Artillery in the Styrian Armoury (16th-17thC)

[ChrisPer]

As requested by Eisenhammer, the guns and mortars I photographed in the Styrian Armoury in Graz, Austria. This armoury is brilliantly preserved with racks of all kinds of arms of the period, with accessories. However many of the cannon were transported to another distant city when invasion threatened and were recast into bells instead of being brought back.

Signal mortars - they had a lot of these.

I only recently took enough interest in cannon to start photographing them a lot. Can you give me tips on what to look out for? Usually the biggest problem is scale. I try to get a profile of the barrel, a shot down on the top for the heraldry, a pic with the complete carriage if its good, a muzzle and occasionally a bore pic. I ought to make a memo of approx. bore diameter, but I haven't gone that far yet.

If you are interested in these, I have references and weblinks for the site; and on this trip I also got serious variety including several 15th century cannon of Mehmet the Conqueror that smashed down the walls of Constantinople, early 1600s dated field guns, via a variety up to a 19th-20th Century coastal artillery gun that defended the Dardanelles against our people in 1915.

 

[matthew.heilgmail.com]

These are great, thank you! These are exactly what I wanted. I'm hoping to build a mortar (scaled down) from the Thirty Years War at some point, and can never find any good references, pictorial or otherwise, on them.

You mentioned you also had some shots of wall guns and the like? Honestly, I'll take anything that goes "BOOM!" :grin:

I think the way you're taking the photos is fine. I like three-quarters front views and top-rear views like you've done, and detail shots such as you've taken are always welcome.

I'd love to see anything else you've got, if it's not a burden (I know you said you had several thousand photos to comb through, after all), and especially if it's from around Central/Eastern Europe and the Ottoman lands.

Thank you again! :hatsoff: