Features of the Armament of the Salgir Fieldwork, the First Russian Fort in the Crimea: An Interdisciplinary Research

This article researches the weaponry of the Salgir fieldwork from 1772–1784, the first Russian fort in the Crimea. The location of the fort and its arsenal was localized with magnetic surveys on a bends of the Salgir River south of the modern village of Muskatnoe, Krasnogvardeiskoe administrative area of the Republic of Crimea. The plan of the fort in the Atlas of Plans and Profiles of Field Fortifications (Fieldworks) in the Crimea and Its Environs of 1778, which resides in the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RSMHA), shows two artillery cellars. One of them appears on the magnetic field map as a great magnetic anomaly. The excavations uncovered a part of the artillery magazine containing 516 cast iron shells of four calibers (four three-pound cannonballs, 216 six-pound grenades, and 8 six-pound cannonballs, 286 twelve-pound cannonballs and 2 twenty-pound cannonballs). Although Catherine II’s decree of 1784 ordered to remove the cannons from the Salgir fieldwork, the ammunition remained in one of the cellars in the fort for more than 240 years. The mark on one of the grenades possibly means “Shuvalov.” It is possible that this and other grenades and cannonballs excavated in Salgir fort were cast at one of the factories of the Gornobladatskii complex on the Urals, which was owned by Count Petr Ivanovich Shuvalov. “The chief commander of the artillery” from 1756 on, he contributed to the development and implementation of new howitzers, called “edinorog/unicorn” after the heraldic image of this monster on Count Shuvalov’s coat-of-arms. The cannonballs were probably made by P. I. Shuvalov’s order at his own factory.