Huge tsar-cannon of a small tsar. Why the tsar cannon fired A shot from the tsar cannon
At first, the gun was aimed at the walls, but then it was moved to Red Square to the Execution Ground. And by decree of Peter I, the cannon went into the yard. Now the giant gun is on. Each movement required the strength of at least 200 horses, which were tied to special brackets on the sides of the gun.
The Tsar Cannon is called so not only because of its size - it also has a portrait of Tsar Fedor, the son of Ivan IV, engraved on it. The lion on the carriage (a stand under the barrel for aiming at the target and accurate shooting) emphasizes the high status of the gun. The carriage itself was cast only in 1835 at the Byrd factory in St. Petersburg.
Many people ask if the Tsar Cannon fired? Scientists say that she did make one test shot for zeroing.
Therefore, inside the muzzle there is a brand of the creator: then the master's nominal seal was put only after the tool was tested in practice. Therefore, we can safely say that the Tsar Cannon fired.
But such massive guns were intended for aimed shooting at the walls of fortresses with heavy cannonballs. But the four cores at the foot of the monument are decorative and hollow inside. Real cores of this size would weigh at least a ton each and would require a special mechanism to load them. Therefore, small stone cannonballs were used to charge the Tsar Cannon. And the real name of the gun is “Russian Shotgun”, or mortar (in military terminology), that is, it should stand with the muzzle up.
There is also a version that, by design, the Tsar Cannon is a bombard. Cannons include guns with a barrel length of 40 calibers and above, while the Tsar Cannon has a length of only 4 calibers, like a bombard. These battering rams were huge enough to destroy a fortress wall and did not have a gun carriage. The barrel was dug into the ground, and 2 more trenches were made nearby for artillery crews, since the guns were often torn apart. The rate of fire of the bombards was from 1 to 6 shots per day.
The Tsar Cannon monument has several copies.
Kremlin: mini-guide to the territoryIn the spring of 2001, by order of the Moscow government, the Udmurt enterprise Izhstal made a copy of the Tsar Cannon from cast iron. The remake weighs 42 tons (each wheel weighs 1.5 tons, the barrel diameter is 89 cm). Moscow presented a copy to Donetsk, where it was installed in front of the city hall.
In 2007, in Yoshkar-Ola, on Obolensky-Nogotkov Square, at the entrance to the National Art Gallery, a copy of the Tsar Cannon, cast at the Butyakovsky Shipbuilding Plant, was placed.
And in Perm there is the world's largest 20-inch cast iron cannon. It's definitely a military weapon. It was made in 1868 by order of the Naval Ministry at the Motovilikha Iron Cannon Plant. When testing the Perm Tsar Cannon, 314 shots were fired with cannonballs and bombs of various systems.
A life-size model of a Perm cannon was exhibited in front of the Russian pavilion at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873. She had to leave for Kronstadt to protect Petersburg from the sea. A carriage was already prepared there, but the giant returned to Perm. By that time, the engineer-inventor Pavel Obukhov from Zlatoust had developed a technology for the production of high-strength cannon steel and opened a plant in St. Petersburg, where lighter guns were cast. So the Perm Tsar Cannon is technically outdated and has become a monument.
What do you know about the history of the Tsar Cannon of the Moscow Kremlin?
The Tsar Cannon has long been one of the symbols of Russia. And she also entered dozens of jokes, which featured the Tsar Cannon that never fired, the Tsar Bell that never rang, and some other non-working miracle Yudo.
But, alas, our venerable historians and dissident jokers are wrong. Firstly, the Tsar Cannon fired, and secondly, this gun is not a cannon at all.
The point in the dispute whether the Tsar Cannon fired was put in 1980 by specialists from the Academy. Dzerzhinsky. They examined the channel of the gun and, based on a number of signs, including the presence of particles of burnt gunpowder, concluded that the Tsar Cannon was fired at least once.
HISTORY Tsar Cannon
In 1586, alarming news came to Moscow: the Crimean Khan was moving towards the city with his horde. In this regard, the Russian master Andrei Chokhov, on the orders of Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich, cast a huge gun, which was intended to protect the Kremlin.
