Leonardo da Vinci’s armored tank was a covered circular fighting vehicle with cannons arranged around its platform.
Leonardo designed the vehicle in the 1480s while working for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Its conical cover was intended to resemble a tortoise shell and protect soldiers inside. The design showed numerous light cannons pointing outward, allowing the vehicle to fire in several directions.
The tank was meant to be moved by people operating cranks connected to gears and wheels. Historians and engineers have debated whether a flaw in the gear arrangement was deliberate or simply an error in the surviving drawing. In either case, the design was never built as a functioning battlefield tank during Leonardo’s lifetime.
It was not a modern armored vehicle with an engine, tracks, or a rotating turret. Leonardo’s concept is important because it combined mobile protection and concentrated gunfire long before twentieth-century tanks became practical.