A kartouwe (plural: kartouwen) is a siege gun used in European warfare during the 16th and 17th centuries. The name kartouwe is of Dutch origin, a corruption of Latin quartana (quarter cannon). In the Holy Roman Empire the gun was called Kartaune in German or cartouwe in contemporary Latin usage, in the Swedish Empire Kartow, spelling variants include kartouw, kartouve, cartow, cartaun, courtaun, and others.

Characteristics

Kartouwen were developed from bombards. A kartouwe has a caliber of 8 in, weighs about 8,000 lb, and is designed to fire cannonballs weighing up to 52 lb. As a minimum, twenty horses or oxen were needed to move a kartouwe. In addition to "whole" ("hele") kartouwen, there were also double, half ("halve") and quarter kartouwen. The barrel of a whole kartouwe has a length of 18 to 19 times the caliber, weighs 300 kg to 350 kg and was transported on a special wagon by 20 to 24 horses, another four to eight horses were needed to transport the mount (lafette). The barrel length of a half-kartouwe is 32 to 34 times the caliber, which ranges between 105 mm and 115 mm. Its barrel weighs 110 kg to 150 kg, the whole gun 170 kg to 240 kg. Half-kartouwen fired cannonballs weighing between 8 lb and 10 lb, and for the transport of its barrel, 10 to 16 horses were needed. The huge size of the cannon and the weight of its 48-pound projectiles (standard value, though real projectiles could vary from 30 to 60 pounds) made it onerous to maneuver and reload. William P. Guthrie estimates that a single kartouwe averaged only 8 to 10 shots under sustained combat conditions, half to a third as much as the more common 3 to 6 pounder field guns, though in all cases "well-drilled troops could shave these times."

Use and perception

Kartouwen were used for example in the Livonian War by the Russian and Swedish forces. During the Battle of Narva (1581), the besieging Swedish forces destroyed the walls of Narva, 5.5 m strong, within two days using twenty-four double and half-kartouwen. Kartouwen were also the characteristic of the Thirty Years' War. As such, they were featured in contemporary poems, e.g. in Am liebsten bey der Liebsten by Sibylla Schwarz ("grausame Kartaune", "gruesome kartouwe") and Tränen des Vaterlandes, anno 1636 by Andreas Gryphius ("donnernde Karthaun '", "thundering kartouwe"). In his 1844 poem Die Tendenz, Heinrich Heine used kartouwen to symbolize loudness.

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