What is a Bombard?

They were usually breech-loaders, using removable ”pots de fer” containing powder, wadding, and a stone cannonball. Some balls thrown by these guns were gigantic, so large they were cut at the site by masons rather than transported with the bombard. Several were in use over many decades, some for centuries. Bombards were mainly used in sieges during the 14th-15th centuries. Most were made by the hoop-and-stave method rather than cast, although a few were cast in two pieces, barrel and breech. The biggest bombards were so powerful they could hurl stones three kilometers. This was so impressive, and really big guns so rare, that bombards were given distinctive noms de guerre and passed down from emperors and kings to successor princes in royal wills and charters. The ”King’s Daughter” was a famous English bombard. ”Mons Meg,” weighing in at 15,000 pounds of iron, was ordered by Philip the Good for Burgundy’s arsenal in 1449. ”Dulle Griete” (”Mad Margot”) was the bombard of Ghent, while ”Chriemhilde” served Nuremberg. At 40 tons, the largest stone-throwing bombard ever made, the ”Tsar-Pushka,” was built by Muscovy to frighten the Tatars. It was never fired.

Very large bombards were built by renegade gunsmiths for the Ottoman sultans. These were so heavy that 60 oxen were needed to move one on dozens of carts, before which 200-300 men leveled the roadway along which they moved. In action, they were served by gun crews of dozens and closely guarded by 200 men. The Ottomans had not only the greatest armory of big guns but the most numerous. The most extraordinary was a bombard called ”Elipolos” (”City-Taker”), which could hurl a stone ball of 300 kilograms some 1.5 kilometers. In 1453 this gun, and several sister pieces, was used to reduce the walls of Constantinople. Bombards were also built in India. The Mughal bombard ”Raja Gopal” weighed an extraordinary 40 metric tons of iron. Only by water transport on barges were such guns manageable, which greatly restricted their utility at any distance from the waterway. The lack of gun carriages carried over to the battlefield, where bombards were raised on mounds of sloped earth or piles of logs. Angle of fire was adjusted by adding or removing earth, or hammering or removing wedges under the logs. By the mid-15th century some bombards had lifting rings attached to facilitate repositioning on stepped firing blocks. By the mid-16th century bombards were outmoded, replaced by smaller but more powerful cast cannon using corned powder and firing iron shot. Yet, as late as 1807 the Ottomans fired some ancient bombards against enemy ships in the Straits. More generally, the late medieval bombard survived into the early modern period redefined as the mortar.