A giant gun weighing 2,400 pounds (39,312 kg) was cast in 1586 at the Moscow Cannon Yard. The length of the Tsar Cannon is 5345 mm, the outer diameter of the barrel is 1210 mm, and the diameter of the thickening at the muzzle is 1350 mm. After the Tsar Cannon was cast and finished at the Cannon Yard, it was dragged and installed on a hill to protect the bridge over the Moscow River and the Spassky Gates and laid on the ground next to the Peacock cannon. To move the gun, ropes were tied to eight brackets on its trunk, 200 horses were harnessed to these ropes at the same time, and they rolled a cannon lying on huge logs - rollers.
Initially, the Tsar and Peacock guns lay on the ground near the bridge leading to the Spasskaya Tower. In 1626, they were lifted from the ground and installed on log cabins, densely packed with earth. These platforms were called roskats. One of them, with the Tsar Cannon and the Peacock, was placed at the Execution Ground, the other, with the Kashpir Cannon, at the Nikolsky Gate. In 1636, wooden roskats were replaced with stone ones, inside which warehouses and shops selling wine were arranged.
Currently, the Tsar Cannon is on a decorative cast-iron carriage, and nearby are decorative cast-iron cannonballs, which were cast in 1834 in St. Petersburg at Byrd's iron foundry. It is clear that it is physically impossible to shoot from this cast-iron carriage, or use cast-iron cannonballs (only lighter stone ones) - the Tsar Cannon will be blown to smithereens! It should be said right away that 4 cast-iron cores, folded in a pyramid near the foot of the cannon, perform a purely decorative function. They are hollow inside.
Documents about the testing of the Tsar Cannon or its use in combat conditions have not been preserved, which gave rise to lengthy disputes about its purpose. Most historians and military men in the 19th and early 20th centuries believed that the Tsar Cannon was a shotgun, that is, a weapon designed to shoot shot, which in the 16th-17th centuries consisted of small stones. A minority of experts generally rule out the possibility of combat use of the gun, believing that it was made specifically to frighten foreigners, especially the ambassadors of the Crimean Tatars. Recall that in 1571 Khan Devlet Giray burned down Moscow.
In the XVIII - early XX centuries, the Tsar Cannon was called a shotgun in all official documents. And only the Bolsheviks in the 1930s decided to raise her rank for propaganda purposes and began to call her a cannon.
In fact, this is not a cannon or a shotgun, but a classic bombard. It is customary to call a gun a gun with a barrel length of more than 40 calibers. And this gun has a length of only four calibers, the same as the bombard. Bombards are large-sized wall-beating weapons that destroy the fortress wall. The carriage was not used for them, since the barrel was simply buried in the ground, and two trenches were dug nearby for artillery crews, since such guns often burst. Let's pay attention - the Tsar Cannon does not have trunnions, with the help of which the gun is given an elevation angle. In addition, she has an absolutely smooth rear section of the breech, with which she, like other bombards, rested against a stone wall or log cabin.
So, the Tsar Cannon is a bombard designed to fire stone cannonballs. The weight of the stone core of the Tsar Cannon was about 50 pounds (819 kg), and the iron core of this caliber weighs 120 pounds (1.97 tons). As a shotgun, the Tsar Cannon was extremely ineffective. At the cost of expenses, instead of it, it was possible to make 20 small shotguns, which take much less time to load - not a day, but only 1-2 minutes.
Who wrote the Tsar Cannon into shotguns and why? The fact is that in Russia all the old guns that were in the fortresses, with the exception of mortars, were automatically transferred over time to shotguns, that is, in the event of a siege of the fortress, they had to shoot shots (stone), and later - cast-iron buckshot at the infantry marching to assault. It was not advisable to use old guns for firing cannonballs or bombs: what if the barrel would blow apart, and the new guns had much better ballistic data. So the Tsar Cannon was written into shotguns.
