Edit: On my phone and misspelled “medieval”, I am ashamed.
Recently got done playing a video game called Ryse: Son of Rome, where the Romans invade a Barbarian controlled area defended by two Roman constructed towers with chains between them. As the Roman fleet enters to make a beachhead, the two towers raise the chain and the ships crash into it, destroying them,
Thinking about it, I remember watching Avatae the Last Airbender, where a similar strategy was used by the Fire Nation.
Although an animated show isn’t related to history, I find these two examples of the same concept to have had of been inspired by some form.
Did this ever happen in history or is this simply a cool concept created in the modern era?
https://youtu.be/26s1WMGhhmU?t=1m4s
1:04 is what I’m referring to.
The best example of this would be the chain the Byzantines used to close off the Golden horn during sieges. The chain stretched between the northern sea walls of the city and the tower of Galata on the nortern side of the Golden Horn.
This tower was constructed specifically as an anchor point of the chain since there was no fortfied settelement or fortress north of the horn. In times of war/sieges the navy (and any merchant ships) could retreat behind the chain and sally forth at tactically opportune moments.
Also due to the chain, the northern sea walls of the city were safe from besieging troops and did not have to be manned, thus saving a lot if troops that could be used on threatened sections of the walls. Also the northern sea walls were not as strong as those on the southern side of Byzantium: whereas it seems that the southern sea walls reached up to the sea and could thus only be attacked by ship based troops, the northern defenses were weaker in the sense that a lot of stretches of low ground between the walls and the water was present. Troops attacking this front could dismount from their ships and then use ladders etc to attack the walls.
The chain was so long that it was supported by wooden floats. It was probably not up to withstanding the impact of a large galley at full speed, but any ship trying this would be brought to a standstill, suffer damage to its bow section and could be immediatly attacked by Byzantine ships behind the chain. As a side note: most of the sieges of Byzantium were done by land powers that had not the expertise for large galleys and relied at best on small boats for water transport.
In 1204 the city could be taken because a heavy Venetian galley charged into the chain and broke it. The Byzantine navy was at that moment practically non existent and could not intervene when that happened. The "crusaders" were then able to attack the weaker sea walls on the Golden horn and thus capture the city.
In the siege of 1453, the Ottomans were not able to brake trough the chain, but circumvented it by dragging ships over land and thus let them in the Golden horn. This was a serious moral blow to the defenders of the city and diluted the already far to small defensive force because the extra length of wall that had now to be defended. The city fell by a breach in its land walls, but the opening of the sea walls on the horn as a possible venue of atttack certainly contributed to the success of the siege (or rather the more rapid conclusion of it).
Hi, you may find these earlier threads interesting
/u/Gaimar goes into some depth on Constantinople in During the Siege of Constantinople the Byzantines deployed a "chain" to stop Ottoman ships from reaching the northern wall of the city. What was this chain made of, and why was it so effective?
/u/XenophonTheAthenian makes a brief mention of a chain in Carthage in Was Carthage's port the most advanced in the world?; there's more on the chain specifically in this old thread How is it the chain across Constantinople's harbour was so effective?
Wouldn't a chain like that break on impact with the ships?