History Of Gunpowder
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Gunpowder Gunpowder, also commonly known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur, carbon (in the form of charcoal) and potassium nitrate (saltpeter). ...
is the first explosive to have been developed. Popularly listed as one of the "
Four Great Inventions The Four Great Inventions () are inventions from ancient China that are celebrated in Chinese culture for their historical significance and as symbols of ancient China's advanced science and technology. They are the compass, History of gunpowder, ...
" of China, it was invented during the late
Tang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...
(9th century) while the earliest recorded chemical formula for gunpowder dates to the
Song dynasty The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...
(11th century). Knowledge of gunpowder spread rapidly throughout Asia and Europe, possibly as a result of the
Mongol conquests The Mongol invasions and conquests took place during the 13th and 14th centuries, creating history's largest contiguous empire: the Mongol Empire ( 1206- 1368), which by 1300 covered large parts of Eurasia. Historians regard the Mongol devastati ...
during the 13th century, with written formulas for it appearing in the Middle East between 1240 and 1280 in a treatise by
Hasan al-Rammah Hasan al-Rammah (, died 1295) was a Syrian Arab chemist and engineer during the Mamluk Sultanate who studied gunpowders and explosives, and sketched prototype instruments of warfare, including the first torpedo. Al-Rammah called his early torpedo ...
, and in Europe by 1267 in the ''
Opus Majus The ''Opus Majus'' (Latin for "Greater Work") is the most important work of Roger Bacon. It was written in Medieval Latin, at the request of Pope Clement IV, to explain the work that Bacon had undertaken. The 878-page treatise ranges over all ...
'' by Roger Bacon. It was employed in warfare to some effect from at least the 10th century in weapons such as
fire arrow Fire arrows were one of the earliest forms of weaponized gunpowder, being used from the 9th century onward. Not to be confused with earlier incendiary arrow projectiles, the fire arrow was a gunpowder weapon which receives its name from the tra ...
s,
bomb A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the Exothermic process, exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-t ...
s, and the
fire lance The fire lance () was a gunpowder weapon and the ancestor of modern firearms. It first appeared in 10th–12th century China and was used to great effect during the Jin-Song Wars. It began as a small pyrotechnic device attached to a polearm weap ...
before the appearance of the gun in the 13th century. While the fire lance was eventually supplanted by the gun, other gunpowder weapons such as rockets and fire arrows continued to see use in China, Korea, India, and eventually Europe. Bombs too never ceased to develop and continued to progress into the modern day as
grenades A grenade is an explosive weapon typically thrown by hand (also called hand grenade), but can also refer to a shell (explosive projectile) shot from the muzzle of a rifle (as a rifle grenade) or a grenade launcher. A modern hand grenade gene ...
,
mine Mine, mines, miners or mining may refer to: Extraction or digging * Miner, a person engaged in mining or digging *Mining, extraction of mineral resources from the ground through a mine Grammar *Mine, a first-person English possessive pronoun ...
s, and other explosive implements. Gunpowder has also been used for non-military purposes such as
firework Fireworks are a class of low explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes. They are most commonly used in fireworks displays (also called a fireworks show or pyrotechnics), combining a large number of devices in ...
s for entertainment, or in explosives for mining and tunneling. The evolution of
guns A gun is a ranged weapon designed to use a shooting tube (gun barrel) to launch projectiles. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns/cannons, spray guns for painting or pressure washing, ...
led to the development of large
artillery Artillery is a class of heavy military ranged weapons that launch munitions far beyond the range and power of infantry firearms. Early artillery development focused on the ability to breach defensive walls and fortifications during siege ...
pieces, popularly known as bombards, during the 15th century, pioneered by states such as the
Duchy of Burgundy The Duchy of Burgundy (; la, Ducatus Burgundiae; french: Duché de Bourgogne, ) emerged in the 9th century as one of the successors of the ancient Kingdom of the Burgundians, which after its conquest in 532 had formed a constituent part of the ...
.
Firearms A firearm is any type of gun designed to be readily carried and used by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see Legal definitions). The first firearms originated in 10th-century China, when bamboo tubes c ...
came to dominate early modern warfare in
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...
by the 17th century. The gradual improvement of
cannon A cannon is a large- caliber gun classified as a type of artillery, which usually launches a projectile using explosive chemical propellant. Gunpowder ("black powder") was the primary propellant before the invention of smokeless powder ...
s firing heavier rounds for a greater impact against fortifications led to the invention of the
star fort A bastion fort or ''trace italienne'' (a phrase derived from non-standard French, literally meaning ''Italian outline'') is a fortification in a style that evolved during the early modern period of gunpowder when the cannon came to domin ...
and the
bastion A bastion or bulwark is a structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of a fortification, most commonly angular in shape and positioned at the corners of the fort. The fully developed bastion consists of two faces and two flanks, with fi ...
in the Western world, where traditional city walls and castles were no longer suitable for defense. The use of gunpowder technology also spread throughout the Islamic world and to
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
,
Korea Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...
, and
Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
. The so-called
Gunpowder Empires The gunpowder empires, or Islamic gunpowder empires, is a collective term coined by Marshall G. S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill at the University of Chicago, referring to three Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire and the Mugha ...
of the early modern period consisted of the
Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...
,
Safavid Empire Safavid Iran or Safavid Persia (), also referred to as the Safavid Empire, '. was one of the greatest Iranian empires after the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Persia, which was ruled from 1501 to 1736 by the Safavid dynasty. It is often conside ...
, and
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
. The use of gunpowder in warfare during the course of the 19th century diminished due to the invention of
smokeless powder Finnish smokeless powderSmokeless powder is a type of propellant used in firearms and artillery that produces less smoke and less fouling when fired compared to gunpowder ("black powder"). The combustion products are mainly gaseous, compared t ...
. Gunpowder is often referred to today as "
black powder Gunpowder, also commonly known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur, carbon (in the form of charcoal) and potassium nitrate (saltpeter). Th ...
" to distinguish it from the propellant used in contemporary firearms.


