CHAPTER IV.
FAMOUS AND ANCIENT CANNON.
History shows us that in past ages there has ever and anon been in most countries a fancy for forging or casting ponderous cannon, even as there has been often in a spirit of rivalry, a fancy for building great ships; and the result has very generally been that, in both instances, there has been a mistake; for the great ships have been almost invariably cast away, and the great guns have proved useless, even for battery purpose; and it is not improbable that such may be the result eventually with our "Woolwich Infants" and our eighty-one ton guns.
Though cannon are mentioned as having been used in a sea fight between a Moorish King of Seville and a King of Tunis in the 13th century, they first marked the inauguration of a new era in war when Edward III. of England brought with him to the field of Cressi in 1346, five small pieces, made by whom is quite unknown; but there can be little doubt that they were constructed in the mode of all early cannon, of iron bars fitted together, hooped with rings and charged with stone shot—not iron balls.
Prior to Cressi, however, cannon had undoubtedly been used in sieges. In 1338 there was one used at Cambrai from which cross-bows were discharged, and several small guns of the same kind were used in the following year at the investment of Quesnoy; again at the siege of the then Moorish town of Algesiras, near Gibraltar, in 1342; and old annals tell us of the overwhelming terror their explosion excited among the enemy.
Iron balls were first cast in the reign of Louis XI. in 1461; but stone were in common use for a hundred years later.
As time went on, cannon, though primitively formed as described, increased in size that prodigious balls might be expelled from them against walled places, in imitation of the ancient machine which they had superseded; thus they soon became of enormous bore, until they attained the dignity of bombardes, like Mons Meg in Edinburgh Castle; but the difficulty of managing these pieces, and the growing knowledge that iron shot of much less weight could be impelled further by the use of better powder, gradually introduced the cast metal cannon used at the present day.
The five little cannon used at Cressi, to the wonder of the French who had none, were doubtless the same that Edward used at the siege of Calais in the following year.
In 1366 the Venetians, when besieging a town now named Chioggia in Lombardy, had with them two small pieces of artillery having leaden balls, worked by Germans, according to Le Blond's "Elements of War," dedicated to Louis of Lorraine; and battering guns were used by the Turks against the Christians at Constantinople in 1394; but the great bombardes were at their zenith when, in 1451, Mahomet II. began his march against the same city, with fourteen gigantic guns, which threw stone shot seventy-eight inches in circumference, weighing 800 lbs. In the siege, traces of which remain to this day, the Christians are supposed to have been without cannon, as they omitted to demolish the great bridge of boats which was constructed by the Turks and conduced so much to the reduction of the city.
For more than four centuries the guns of Mahomet II. protected the Dardanelles—the gate of the Eastern Empire; and, as an old traveller relates, that as they were shotted when fired on holidays, land was usually to be had very cheap on the opposite side of the straits.
Though practically these great pieces of artillery have given place to Krupp and other guns, they still remain on their old sites; but cannon of this description can only be discharged with effect when the object passes their line of fire, as they are not mounted on carriages but built into a wall. Some of those at the Dardanelles carry balls 26½ inches in diameter, and lie flat on a paved terrace near the level of the water, where they opened on our fleet in 1808, when Admiral Sir John Duckworth forced the passage of the Straits.