FIRST SHOT
According to legend, the Tsar Cannon, nevertheless, fired. It happened once. After the impostor False Dmitry was exposed, he tried to escape from Moscow. But on the way he was brutally killed by an armed detachment.
The desecration of the body of False Dmitry showed how changeable the people are in their sympathies: a carnival mask was put on the dead face, a pipe was inserted into the mouth, and for another three days the corpse was smeared with tar, sprinkled with sand and spat on. It was a "commercial execution", which was subjected only to persons of "vile" origin.
On the day of the election, Tsar Vasily ordered the removal of False Dmitry from the square. The corpse was tied to a horse, dragged out into the field and buried there by the side of the road.
Near the pit, which became the last refuge of the king, people saw blue lights rising straight from the ground.
The next day after the burial, the corpse was found near the almshouse. He was buried even deeper, but after a while, the body reappeared, but in a different cemetery. People said that his land does not accept.
Then the cold broke out, and all the greenery in the city withered.
The clergy were alarmed by these rumors and deliberated for a long time how to put an end to the dead sorcerer and sorcerer.
On the advice of the monks, the corpse of False Dmitry was dug out of the pit, dragged for the last time through the streets of the city, after which it was taken to the village of Kotly south of Moscow and burned there. After that, the ashes were mixed with gunpowder and fired from the Tsar Cannon towards Poland - from where False Dmitry came.
Another refutation of the use of the gun specifically for combat purposes is the absence of any traces in the barrel, including longitudinal scratches left by stone cannonballs.
In this article: What is the Tsar Cannon? Who and where was it created? Why was she actually put on the territory of the Kremlin? What record does she own? Where are her "twins" and has she never shot?
Tsar Cannon, like the Cap of Monomakh, is familiar to us from school time. Her photographs are in almost every textbook or historical encyclopedia. At various times, postage stamps with her image were issued. Well, in Moscow, perhaps everyone saw her. Every tourist who has visited the Kremlin will definitely take a selfie against its background. After all, it is not just a unique bombardment and a historical monument. It demonstrates the art of Russian foundry workers and symbolizes the power of Russian artillery.
But what else do we know about her? Let's take a look at her interesting story.
Appearance
So, let's take a closer look at the famous monument. Tsar Cannon is now located in Moscow on Ivanovskaya Square not far from the Cathedral of the Twelve Apostles. It is a muzzle-loading smoothbore gun with the largest caliber in the world. According to the length of the barrel (the Cannon has 6 calibers), according to the classification of the 17th - 18th centuries, it is considered a bombard, according to the modern one - a mortar. Cast in Moscow at the Cannon Yard in 1586.
The Tsar Cannon is a huge bronze colossus. Its weight is 2,400 pounds, which is almost 40 tons. The length reaches 5.3 meters, its diameter along the outer edge is 1.2 meters, and together with the decorative belt it is 134 centimeters. Its caliber is 35 inches (890 mm).
Along the length of the Cannon's barrel, there are four decorative embossed belts that divide it into three equal parts. On the right side, almost at the very muzzle, there is a relief image of a rider - Tsar Fyodor I Ivanovich (1557 - 1598), the third son of Ivan the Terrible. Above it is written:
In the center of the trunk are two inscriptions:
The Tsar Cannon stands on a decorative gun carriage made of cast iron, which was cast in St. Petersburg in 1835 at the Byrd factory. Artistic design was developed by A. P. Bryullov, and the drawing was prepared by P. Ya. de Witte. The carriage is decorated with floral ornaments, in front there is a grinning muzzle of a lion, on the sides behind the wheels there are lions devouring snakes.
In front of the Cannon lies five cast-iron cannonballs. Each weighs almost two tons. According to experts, the Cannon would not be able to shoot them.
"Father" Tsar Cannon
Its creator is Andrey Chokhov, a renowned caster, bell and cannon maker. There is no date of his birth, but it is believed that he was born in 1545 and died in 1629. Almost nothing is known about his origins and personal life. Only a few facts and the results of his labors have come down to us.
