page_title: Howitzer
section_title: Early modern period
hierarchical_section_title: Howitzer / History / Early modern period
caption_attribution_description: English: 12 pounder mountain howitzer on display at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site in eastern Wyoming.
context_page_description: A howitzer is a type of artillery piece characterized by a short barrel and the use of small propellant charges to propel projectiles over high trajectories, with a steep angle of descent.
  In the taxonomies of artillery pieces used by European armies in the 17th to 20th centuries, the howitzer stood between the "cannon" and the "mortar". Howitzers, like other artillery equipment, are usually organized in groups called batteries.
context_section_description: The modern howitzers were invented in Sweden towards the end of the 17th century. These were characterized by a shorter trail than other field guns, meaning less stability when firing, which reduced the amount of powder that could be used; armies using these had to rely on a greater elevation angle to achieve a given range, which gave a steeper angle of descent.
  Originally intended for use in siege warfare, they were particularly useful for delivering cast-iron shells filled with gunpowder or incendiary materials into the interior of fortifications. In contrast to contemporary mortars, which were fired at a fixed angle and were entirely dependent on adjustments to the size of propellant charges to vary range, howitzers could be fired at a wide variety of angles. Thus, while howitzer gunnery was more complicated than the technique of employing mortars, the howitzer was an inherently more flexible weapon that could fire its projectiles along a wide variety of trajectories.
  In the middle of the 18th century, a number of European armies began to introduce howitzers that were mobile enough to accompany armies in the field. Though usually fired at the relatively high angles of fire used by contemporary siege howitzers, these field howitzers were rarely defined by this capability. Rather, as the field guns of the day were usually restricted to inert projectiles (which relied entirely on momentum for their destructive effects), the field howitzers of the 18th century were chiefly valued for their ability to fire explosive shells. Many, for the sake of simplicity and rapidity of fire, dispensed with adjustable propellant charges.
  The Abus gun was an early form of howitzer in the Ottoman Empire. In 1758 the Russian Empire introduced a specific type of howitzer (or rather gun-howitzer), with a conical chamber, called a licorne, which remained in service for the next 100 years.
  In the mid-19th century, some armies attempted to simplify their artillery parks by introducing smoothbore artillery pieces that were designed to fire both explosive projectiles and cannonballs, thereby replacing both field howitzers and field guns. The most famous of these "gun-howitzers" was the Napoleon 12-pounder, a weapon of French design that saw extensive service in the American Civil War. The longest-serving artillery piece of the 19th century was the mountain howitzer, which saw service from the war with Mexico to the Spanish–American War.
  In 1859, the armies of Europe (including those that had recently adopted gun-howitzers) began to rearm field batteries with rifled field guns. These new field pieces used cylindrical projectiles that, while smaller in caliber than the spherical shells of smoothbore field howitzers, could carry a comparable charge of gunpowder. Moreover, their greater range let them create many of the same effects (such as firing over low walls) that previously required the sharply curved trajectories of smoothbore field howitzers. Because of this, military authorities saw no point in obtaining rifled field howitzers to replace their smoothbore counterparts but, instead, used rifled field guns to replace both guns and howitzers.
  In siege warfare, the introduction of rifling had the opposite effect. In the 1860s, artillery officers discovered that rifled siege howitzers (substantially larger than field howitzers) were a more efficient means of destroying walls (particularly walls protected by certain kinds of intervening obstacles) than smoothbore siege guns or siege mortars. Thus, at the same time armies were taking howitzers of one sort out of their field batteries, they were introducing howitzers of another sort into their siege trains and fortresses. The lightest of these weapons (later known as "light siege howitzers") had calibers around 150 mm and fired shells that weighed between 40 and 50 kilograms. The heaviest (later called "medium siege howitzers") had calibers between 200 mm and 220 mm and fired shells that weighed about 100 kilograms (220 pounds).
  In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the inability of rifled field guns
caption: Nineteenth-century 12-pounder (5 kg) mountain howitzer displayed by the National Park Service at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, United States
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