French troops arriving in Naples, 1494.
The first fully mobile and effective field artillery
appeared in 1494 in the train of Charles VIII of France when he invaded Italy,
and Fornovo (1495) was probably the first battle where artillery played a
really effective part. The eight-foot bronze guns were drawn by horse teams and
could keep up with marching infantry. They made a great impression on the
Italians whose few heavy pieces, being ox-drawn, usually arrived too late for
battles and, according to Machiavelli, could never fire more than one or two
shots before battle was joined.
The offensive on the rampage 1494-1503
Charles VIII and the advent of mobile siege artillery
In military affairs, the events of 1494 did much to bring
the Middle Ages to an end. In that year King Charles VIII of France led his
army across the Mont-Genevre Pass into Italy, and marched across the Lombard
plain and the Apennines to the port of La Spezia, where he picked up the forty
or so siege guns with which he intended to make good his claim to the Kingdom
of Naples.
These guns were the lineal descendants of the state-owned
artillery which had enabled the French to burst open the English strongholds in
Normandy and Guyenne in the middle of the century. Craftsmen and bell-founders
worked tirelessly to improve the weapon, and by the 1490S they had evolved a
cannon that was recognisably the same creature that was going to decide battles
and sieges for nearly four hundred years to come.
The medieval bombard was a massive pipe of wrought-iron rods
or bronze, designed specifically to throw a large but relatively light ball of stone.
The weapon was by no means without its virtues. In relation to muzzle velocity,
the stone ball required only one-half the weight of powder as an iron shot of
the same calibre, and it exercised a considerable smashing effect on targets
like walls, siege towers, ships and trenches full of men. At the same time the
bombard and its ammunition were undeniably bulky. The gun was usually fired
from a solid block of wood, which rested directly on the earth; it put up a
valiant fight against any gunners who threatened to disturb its repose. For
transport, the bombard had to be lifted bodily onto an ox waggon running on disc-like
wheels which, whenever the cart was canted over to one side, threatened to
collapse and deposit the whole load gently back to earth again.
Another disadvantage concerned the manufacture of the
missiles. Whereas the casting or forging of an iron cannon ball was a hot but
satisfying business, skilled stonemasons had to be paid highly if they were to
address themselves to the laborious and frustrating work of carving a stone
ball that was just going to be fired from a gun.
In the train of Charles VIII, however, the bombard had been
largely supplanted by cannon with homogeneous bronze barrels no more than eight
feet long. These pieces could be transported and loaded with ease, and they
discharged wrought-iron balls which could compete in range and accuracy with
stone-firing bombards of at least three times their calibre. The barrel of the
French cannon was readily elevated or depressed around the fulcrum formed by
two trunnions (prongs). These were cast into the barrel just forward of the
centre of gravity, and rested almost over the axle of the two-wheeled gun
carriage beneath. For traversing, the trail of the carriage was lifted from the
ground and swung to right or left.
The numerous and well-trained French gunners knew how to
take advantage of their new weapon, and an Italian contemporary (Guicciardini,
1562, Bk I) wrote that the cannon were planted against the walls of a town with
such speed, the space between the shots was so brief, and the balls flew so
speedily, and were driven with such force, that as much execution was inflicted
in a few hours as used to be done in Italy over the same number of days.
The enhanced mobility of the French guns was, if possible,
still more important than their firepower. Over long distances the heavier of
the barrels still had to be loaded onto separate waggons, as before, but gun
carriages and waggons alike were now drawn by strong and trained horses, and
travelled on ‘dished’ wheels which stood up stoutly to the strains imposed upon
them by fifteenth-century roads.
By all reasonable calculations Charles should have been
stopped short by one of the Florentine or papal fortresses long before he could
reach his goal of Naples. Unfortunately for Italy, the French and their
artillery were not reasonable opponents. Charles directed his march down the
western side of the Apennines against the northern frontier of the state of
Florence, the first obstacle in his path. Florence was on the verge of one of
its bouts of puritanical, patriotic republicanism, and the poor Duke Piero de’
Medici, already insecure at home, threw himself on the mercy of Charles as soon
as he learnt that the little fortress of Fivizzano had fallen to the French.
Sarzana, Sarzanello, Pietra Santa and the citadels of Pisa and Leghorn, all
were delivered up without resistance, and on 17 November the pale little French
king made his triumphal entry into Florence, lance balanced on thigh. The
terrified Pope Alexander VI followed Piero’s example, and hastened to place his
strongholds at the disposal of the French.
There was nothing to stand between Charles and the kingdom
of Naples. The small Neapolitan citadel of Monte Fortino capitulated as soon as
the cannon were planted against it; and the French took a mere eight hours for
the business of breaching the important frontier stronghold of Monte San
Giovanni and massacring its garrison. The place had once withstood a siege of
seven years. With horrifying consistency the French later used the same cruelty
at Capua in 1501, Pavia in 1527, and Melfi in 1528.
In the short term the impact of the new French methods was
devastating, and on 22 February 1495 Charles was able to ride into the city of
Naples in the same style as he had entered Florence.
The French successes had conjured up a hostile league of
Venice, the Pope, Milan and Spain. Charles accordingly retraced his steps and
smashed open his communications back to France. The king thereafter lost
interest in his new conquests, and over the course of 1496 his negligence and
cowardice permitted the Spanish to starve into submission all the strongholds
in Naples – an episode which indicated that it was nowadays far easier to
conquer a kingdom than to hold it.
The Spanish counter-attack and the gunpowder mine
Objections may be made to the choice of the year 1494 to
mark the beginning of early modern fortress warfare. Italian military
technology had not been entirely static and, as we shall see, the all-important
device of the angle bastion was invented seven years before Charles VIII burst
into Italy. Then again, the occasions on which the French needed to plant their
cannon were surprisingly few, because fortresses tended to surrender at the
very wind of their coming. However, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini and almost all
the people who have written since about Renaissance warfare are surely right to
stress the revolutionary impact of the French and their new artillery. What the
authorities are talking about was essentially a Blitzkrieg, which depended as
much for its effect upon speed, energy and the potential for destruction, as
the actual scale of physical damage. Warfare was prosecuted with a new urgency
and tempo, and, no less importantly, big-power politics intruded on Italian
affairs.
The newly-revealed power of the offensive fired the ambition
of all the hungry southern princes, and upset the equilibrium which had reigned
among the major Italian states since the middle of the fifteenth century. In
15°2 the French and Spaniards came to blows over the possession of Naples.
Acting with admirable energy, the Spanish defeated the French field army twice
over, then proceeded to mop up the isolated enemy garrisons all over Naples.
Out of all the doomed strongholds, the Castle of Uovo (by
the city of Naples) was certainly the one that was taken in the most spectacular
fashion. Cannon alone were powerless to reduce the place, situated as it was on
a narrow peninsula separated from the mainland by a deep ditch. The Spaniards,
however, had in their ranks one Pedro Navarro, ‘a thin little man’, who had
perfected the gunpowder mine, the one weapon capable of blasting the French
from their rocky retreat.
Gunpowder mines had figured in the treatises of Taccola,
Mariano of Siena, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, but it seems that they were
first used in actual warfare in 1439, when the Italian educated John Vrano used
a countermine in his defence of Belgrade against Sultan Amurath. Under the
direction of Martini, the Genoese used gunpowder below ground in their attack
on the Florentine held fortress of Sarzanello in 1487. The effect on this
occasion was small, for the gallery had not been driven far enough under the
foundations. Pedro Navarro, who is said to have witnessed the experiment as a
private soldier, went on to remedy this effect at the siege of the Turkish
fortress of San Giorgio on the island of Cephalonia in 1500. On that occasion
Navarro tunnelled out long galleries beneath the citadel rock, stuffed them
with gunpowder ‘to excite the flames’, and produced a devastating flare-up.
The wording of the descriptions of these early mines leaves
open the possibility that the powder charges were not primarily explosive in
character, but rather intended to hasten the burning of the props which
supported the undermined masonry. No such doubt attaches to Navarro’s device at
the Castle of Uovo in 1503. He piled his men and tools into covered boats,
brought them unknown to the French to the side of the cliff facing
Pizzafalcone, and laboured for three weeks to drive a gallery through the rock.
On 26 June the Spanish touched off the charge, and part of the rock sprang into
the air. The governor and his council were at debate in the chapel above, and
despite their misuse of these sacred precincts they were propelled heavenwards
with greater force than all the saints of Christianity. Thus Navarro ‘gained
great credit at this siege, and struck a terror into everybody’ (Guicciardini,
1562, Bk I).
For a time the older and newer methods of mining co-existed.
As late as 1537 the Spaniards attacked Saint-PQI by cutting a gash in the
salient of a tower, supporting the masonry by timber, and then burning away the
props. In the main, however, besiegers avidly seized on the possibility of wrecking
a wall by an explosion, rather than effecting its tame subsidence by the
‘burnt-prop’ method. The explosive mine furthered the work of the cannon in
wiping from the strategic map the hosts of small medieval castles which had
disrupted and bedevilled so many offensive campaigns in the past. Only a good
wet ditch, or a deep and well-flanked dry one was capable of deterring the
enemy from ‘attaching the miner’ to the scarp.