It is known that he studied foundry under the famous cannon master Kashpir Ganusov. Having become a famous foundry worker, Chokhov himself taught many students. Some of them became famous masters of their craft: P. Fedorov, G. Naumov, K. Mikhailov and others. From 1589 until his death, Andrei Chokhov worked in Moscow at the Cannon Yard. During this period of time, he created more than 20 different artillery pieces. Of these, only a few siege squeakers of various calibers have survived to this day. These were the squeaks of "Wolf", "Lion", "Skoropeya", and "King Achilles".
History and purpose
As mentioned above, the Tsar Cannon was made in 1586. Initially, it was installed at the Frontal Bridge for the defense of Red Square. Since the carriage was cast much later, it stood on a special flooring made of logs, the so-called cannon peal. The Cannon stood at this place until the 18th century, until it was moved to the Spassky Gates - the main gates of the Kremlin. Almost a century later, the Cannon was put on the carriage described above. And only in the 1960s Tsar Cannon "moved" to the place where we see it today.
There are still disputes about the purpose of the Cannon. According to a study conducted in 1980, Soviet experts came to the conclusion that it was intended for conducting mounted fire with shot (small stone cores).
But this version is rejected by some facts. For example, the presence of bronze tides in the barrel (they are inevitable when the guns are cast, but are erased by the ejected core at the first shot). And, most importantly, the Cannon does not have a flash hole! And if it is impossible to ignite gunpowder, then it cannot shoot, by definition.
So why cast such a hulk? Did the extra bronze appear?
There are some assumptions about this. There is a theory that Cannon was cast for decorative and demonstrative purposes. She was supposed to decorate Red Square with herself, become a symbol of the power and skill of Russian foundry workers, and also impress ambassadors, merchants and other foreigners. In general, throw dust in the eyes of enemies and cause pride among compatriots.
"Twins" Tsar Cannon and its outstanding record
She has her doppelgangers. A copy of the gun stands in front of the city hall in Donetsk, another one in Izhevsk on the territory of the Izhstal OJSC enterprise, and another one in Yoshkar-Ola.
Interestingly, the Tsar Cannon got into the Guinness Book of Records as the gun with the largest caliber.
But is the "Tsar Cannon" a sham or a real artillery gun? Yes and no.
Here, as they say, "on the third day" I visited India () and, along with all sorts of beauties, I observed the largest cannon in Asia there.
While staying near this weapon, a thought was spinning in my head ... but we have more, but it was interrupted by another - there is - that is, but there are only rumors that it (ours) is not real, but fake, and since certainties If it wasn’t, then there was some kind of ambiguity in my soul, and I don’t like this state ...
Even then I decided I'll come home and find out for sure!
Maybe everything would have been forgotten, but then the son with the whole class went on an excursion to Moscow and then, upon arrival, showed a photo, including this one:
and all sorts of doubts flooded in again, and since I’m still an artilleryman (oh, what kind of artilleryman are you, knowledgeable people will exclaim, you’re an artilleryman like from Savchenko - a pilot) decided to figure it out finally - what’s what, all the more, I’m going to ride here one of these days Moscow and take a walk there in historical places, climb skyscrapers, visit Poklonnaya Hill.
Well, it’s understandable to visit the Kremlin, and even there you can’t pass by the Tsar Cannon.
As you know, the Tsar Cannon is a medieval artillery piece and a monument of Russian artillery, cast in bronze in 1586 by the Russian master Andrei Chokhov at the Cannon Yard.
Tsar - gun bronze.
But this is the barrel itself, everything else that is on display is, yes ... - props, namely: cast-iron cores (by the way, they are hollow inside), which in the 19th century became a source of talk about the decorative purpose of the gun.
In the 16th century, stone cannonballs were used, and they are 2.5 times lighter than cast-iron ones. It can be said for sure that the walls of the gun would not withstand the pressure of powder gases when fired with such a core. Of course, this was understood when they were cast at Byrd's factory.