Chinese beginnings


Gunpowder formula

Gunpowder was invented in China sometime during the first millennium AD. The earliest possible reference to gunpowder appeared in 142 AD during the
Eastern Han dynasty The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...
when the
alchemist Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscience, protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in Chinese alchemy, C ...
Wei Boyang Wei Boyang () was a notable Chinese writer and Taoist alchemist of the Eastern Han Dynasty. He is the author of '' The Kinship of the Three'', and is noted as the first person to have documented the chemical composition of gunpowder in 142 AD.Pe ...
, also known as the "father of alchemy", wrote about a substance with gunpowder-like properties. He described a mixture of three powders that would "fly and dance" violently in his ''
Cantong qi The ''Cantong qi'' is deemed to be the earliest book on Taoist alchemy in China. The title has been variously translated as ''Kinship of the Three'', ''Akinness of the Three'', ''Triplex Unity'', ''The Seal of the Unity of the Three'', and in se ...
'', otherwise known as the ''Book of the Kinship of Three'', a
Taoist Taoism (, ) or Daoism () refers to either a school of philosophical thought (道家; ''daojia'') or to a religion (道教; ''daojiao''), both of which share ideas and concepts of Chinese origin and emphasize living in harmony with the ''Tao'' ...
text on the subject of alchemy. Although he did not name the powders, "they were almost certainly the ingredients of gunpowder," and no other explosive known to scientists is composed of three powders. At this time, saltpeter was produced in
Hanzhong Hanzhong (; abbreviation: Han) is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Shaanxi province, China, bordering the provinces of Sichuan to the south and Gansu to the west. The founder of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang, was once enfeoffed as the ...
, but would shift to
Gansu Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...
and
Sichuan Sichuan (; zh, c=, labels=no, ; zh, p=Sìchuān; alternatively romanized as Szechuan or Szechwan; formerly also referred to as "West China" or "Western China" by Protestant missions) is a province in Southwest China occupying most of the ...
later on. Wei Boyang is considered to be a semi-legendary figure meant to represent a "collective unity", and the ''Cantong qi'' was probably written in stages from the Han dynasty to 450 AD. While it was almost certainly not their intention to create a weapon of war, Taoist alchemists continued to play a major role in gunpowder development due to their experiments with
sulfur Sulfur (or sulphur in British English) is a chemical element with the symbol S and atomic number 16. It is abundant, multivalent and nonmetallic. Under normal conditions, sulfur atoms form cyclic octatomic molecules with a chemical formula ...
and
saltpeter Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and nitrat ...
involved in searching for eternal life and ways to transmute one material into another. Historian Peter Lorge notes that despite the early association of gunpowder with Taoism, this may be a quirk of historiography and a result of the better preservation of texts associated with Taoism, rather than being a subject limited to only Taoists. The Taoist quest for the elixir of life attracted many powerful patrons, one of whom was
Emperor Wu of Han Emperor Wu of Han (156 – 29 March 87BC), formally enshrined as Emperor Wu the Filial (), born Liu Che (劉徹) and courtesy name Tong (通), was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty of ancient China, ruling from 141 to 87 BC. His reign la ...
. One of the resulting alchemical experiments involved heating 10% sulfur and 75% saltpeter to transform them. The next reference to gunpowder occurred in the year 300 during the
Jin dynasty (266–420) The Jin dynasty (; ) or the Jin Empire, sometimes distinguished as the (司馬晉) or the (兩晉), was an imperial dynasty of China that existed from 266 to 420. It was founded by Sima Yan (Emperor Wu), eldest son of Sima Zhao, who had pr ...
. A Taoist philosopher by the name of
Ge Hong Ge Hong (; b. 283 – d. 343 or 364), courtesy name Zhichuan (稚川), was a Chinese linguist, Taoist practitioner, philosopher, physician, politician, and writer during the Eastern Jin dynasty. He was the author of '' Essays on Chinese Characte ...
wrote down the ingredients of gunpowder in his surviving works, collectively known as the '' Baopuzi'' ("The Master Who Embraces Simplicity"). The "Inner Chapters" (''neipian'') on Taoism contains records of his experiments to create gold with heated saltpeter, pine resin, and
charcoal Charcoal is a lightweight black carbon residue produced by strongly heating wood (or other animal and plant materials) in minimal oxygen to remove all water and volatile constituents. In the traditional version of this pyrolysis process, cal ...
among other carbon materials, resulting in a purple powder and arsenic vapours. In 492, Taoist alchemists noted that saltpeter, one of the most important ingredients in gunpowder, burns with a purple flame, allowing for practical efforts at purifying the substance. During the Tang dynasty, alchemists used saltpetre in processing the "four yellow drugs" (sulfur, realgar, orpiment, arsenic trisulfide). The first confirmed reference to what can be considered gunpowder in China occurred more than three hundred years later during the Tang dynasty, first in a formula contained in the ''Taishang Shengzu Jindan Mijue'' (太上聖祖金丹秘訣) in 808, and then about 50 years later in a Taoist text known as the ''Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe'' (真元妙道要略). The first formula was a combination of six parts sulfur to six parts saltpeter to one part birthwort herb. The Taoist text warned against an assortment of dangerous formulas, one of which corresponds with gunpowder: "Some have heated together sulfur,
realgar Realgar ( ), also known as "ruby sulphur" or "ruby of arsenic", is an arsenic sulfide mineral with the chemical formula α-. It is a soft, sectile mineral occurring in monoclinic crystals, or in granular, compact, or powdery form, often in asso ...
(arsenic disulfide), and saltpeter with honey; smoke nd flamesresult, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house burned down." Alchemists called this discovery fire medicine ("huoyao" 火藥), and the term has continued to refer to gunpowder in China into the present day, a reminder of its heritage as a side result in the search for longevity increasing drugs. A book published in 1185 called ''Gui Dong'' (The Control of Spirits) also contains a story about a
Tang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...
alchemist whose furnace exploded, but it is not known if this was caused by gunpowder. The earliest surviving chemical formula of gunpowder dates to 1044 in the form of the military manual ''
Wujing Zongyao The ''Wujing Zongyao'' (), sometimes rendered in English as the ''Complete Essentials for the Military Classics'', is a Chinese military compendium written from around 1040 to 1044. The book was compiled during the Northern Song dynasty by Z ...
'', also known in English as the ''Complete Essentials for the Military Classics'', which contains a collection of factoids on Chinese weaponry. However the 1044 edition has since been lost and the only currently extant copy is dated to 1510 during the
Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol Empire, Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last ort ...
. The ''Wujing Zongyao'' served as a repository of antiquated or fanciful weaponry, and this applied to gunpowder as well, suggesting that it had already been weaponized long before the invention of what would today be considered conventional firearms. These types of gunpowder weapons styles an assortment of odd names such as "flying incendiary club for subjugating demons", "caltrop fire ball", "ten-thousand fire flying sand magic bomb", "big bees nest", "burning heaven fierce fire unstoppable bomb", "fire bricks" which released "flying swallows", "flying rats", "fire birds", and "fire oxen". Eventually they gave way and coalesced into a smaller number of dominant weapon types, notably gunpowder arrows, bombs, and guns. This was most likely because some weapons were deemed too onerous or ineffective to deploy.


