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What would those south German dinner guests have thought as they watched and listened to this amusing and amazing object in action? They would, of course, have admired the clockwork brilliance of the playful automaton, but they must also have been fully aware that this was a metaphor in motion, a symbol of the ship of state. That idea of the state as a ship and its ruler as the helmsman or captain is a very old one in European culture. It is frequently used by Cicero, and indeed our word ‘governor’ comes from the Latin for ‘helmsman’ – gubernator. Even more enticingly, the root of gubernator is the Greek kubernetes, which is also the origin of our word ‘cybernetics’; so the notions of ruling, steering and robotics all coincide in our language – and in this galleon.

The state that this model ship symbolized was like no other. The Holy Roman Empire was a unique phenomenon in Europe. Covering the area of modern Germany and a great deal beyond, it was a mechanism every bit as complex as our galleon. It was not a state in the modern sense of the word but an intricate meshing of church lands, huge princely holdings and small, rich, city-states. It was an old European dream that so many diverse elements could coexist in peace, all held together by loyalty to the person of the emperor, and a dream that had proved astonishingly adaptable.

By the time of our gilded galleon the ancient metaphor of the ship of state was acquiring a new layer of meaning. Ships had become the focus of an intense interest in mechanics and technology, subjects which were absorbing, indeed obsessing, rulers right across Europe. The historian Lisa Jardine explains:

The rich, the wealthy of all kinds, the aristocracy, everybody wanted to own a bit of technology – something with cogs and wheels and winding bits, a very ornamental clock or a very ornamental position-finding instrument. It was fashionable to own scientific instruments, because they were the means of expansion and discovery. Clockwork is fundamentally European, and it develops in the early sixteenth century, at least on a small scale. It’s all hand-worked, minute craftsmanship, not mass-produced at all, and it’s mostly done by gold and silversmiths. It immediately fascinates everyone that you can wind something up and it goes without your touching it. Clockwork is magic in the sixteenth century.

Magic it may have been, but clockwork was also big business in sixteenth-century Germany. In our ship, the greatest technical skill is not the modelling or the gilding of the galleon itself but the engineering of the clock and the automated moving parts. Observers repeatedly stressed the precision, the orderliness, the grace of mechanisms like this one, which embodied the ideal of the early modern European state as it ought to have been and rarely was, with everything working together harmoniously under the control of one guiding idea and one beneficent sovereign. Its appeal went far beyond Europe: automata like our galleon were presented as gifts to the emperor of China and the Ottoman sultan and were greatly prized. What ruler, from Dresden to Kyoto, would not gaze in delight as figures moved to his command in strict and unswerving order? So unlike the messiness of rule in the real world.

Even in the sixteenth century, automata like this were far more than just toys for the rich: they were central to the experimental sciences, mechanics, engineering and the search for perpetual motion, the growing desire to control the world by taking possession of the secrets of its workings. Even more fundamentally, they speak of that urge to imitate life by mechanical means, which would ultimately be the basis of modern automation and cybernetics. You can say that it is around 1600 that our understanding of the whole world as a mechanism really begins to crystallize, seeing the cosmos as a kind of machine, complex and difficult to understand but ultimately manageable and controllable.

The state that the galleon symbolizes, the Holy Roman Empire,