B
Ballistics in Renaissance
Science
Patrick Brugh
Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD,
USA
Abstract
This entry discusses the historical legacy in
innovations of ballistics as they relate to war-
fare in Europe between 1300 and 1700. It pri-
marily deals with the problems of smoothbore
gunpowder weapons (both artillery and small
arms) and the ways in which commanders and
artillerists adjusted their strategies and tactics
to account for the limitations of accuracy and
unreliability of these weapons. Also discussed
are modern comparative studies of early mod-
ern gunpowder small arms and early modern
scientific and mathematical studies of the tra-
jectory of gunpowder weapons.
Definition of Ballistics and Importance
for Early Modern Warfare
Ballistics is the study of the flight of projectiles,
most frequently associated with the flight of mis-
sile weapons, artillery ordinance, and bullets. The
bulk of our knowledge about the ballistic proper-
ties of early modern arms comes from historical
resources such as battlefield reports and military
# Springer International Publishing AG 2018
M. Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_902-1
treatises of the early modern period, eighteenth-
and nineteen-century tests of artillery, and some
contemporary recreations using both
manufactured reproductions and original artifacts.
In particular, thanks to debate surrounding the
impact of gunpowder warfare on European soci-
ety, modern scholars have looked closely at the
physics of smoothbore weaponry. Among the
challenges to study accurately the ballistics of
early modern weapons are the unreliability and
lack of technical detail in early modern and late
medieval sources, the impossibility of
reproducing battlefield conditions, and the chem-
ical and metallurgical differences between
weapons and combustibles with different geo-
graphical and historical origins. Strictly speaking,
the majority of scientific knowledge about ballis-
tics was created centuries after the more practical
considerations of warfare brought weapons such
as guns, catapults, and crossbows to the
battlefield.
Heritage and Rupture with Tradition:
Vegetius’s Legacy in the Age of
Gunpowder Weapons
The bulk of the written record of ballistic studies
in the middle ages stems from interactions with
the military treatise De re militari by Flavius
Vegetius Renatus (fl. fourth century C.E.), more
commonly known as Vegetius. Vegetius’s work
was heavily translated and summarized by early
2 Ballistics in Renaissance Science
modern military theorists, among others by
Christine de Pizan in her Fais d’armes et de
chevalerie (ca. 1410), Conrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis
(ca. 1405), and even later Leonhard Fronsperger
in his Kriegsbuch (1573). Vegetius’s mark on
medieval and early modern siegecraft and prepa-
rations for war should not be understated, since
even today some 150 manuscripts of his De re
militari dating from the tenth to fifteenth centuries
survive in various languages. Although his text
was written centuries before the advent of gun-
powder warfare, its recommendations are passed
along almost unchallenged save the addition of
cannons and gunpowder to the list of materials
needed for war next to trebuchets, mantelets, and
other siege machines. Gunpowder weapons,
therefore, became another – increasingly
important – tool in the military commander’s kit
of ballistic weaponry. Due to the early ineffective-
ness, burden, and unreliability of gunpowder
weapons to make decisive victories in all but a
handful of military conflicts, versions of Roman
missile weapons, of which many were passed
down by Vegetius, remained an operative part of
the manuals of war written well into the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.
Innovative and Original Aspects:
Smoothbore Ballistics and Early Modern
Theories of Ballistic Flight
The Magnus effect (1852) and Bernoulli’s princi-
ple (1738) have helped to explain the inaccuracy
of smoothbore ballistics in retrospect, but the
operators of early modern firearms were more
interested in developing battlefield tactics for
overcoming these shortfalls than explaining
them. Since smoothbore weapons fired rounded
shot from unrifled gun barrels, slight imperfec-
tions in the shot or the barrel could send the shot
spinning on an axis, giving it unpredictable angu-
lar momentum. The effect of this spin, as
explained by Gustav Magnus and discovered in
experiments recorded by Benjamin Robins in his
New Principles of Gunnery (1742), resulted in
deviations from several inches to several feet
from the original target depending on its distance.
Since musketballs (and cannonballs) could miss a
target by a wide margin when mounted on a fixed
position and fired under ideal conditions, it is not
hard to imagine how far flung a bullet could fly in
the havoc of battle.
Some early modern mathematicians and scien-
tists, in particular Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia
(d. 1557) in his work Nova scientia (1537), did
try to deal with the mechanics of trajectory and
distance, by applying different forms of reasoning
such as geometrical, Archimedean, and algebraic
approaches to the trajectory of ballistical objects.