Fire arrows

The early gunpowder formula contained too little saltpeter (about 50%) to be explosive, but the mixture was highly flammable, and contemporary weapons reflected this in their deployment as mainly shock and incendiary weapons. One of the first, if not the first of these weapons was the
fire arrow Fire arrows were one of the earliest forms of weaponized gunpowder, being used from the 9th century onward. Not to be confused with earlier incendiary arrow projectiles, the fire arrow was a gunpowder weapon which receives its name from the tra ...
. The first possible reference to the use of fire arrows was by the Southern Wu in 904 during the siege of Yuzhang. An officer under
Yang Xingmi Yang Xingmi (; 852''Spring and Autumn Annals of the Ten Kingdoms''vol. 1 – December 24, 905Academia Sinicabr>Chinese-Western Calendar Converter''Zizhi Tongjian'', vol. 265.), né Yang Xingmin (楊行愍, name changed 886), courtesy name Huayuan ...
by the name of Zheng Fan (鄭璠) ordered his troops to "shoot off a machine to let fire and burn the Longsha Gate", after which he and his troops dashed over the fire into the city and captured it, and he was promoted to Prime Minister Inspectorate for his efforts and the burns his body endured. A later account of this event corroborated with the report and explained that "by let fire (飛火) is meant things like firebombs and fire arrows." Arrows carrying gunpowder were possibly the most applicable form of gunpowder weaponry at the time. Early gunpowder may have only produced an effective flame when exposed to oxygen, thus the rush of air around the arrow in flight would have provided a suitably ample supply of reactants for the reaction.


Rockets

The first fire arrows were arrows strapped with gunpowder incendiaries but they eventually became gunpowder propelled projectiles (
rocket A rocket (from it, rocchetto, , bobbin/spool) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely fr ...
s). It's not certain when this happened. According to the '' History of Song'', in 969 two Song generals, Yue Yifang and Feng Jisheng (馮繼升), invented a variant fire arrow which used gunpowder tubes as propellants. These fire arrows were shown to the emperor in 970 when the head of a weapons manufacturing bureau sent Feng Jisheng to demonstrate the gunpowder arrow design, for which he was heavily rewarded. However
Joseph Needham Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, in ...
argues that rockets could not have existed before the 12th century, since the gunpowder formulas listed in the ''
Wujing Zongyao The ''Wujing Zongyao'' (), sometimes rendered in English as the ''Complete Essentials for the Military Classics'', is a Chinese military compendium written from around 1040 to 1044. The book was compiled during the Northern Song dynasty by Z ...
'' are not suitable as rocket propellant. According to Stephen G. Haw, there is only slight evidence that rockets existed prior to 1200 and it is more likely they were not produced or used for warfare until the latter half of the 13th century. Rockets are recorded to have been used by the Song navy in a military exercise dated to 1245. Internal-combustion rocket propulsion is mentioned in a reference to 1264, recording that the 'ground-rat,' a type of
firework Fireworks are a class of low explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes. They are most commonly used in fireworks displays (also called a fireworks show or pyrotechnics), combining a large number of devices in ...
, had frightened the Empress-Mother Gongsheng at a feast held in her honor by her son the
Emperor Lizong Emperor Lizong of Song (26 January 1205 – 16 November 1264), personal name Zhao Yun, was the 14th emperor of the Song dynasty of China and the fifth emperor of the Southern Song dynasty. He reigned from 1224 to 1264. His original name was ...
. In 975, the state of
Wuyue Wuyue (; ), 907–978, was an independent coastal kingdom founded during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960) of Chinese history. It was ruled by the Haiyan Qian clan (海盐钱氏), whose family name remains widespread in t ...
sent to the Song dynasty a unit of soldiers skilled in the handling of fire arrows and in the same year, the Song used fire arrows to destroy the fleet of
Southern Tang Southern Tang () was a state in Southern China that existed during Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, which proclaimed itself to be the successor of the former Tang dynasty. The capital was located at Nanjing in present-day Jiangsu Province ...
. In 994, the
Liao dynasty The Liao dynasty (; Khitan: ''Mos Jælud''; ), also known as the Khitan Empire (Khitan: ''Mos diau-d kitai huldʒi gur''), officially the Great Liao (), was an imperial dynasty of China that existed between 916 and 1125, ruled by the Yelü ...
attacked the Song and laid siege to Zitong with 100,000 troops. They were repelled with the aid of fire arrows. In 1000 a soldier by the name of Tang Fu (唐福) also demonstrated his own designs of gunpowder arrows, gunpowder pots (a proto-bomb which spews fire), and gunpowder caltrops, for which he was richly rewarded as well. The imperial court took great interest in the progress of gunpowder developments and actively encouraged as well as disseminated military technology. For example, in 1002 a local militia man named Shi Pu (石普) showed his own versions of fireballs and gunpowder arrows to imperial officials. They were so astounded that the emperor and court decreed that a team would be assembled to print the plans and instructions for the new designs to promulgate throughout the realm. The Song court's policy of rewarding military innovators was reported to have "brought about a great number of cases of people presenting technology and techniques" (器械法式) according to the official '' History of Song''. Production of gunpowder and fire arrows heavily increased in the 11th century as the court centralized the production process, constructing large gunpowder production facilities, hiring artisans, carpenters, and tanners for the military production complex in the capital of
Kaifeng Kaifeng () is a prefecture-level city in east-central Henan province, China. It is one of the Eight Ancient Capitals of China, having been the capital eight times in history, and is best known for having been the Chinese capital during the Nort ...
. One surviving source circa 1023 lists all the artisans working in Kaifeng while another notes that in 1083 the imperial court sent 100,000 gunpowder arrows to one garrison and 250,000 to another. Evidence of gunpowder in the
Liao dynasty The Liao dynasty (; Khitan: ''Mos Jælud''; ), also known as the Khitan Empire (Khitan: ''Mos diau-d kitai huldʒi gur''), officially the Great Liao (), was an imperial dynasty of China that existed between 916 and 1125, ruled by the Yelü ...
and
Western Xia The Western Xia or the Xi Xia (), officially the Great Xia (), also known as the Tangut Empire, and known as ''Mi-nyak''Stein (1972), pp. 70–71. to the Tanguts and Tibetans, was a Tangut-led Buddhist imperial dynasty of China tha ...
is much sparser than in Song, but some evidence such as the Song decree of 1073 that all subjects were henceforth forbidden from trading sulfur and saltpeter across the Liao border, suggests that the Liao were aware of gunpowder developments to the south and coveted gunpowder ingredients of their own. File:11th century basketry fire arrow rocket launcher.jpg, An illustration of
fire arrow Fire arrows were one of the earliest forms of weaponized gunpowder, being used from the 9th century onward. Not to be confused with earlier incendiary arrow projectiles, the fire arrow was a gunpowder weapon which receives its name from the tra ...
launchers as depicted in the ''
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
'' (1621). The launcher is constructed using basketry. File:群豹奔橫箭.jpg, A "charging leopard pack" arrow rocket launcher as depicted in the ''
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
''. File:一窩蜂.jpg, A "nest of bees" or "wasp nest" (yi wo feng 一窩蜂) arrow rocket launcher as depicted in the ''
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
''. So called because of its hexagonal honeycomb shape. File:11th century long serpent fire arrow rocket launcher.jpg, A "long serpent enemy breaking" fire arrow launcher as depicted in the ''
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
''. It carries 32 medium small poisoned rockets and comes with a sling to carry on the back. File:Convocation of eagles chasing hare arrow.png, The 'convocation of eagles chasing hare' rocket launcher from the ''
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
''. A double-ended rocket pod that carries 30 small poisoned rockets on each end for a total of 60 rockets. It carries a sling for transport. File:Fire arrow rocket launcher.jpg, The 'divine fire arrow screen' from the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. A stationary arrow launcher that carries one hundred fire arrows. It is activated by a trap-like mechanism, possibly of wheellock design.


