Historically, artillery (from French artillerie) refers to any engine used for the discharge of large projectiles in war. The term also describes soldiers with the primary function of manning such weapons and is used organizationally for the arm of a nation's land forces that operates the weapons. This term includes coastal artillery which traditionally defended coastal areas against seaborne attack and controlled the passage of ships. With the advent of powered flight at the start of the 20th century, artillery also included ground-based anti-aircraft batteries. In military terminology, a unit of artillery is commonly referred to as a battery.

History

The word as used in the current context originated in the Middle Ages. It comes from the Old French atellier meaning "to arrange", and attillement meaning "equipment". From the 13th century an artillier referred to a builder of any war equipment, and for the next 250 years the sense of the word "artillery" covered all forms of military weapons. Hence the naming of the Honourable Artillery Company an essentially Infantry unit until the 19th century.

Older engines like the catapult, onager, trebuchet and ballista are artillery (see siege engines for more information on pre-gunpowder devices), but the first documented record of artillery with gunpowder propellent used on the battlefield is on January 28, 1132 when General Han Shizhong of the Song Dynasty used escalade and Huochong to capture a city in Fujian. These small, crude weapons diffused into the Middle East (the madfaa) and reached Europe in the 13th century, in a very limited manner. These small smoothbore tubes were initially cast in iron or bronze around a core, the first with the bore drilled was recorded in operation near Seville in 1247. They fired lead, iron, or stone balls, sometimes large arrows and on occasions simply handfuls of whatever scrap came to hand. During the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) these weapons became more common, initially as the bombard and later the cannon. Cannon were always muzzle-loaders, there were many early attempts at breech-loading designs but weakness in engineering rendered them even more dangerous to use than muzzle-loaders.

In Asia, Mongols adopted the Chinese artillery and used it effectively in the great conquest. By late 14th AD, Chinese rebels used organized artillery and cavalry to push Mongols out. The new Ming Dynasty established the "Divine Engine Division" 神机营 - specialized in various types of artillery. Light cannons and cannons with multiple volleys were developed. In a campaign to suppress a local minority rebellion near today's Burmese border, the Ming army used a 3-line method of arquebuses/muskets to destroy an elephant formation. Between 1593 and 1597, about 300,000 Chinese and Japanese troops fought in Korea and both sides used heavy artillery in land and sea battles.

Bombards were massive smoothbore weapons distinguished by their lack of a field carriage, immobility once emplaced, highly individual design, and noted unreliability. Their large size precluded the barrels being cast and they were constructed out of metal staves or rods bound together with hoops like a barrel. Bombards were of value mainly in sieges, a famous Turkish example used at the siege of Constantinople in 1453 massed 19 tons, took 200 men and sixty oxen to emplace and could fire seven times a day.

The use of the word "cannon" marks the introduction in the 15th century of a dedicated field carriage with axle, trail and animal-drawn limber—this produced mobile field pieces that could move and support an army in action, rather than being found only in siege and static defenses. The reduction in the size of the barrel was due to improvements in both iron technology and gunpowder manufacture. The first mobile weapon is usually credited to Jan Žižka, who deployed his oxen-hauled cannon during the Hussite Wars of Bohemia (1418–1424). However cannon were still large and cumbersome. With the rise of musketry in the 16th century cannon were largely displaced from the battlefield—the cannon were too slow and cumbersome to be used and too easily lost to a rapid enemy advance.

The combining of shot and powder into a single unit, a cartridge, occurred in the 1620s with a simple fabric bag, and was quickly adopted by all nations. It speeded loading and made it safer, but unexpelled bag fragments were an additional fouling in the gun barrel and a new tool—a worm—was introduced to remove them. Gustavus Adolphus is identified as the general who reintroduced cannon to the battlefield—pushing the development of much lighter and smaller weapons and deploying them in far greater numbers than previously. But the outcome of battles was still determined by the clash of infantry.

Shells, explosive-filled fused projectiles, were also developed in the 17th century. The development of specialized pieces—shipboard artillery, howitzers and mortars—was also begun in this period. More esoteric designs, like the multi-barrel ribauldequin, were also built.

The 17th century book by Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth inventor Kazimierz Siemienowicz "Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima" ("Great Art of Artillery, the First Part," also known as "The Complete Art of Artillery") was one of the most important contemporary publications on the subject of artillery. For over two centuries this work was used in Europe as a basic artillery manual.

Cannon continued to become smaller and lighter—Frederick II of Prussia deployed the first genuine light artillery during the Seven Years War—but until the mid-19th century improvements in metallurgy, chemistry, manufacturing and other sciences did not alter the basic design and operation of a cannon.

Rifling had been tried on small arms in the 15th century. The machinery to accurately rifle a cannon barrel did not arrive until the 19th. Cavelli, Wahrendorff, and Whitworth all independently produced rifled cannon in the 1840s, but these guns did not see widespread use until the latter stages of the American Civil War—when designs such as the various calibre Rodman guns came to prominence.

Artillery continued to gain prominence in the 18th century when Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, a French artillery engineer introduced the standardization of cannon design. He developed a 6-inch (150 mm) field howitzer whose gun barrel, carriage assembly and ammunition specifications were made uniform for all French cannons. The standardized interchangeable parts of these cannons down to the nuts, bolts and screws made their mass production and repair much easier. Another major change at this time was the development of a flintlock firing mechanism for the cannons. The old method of firing the cannon involved the use of a linstock or match to light a small quantity of powder charge in a touchhole drilled into the breech. This technique was quite faulty because the ignited powder could easily be extinguished by rain and an excess amount of charge could cause the guns to burst. The flintlock mechanism on the other hand only needs to be cocked and when its trigger is pulled the flint of the hammer strikes the frizzen throwing sparks into the pan and detonating the charge at the breech. The trigger can be tied to a lanyard and fired from a safe distance. These changes laid down in 1789 would prove decisive for Napoleon's conquests.

From the 1860s artillery was forced into a series of rapid technological and operational changes, accelerating through the 1870s and thereafter. The first effective breech-loaders (allowing a gun crew to operate while always behind protective barriers) were developed in the 1880s. The first cannon to contain all 'modern' features is generally considered to be the French 75 of 1897 with its cased ammunition, effective breech-loading, modern sights, self-contained firing mechanism, and hydro-pneumatic recoil dampening.

In the 19th century artillery finally made the decisive split between smaller, lighter, and more mobile pieces that stayed with the troops, and much larger weapons deployed to use indirect fire. The second option, using indirect fire, drove the development of the technologies and doctrines that have produced current artillery weapons.

"[By WWII] decades if not centuries of weapons development had settled into maturity on an almost imperceptibly rising plateau; the sciences of ballistics and explosive chemistry had achieved near perfection given the available technology of the age. Arguably the only new developments of note were discarding sabot rounds... and the hollow-charge projectile... both of which were of marginal significance in the Second World War."