Cannon

• 1. Introduction

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  The cannon has shaped the world's walls, its wars, and its borders for the better part of a millennium. In 1453, sixty-eight super-sized bombards thundered against the walls of Constantinople for fifty-five days, ending a civilization that had stood for over a thousand years. The sound of their firing could reportedly be heard ten miles away. The city that fell was the capital of the Roman Empire's last remnant, protected by what had once been the strongest walls in Europe. After that bombardment, no fortification in the world could ever again feel truly permanent.

  What was the cannon, exactly, and where did it come from? How did a tube filled with black powder upend not just armies but the entire architecture of power? And how did an invention that may have begun as a simple fire-lance in Song dynasty China end up deciding the fate of empires from Java to Paris?

• 2. A Word Made of Reeds

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  The very name of the cannon carries a quiet origin story. Cannon derives from the Old Italian cannone, meaning "large tube", which itself came from the Latin canna. That Latin word traces back to the Greek kanna, meaning "reed". The word traveled from the natural world of hollow plants into the vocabulary of artillery, and has been used to refer to a gun since 1326 in Italy and 1418 in England.

  The thing the word described evolved from the fire-lance, a short-ranged anti-personnel weapon that combined a gunpowder-filled tube with a polearm. Iron scraps and porcelain shards were eventually packed into fire-lance barrels alongside the powder, co-viative projectiles that flew outward when the charge ignited. Over time, the paper and bamboo of those early barrels gave way to metal, and the weapon transformed into something that could do far more than wound a soldier at close range.

  Gunpowder itself, the black powder that drove everything, remained the primary propellant until smokeless powder arrived in the late 19th century. The invention that followed that transition would gradually push the word cannon out of common military use, replaced by guns, artillery, howitzers, and mortars.

• 3. Born in the 13th Century

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  A sculpture at the Dazu Rock Carvings in Sichuan, dated to 1128, shows what may be the earliest known depiction of a cannon. Physical specimens and textual accounts, however, do not appear until the 13th century. Three cannons from that era survive: the Wuwei Bronze Cannon, dated to 1227; the Heilongjiang hand cannon, dated to 1288; and the Xanadu Gun, dated to 1298. Of these, only the Xanadu Gun carries an inscription bearing its date of production, making it the earliest confirmed extant cannon. It measures 34.7 cm in length and weighs 6.2 kg.

  The Heilongjiang hand cannon holds a separate distinction. It was unearthed near the area where the History of Yuan records a battle involving hand cannons in 1288, when a Jurchen commander named Li Ting led troops armed with these weapons against the rebel prince Nayan. That connection has led some historians to call it the oldest firearm ever found.

  Scholars disagree sharply on when exactly the gun first appeared. Chen Bingying argues there were no guns before 1259. Dang Shoushan believes samples from the Western Xia era point to guns by 1220. Stephen Haw pushes the date as far back as 1200. Sinologist Joseph Needham and renaissance siege expert Thomas Arnold offer a more conservative estimate of around 1280. What seems clear is that the gun was born sometime during the 13th century, and that by 1341, the weapon had entered Chinese literature. In a poem called The Iron Cannon Affair, Xian Zhang described a cannonball that could "pierce the heart or belly when striking a man or horse, and even transfix several persons at once."

• 4. Europe Takes the Tube

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  On the 11th of February 1326, the Signoria of Florence appointed two officers to obtain canones de mettallo and ammunition for the town's defense. That appointment is among the earliest documentary records of cannon in Europe, matching the year that a manuscript attributed to Walter de Milemete depicted a gun firing a large arrow, with a user lowering a long stick to the touch hole to ignite it. The 1320s appear to have been the decisive decade, with most modern military historians treating that period as the takeoff point for guns in Europe.

  Early European cannons were small. They shot arrows, not balls, and went by names like pot-de-fer, tonnoire, ribaldis, and büszenpyle. The ribaldis, which launched large arrows and simplistic grapeshot, appear in English Privy Wardrobe accounts during preparations for the Battle of Crécy between 1345 and 1346. The Florentine Giovanni Villani recorded the aftermath: by the end of the battle, "the whole plain was covered by men struck down by arrows and cannon balls."

  The English at Crécy had originally hoped the loud noise of their cannon would panic French cavalry horses, in addition to killing the knights atop them. The guns also proved useful against siege equipment, as English cannon were used defensively in 1346 during the siege of Breteuil to launch fire onto an advancing siege tower. The oldest surviving cannon in Europe, a small bronze example found at Loshult in Scania in southern Sweden, dates from the early-to-mid 14th century and now resides in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm.

• 5. The Ottoman Bombard

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  In 1453, the question of whether cannon could breach the strongest walls in Europe was settled definitively. Sixty-eight Hungarian-made cannon bombarded Constantinople for fifty-five days, hurling stones that, according to one account, scattered "pieces everywhere and killing those who happened to be nearby". The largest of these, the Great Turkish Bombard, required a crew of 200 men and 70 oxen to operate, and 10,000 men to transport. Created in 1464, a pair of similar Dardanelles Guns cast in bronze by Munir Ali remained in use through the Anglo-Turkish War of 1807-1809, more than three centuries later.

