Roma-Caligula!

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The emperor Caligula is said to have ridden a horse across a pontoon bridge stretching two miles between Baiae and Puteoli while wearing the armour of Alexander the Great to mock a soothsayer who had claimed he had "no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae". Caligula's construction of the bridge cost a massive sum of money and added to discontent with his rule.

The late Roman writer Vegetius, in his work De Re Militari, wrote:

But the most commodious invention is that of the small boats hollowed out of one piece of timber and very light both by their make and the quality of the wood. The army always has a number of these boats upon carriages, together with a sufficient quantity of planks and iron nails. Thus with the help of cables to lash the boats together, a bridge is instantly constructed, which for the time has the solidity of a bridge of stone

ROMAN-GRECO ERA

The Greek writer Herodotus in his Histories, records several pontoon bridges. The Persian Emperor Darius used a 2-kilometre

(1.2 mi) pontoon bridge to cross the Bosphorus and Emperor Caligula built a 2-mile (3.2 km) bridge at Baiae in 37 AD. For

Emperor Darius I The Great of Persia (522–485 BC), the Greek Mandrocles of Samos once engineered a pontoon bridge that

stretched across the Bosporus, linking Asia to Europe, so that Darius could pursue the fleeing Scythians as well as move his army into position in the Balkans to overwhelm Macedon. Other spectacular pontoon bridges were Xerxes' Pontoon Bridges across the Hellespont by Xerxes I in 480 BC to transport his huge army into Europe

The Sicilian Expedition (415 - 413 B.C.), the Athenian general, Nicias, paid builders to engineer an extraordinary pontoon bridge composed of gilded and tapestried ships for a festival that drew Athenians and Ionians across the sea to the sanctuary of Apollo on Delos. On the occasion when Nicias was a sponsor, young Athenians paraded across the boats, singing as they walked, to give the armada a spectacular farewell.

MIDDLE AGE

Emperor Heraclius crossed the Bosporus on horseback on a large pontoon bridge in 638. The army of the Umayyad Caliphate built

a pontoon bridge over the Bosporus in 717 during the Siege of Constantinople (717–718). The Carolingian army of Charlemagne

constructed a portable pontoon bridge of anchored boats bound together and used it to cross the Danube during campaigns against

the Avar Khaganate in the 790s. Charlemagne's army built two fortified pontoon bridges across the Elbe in 789 during a campaign

against the Slavic Veleti. The German army of Otto the Great employed three pontoon bridges, made from pre-fabricated materials, to rapidly cross the Recknitz river at the Battle on the Raxa in 955 and win decisively against the Slavic Obotrites. Tenth-Century German Ottonian capitularies demanded that royal fiscal estates maintain watertight, river-fordable wagons for purposes of war.