Explosives

The
Jurchen people Jurchen (Manchu: ''Jušen'', ; zh, 女真, ''Nǚzhēn'', ) is a term used to collectively describe a number of East Asian Tungusic-speaking peoples, descended from the Donghu people. They lived in the northeast of China, later known as Manchu ...
of
Manchuria Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer Manc ...
united under
Wanyan Aguda Emperor Taizu of Jin (August 1, 1068 – September 19, 1123), personal name Aguda, sinicised name Min (), was the founder and first emperor of the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty of China. He was originally the chieftain of the Wanyan tribe, the most ...
and established the Jin dynasty in 1115. Allying with the Song, they rose rapidly to the forefront of East Asian powers and defeated the Liao dynasty in a shockingly short span of time, destroying the 150-year balance of power between the Song, Liao, and Western Xia. Remnants of the Liao fled to the west and became known as the
Qara Khitai The Qara Khitai, or Kara Khitai (), also known as the Western Liao (), officially the Great Liao (), was a Sinicized dynastic regime based in Central Asia ruled by the Khitan Yelü clan. The Qara Khitai is considered by historians to be an ...
, or Western Liao to the Chinese. In the east, the fragile Song-Jin alliance dissolved once the Jin saw how badly the Song army had performed against Liao forces. Realizing the weakness of Song, the Jin grew tired of waiting and captured all five of the Liao capitals themselves. They proceeded to make war on Song, initiating the Jin-Song Wars. For the first time, two major powers would have access to equally formidable gunpowder weapons. Initially the Jin expected their campaign in the south to proceed smoothly given how poorly the Song had fared against the Liao. However they were met with stout resistance upon besieging Kaifeng in 1126 and faced the usual array of gunpowder arrows and fire bombs, but also a weapon called the "thunderclap bomb" (霹靂炮), which one witness wrote, "At night the thunderclap bombs were used, hitting the lines of the enemy well, and throwing them into great confusion. Many fled, screaming in fright." The thunderclap bomb was previously mentioned in the ''Wujing Zongyao'', but this was the first recorded instance of its use. Its description in the text reads thus: Jin troops withdrew with a ransom of Song silk and treasure but returned several months later with their own gunpowder bombs manufactured by captured Song artisans. According to historian Wang Zhaochun, the account of this battle provided the "earliest truly detailed descriptions of the use of gunpowder weapons in warfare." Records show that the Jin used gunpowder arrows and
trebuchet A trebuchet (french: trébuchet) is a type of catapult that uses a long arm to throw a projectile. It was a common powerful siege engine until the advent of gunpowder. The design of a trebuchet allows it to launch projectiles of greater weight ...
s to hurl gunpowder bombs while the Song responded with gunpowder arrows, fire bombs, thunderclap bombs, and a new addition called the "molten metal bomb" (金汁炮). As the Jin account describes, when they attacked the city's Xuanhua Gate, their "fire bombs fell like rain, and their arrows were so numerous as to be uncountable." The Jin captured Kaifeng despite the appearance of the molten metal bomb and secured another 20,000 fire arrows for their arsenal. The molten metal bomb appeared again in 1129 when Song general Li Yanxian (李彥仙) clashed with Jin forces while defending a strategic pass. The Jin assault lasted day and night without respite, using siege carts, fire carts, and sky bridges, but each assault was met with Song soldiers who "resisted at each occasion, and also used molten metal bombs. Wherever the gunpowder touched, everything would disintegrate without a trace."


Fire lance

The Song relocated their capital to
Hangzhou Hangzhou ( or , ; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ), also romanized as Hangchow, is the capital and most populous city of Zhejiang, China. It is located in the northwestern part of the province, sitting at the head of Hangzhou Bay, whi ...
and the Jin followed. The fighting that ensued would see the first proto-gun, the
fire lance The fire lance () was a gunpowder weapon and the ancestor of modern firearms. It first appeared in 10th–12th century China and was used to great effect during the Jin-Song Wars. It began as a small pyrotechnic device attached to a polearm weap ...
, in action – with earliest confirmed employment by Song dynasty forces against the Jin in 1132 during the
siege of De'an The siege of De'an (德安之戰) was fought as part of the Jin-Song Wars of China in 1132, during the Jin invasion of Hubei and Shaanxi. The battle between the besiegers, a group of rebels led by Li Heng and the Song Chinese defenders is impor ...
(modern
Anlu Anlu () is a county-level city in east-central Hubei province, China. It is under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Xiaogan. The siege of De'an took place here during the Song-Jin Wars. Administrative divisions Two subdistric ...
, Hubei), Most Chinese scholars reject the appearance of the fire lance prior to the Jin-Song wars, but its first appearance in art with a silk banner painting from Dunhuang dates to the
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (), from 907 to 979, was an era of political upheaval and division in 10th-century Imperial China. Five dynastic states quickly succeeded one another in the Central Plain, and more than a dozen conc ...
in the mid-10th century. The siege of De'an marks an important transition and landmark in the history of gunpowder weapons as the fire medicine of the fire lances were described using a new word: "fire bomb medicine" (火炮藥), rather than simply "fire medicine." This could imply the use of a new more potent formula, or simply an acknowledgement of the specialized military application of gunpowder. Peter Lorge suggests that this "bomb powder" may have been corned, making it distinct from normal gunpowder. Evidence of gunpowder firecrackers also points to their appearance at roughly around the same time fire medicine was making its transition in the literary imagination. Fire lances continued to be used as anti-personnel weapons into the Ming dynasty, and were even attached to battle carts on one situation in 1163. Song commander Wei Sheng constructed several hundred of these carts known as "at-your-desire-war-carts" (如意戰車), which contained fire lances protruding from protective covering on the sides. They were used to defend mobile trebuchets that hurled fire bombs. They were used as cavalry weapons by the 13th century.


