Artillery was a touchy subject in the late
medieval and the early modern period. For example, captured enemy master gunners were frequently
made a human cannonball. Friendly artillerymen, in contrast, were usually appreciated
for their destructive capabilities but not trusted completely. Their craft of
killing and destroying at a distance was incomprehensible to the other soldiers
and considered by many to be a dark art. So, without further ado let’s look at what
this dark art looked like in practice and what the position of artillery
was within early modern armies. According to historian Siegfried
Fiedler, artillery had a unique position in the armies of Europe until the
17th century. Within the army organization, it was a small, detached unit and usually
had its own jurisdiction. Generally speaking, a medieval or early modern army did not
have many cannons, nor many artillerymen. According to Georg Ortenburg, an expert
on warfare in the age of the Landsknechts, only about 3 guns per 1,000 men were brought
to battle at the beginning of the 16th century, and even fewer toward the end of the century.
Per gun, there were one or two specialists who commanded a team of assistants, mostly
consisting of bell founders, blacksmiths, powder makers, carpenters and other craftsmen.
These specialists were the so-called master gunners. The historian Gerhard Quaas explains
that they were usually craftsmen who specialized in the construction and operation of guns
- a famous example is the engineer Orban, who made some of the large cannons used by
the Ottomans in the siege of Constantinople in 1453. He was reportedly killed with part
of his crew when one of his bombards exploded. In the 16th century, the master gunners gradually
split into specialists focusing on the manufacture of cannons on one hand and specialists operating
and maintaining the guns on the other hand. The second group, the operators, kept the name
master gunners. The master gunners were a small group, organized similarly to guilds and passing
their knowledge only from father to son or by means of manuscripts within their guild. Printed
works on the art of artillery warfare became widespread only at the beginning of the 17th
century. They kept their secrets well-hidden and their specialist services, consequently,
remained in high demand for a long time. While some master gunners were permanently
employed by a prince or a city, most of them were recruited whenever needed, just like most
other soldiers. Gunsmiths were commanded and selected by the supreme commander of an army's
artillery. ANM They had to pass entrance exams, present certificates, and sometimes even
demonstrate their skills in target practice. Those who met the requirements were then divided
into three groups: the best operated the mortars, the second best the heavy guns and all the
others the light guns. The pay was also based on this classification. Because the artillery
had to work hand in hand with them, sappers, miners and bridge builders were also under the
command of the supreme commander of the artillery. Princes and cities were eager to provide good
conditions for these specialists so that they would stay with them as long as possible. After
all, no one wanted to see a capable gunner join the enemy's ranks. Therefore, members of the
artillery had certain privileges. If a battle for a city ended in success, they received three to
four times the pay, all captured ammunition and, if they were in enemy territory, also
the bells of the surrounding churches, which they could then use as raw material to cast
additional guns. They were also given preference in the distribution or purchase of food and were
allowed to bring along their families to the camp. A nice example for their special legal position is
the Arckeley, the artillery of the Landsknechts. The members of this group were not subject
to the jurisdiction of the Provost as all the other Landsknechts, but only to the commander
of the artillery, the so-called Feldzeugmeister. Some Landsknechts tried to abuse this
special status. If a Landsknecht was accused of an offense, he might dart to the next
artillery gun, touch it, and claim to be, by law, an artilleryman. If he managed to do touch
it before he was captured, he could only be judged by the artillery captain. In such a case
he could only be arrested if he moved more than 24 paces away from the gun or was not recognized
by the other artilleryman within 72 hours. If the Provost ignored this law, the Feldzeugmeister
had the right to break camp and leave the army – with his men and the complete artillery.
Despite, or perhaps because of their special status, artillerymen were not particularly
popular in the army camps of the late 15th and 16th centuries. In addition, it was
considered unchristian, unchivalrous and unfair to kill people, devastate livestock and
destroy buildings at long range. The common soldiers suspected "dark art", sorcery and the
devil's work in the mysterious ways of artillery, an uncanny and unjustified advantage of cowards
over brave warriors. Siegfried Fiedler mentions that master gunners were often treated accordingly
when they fell into the hands of the enemy, and Hans Delbrück, the source of what we
said in the introduction and one of the great historians of the late 19th and early
20th centuries wrote: "It is not infrequently reported that captured master gunners were put
into their own big gun, which was then fired." Considering the basic means and difficult
circumstances under which the master gunners were handling their guns, it is understandable why
their work seemed like magic to contemporaries. Operating and especially gun laying, that is
aiming with an early modern gun was truly a form of art. The aiming devices were very basic
, the cannons inaccurate, and the projectiles anything but uniform. In addition, the cannons had
to be repositioned and realigned after each shot. According to Dutch historian Olaf van Nimwegen,
a heavy gun, such as a 24-pounder, could roll back five to six meters after each shot due to the
recoil. The master gunner and his assistants then had to use lifting beams and levers to bring
the gun back into position and realign it. Even though master gunners and military scientists
developed increasingly sophisticated tools to align the cannons as precisely as possible,
it took a long time before reliable aiming was possible. A major milestone on the road
to accurate shooting was a 1537 publication by the Italian mathematician and engineer
Niccolò Tartaglia, who was dubbed the father of ballistics. Tartaglia recognized that a
cannonball’s maximum range was reached when fired at an angle of 45° and that the ideal amount
of powder was met when the entire length of the barrel is used for its combustion. The knowledge