The carriage, cast in the same place, is also fake. You can't shoot from it. When fired with a regular stone 800 kilogram cannonball from a 40 ton Tsar Cannon, even with a small initial speed of 100 meters per second, the following will happen: expanding powder gases, creating pressure, will, as it were, push the space between the core and the bottom of the cannon; the core will begin to move in one direction, and the gun in the opposite direction, while the speed of their movement will be inversely proportional to the mass (how many times lighter the body is, how many times faster it will fly).
The mass of the cannon is only 50 times the mass of the cannonball (in the Kalashnikov assault rifle, for example, this ratio is about 400), so when the cannonball flies forward at a speed of 100 meters per second, the cannon will roll back at a speed of about 2 meters per second. This colossus will not stop immediately, after all, 40 tons. The recoil energy will be approximately equal to the hard impact of KAMAZ into an obstacle at a speed of 30 km/h. The tsar cannon will be torn off the gun carriage. Especially since she just lies on top of him like a log. All this can only be held by a special sliding carriage with hydraulic dampers (recoil dampers) and a reliable mounting of the gun. Then it just didn't happen. . Therefore, that artillery complex, which is shown to us in the Kremlin under the name Tsar Cannon, is a giant props.
But that's only part of the picture. There is another.
What Andrei Chokhov cast in 1586, that is, the bronze barrel itself, could really shoot. It just doesn't look like what most people think. The fact is that, by its design, the Tsar Cannon is not a cannon, but a classic bombard. A cannon is a gun with a barrel length of 40 calibers or more. The Tsar Cannon has a barrel length of only 4 calibers. And for a bombard, this is just normal. They often had an impressive size and were used for the siege, as a battering ram. To destroy the fortress wall, you need a very heavy projectile. For this, and giant calibers.
There was no talk of any carriage then. The trunk was simply dug into the ground. The flat end rested against deeply driven piles.
Nearby they dug shelters for artillery crews, since such a gun could break. Loading sometimes took a day. Hence the rate of fire of such guns - from 1 to 6 shots per day. But all this was worth it, because it made it possible to crush impregnable walls, do without many months of sieges and reduce combat losses during the assault.
Only in this can there be a point in casting a 40-ton barrel with a caliber of 900 mm. The Tsar Cannon is a bombard - a battering ram designed to lay siege to enemy fortresses.
Now about that - did she shoot?
In 1980, experts from the Academy named after V.I. Dzerzhinsky concluded that the Tsar Cannon was fired at least once ...
However, as they say now, not everything is so obvious - the report of these very specialists, for unknown reasons, was not published. And since the report is not shown to anyone, it cannot be considered evidence. The phrase “they shot at least 1 time” was apparently dropped by one of them in a conversation or interview, otherwise we would not have known anything about it at all. If the gun had been used for its intended purpose, then inevitably there would have been not only particles of gunpowder in the barrel, which, according to rumors, were found, but also mechanical damage in the form of longitudinal scratches. In battle, the Tsar Cannon would be fired not with cotton, but with stone cannonballs weighing about 800 kg.
There should also be some wear on the surface of the bore. It cannot be otherwise, because bronze is a rather soft material. The expression "at least" just indicates that, apart from particles of gunpowder, nothing significant could be found there. If so, then the gun was not used for its intended purpose. And particles of gunpowder could remain from test shots. The fact that the Tsar Cannon never left Moscow limits puts an end to this issue.
“After the Tsar Cannon was cast and finished at the Cannon Yard, it was dragged to the Spassky Bridge and laid on the ground next to the Peacock Cannon. To move the gun, ropes were tied to eight brackets on its trunk, 200 horses were harnessed to these ropes at the same time, and they rolled a cannon lying on huge logs-skating rinks. Initially, the Tsar and Peacock guns lay on the ground near the bridge leading to the Spasskaya Tower, and the Kashpirova cannon was located near the Zemsky order, located where the Historical Museum is now. In 1626, they were lifted from the ground and installed on log cabins, densely packed with earth. These scaffolds were called roskats…”
At home, using a battering ram for its intended purpose is somehow suicidal. Who were they going to shoot at with an 800-kilogram cannonball from the walls of the Kremlin? It is pointless to shoot at the enemy’s manpower once a day. There were no tanks then.
