Which Venetian institution ran a state-owned shipyard producing a galley a day?

The Arsenal, which at its height employed some 16,000 people and could fit out a galley in a day from prefabricated parts - hulls moved down a channel past stations where masts, rigging, oars, weapons and provisions were added in sequence. Assembly-line production, four centuries before it was reinvented.

It worked because the state standardised everything. Components were made to fixed dimensions and stockpiled, so any rudder fitted any hull, and shipwrights were forbidden to work abroad. Visiting dignitaries were given the galley-in-a-day demonstration precisely because it was propaganda: a city of a hundred thousand people advertising that it could replace a fleet faster than anyone could sink one.

It supplied the word arsenal to most European languages, from an Arabic term for a house of manufacture. Dante had visited and used it as a simile in the Inferno - boiling pitch in the shipyard standing in for the punishment of corrupt officials - which is close to the only case of an industrial process turning up in a fourteenth-century poem.