Connect and Punish. The Galley Penalty in the Holy Roman Empire as a Translocal Practice

The galley was the most important boat type in the Mediterranean world since antiquity, both for warfare and the transport of goods. But it was not until the 1500s that governments began to use convicted criminals as oarsmen. Remarkably, this trend also reached countries that had no galley fleets themselves such as the Holy Roman Empire. From the late 16^th until the early 19^th century several imperial states sentenced criminals with the galley penalty and afterwards transferred them to Mediterranean sea powers to serve their sentences. However, still very little is known about the overall dimensions of this practice – how many ‘criminals’ were sentenced to the galleys, who were the actors involved and how were the sentences implemented? Historical literature has thus far only rudimentarily addressed the topic both for the German speaking lands and the Mediterranean region.
My project aims to fill this gap by analysing the galley penalty from a broad perspective that combines sources and research traditions from different contexts. I argue that the galley penalty in the Holy Roman Empire was a genuinely translocal practice. Since the German states did not have their own galleys, the determination of the sentence and its execution were separated – not only geographically, but also politically. Negotiating the exchange of convicts and putting this exchange into practice thus connected different European authorities, legal systems and geographical regions. Transregional legal punishment, it thus can be argued, was as much a means of constructing Europe as a common space as were trade, science, art, war or diplomacy.