of ballistics, however, was slow to catch on, and even 100 years later, some textbooks were
still conveying completely outdated views. Yet, in the hands of good gunners, artillery
could be the greatest asset of an army. It could inflict heavy casualties from a distance,
devastate the morale of enemy troops, break the front of the enemy formation and thus
prepare the attack of the infantry or cavalry. Accordingly, the artillery usually opened the
battle. If those under fire wanted to prevent heavy losses, they were forced to abandon
their position and either attack or retreat, possibly giving up their advantage. An example
of this is the Battle of Formigny in 1450, where the French bombarded the formation of the
enemy English longbowmen which forced them to attack. The English managed to capture
the two French cannons, but they had to leave their strong, fortified position and fell
into disorder. This gave 1,200 Breton knights, who reached the battlefield at that very moment,
the chance to ride them down from the flank. Formigny is also an example of a serious problem
of artillery in the late medieval and early modern period: the guns, especially the big ones,
were extremely heavy and cumbersome so that they often fell into enemy hands, who could then
use them against those who had brought them to the battlefield in the first place. This is why
the use of heavy guns in field battles decreased over the course of the 16th century. Maurice of
Nassau, for example, used only 8 cannons in the Battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600, in which he fought
the Spanish in the dunes of Flanders with nearly 12,000 men. During this period, heavy artillery
was increasingly used in siege warfare. For those who want to know more about the use of artillery
in siege warfare, we recommend our tutorial on conquering early modern fortresses. It
is linked in the upper right corner. The correct positioning of artillery
was seen as a high art of warfare. Ideally, the guns could shoot at the enemy's
main point of attack from a safe position. The larger guns formed the so-called
static position artillery. If possible, they were placed on the flanks or on a hill,
so that they were fairly well protected and had the advantage of an elevated position. If
no such advantageous position was available, the guns were set up in front of the army
and secured with field fortifications such as chevaux de frises, trenches and palisades as
best as possible. The light guns were combined with the big ones, placed in separate smaller
groups near the pike squares of the infantry, or integrated into the defenses of the camp.
The groups in which the artillery was placed were called batteries. A battery consisted
of 2-30 guns of different sizes. Each battery was normally assigned an artillery coronel
who commanded the gunners of his position. Size, composition and position of batteries
varied wildly, and it was only very late that tactical guidelines and theoretical works on
how to deploy artillery became widely available. In general, as Georg Ortenburg writes, it was
barely possible to speak of tactical formations or deployment of artillery until well into the
16th century. However, the various types of guns were already divided into three groups according
to their intended use: Field Gun, Breaching Gun, and Mortars, with field guns usually making
up about half of all artillery in an army. There were also different modes of firing,
such as the shot at point blank range, in which the barrel was in a horizontal
position and directly aimed at the target. Then there was the shot aimed along some sort of
sight or the elevated barrel to shoot in an arch, or the ricochet shot, in which the bullet
was fired at a flat angle in order to have it bounce after the impact and rip a
gouge of death in the enemy formation. The firing mode considered most difficult was the
so-called plunging fire, in which the projectile was fired at an angle of more than 45°, for
example from a mortar. Reinhard zu Solms, a German army commander, military engineer and
military theorist of the 16th century wrote: "A master gunner may be master of his gun, but
never has a man finished training at the mortar.” Depending on the firing mode and the target,
different bullets were used. By far the most important was the solid round shot, simply called
balls. They were mostly made of stone until the late 15th century, when artillerists increasingly
relied on projectiles of lead or iron. In addition to these simple balls, however,
there was also a wide range of other projectiles. When the target was an entire enemy formation,
hail shot or canister shot were used quite frequently. These were, simply put, shotgun rounds
for artillery and came in a variety of designs, the best known being the so-called grapeshot,
in which a simple cartridge was filled with a few larger, symmetrically arranged balls.
Much rarer were so-called fireballs. This is an umbrella term that refers to everything
that burns or explodes. Fireballs included, for example, red-hot iron balls, which were used
mainly against ships and flammable buildings, basket-shaped balls filled with combustible
material and, from the 16th century onwards, hollow balls filled with powder that exploded
after impact. These projectiles usually had a separate fuse that was ignited either with
the charge of the gun or before loading, and then burned off in flight. The last noteworthy
type of bullet were chain bullets. These usually consisted of a bullet cut in half but connected
by a chain. After firing, this projectile flew in a very unstable fashion and then tore a large
hole in its target. That's why they were popular for destroying the rigging and sails of ships,
which is for example depicted in AC4 Black Sails. All in all, the master gunners and military
minds of the time were very inventive, not only when it came to finding the most
effective projectiles, but also in expediting tactical and technological progress. In the late
16th and 17th century, artillery gradually lost its guild-like character. The master gunners
lost their special role. At the same time, guns were becoming more uniform, reliable and
efficient, while ballistics and artillery tactics had been making rapid progress. The first to
rely on large numbers of lighter regimental guns in battle, operated by specially trained
soldiers was the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. After the Thirty Years' War many other
European armies followed his example and increasingly relied on artillery in field
battles. This put an end to the special position of artillery. It gradually became
a regular army compartment with standardized tactical maneuvers and eventually became the equal
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