Naval bombs

Gunpowder technology also spread to naval warfare and in 1129 Song decreed that all warships were to be fitted with trebuchets for hurling gunpowder bombs. Older gunpowder weapons such as fire arrows were also used. In 1159 a Song fleet of 120 ships caught a Jin fleet at anchor near Shijiu Island (石臼島) off the shore of
Shandong Shandong ( , ; ; alternately romanized as Shantung) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the East China region. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilizati ...
peninsula. The Song commander "ordered that gunpowder arrows be shot from all sides, and wherever they struck, flames and smoke rose up in swirls, setting fire to several hundred vessels." Song forces took another victory in 1161 when Song paddle boats ambushed a Jin transport fleet, launched thunderclap bombs, and drowned the Jin force in the
Yangtze The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ; ) is the longest river in Asia, the third-longest in the world, and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains (Tibetan Plateau) and flows ...
. According to a minor military official by the name of Zhao Wannian (趙萬年), thunderclap bombs were used again to great effect by the Song during the Jin siege of Xiangyang in 1206–1207. Both sides had gunpowder weapons, but the Jin troops only used gunpowder arrows for destroying the city's moored vessels. The Song used fire arrows, fire bombs, and thunderclap bombs. Fire arrows and bombs were used to destroy Jin trebuchets. The thunderclap bombs were used on Jin soldiers themselves, causing foot soldiers and horsemen to panic and retreat. "We beat our drums and yelled from atop the city wall, and simultaneously fired our thunderclap missiles out from the city walls. The enemy cavalry was terrified and ran away." The Jin were forced to retreat and make camp by the riverside. In a rare occurrence, the Song made a successful offensive on Jin forces and conducted a night assault using boats. They were loaded with gunpowder arrows, thunderclap bombs, a thousand crossbowmen, five hundred infantry, and a hundred drummers. Jin troops were surprised in their encampment while asleep by loud drumming, followed by an onslaught of crossbow bolts, and then thunderclap bombs, which caused a panic of such magnitude that they were unable to even saddle themselves and trampled over each other trying to get away. Two to three thousand Jin troops were slaughtered along with eight to nine hundred horses.


Hard-shell explosives

The introduction of the iron bomb was significant to the history of gunpowder weaponry. Traditionally the inspiration for the development of the iron bomb is ascribed to the tale of a fox hunter named Iron Li. According to the story, around the year 1189 Iron Li developed a new method for hunting foxes which used a ceramic explosive to scare foxes into his nets. The explosive consisted of a ceramic bottle with a mouth, stuffed with gunpowder, and attached with a fuse. Explosive and net were placed at strategic points of places such as watering holes frequented by foxes, and when they got near enough, Iron Li would light the fuse, causing the ceramic bottle to explode and scaring the frightened foxes right into his nets. While a fanciful tale, it's not exactly certain why this would cause the development of the iron bomb, given the explosive was made using ceramics, and other materials such as bamboo or even leather would have done the same job, assuming they made a loud enough noise. Nonetheless, the iron bomb made its first appearance in 1221 at the siege of Qizhou (in modern
Hubei Hubei (; ; alternately Hupeh) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, and is part of the Central China region. The name of the province means "north of the lake", referring to its position north of Dongting Lake. The prov ...
), and this time it would be the Jin who possessed the technological advantage. The Song commander Zhao Yurong (趙與褣) survived and was able to relay his account for posterity. Qizhou was a major fortress city situated near the Yangtze and a 25 thousand strong Jin army advanced on it in 1221. News of the approaching army reached Zhao Yurong in Qizhou, and despite being outnumbered nearly eight to one, he decided to hold the city. Qizhou's arsenal consisted of some three thousand thunderclap bombs, twenty thousand "great leather bombs" (皮大炮), and thousands of gunpowder arrows and gunpowder crossbow bolts. While the formula for gunpowder had become potent enough to consider the Song bombs to be true explosives, they were unable to match the explosive power of the Jin iron bombs. Yurong describes the uneven exchange thus, "The barbaric enemy attacked the Northwest Tower with an unceasing flow of catapult projectiles from thirteen catapults. Each catapult shot was followed by an iron fire bomb atapult shot whose sound was like thunder. That day, the city soldiers in facing the catapult shots showed great courage as they maneuvered ur owncatapults, hindered by injuries from the iron fire bombs. Their heads, their eyes, their cheeks were exploded to bits, and only one half
f the face F, or f, is the sixth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphabet#Let ...
was left." Jin artillerists were able to successfully target the command center itself: "The enemy fired off catapult stones ... nonstop day and night, and the magistrate's headquarters at the eastern gate, as well as my own quarters ..., were hit by the most iron fire bombs, to the point that they struck even on top of ysleeping quarters and nearly perished! Some said there was a traitor. If not, how would they have known the way to strike at both of these places?" Zhao was able to examine the new iron bombs himself and described thus, "In shape they are like gourds, but with a small mouth. They are made with pig iron, about two inches thick, and they cause the city's walls to shake." Houses were blown apart, towers battered, and defenders blasted from their placements. Within four weeks all four gates were under heavy bombardment. Finally the Jin made a frontal assault on the walls and scaled them, after which followed a merciless hunt for soldiers, officers, and officials of every level. Zhao managed an escape by clambering over the battlement and making a hasty retreat across the river, but his family remained in the city. Upon returning at a later date to search the ruins, he found that the "bones and skeletons were so mixed up that there was no way to tell who was who."


