Siege Mortar

The siege mortar is a short, wide-bored artillery piece designed to fire explosive shells at a steep, high trajectory so they arced over fortification walls and dropped down onto defenders and structures within, a role standard cannon firing a flat trajectory could not perform. Developed from earlier medieval and Ottoman siege pieces and standardized by European armies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mortars became a core part of formal siege warfare as taught by military engineers such as Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, whose systematic approach to besieging fortified towns relied on combining mortar bombardment with parallel trenches and breaching batteries. Mortars remained essential siege weapons through the Napoleonic era, and the type's high-angle, short-range fire concept carried forward into the much larger coastal and siege mortars used well into the nineteenth century.