Of course, these huge battering rams were put on public display not for combat purposes, but as an element of the prestige of the state. And, of course, this was not their main purpose. Under Peter I, the Tsar Cannon was installed on the territory of the Kremlin itself. There she is to this day. Why has it never been used in combat, although it is quite combat-ready as a battering ram? Maybe the reason for this is its too huge weight? Was it realistic to move such a weapon over long distances?
Modern historians rarely ask themselves the question: “why?”. The question is extremely helpful. So let's ask, why was it necessary to cast a siege weapon weighing 40 tons if it could not be delivered to an enemy city? To scare the ambassadors? Unlikely. We could make a cheap layout for this and show it from afar. Why spend so much work and bronze on a bluff? No, the Tsar Cannon was cast in order to use it practically. So they could move. How could they do it?
40 tons is very heavy. and the "Tsar Cannon" was dragged, but not carried.
Look at the picture of a heavy weapon being loaded - a transport platform is visible in the background. She has a bow bent to the top (protection from sticking in bumps). The platform was obviously used for sliding. That is, the load was dragged, not rolled. And it is right. It is also quite clear that the curved nose is bound in metal, because the load is very heavy. The weight of most wall-beating guns did not exceed 20 tons.
Let us assume that they traveled the main part of the way by water. Dragging these bombards over short distances of several kilometers with the help of many horses is also a doable task, although a very difficult one.
Is it possible to do the same with a 40 ton gun?
Let's say goodbye to the idea that our rulers were dumber than today's historians. Enough to blame everything on the inexperience of the masters and the tyranny of the kings. The tsar, who managed to take this high post, ordered a 40-ton gun, paid for its manufacture, was clearly not a fool, and had to think over his act very well. Such costly issues are not solved out of hand. He absolutely understood how he was going to deliver this "gift" to the walls of enemy cities.
The fact that the Tsar Cannon is not just a surge of enthusiasm among Moscow foundry workers is also proved by the existence of an even more enormous instrument, Malik-e-Maidan.
It was cast in Ahman - Dagar in India in 1548 and has a mass of as much as 57 tons.
This is a siege weapon of the same purpose as the Tsar Cannon, only 17 tons heavier.
And how many more such guns need to be discovered in order to understand that they were cast at that time, delivered to the besieged cities and practically used?
Here is the logical picture. In the 16th century, the Moscow principality waged numerous military operations both in the east (taking Kazan), in the south (Astrakhan), and in the west (wars with Poland, Lithuania and Sweden). The cannon was cast in 1586.
Although Kazan had already been taken by this time, and a shaky truce was established by Western countries, however, more like a respite.
Could the Tsar Cannon be in demand under these conditions? Yes, definitely. The success of the military campaign depended on the presence of wall-to-wall artillery. The fortified cities of the western neighbors had to be taken somehow.
The Tsar Cannon is real.
The surroundings around her are props.
The public opinion formed about her is false.
On the one hand, we have a sample of a giant props from the 19th century, on the other hand, one of the largest active medieval guns, and it turns out that a real miracle is on display in the Kremlin (it’s not for nothing that the Tsar Cannon got into the Guinness Book of Records), disguised as absurdity , but for some reason we do not notice it.
Maybe because they are zombified by Russophobic propaganda, false hypotheses and the opinion of liberal "authorities" who claim that the Russians did not and do not know how to do anything other than "sip bast shoes".
And now some interesting and informative facts, as well as tales related to this miracle cannon.
- Gumilyov claims that she shot False Dmitry I, the only Pole who returned to Poland from Russia, albeit in the form of a mixture of black powder and teeth.
- They also say that the second shot was fired in the 60s of the 20th century - the cannon was taken to the landfill before being moved. The core flew about 250 meters. The weight of the core is 40 pounds.
- The well-known mathematician - the troll Fomenko claims that the Tsar Cannon was cast under Nicholas II, and earlier it did not exist at all.