Hand cannon

The early fire lance, considered to be the ancestor of firearms, is not considered a true gun because it did not include projectiles, whereas a gun by definition uses "the explosive force of the gunpowder to propel a projectile from a tube: cannons, muskets, and pistols are typical examples.". Even later on when shrapnel such as ceramics and bits of iron were added to the fire lance, these didn't occlude the barrel, and were only swept along with the discharge rather than making use of
windage Windage is a term used in aerodynamics, firearms ballistics, and automobiles. Usage Aerodynamics Windage is a force created on an object by friction when there is relative movement between air and the object. Windage loss is the reduction in ...
, and so are referred to as "co-viatives." In 1259 a type of "fire-emitting lance" (''tuhuoqiang'' 突火槍) made an appearance and according to the ''History of Song'': "It is made from a large bamboo tube, and inside is stuffed a pellet wad (子窠). Once the fire goes off it completely spews the rear pellet wad forth, and the sound is like a bomb that can be heard for five hundred or more paces." The pellet wad mentioned is possibly the first true bullet in recorded history depending on how bullet is defined, as it did occlude the barrel, unlike previous co-viatives used in the fire lance. Fire lances transformed from the "bamboo- (or wood- or paper-) barreled firearm to the metal-barreled firearm" to better withstand the explosive pressure of gunpowder. From there it branched off into several different gunpowder weapons known as "eruptors" in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, with different functions such as the "filling-the-sky erupting tube" which spewed out poisonous gas and porcelain shards, the "orifice-penetrating flying sand magic mist tube" (鑽穴飛砂神霧筒) which spewed forth sand and poisonous chemicals into orifices, and the more conventional "phalanx-charging fire gourd" which shot out lead pellets. The earliest artistic depiction of what might be a hand cannon – a rock sculpture found among the
Dazu Rock Carvings The Dazu Rock Carvings () are a series of Chinese religious sculptures and carvings and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Dazu District, Chongqing, China. The carvings date back as far as the 7th century AD, depicting and influenced by Buddhi ...
– is dated to 1128, much earlier than any recorded or precisely dated archaeological samples, so it is possible that the concept of a cannon-like firearm has existed since the 12th century. This has been challenged by others such as Liu Xu, Cheng Dong, and Benjamin Avichai Katz Sinvany. According to Liu, the weight of the cannon would have been too much for one person to hold, especially with just one arm, and points out that fire lances were being used a decade later at De'an. Cheng Dong believes that the figure depicted is actually a wind spirit letting air out of a bag rather than a cannon emitting a blast. Stephen Haw also considered the possibility that the item in question was a bag of air but concludes that it is a cannon because it was grouped with other weapon wielding sculptures. Sinvany believes in the wind bag interpretation and that the cannonball indentation was added later on. Archaeological samples of the gun, specifically the
hand cannon The hand cannon (Chinese: 手 銃 ''shŏuchòng'', or 火 銃 ''huŏchòng''), also known as the gonne or handgonne, is the first true firearm and the successor of the fire lance. It is the oldest type of small arms as well as the most mecha ...
(
huochong ''Huochong'' () was the Chinese name for hand cannons. The oldest confirmed metal ''huochong'', also the first cannon, is a bronze hand cannon bearing an inscription dating it to 1298 (see Xanadu Gun, Xanadu gun). By the time of the Ming Dynast ...
), have been dated starting from the 13th century. The oldest extant gun whose dating is unequivocal is the
Xanadu Gun The oldest extant gun bearing a date of production is the Xanadu Gun, so called because it was discovered in the ruins of Xanadu (Shangdu), the summer palace of the Yuan dynasty in Inner Mongolia, China. The Xanadu Gun is 34.7 cm in length a ...
because it contains an inscription describing its date of manufacture corresponding to 1298. It is so called because it was discovered in the ruins of Xanadu, the Mongol summer palace in Inner Mongolia. The Xanadu Gun is 34.7 cm in length and weighs 6.2 kg. The design of the gun includes axial holes in its rear which some speculate could have been used in a mounting mechanism. Like most early guns it is small, weighing just over six kilograms and thirty-five centimeters in length. Although the Xanadu Gun is the most precisely dated gun from the 13th century, other extant samples with approximate dating likely predate it. The
Heilongjiang hand cannon The Heilongjiang hand cannon or hand-gun is a bronze hand cannon manufactured no later than 1288 and is the world's oldest confirmed surviving firearm. It weighs 3.55 kg (7.83 pounds) and is 34 centimeters (13.4 inches) long. The Heilongjian ...
is dated a decade earlier to 1288, but the dating method is based on contextual evidence; the gun bears no inscription or era date. According to the ''
History of Yuan The ''History of Yuan'' (''Yuán Shǐ''), also known as the ''Yuanshi'', is one of the official Chinese historical works known as the ''Twenty-Four Histories'' of China. Commissioned by the court of the Ming dynasty, in accordance to political ...
'', in 1287, a group of soldiers equipped with hand cannons led by the Jurchen commander Li Ting () attacked the rebel prince Nayan's camp. The ''History'' reports that the hand cannons not only "caused great damage," but also caused "such confusion that the enemy soldiers attacked and killed each other." The hand cannons were used again in the beginning of 1288. Li Ting's "gun-soldiers" or ''chongzu'' () were able to carry the hand cannons "on their backs". The passage on the 1288 battle is also the first to coin the name ''chong'' () for metal-barrel firearms. ''Chong'' was used instead of the earlier and more ambiguous term ''huo tong'' (fire tube; ), which may refer to the tubes of
fire lances The fire lance () was a gunpowder weapon and the ancestor of modern firearms. It first appeared in 10th–12th century China and was used to great effect during the Jin-Song Wars. It began as a small pyrotechnic device attached to a polearm weap ...
, proto-cannons, or signal flares. Another specimen, the
Wuwei Bronze Cannon The Wuwei Bronze Cannon (武威銅火炮 — Wǔwēi tóng huǒpào) or Xi Xia Bronze cannon (西夏铜火炮 — Xīxià tóng huǒpào)Kelly DeVries, John France, Clifford J. Rogers (October 2015). Journal of Medieval Military History'. 13: 25 ...
, was discovered in 1980 and may possibly be the oldest as well as largest cannon of the 13th century: a 100 centimeter 108 kilogram bronze cannon discovered in a cellar in Wuwei, Gansu containing no inscription, but has been dated by historians to the late Western Xia period between 1214 and 1227. The gun contained an iron ball about nine centimeters in diameter, which is smaller than the muzzle diameter at twelve centimeters, and 0.1 kilograms of gunpowder in it when discovered, meaning that the projectile might have been another co-viative. Ben Sinvany and Dang Shoushan believe that the ball used to be much larger prior to its highly corroded state at the time of discovery. While large in size, the weapon is noticeably more primitive than later Yuan dynasty guns, and is unevenly cast. A similar weapon was discovered not far from the discovery site in 1997, but much smaller in size at only 1.5 kg. Chen Bingying disputes this however, and argues there were no guns before 1259, while Dang Shoushan believes the Western Xia guns point to the appearance of guns by 1220, and Stephen Haw goes even further by stating that guns were developed as early as 1200. Sinologist
Joseph Needham Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, in ...
and renaissance siege expert Thomas Arnold provide a more conservative estimate of around 1280 for the appearance of the "true" cannon. Whether or not any of these are correct, it seems likely that the gun was born sometime during the 13th century.


Use by the Mongols

The
Mongols The Mongols ( mn, Монголчууд, , , ; ; russian: Монголы) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China and the Buryatia Republic of the Russian Federation. The Mongols are the principal membe ...
and their rise in world history as well as conflicts with both the Jin and Song played a key role in the evolution of gunpowder technology. Mongol aptitude in incorporating foreign experts extended to the Chinese, who provided artisans that followed Mongol armies willingly and unwillingly far into the west and even east, to Japan. Unfortunately textual evidence for this is scant as the Mongols left few documents. This lack of primary source documents has caused some historians and scholars such as Kate Raphael to doubt the Mongol's role in disseminating gunpowder throughout Eurasia. On the opposite side stand historians such as
Tonio Andrade Tonio Adam Andrade (born 1968) is an historian of East Asian history and the history of East Asian trading networks. Bibliography * ''Commerce, Culture, and Conflict: Taiwan Under European Rule, 1624–1662''. Yale University Press, 2000. * ''H ...
and Stephen Haw, who believe that the Mongol Empire not only used gunpowder weapons but deserves the moniker "the first gunpowder empire."


