Ship Mill - History

History

There is historical evidence that the development of this type of mill dates back to the ingenious invention of Vitruvius, a Roman engineer of the 1st century BC. Vitruvius described a ship odometer working with a waterwheel attached to the ship hull.

In the 537 siege of Rome, supplies were interrupted by the Goths from providing the population with vital flour from the surrounding water mills. Also, the aqueducts that supplied Rome with water and some cities which had water-driven mills could no longer work. The solution devised by the Eastern Roman general Belisarius was the "reverse principle of a water mill" - the ship mills, which were anchored on the Tiber river around Rome. It was a type of watermill powered by water wheels mounted on the sides of ships moored in midstream, preferably close to bridges where the current is stronger. From then on, the ship mill spread throughout medieval Europe, reaching Paris (556) Geneva (563) and Dijon (c. 575) in quick succession. They remained a common sight in much of Europe until the 19th century, with a few of them surviving up to our time.

By the 10th century, the medieval ship mill had spread east to the Islamic world. It was employed along the Tigris at Mosul in 10th-century Iraq, where large ship mills made of wood and iron could produce 10 tons of flour from corn every day for the granary in Baghdad. In 1184, Ibn Jubayr described ship mills in the same region on the Khabur River. From the lack of records, it appears that they did not spread further to Iran.

The German terms "Schiffsmühle" and "Schiffmühle" are not clearly defined and in the literature are typically used twice. Both names are equivalent to coexist, but in the south-German and Alps areas, the first spelling ("Schiffs-") for "ship mill" is used.