Artillery Through the Ages A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America — Story, Setting & Ideas

Archimedes was leveling some machine at them, and turned their backs and fled."

Long after the introduction of gunpowder, the old engines of war continued in use. Often they were side by side with cannon.

GUNPOWDER COMES TO EUROPE

Chinese "thunder of the earth" (an effect produced by filling a large bombshell with a gunpowder mixture) sounded faint reverberations amongst the philosophers of the western world as early as A.D. 300. Though the Chinese were first instructed in the scientific casting of cannon by missionaries during the 1600'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.D. 1118. In later years the Spaniards turned the new weapon against their Moorish enemies at the siege of Cordova (1280) and the capture of Gibraltar (1306).

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 700 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 (1339-1453) 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.

By the middle 1400's the little popguns that tossed one-or two-pound pellets had grown into enormous bombards. Dulle Griete, the giant bombard of Ghent, had a 25-inch caliber and fired a 700-pound granite ball. It was built in 1382. Edinburgh Castle's famous Mons Meg threw a 19-1/2-inch iron ball some 1,400 yards (a mile is 1,760 yards), or a stone ball twice that far.

The Scottish kings used Meg between 1455 and 1513 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 1453. One of these monsters weighed 19 tons and hurled a 600-pound stone seven times a day. It took some 60 oxen and 200 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 1525, 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 1807. 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 100 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. 49).