The impact of cannon on siege warfare is a subject still under dispute among historians. Some argue for an Artillery Revolution in the fifteenth century, when large bombards surpassed earlier forms of artillery in their effectiveness and proved able to demolish fortifications, including opening large breaches, in relatively short periods—weeks or sometimes just days, rather than months. Others see the changes brought about by guns as less significant and more gradual, evolutionary rather than revolutionary.122
It is clearly true that for the first 75 years or so after their first use in Europe (around 1327), gunpowder weapons evolved in a fairly linear manner, steadily growing in size and power. The first guns were functionally comparable to springalds, firing metal bolts or pellets primarily for antipersonnel effect.123 After a half-century, cannon were being made that could match large counterweight trebuchets, firing 400-pound stones. By the second decade of the fifteenth century, the largest bombards had surpassed any previous engine in power, casting stones of up to 1,600 or 1,800 pounds. In the succeeding decades the technology was improved further through the synergistic effects of several developments. As cannon makers improved the strength of their creations, it became possible to make full use of recently invented wet-mixed gunpowder, which exploded with at least double the practical force of the original dry mixture. More strongly made guns also allowed greater use of iron cannonballs, which packed the same punch from a much smaller barrel since iron is three times as dense as hard stone. Longer barrels also increased muzzle velocity and accuracy and, moreover, reduced loading time. All of this put together meant that even strong fortifications with thick stone walls could be battered down in a few weeks or less, rather than over months.
As we have seen, however, the simple creation of a breach, even a broad breach, was by no means a guarantee of an easy assault. Indeed, the defender could use cannon and handguns to ensure that any attempt to storm a breach would exact a substantial cost in lives. Primitive handguns were awkward and inaccurate weapons, but, especially at short range, they could penetrate even the best armor. Still, owing to their slow rate of fire, the defenders’ guns could not prevent the success of a determined assault. The creation of a breach had always been a likely occasion for the conclusion of a surrender agreement; now it was even more so, and it came faster. In my judgment it is fair to call the ways in which this altered the conduct of campaigns “revolutionary.” Until that point, the defender had always enjoyed a great advantage in medieval warfare—overall as well as in the context of a particular siege—and outright conquest had been difficult and relatively rare. Now it became quite feasible, as the French, Burgundian, Ottoman, and Spanish states demonstrated.
How did all this affect the lives of ordinary soldiers? Very greatly. First, the Artillery Revolution put a premium on a state’s ability to deploy standing forces, whose constant readiness allowed them to take full advantage of the accelerated style of campaigning possible with wall-breaking artillery. Partly for that reason, the proportion of year-round, full-time soldiers in most armies increased dramatically in the second half of the fifteenth century. In the context at hand here—the siege—the changing dynamic meant a major transformation of the soldiers’ experiences. Long sieges, though not unknown, became much rarer, and with them the problems of starvation and disease among the besiegers.124 Grand assaults with mass escalade and siege towers also became much less common, in part because of the increased effectiveness of the defenders’ counterfire and in part because the relative ease of creating breaches made them unnecessary. Traction trebuchets, which had absorbed so much of the time and labor of soldiers in the thirteenth century and earlier, largely went out of use. On the other hand, much labor was now devoted to digging trenches so as to allow guns and their crews to advance safely into battery range. This work, however, came to be often committed to specialists or to peasants drafted from the area, rather than to the combat infantry.125
Heavy gunpowder bombardments changed the very air in which the soldier lived, sometimes filling it with so much sulfurous smoke that the sky was barely visible and shaking it with sounds louder than any medieval men could otherwise experience.126 The capture of Bayeux in 1450, a fairly typical siege of the Artillery Revolution era, was a very different phenomenon than the seven-month-long siege of Cherbourg in 1418 or Meaux in 1421, both of which ended only when the defenders faced starvation:127
The town [of Bayeux] was enclosed on all sides, and severely battered by bombards for fifteen days, and hard-pressed by miners, so that it was ready to be assaulted. But the king of France and the lords felt pity at the prospect of the town’s destruction, and would not allow it. Nevertheless, without their permission and without order, the soldiers, out of the great ardor they had to capture it, assaulted it two times in one day, on one side. Both sides conducted themselves very well; and many were killed on both sides by bolts and arrows, and by culverins [small guns]. But in the end the attackers accomplished nothing; yet if they had assaulted under the guidance of their captains, who would have known well how to manage the attack, it would have been taken by assault without fail; for they attacked only on one side.
Matthew Gough, the captain, was very worried by these assaults, for some valiant Englishmen had been killed. And therefore he treated with the count of Dunois and the other French lords, and surrendered the town.128
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