  The Ottomans understood siege artillery in ways that reshaped strategy across the region. Sixty-eight bombards at Constantinople. Eleven bombards and two mortars at the 1478-79 siege of Shkodra, described at length by the Shkodran historian Marin Barleti in his 1504 book De obsidione Scodrensi. Ottoman cannon also stopped crusaders at Varna in 1444 and Kosovo in 1448, and were used to control the passage of ships through the Bosphorus strait.

  The fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453 was, in one contemporary account, "the end of an era in more ways than one". Gunpowder made the formerly devastating Greek fire obsolete and forced military architects to rethink everything. The next generation of fortifications would not rise in towers and merlons; they would spread low, thick, and angled, becoming what were known as bastion forts, designed to direct any advance straight into the cannon fire of the defenders.

• 6. Across the World

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  When Kublai Khan's Mongol-Chinese army under Ike Mese attempted to invade Java in 1293, the encounter brought gunpowder technology to the Nusantara archipelago. Majapahit under Gajah Mada, who served as prime minister from 1331 to 1364, used that Yuan dynasty technology in its naval fleet. Two distinct cannon traditions eventually took hold in the region: eastern-style cetbang, similar to Chinese cannon, and western-style cetbang, derived from the Turkish prangi, a breech-loading swivel gun made of bronze or iron. By the early 16th century, Javanese foundries were producing large guns ranging from 180- to 260-pounders, weighing between three and eight tons, some of which survive today as what local traditions call "sacred cannon".

  In Africa, both the Adal Sultanate and the Abyssinian Empire deployed cannon during the Adal-Abyssinian War. The Adalites, led by Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi and supplied with weapons imported from Arabia and the wider Islamic world, were the first African power to bring cannon warfare to the continent. The Portuguese later supplied and trained the Abyssinians, while the Ottoman Empire sent cannon and soldiers to Adal.

  In Japan, cannon arrived only in 1510, when a monk brought one back from China. The country did not produce them in appreciable numbers until much later. During the 1593 siege of Pyongyang, 40,000 Ming troops deployed a variety of cannon against Japanese soldiers, who despite holding a defensive position and carrying arquebuses were at a severe disadvantage because they had no cannon of their own.

• 7. Tactics and Transformation

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  Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden changed how cannon were used in the field. He discontinued all cannon of 12 pounds or heavier as field artillery, preferring weapons that could be handled by only a few men. One older type, the "leatheren", was replaced by 4 pounder and 9 pounder demi-culverins, each operable by three men and pulled by only two horses. His army was also the first to use a cartridge containing both powder and shot, speeding up reloading and raising the rate of fire. Against infantry he pioneered the use of canister shot, essentially a tin can filled with musket balls, and increased the number of cannon per infantryman sixfold over the prevailing standard.

  At the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631, Adolphus defeated Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, despite being severely outnumbered. The Swedes fired between three and five times as many artillery volleys. Battered by cannon fire and low on morale, Tilly's men broke and fled.

  On the 13th of Vendémiaire 1795, which fell on the 5th of October in the calendar used outside France, Napoleon faced a royalist assault of over 25,000 men led by General Danican against Paris. Outnumbered five to one, Napoleon ordered Joachim Murat to retrieve the guns from the Sablons artillery park. Murat and his cavalry fought through to the cannon and brought them back. Napoleon then ordered grapeshot fired into the attacking crowd, an act that became known as the "whiff of grapeshot". The slaughter ended the threat and made Napoleon a famous public figure almost overnight. Years later, at the Battle of Friedland, 66 French guns fired 3,000 roundshot and 500 rounds of grapeshot, inflicting over 20,000 Russian casualties.

• 8. The Modern Cannon

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  During World War I, cannon directly or indirectly caused over 75% of all casualties. The Paris Gun, a 200 mm calibre weapon used by the Germans against Paris, could hit targets more than 122 km away, making it the longest-ranged gun ever fired. The onset of trench warfare created surging demand for howitzers, as their shells carried more explosive than those of guns, and caused less barrel wear.

  World War II brought proximity fuses, which emerged on European battlefields in late December 1944. These fuses detonated shells near their targets without requiring a direct hit, and proved particularly useful against V-1 flying bombs and kamikaze planes. During the Battle of the Bulge, American troops called them their artillery's "Christmas present" for the German army. Anti-tank gun calibres grew rapidly across the war: the British started in 1939 with primarily 2 pounder and 6 pounder guns and ended it with 17 pounders and 32 pounders in development. The German Panzer III went from a 37 mm gun in its original design to a 50 mm cannon in mass production, then gave way entirely to the Panzer IV and Panther when even the more powerful 50 mm proved unable to match the Russian T-34.

  Autocannons, which fire automatically at high rates like a machine gun but use larger calibre explosive shells, represent the live end of the cannon's lineage. The fastest of the rotary autocannons, the GSh-6-23, achieves a rate of fire of over 10,000 rounds per minute. The 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger, mounted on the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II, is among the most powerful aircraft cannon in current service. The term "cannon fodder", meaning soldiers regarded as expendable in the face of artillery, was first used by François-René de Chateaubriand in 1814, though the concept had appeared in William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 as early as 1598.