Veneti

A Gallic people who built ocean-going ships and lost their independence in the first naval battle in Atlantic waters that history records. The Veneti lived on the southern coast of Brittany around what is now Vannes, which carries their name, and controlled the sea route to Britain and the tin trade that came with it. Caesar describes their ships with unusual attention: oak hulls, iron chains instead of rope for the anchors, leather sails, and flat bottoms that let them sit upright on a falling tide - built for the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean and far tougher than Roman vessels. Their strongholds sat on headlands that became islands at high water, so a besieging army could not stay and a fleet could not approach. In 56 BC they seized Roman officers sent to requisition grain, and Caesar treated it as a revolt. He had a fleet built on the Loire under Decimus Brutus and won by an unglamorous expedient: hooks on long poles to cut the halyards, becalming the Venetic ships so they could be boarded. Caesar then executed the Venetic council and sold the entire population into slavery, explaining that they had violated the status of ambassadors. It was the harshest sentence he recorded imposing on any Gallic people. The region was absorbed into Lugdunensis. Their megalithic coastline later became one of the most studied prehistoric landscapes in Europe. Caesar's account is the only substantial description of their society that survives. Their territory corresponds to the modern Morbihan. The sea route they controlled reached Cornwall and southern Ireland. Their name is unrelated to that of the Veneti of northern Italy.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history