Part 1 (1/2)
Artillery Through the Ages.
by Albert Manucy.
THE ERA OF ARTILLERY
_Looking at an old-time cannon, most people are sure of just one thing: the shot came out of the front end. For that reason these pages are written; people are curious about the fascinating weapon that so prodigiously and powerfully lengthened the warrior's arm. And theirs is a justifiable curiosity, because the gunner and his ”art” played a significant role in our history._
THE ANCIENT ENGINES OF WAR
To compare a Roman catapult with a modern trench mortar seems absurd.
Yet the only basic difference is the kind of energy that sends the projectile on its way.
In the dawn of history, war engines were performing the function of artillery (which may be loosely defined as a means of hurling missiles too heavy to be thrown by hand), and with these crude weapons the basic principles of artillery were laid down. The Scriptures record the use of ingenious machines on the walls of Jerusalem eight centuries B.C.--machines that were probably predecessors of the catapult and ballista, getting power from twisted ropes made of hair, hide or sinew. The ballista had horizontal arms like a bow. The arms were set in rope; a cord, fastened to the arms like a bowstring, fired arrows, darts, and stones. Like a modern field gun, the ballista shot low and directly toward the enemy.
The catapult was the howitzer, or mortar, of its day and could throw a hundred-pound stone 600 yards in a high arc to strike the enemy behind his wall or batter down his defenses. ”In the middle of the ropes a wooden arm rises like a chariot pole,” wrote the historian Marcellinus. ”At the top of the arm hangs a sling. When battle is commenced, a round stone is set in the sling. Four soldiers on each side of the engine wind the arm down until it is almost level with the ground. When the arm is set free, it springs up and hurls the stone forth from its sling.” In early times the weapon was called a ”scorpion,” for like this dreaded insect it bore its ”sting” erect.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 1--BALLISTA. Caesar covered his landing in Britain with fire from catapults and ballistas.]
The trebuchet was another war machine used extensively during the Middle Ages. Essentially, it was a seesaw. Weights on the short arm swung the long throwing arm.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 2--CATAPULT.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 3--TREBUCHET. A heavy trebuchet could throw a 300-pound stone 300 yards.]
These weapons could be used with telling effect, as the Romans learned from Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse (214-212 B.C.). As Plutarch relates, ”Archimedes soon began to play his engines upon the Romans and their s.h.i.+ps, and shot stones of such an enormous size and with so incredible a noise and velocity that nothing could stand before them.
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.”
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 bombsh.e.l.l 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 ma.n.u.script 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 b.a.l.l.s. They were laid directly on the ground, with muzzles elevated by mounding up the earth. Being c.u.mbrous and inefficient, they played little part in battle, but were quite useful in a siege.
THE BOMBARDS
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 n.o.bles. 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 flags.h.i.+p, and another crushed through the English ranks to kill or wound 60 men.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 4--EARLY SMALL BOMBARD (1330). It was made of wrought-iron bars, bound with hoops.]