Tartaglia’s goal, as he states in the opening of his
work, was to solve the “bombardier’s challenge”
and determine the proper angle of a shot to create
the maximum range of a cannon. Despite the fact
that he claimed to pull from both observed and
theoretical physics and geometry, Tartaglia’s work
does not account for the parabolic motion of a
fired object, a mechanical fact that he would
have encountered in Archimedes’ Quadrature of
the Parabola (third century B.C.), which he seems
to have read and whose writer he cites as central to
his own work (Ekholm 2010: 196). Based on his
ideal cannon angle of 45 degrees, his diagrams
depict an object flying upward at a 45-degree
angle in a straight line, then making a slightly
circular descent, and finally falling again to earth
in a perfectly straight line perpendicular to the
ground. Tartaglia’s patchwork method of calculat-
ing the maximum distance of a shot had little
grounding in the actual mechanics or practical
application of ballistics, but it did arrive at a
moment in which the debate over the relationship
between natural science and theoretical mathe-
matical proofs was beginning to shape the devel-
opment of renaissance scientific method in the
Aristotelian traditions.
It would be another century before Galileo
published his dialogues on Two New Sciences
(1638), which would address the motion of pro-
jectiles, in particular those launched from fire-
arms. In contrast to his scientific worldview,
Galileo depicted the force behind firearms as
“supernatural” and thus deserving of a differenti-
ated approach from other projectiles. One conse-
quence of “the enormous momentum of these
violent shots” from firearms helps to explain the
Ballistics in Renaissance Science
straight trajectory that Tartaglia had assumed a
century earlier, because, as Galileo points out in
“The Motion of Projectiles, Theorem I, Proposi-
tion I,” the “beginning of the parabola” may be
flatter and less curved than at the end, but “this is a
matter of small consequence in practical opera-
tions, the main one of which is the preparation of a
table of ranges for shots of high elevation, giving
the distance attained by the ball as a function of
the angle of elevation” (Galileo 1638). Perhaps
notably above, and found also in his many other
caveats placed throughout the dialogue in which
he considers the flight of projectiles, Galileo
points out that the number of factors that could
affect the accuracy and speed of a cannon shot in
real life are beyond his ability to calculate
abstractly. More useful to the bombardier, it
seemed, are tables that carefully lay out charge
weights, shot weights, firing angles, and distances
for consideration in practical matters of war.
Galileo was not alone in believing that practice
with firearms seemed to be an important element
in gunpowder warfare. Even though Tartaglia and
Galileo had tried to reason the theoretical trajec-
tories of cannonballs, and others such as Ufano,
Pizan, and Fronsperger had compiled and
recorded tables and practical lessons for consider-
ation, the operator of small arms and artillery alike
had to be aware that technical limitations and a
lack of standardization made practice with the
actual equipment a necessary part of military
training. The weapons manufacturer, meanwhile,
should strive to increase standardization in order
to render firing outcomes more predictable. From
England to Sweden to the Hapsburg and Ottoman
Empires, firearms manufacturers did indeed begin
standardizing their weaponry in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Nations also slowly began
to standardize their militaries to account for gun-
powder ballistics. At the end of the sixteenth
century, in fact, around the same time that Galileo
was teaching the concepts of physics that he
would later commit to writing in the Two New
Sciences, the idea of drilling soldiers with their
weapons in very careful and exact ways was inno-
vated by Maurice of Orange and illustrated in a
bound series of images by Jacob de Gheyn.
Whether firing a pistol or a gigantic bombard,
3
the soldier on the battlefield needed to marry
technical knowledge and disciplined movements
to Galileo’s scientific theory to overcome the
number of complicating physical, psychological,
strategic, and technical factors that could impact
the ballistical function of his guns.
SMALL ARMS: Modern efforts to understand
the ballistics of smoothbore small arms on the
battlefields of Europe from the 1400s to 1700s
turn to three questions with an eye to gunpowder
weaponry – “How fast did the bullets travel? How
accurate was smoothbore gunfire? And how much
damage did such bullets inflict on their target?”
(Hall 1997: 135). In terms of speed, historical
comparisons of modern shoulder and side arms
show that bullets fired from early modern
weapons have supersonic muzzle velocities
about half that of modern assault rifles but faster
than most standard modern handguns. As
discussed above, the accuracy of these weapons
was typically poor, despite the fact that gun
makers as early as the fifteenth century were
familiar with the idea of rifling, a trick of physics
that they had learned from the fletchers of arrows.
Although it (sometimes) led to greater accuracy,
rifling was not typically added to battlefield fire-
arms because it reduced the rate of fire and
became easily clogged with gunpowder residue.
