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John turned a little to the left, going nearer to the window, where he could gain a better view of the Madonna, which he had heard so often was the most famous.
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At length the Romans were so terrified that, if they saw but a rope or a beam projecting over the walls of Syracuse, they cried out that Archimedes was leveling some machine at them, and turned their backs and fled. Often they were side by side with cannon. Though the Chinese were first instructed in the scientific casting of cannon by missionaries during the 's, crude cannon seem to have existed in China during the twelfth century and even earlier.
In Europe, a ninth century Latin manuscript contains a formula for gunpowder. But the first show of firearms in western Europe may have been by the Moors, at Saragossa, in A. In later years the Spaniards turned the new weapon against their Moorish enemies at the siege of Cordova and the capture of Gibraltar It therefore follows that the Arabian madfaa , which in turn had doubtless descended from an eastern predecessor, was the original cannon brought to western civilization.
This strange weapon seems to have been a small, mortar-like instrument of wood. Like an egg in an egg cup, the ball rested on the muzzle end until firing of the charge tossed it in the general direction of the enemy. Another primitive cannon, with narrow neck and flared mouth, fired an iron dart.
The shaft of the dart was wrapped with leather to fit tightly into the neck of the piece. A red-hot bar thrust through a vent ignited the charge. The range was about yards. The bottle shape of the weapon perhaps suggested the name pot de fer iron jug given early cannon, and in the course of evolution the narrow neck probably enlarged until the bottle became a straight tube. During the Hundred Years' War cannon came into general use. Those early pieces were very small, made of iron or cast bronze, and fired lead or iron balls.
They were laid directly on the ground, with muzzles elevated by mounding up the earth. Being cumbrous and inefficient, they played little part in battle, but were quite useful in a siege. Dulle Griete, the giant bombard of Ghent, had a inch caliber and fired a pound granite ball. It was built in The Scottish kings used Meg between and to reduce the castles of rebellious nobles. A baron's castle was easily knocked to pieces by the prince who owned, or could borrow, a few pieces of heavy ordnance. The towering walls of the old-time strongholds slowly gave way to the earthwork-protected Renaissance fortification, which is typified in the United States by Castillo de San Marcos, in Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, St.
Augustine, Fla. Some of the most formidable bombards were those of the Turks, who used exceptionally large cast-bronze guns at the siege of Constantinople in One of these monsters weighed 19 tons and hurled a pound stone seven times a day. It took some 60 oxen and men to move this piece, and the difficulty of transporting such heavy ordnance greatly reduced its usefulness. The largest caliber gun on record is the Great Mortar of Moscow. Built about , it had a bore of 36 inches, was 18 feet long, and fired a stone projectile weighing a ton.
But by this time the big guns were obsolete, although some of the old Turkish ordnance survived the centuries to defend Constantinople against a British squadron in In that defense a great stone cut the mainmast of the British flagship, and another crushed through the English ranks to kill or wound 60 men. The ponderosity of the large bombards held them to level land, where they were laid on rugged mounts of the heaviest wood, anchored by stakes driven into the ground. A gunner would try to put his bombard yards from the wall he wanted to batter down.
One would surmise that the gunner, being so close to a castle wall manned by expert Genoese cross-bowmen, was in a precarious position. He was; but earthworks or a massive wooden shield arranged like a seesaw over his gun gave him fair protection. Lowering the front end of the shield made a barricade behind which he could charge his muzzle loader see fig.
In those days, and for many decades thereafter, neither gun crews nor transport were permanent. They had to be hired as they were needed. Master gunners were usually civilian "artists," not professional soldiers, and many of them had cannon built for rental to customers. Artillerists obtained the right to captured metals such as tools and town bells, and this loot would be cast into guns or ransomed for cash. The making of guns and gunpowder, the loading of bombs, and even the serving of cannon were jealously guarded trade secrets. Gunnery was a closed corporation, and the gunner himself a guildsman.
The public looked upon him as something of a sorcerer in league with the devil, and a captured artilleryman was apt to be tortured and mutilated. At one time the Pope saw fit to excommunicate all gunners.
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Also since these specialists kept to themselves and did not drink or plunder, their behavior was ample proof to the good soldier of the old days that artillerists were hardly human. Lighter cannon began to replace the bombards. Throughout the 's improvement was mainly toward lightening the enormous weights of guns and projectiles, as well as finding better ways to move the artillery. Thus, by Emperor Ferdinand was able to march against the Turks with 57 heavy and light pieces of ordnance. At the beginning of the 's cast-iron balls had made an appearance. The greater efficiency of the iron ball, together with an improvement in gunpowder, further encouraged the building of smaller and stronger guns.
