Artillery

Some authorities argue that Russia first encountered gunpowder artillery in 1376 during their siege of Great Bulgar on the River Volga, in the far north of the Golden Horde’s domain. However, all that the relevant original source actually says is that ‘thunder was thrown’, and many Russian archaeologists understandably maintain that it is not cannon that are actually intended, but clay grenades such as have been found in the Volga region. Whatever the truth may be, it is undeniable that in 1382* a strong garrison left in Moscow by Dmitri Donskoi was equipped with pushki and tiufiaki, seemingly the first irrefutable evidence of the use of gunpowder artillery in Russia. Regarding the specific terminology used, it is interesting to note that pushka derives from the Bohemian word puska or its German equivalent Piichse, which tallies with one early Russian chronicle’s comment that ‘cannon arrived from Germany [NemetzV. However, the use of the term tiufiaki is also interesting, since it is the same as the Turkish word tufek (see figure 7), which may therefore imply that artillery was introduced into Russia from both East and West simultaneously.

Although the first guns may very well have been imported from Bohemia or elsewhere, they were certainly being cast in Russia by the 15th century, and the evolution of artillery in Muscovy thereafter followed much the same course as that of Western Europe (which is hardly surprising since the majority of Russia’s gun-founders and master gunners were Germans and Italians). Light, mobile guns called pischali (from the Bohemian piStaly) appeared in the first half of the 15th century (in Tver by 1408, and in Moscow by 1451), one later chronicle even claiming that they were used in the field against the Tartars as early as 1380. However, the Muscovites tended to use their artillery principally from fixed positions — i. e. in the defence of their cities — only rarely using them in sieges, and then usually ineffectively, and taking them on campaign even less, though some certainly accompanied Ivan Ill’s army at the Ugra Fords in 1480. In 1481 his guns (actually, those from Pskov) achieved their only siege success of this period, by breaching the walls of the Teutonic Knights’ fortress at Fellin in Livonia, which achievement may be connected with the first appearance in Russia at about that date of large, brass guns, the earliest surviving example dating to 1485.

The transport of artillery, along with the infantry and sometimes even the cavalry, was often achieved by boat, utilising Russia’s complex of rivers. (This was a mode of transport also used by the Tartars, as, for instance, by Tokhtamysh against Moscow in 1381.)