Thus, a shot fired from typical musket or handgun
could easily miss its target by several feet. Modern
tests of smoothbore weapons have shown that
there was a 50–50 chance of hitting a man-sized
target at 100 m under ideal conditions. Finally,
tests conducted in Austria in the late 1980s using
period weapons and armor showed that smooth-
bore small arms created wound cavities at a short
range that were two to three times larger than
wound cavities made by modern assault weapons.
When used against 3 mm plate armor at a distance
of 8.5–9 m, the bullets would fragment, badly
wounding or at least seriously bruising the target,
but not inflicting immediately mortal damage.
Taken together, these results showed that typical
early modern European guns were tremendously
dangerous at a short range, but quickly lost their
effectiveness both in accuracy and inflicted dam-
age at greater distances.
4 Ballistics in Renaissance Science
ARTILLERY: Cannons were first used as siege
weapons, another kind of catapult to besiege
towns and knock down walls. In fifteenth-century
military treatises and fictional war literature,
which drew heavily on Vegetius, such as Heinrich
Wittenwiler’s Der Ring (ca. 1410), cannons and
trebuchets were given similar importance in terms
of their means of delivering blows to a target. The
earliest bombard cannons of the fourteenth cen-
tury were little more than massive metal tubes
stuffed with gunpowder and huge stones to be
flung in the general direction of a defensive
walls, fortifications, and towers. Accuracy was
of less importance than force. Through the
1300s, these weapons were also incredibly diffi-
cult to transport, and thus to place, and therefore
were of little use to field tactics. Only under the
leadership of Jan Zizka, the Hussite Rebels of the
1420s demonstrated the potential value of gun-
powder weapons in field warfare by using
medium to large caliber Wagenburg-mounted
artillery to fire on charging knights and infantry.
Even when artillery grew more mobile and accu-
rate in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
value of cannons for siege warfare was the ability
to constantly barrage a large target area with the
general idea of inflicting damage. As with small
arms, field artillery’s inaccuracy required high
rates of fire and oblique angles to the targets,
which had to be slow and large, such as massed
formations of marching men. There is significant
evidence in European war treatises of the fif-
teenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that
artillerists were constantly experimenting with
angles of attack and defense, the weight and com-
position of gunpowder charges, design of the
ordinance, and the tools used to determine dis-
tance of targets in order to add some degree of
accuracy to a relatively inaccurate ballistic tool.
Impact and Legacy
Thanks to the inaccuracy and unreliability of early
modern firearms, tacticians and commanders of
the sixteenth and seventeenth (even eighteenth)
centuries took a stochastic approach to gunpow-
der weapons for both the infantry and artillery.
Infantry and heavy cavalry units, especially in
the late 1500s, developed tactics and drills like
the countermarch, the caraçol, and weapons drill
that sought to sustain high rates of fire on the
battlefield in order to increase the chances of
hitting targets. Thus, soldiers were grouped care-
fully together in rows that could fire past each
other, were trained to mechanize their movements
to improve efficiency, and were deployed to max-
imize the surface area of the target. Gunpowder
artillery was also used widely from the late four-
teenth century on but required continuous techni-
cal and tactical tinkering to make it more effective
both in siege, field, and sea warfare. By the mid-
sixteenth century, artillery established itself as a
necessary division of all large-scale armies, and
the challenges of smoothbore gunpowder ballis-
tics had become mandatory considerations in the
training and deployment of both infantry and
cavalry units.
Cross-References
▶ Art of War
▶ Ballistics
▶ Gunpowder
▶ Mechanics
▶ Metallurgy
▶ Technology
▶ War
▶ Warfare
▶ Wars of Religion
References
Primary Literature
Anonymous. Feuerwerkbuch. Munich. Bayerische
Staatsbibiliothek. Cod. germ. 600. Ca. 1400–1420
Fronsperger, Leonhard. 1573. Kriegsbuch. Vol. 3. Frank-
furt: Feyerabend.
Galilei, Galileo. 1638. Discorsi E Dimonstrazioni
Matematiche: intorno à due nuoue scineze Attenenti
alla Mecanica & i Movimenti Locali. Leiden:
Elsevirius.
Ballistics in Renaissance Science 5

Secondary Literature problem. The British Journal for the History of Science
Ekholm, Karin. 2010. Tartaglia’s ragioni: A maestro 43 (2): 181–207.
d’abaco’s mixed approach to the bombardier’s Hall, Bert. 1997. Weapons and warfare in renaissance
Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.