Before the siege gun had been the predominant piece. Now forged-iron cannon for field, garrison, and naval service—and later, cast-iron pieces—were steadily developed along with cast-bronze guns, some of which were beautifully ornamented with Renaissance workmanship. The casting of trunnions on the gun made elevation and transportation easier, and the cumbrous beds of the early days gave way to crude artillery carriages with trails and wheels.
The French invented the limber and about took a sizable forward step by standardizing the calibers of their artillery.
Meanwhile, the first cannon had come to the New World with Columbus. As the Pinta's lookout sighted land on the early morn of October 12, , the firing of a lombard carried the news over the moonlit waters to the flagship Santa Maria. Within the next century, not only the galleons, but numerous fortifications on the Spanish Main were armed with guns, thundering at the freebooters who disputed Spain's ownership of American treasure.
Sometimes the adventurers seized cannon as prizes, as did Drake in when he made off with 14 bronze guns from St. Augustine's little wooden fort of San Juan de Pinos. Drake's loot no doubt included the ordnance of a list, which gives a fair idea of the armament for an important frontier fortification: three reinforced cannon, three demiculverins, two sakers one broken , a demisaker and a falcon, all properly mounted on elevated platforms in the fort to cover every approach. Most of them were highly ornamented pieces founded between and The reinforced cannon, for instance, which seem to have been cast from the same mold, each bore the figure of a savage hefting a club in one hand and grasping a coin in the other.
On a demiculverin, a bronze mermaid held a turtle, and the other guns were decorated with arms, escutcheons, the founder's name, and so on. In the English colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lighter pieces seem to have been the more prevalent; there is no record of any "cannon.
Culverins are mentioned occasionally and demiculverins rather frequently, but most common were the falconets, falcons, minions, and sakers.
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At Fort Raleigh, Jamestown, Plymouth, and some other settlements the breech-loading half-pounder perrier or "Patterero" mounted on a swivel was also in use. See frontispiece. It was during the sixteenth century that the science of ballistics had its beginning. In , Niccolo Tartaglia published the first scientific treatise on gunnery. Principles of construction were tried and sometimes abandoned, only to reappear for successful application in later centuries. Breech-loading guns, for instance, had already been invented.
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They were unsatisfactory because the breech could not be sealed against escape of the powder gases, and the crude, chambered breechblocks, jammed against the bore with a wedge, often cracked under the shock of firing. Neither is spiral rifling new. It appeared in a few guns during the 's. Mobile artillery came on the field with the cart guns of John Zizka during the Hussite Wars of Bohemia Using light guns, hauled by the best of horses instead of the usual oxen, the French further improved field artillery, and maneuverable French guns proved to be an excellent means for breaking up heavy masses of pikemen in the Italian campaigns of the early 's.
The Germans under Maximilian I, however, took the armament leadership away from the French with guns that ranged 1, yards and with men who had earned the reputation of being the best gunners in Europe. Then about the famous Spanish Square of heavily armed pikemen and musketeers began to dominate the battlefield. In the face of musketry, field artillery declined.
Barrage: the guns in action by Ian V. Hogg
Although artillery had achieved some mobility, carriages were still cumbrous. To move a heavy English cannon, even over good ground, it took 23 horses; a culverin needed nine beasts. Ammunition—mainly cast-iron round shot, the bomb an iron shell filled with gunpowder , canister a can filled with small projectiles , and grape shot a cluster of iron balls —was carried the primitive way, in wheelbarrows and carts or on a man's back. The gunner's pace was the measure of field artillery's speed: the gunner walked beside his gun!
Furthermore, some of these experts were getting along in years. During Elizabeth's reign several of the gunners at the Tower of London were over 90 years old.
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Lacking mobility, guns were captured and recaptured with every changing sweep of the battle; so for the artillerist generally, this was a difficult period. The actual commander of artillery was usually a soldier; but transport and drivers were still hired, and the drivers naturally had a layman's attitude toward battle. Even the gunners, those civilian artists who owed no special duty to the prince, were concerned mainly over the safety of their pieces—and their hides, since artillerists who stuck with their guns were apt to be picked off by an enemy musketeer.
Fusilier companies were organized as artillery guards, but their job was as much to keep the gun crew from running away as to protect them from the enemy. So, during years, cannon had changed from the little vases, valuable chiefly for making noise, into the largest caliber weapons ever built, and then from the bombards into smaller, more powerful cannon.
The gun of could throw a shot almost as far as the gun of ; not in fire power, but in mobility, organization, and tactics was artillery undeveloped. Because artillery lacked these things, the pike and musket were supreme on the battlefield.