print. He is a former Royal Navy officer, maritime archaeologist and museum curator, who has worked in the Royal Armouries, Tower of London, and Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. Now a full-time author and historian, he lives in Orkney.

Reviews for Sovereigns of the Sea

[shannonlove65 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good, if somewhat lightweight, overview of the evolution of the armed merchantmen of the medieval period into the dedicated, purpose built ship-of-the-line warship that dominated the last two centuries of the age of sail.

Rather light on technical details and no illustrations save those form historical text. If you don't look up the ships described on your own, you won't know what they really looked like. That can make it hard to understand the significance of the various technological changes, which are what the book is really about.

Still, despite the weakness, worth the read.

[shrike58 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an entertaining survey of the evolution of the western fighting ship, with particular emphasis on showpiece vessels meant to demonstrate the might of the monarchs who built them. The culmination being the British "Sovereign of the Sea," which Konstam sees as the prototypical ship of the line.Apart from a little editorial clunkiness, my main complaint is that the author could have dwelt more explicitly on how shipbulding interacted with state building in Western Europe. That the author would use the anachronistic term "privitization" (particularly in regards to Early Bourbon France) makes me wonder a little about his grasp of process.