Conquest of the Jin dynasty

The first concerted Mongol invasion of Jin occurred in 1211 and total conquest was not accomplished until 1234. In 1232 the Mongols besieged the Jin capital of Kaifeng and deployed gunpowder weapons along with other more conventional siege techniques such as building stockades, watchtowers, trenches, guardhouses, and forcing Chinese captives to haul supplies and fill moats. Jin scholar Liu Qi (劉祈) recounts in his memoir, "the attack against the city walls grew increasingly intense, and bombs rained down as he enemyadvanced." The Jin defenders also deployed gunpowder bombs as well as fire arrows (''huo jian'' 火箭) launched using a type of early solid-propellant rocket. Of the bombs, Liu Qi writes, "From within the walls the defenders responded with a gunpowder bomb called the heaven-shaking-thunder bomb (震天雷). Whenever the ongoltroops encountered one, several men at a time would be turned into ashes." A more fact based and clear description of the bomb exists in the ''
History of Jin The ''History of Jin'' (''Jin Shi'') is a Chinese historical text, one of the ''Twenty Four Histories'', which details the history of the Jin dynasty founded by the Jurchens in northern China. It was compiled by the Yuan dynasty historian and mi ...
'': "The heaven-shaking-thunder bomb is an iron vessel filled with gunpowder. When lighted with fire and shot off, it goes off like a crash of thunder that can be heard for a hundred li hirty miles burning an expanse of land more than half a mu 爇圍半畝之上, a mu is a sixth of an acre and the fire can even penetrate iron armor." A Ming official named He Mengchuan would encounter an old cache of these bombs three centuries later in the Xi'an area: "When I went on official business to Shaanxi Province, I saw on top of Xi'an's city walls an old stockpile of iron bombs. They were called 'heaven-shaking-thunder' bombs, and they were like an enclosed rice bowl with a hole at the top, just big enough to put your finger in. The troops said they hadn't been used for a very long time." Furthermore, he wrote, "When the powder goes off, the bomb rips open, and the iron pieces fly in all directions. That is how it is able to kill people and horses from far away." Heaven-shaking-thunder bombs, also known as thunder crash bombs, were used prior to the siege in 1231 when a Jin general made use of them in destroying a Mongol warship, but during the siege the Mongols responded by protecting themselves with elaborate screens of thick cowhide. This was effective enough for workers to get right up to the walls to undermine their foundations and excavate protective niches. Jin defenders countered by tying iron cords and attaching them to heaven-shaking-thunder bombs, which were lowered down the walls until they reached the place where the miners worked. The protective leather screens were unable to withstand the explosion, and were penetrated, killing the excavators. Another weapon the Jin employed was an improved version of the fire lance called the flying fire lance. The ''History of Jin'' provides a detailed description: "To make the lance, use chi-huang paper, sixteen layers of it for the tube, and make it a bit longer than two feet. Stuff it with willow charcoal, iron fragments, magnet ends, sulfur, white arsenic robably an error that should mean saltpeter and other ingredients, and put a fuse to the end. Each troop has hanging on him a little iron pot to keep fire robably hot coals and when it's time to do battle, the flames shoot out the front of the lance more than ten feet, and when the gunpowder is depleted, the tube isn't destroyed." While Mongol soldiers typically held a view of disdain toward most Jin weapons, apparently they greatly feared the flying fire lance and heaven-shaking-thunder bomb. Kaifeng managed to hold out for a year before the Jin emperor fled and the city capitulated. In some cases Jin troops still fought with some success, scoring isolated victories such as when a Jin commander led 450 fire lancers against a Mongol encampment, which was "completely routed, and three thousand five hundred were drowned." Even after the Jin emperor committed suicide in 1234, one loyalist gathered all the metal he could find in the city he was defending, even gold and silver, and made explosives to lob against the Mongols, but the momentum of the Mongol Empire could not be stopped. By 1234, both the Western Xia and Jin dynasty had been conquered.


