Ships and Guns brings together experts from the field of historic artillery and underwater archaeologists to present a series of papers which focus on the development of naval ordnance in Europe and, especially, Venice, in the 15th17th centuries, as exemplified by the maritime archaeological resource. Subjects include Venetian ordnance in shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, the race to develop big calibres in the first war of Morea, Genoese ordnance aboard galleys in the 16th century, the strategic logistics of guns at sea during the Spanish armada of 1588 and ships and guns of the Tudor navy.
Often specialists in ordnance study artefacts recovered from wrecks without a complete knowledge of the archaeological context from which they have been recovered. Archaeologists investigating the context of the objects on the other hand, often do so with only a superficial knowledge of historic artillery. This volume hopes to redress the balance, and also to present a large amount of information, often concerning little-known wrecks, on this important but under-published subject area.
Introduction: Ships, Guns and Historical Archaeology (Sauro Gelichi and Mauro Librenti)
Venetian Guns for and from the Sea
1. Morphology and constructive techniques of Venetian artilleries in the 16th
and seventeenth century: some notes (Marco Morin)
2. Venetian ordnance in the shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Sea (Carlo Beltrame)
3. The race to big calibres during the first war of Morea and Sigismondo Alberghetti’s guns of new invention (Guido Candiani)
4. Two Venetian swivel guns from Messina Strait, Italy (Rossella Scordato)
5. A Venetian ship sunk in Cyrenaica at the beginning of the 18th century (Sebastiano Tusa)
Italian Production of Naval Ordnance between the 15th and 17th Centuries
6. Genoese ordnance aboard galleys and merchantmen in the 16th century
(Renato Gianni Ridella)
7. Bombards in Savona in the 15th and 16th centuries (Furio Ciciliot)
8. Guns and profit. Tuscan naval artillery in the 16th to 17th centuries (Niccolò Capponi)
9. Armed ships of the Post-Medieval period in Croatia (Irena Radic Rossi)
European Ordnance aboard the Ships (15th–17th Centuries)
10. Did naval artillery really exist during the Modern period? A brief note on cannon design (Javier López Martín)
11. Stowed or mounted: the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the strategic logistics of guns at sea (Colin Martin)
12. “A jewel of great value”: English iron gunfounding and its rivals, 1550–1650 (Ruth Brown)
13. Ships and guns of the Tudor Navy 1495–1603 (Robert Douglas Smith)
14. The British sea service mortars. Some notes on their evolution with particular reference to the drawings of Albert Borgard, c. 1700 (Martino Ferrari Bravo)
15. Sixteenth-century French naval guns (Max Guérout)