- The Tsar Cannon was moved back and forth for a long time. First, it was placed on Lobnoye Mesto, after which it was transferred inside the Kremlin to the Arsenal building. After that, they pulled it out and installed it next to a decorative carriage and placed two stacks of cores next to it. And only under Soviet rule in the 60s they brought it to Ivanovskaya Square, where it still stands today.
- In 2001, a duplicate was made by special order in Izhevsk and donated to Donetsk. The duplicate weighs 42 tons. Completely souvenir, can not be used for its intended purpose.
- In 2007, a duplicate was also cast in Yoshkar-Ola, half the original size. They claim that this is a working model, so they put the core into the barrel and brewed it there. Unlike the original, it is made entirely of steel (the original has a bronze barrel). Weight - 12 tons.
- Other guns made by Chokhov have also been preserved.
Siege arquebus "Skoropeya"
Siege arquebus "Lion"
Siege pischal "Lion", slightly redone, now looks like this.
All of them are located in St. Petersburg in the Artillery Museum on Kronverkskaya embankment.
Every resident of Russia during a tour of the Moscow Kremlin, of course, saw two unique historical artifacts - the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell. At the same time, the guide probably claimed that the bell never rang, and the cannon did not fire. This is not true. Once a shot was fired from the Tsar Cannon, although from the point of view of military science it was never an artillery gun.
Cannon for the king
Despite the fact that today the Tsar Cannon is considered a sham, it was cast in 1586 on the nominal order of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich for the defense of Moscow. The creator of the giant gun, or rather its barrel, was the foundry worker of the cannon yard Andrei Chokhov. For 18 years of his work as a gunsmith, this talented master made many unique weapons, among which the Tsar Cannon turned out to be the most grandiose. Its weight was 39,310 kilograms, with a barrel length of 5.4 meters and a caliber of 890 mm. Since the formidable weapon was intended to protect Moscow, from the moment of its creation until 1706, the Tsar Cannon served in combat on the fortifications of Kitai-Gorod. Subsequently, it was moved to the courtyard of the Arsenal, and then to the Ivanovskaya Square of the Moscow Kremlin.
Tsar Mortar
What the guides are right about is that the cannonballs and carriage of the Tsar Cannon were indeed made much later and are fake. The fact is that the Tsar Cannon is actually a mortar, which was never installed when firing on a carriage, but dug into the ground, reinforced with logs. Most often, this type of weapon was used in the storming of fortresses or their defense. The carriage for the Tsar Cannon was made in 1835 according to the sketch of Alexander Bryullov, when it was decided to install the gun on Ivanovskaya Square as a decoration. The cores were cast at the Byrd plant in St. Petersburg. Each of them weighs about two tons. According to the calculations of experts, if the Tsar Cannon is charged with these metal cannonballs and fired, then its barrel will break, and the gun carriage will fall apart. This is not surprising, since at the time of the creation of this tool it was assumed that it would be fired from stone cores weighing about 800 kilograms, while the tool itself would be strengthened in the ground so that the recoil from the shot went into it. No more than six shots could be fired from such a gun per day.
Weapons of the formidable king
The most interesting thing is that during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who made many military campaigns, 11 such guns were cast. They were used in the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan, as well as in military campaigns against Sweden, Poland and Lithuania. Among the predecessors of the Tsar Cannon, the Kashpirov Cannon weighing 19.65 tons and the Peacock weighing 16.7 tons can be noted. These guns were actively used during the siege by the troops of Ivan the Terrible of Polotsk to destroy the walls of the city.
It should be noted that according to legend, the Tsar Cannon was once fired ... with the ashes of False Dmitry. By the way, the fact of a single shot from the Tsar Cannon was confirmed by experts who conducted a study of the barrel of the Tsar Cannon in Soviet times. But, scientists could not say exactly when the shot was fired. In their opinion, it was much earlier than the Time of Troubles. Most likely, the shot was fired shortly after the gun was cast at the cannon yard, in order to test it before installation in Kitay-gorod. At the same time, the fact that the gun never took part in battles is explained solely by the absence of hostilities near the walls of the city during the years of its combat duty, and not at all by professional unsuitability, as is commonly believed today.