Conquest of the Song dynasty

The Mongol war machine moved south and in 1237 attacked the Song city of Anfeng (modern Shouxian, Anhui) "using gunpowder bombs uo paoto burn the efensivetowers." These bombs were apparently quite large. "Several hundred men hurled one bomb, and if it hit the tower it would immediately smash it to pieces." The Song defenders under commander Du Gao (杜杲) rebuilt the towers and retaliated with their own bombs, which they called the "Elipao," after a famous local pear, probably in reference to the shape of the weapon. Perhaps as another point of military interest, the account of this battle also mentions that the Anfeng defenders were equipped with a type of small arrow to shoot through eye slits of Mongol armor, as normal arrows were too thick to penetrate. By the mid 13th century, gunpowder weapons had become central to the Song war effort. In 1257 the Song official Li Zengbo was dispatched to inspect frontier city arsenals. Li considered an ideal city arsenal to include several hundred thousand iron bombshells, and also its own production facility to produce at least a couple thousand a month. The results of his tour of the border were severely disappointing and in one arsenal he found "no more than 85 iron bomb-shells, large and small, 95 fire-arrows, and 105 fire-lances. This is not sufficient for a mere hundred men, let alone a thousand, to use against an attack by the ... barbarians. The government supposedly wants to make preparations for the defense of its fortified cities, and to furnish them with military supplies against the enemy (yet this is all they give us). What chilling indifference!" Fortunately for the Song,
Möngke Khan Möngke ( mn, ' / Мөнх '; ; 11 January 1209 – 11 August 1259) was the fourth khagan-emperor of the Mongol Empire, ruling from 1 July 1251, to 11 August 1259. He was the first Khagan from the Toluid line, and made significant reform ...
died in 1259 and the war would not continue until 1269 under the leadership of
Kublai Khan Kublai ; Mongolian script: ; (23 September 1215 – 18 February 1294), also known by his temple name as the Emperor Shizu of Yuan and his regnal name Setsen Khan, was the founder of the Yuan dynasty of China and the fifth khagan-emperor of th ...
, but when it did the Mongols came in full force. Blocking the Mongols' passage south of the Yangtze were the twin fortress cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng. What resulted was one of the longest sieges the world had ever known, lasting from 1268 to 1273. In 1273 the Mongols enlisted the expertise of two Muslim engineers, one from Persia and one from Syria, who helped in the construction of counterweight trebuchets. These new siege weapons had the capability of throwing larger missiles further than the previous traction trebuchets. One account records, "when the machinery went off the noise shook heaven and earth; every thing that he missilehit was broken and destroyed." The fortress city of Xiangyang fell in 1273. The next major battle to feature gunpowder weapons was during a campaign led by the Mongol general Bayan, who commanded an army of around two hundred thousand, consisting of mostly Chinese soldiers. It was probably the largest army the Mongols had ever used. Such an army was still unable to successfully storm Song city walls, as seen in the 1274 Siege of Shayang. Thus Bayan waited for the wind to change to a northerly course before ordering his artillerists to begin bombarding the city with molten metal bombs, which caused such a fire that "the buildings were burned up and the smoke and flames rose up to heaven." Shayang was captured and its inhabitants massacred. Gunpowder bombs were used again in the 1275 Siege of Changzhou in the latter stages of the Mongol-Song Wars. Upon arriving at the city, Bayan gave the inhabitants an ultimatum: "if you ... resist us ... we shall drain your carcasses of blood and use them for pillows." This didn't work and the city resisted anyway, so the Mongol army bombarded them with fire bombs before storming the walls, after which followed an immense slaughter claiming the lives of a quarter million. The war lasted for only another four years during which some remnants of the Song held up last desperate defenses. In 1277, 250 defenders under Lou Qianxia conducted a suicide bombing and set off a huge iron bomb when it became clear defeat was imminent. Of this, the ''History of Song'' writes, "the noise was like a tremendous thunderclap, shaking the walls and ground, and the smoke filled up the heavens outside. Many of the troops utsidewere startled to death. When the fire was extinguished they went in to see. There were just ashes, not a trace left." So came an end to the Mongol-Song Wars, which saw the deployment of all the gunpowder weapons available to both sides at the time, which for the most part meant gunpowder arrows, bombs, and lances, but in retrospect, another development would overshadow them all, the birth of the gun. In 1280, a large store of gunpowder at Weiyang in
Yangzhou Yangzhou, postal romanization Yangchow, is a prefecture-level city in central Jiangsu Province (Suzhong), East China. Sitting on the north bank of the Yangtze, it borders the provincial capital Nanjing to the southwest, Huai'an to the north, Yan ...
accidentally caught fire, producing such a massive explosion that a team of inspectors at the site a week later deduced that some 100 guards had been killed instantly, with wooden beams and pillars blown sky high and landing at a distance of over 10 li (~2 mi. or ~3 km) away from the explosion, creating a crater more than ten feet deep. Needham, V 7, pp. 209–10. By the time of
Jiao Yu Jiao Yu () was a Chinese military general, philosopher, and writer of the Yuan dynasty and early Ming dynasty under Zhu Yuanzhang, who founded the dynasty and became known as the Hongwu Emperor. He was entrusted by Zhu as a leading artillery ...
and his ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
'' (a book that describes military applications of gunpowder in great detail) in the mid 14th century, the explosive potential of gunpowder was perfected, as the level of nitrate in gunpowder formulas had risen from a range of 12% to 91%, Needham, V 7, p. 345. with at least 6 different formulas in use that are considered to have maximum explosive potential for gunpowder. By that time, the Chinese had discovered how to create explosive
round shot A round shot (also called solid shot or simply ball) is a solid spherical projectile without explosive charge, launched from a gun. Its diameter is slightly less than the bore of the barrel from which it is shot. A round shot fired from a la ...
by packing their hollow shells with this nitrate-enhanced gunpowder. Needham, V 7, p. 264.


Invasions of Europe and Japan

Gunpowder may have been used during the Mongol invasions of Europe. "Fire catapults", "''pao''", and "naphtha-shooters" are mentioned in some sources. However, according to Timothy May, "there is no concrete evidence that the Mongols used gunpowder weapons on a regular basis outside of China." Shortly after the
Mongol invasions of Japan Major military efforts were taken by Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty in 1274 and 1281 to conquer the Japanese archipelago after the submission of the Korean kingdom of Goryeo to vassaldom. Ultimately a failure, the invasion attempts are of m ...
(1274–1281), the Japanese produced a scroll painting depicting a bomb. Called tetsuhau in Japanese, the bomb is speculated to have been the Chinese
thunder crash bomb The thunder crash bomb (), also known as the heaven-shaking-thunder bomb, was one of the first bombs or hand grenades in the history of gunpowder warfare. It was developed in the 12th-13th century Song and Jin dynasties. Its shell was made of cast ...
. Japanese descriptions of the invasions also talk of iron and bamboo ''pao'' causing "light and fire" and emitting 2–3,000 iron bullets. The ''Nihon Kokujokushi'', written around 1300, mentions ''huo tong'' (fire tubes) at the Battle of Tsushima in 1274 and the second coastal assault led by Holdon in 1281. The ''Hachiman Gudoukun'' of 1360 mentions iron ''pao'' "which caused a flash of light and a loud noise when fired." The ''Taiheki'' of 1370 mentions "iron ''pao'' shaped like a bell."


Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission

According to historian Tonio Andrade, "Scholars today overwhelmingly concur that the gun was invented in China," however multiple independent gunpowder and gun invention theories continue to exist today, advocating for European, Islamic, or Indian origins. Opponents of Chinese invention and transmission criticize the vagueness of Chinese records on specific gunpowder usage in weaponry, the possible lack of gunpowder in incendiary weapons as described by Chinese documents, the weakness of Chinese firearms, the lack of evidence of guns between Europe and China before 1326, and emphasize the appearance of earlier or superior gunpowder weapons. For example, Stephen Morillo, Jeremy Black, and Paul Lococo's ''War in World History'' argues that "the sources are not entirely clear about Chinese use of gunpowder in guns. There are references to bamboo and iron cannons, or perhaps proto-cannons, but these seem to have been small, unreliable, handheld weapons in this period. The Chinese do seem to have invented guns independently of the Europeans, at least in principle; but, in terms of effective cannon, the edge goes to Europe." Independent invention theories include examples such as the attribution of gunpowder to
Berthold Schwarz Berthold Schwarz (sometimes spelled Schwartz), also known as Berthold the Black and der Schwartzer, was a legendary German (or in some accounts Danish or Greek) alchemist of the late 14th century, credited with the invention of gunpowder by 15t ...
(Black Berthold), the usage of cannons by Mamluks at the
Battle of Ain Jalut The Battle of Ain Jalut (), also spelled Ayn Jalut, was fought between the Bahri Mamluks of Egypt and the Mongol Empire on 3 September 1260 (25 Ramadan 658 AH) in southeastern Galilee in the Jezreel Valley near what is known today as the S ...
in 1260, and descriptions of gunpowder and firearms to various
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
texts. The problem with all theories of non-Chinese invention boils down to lack of evidence and dating. It's not certain who exactly Berthold Schwarz was since there are no contemporary records of him. According to J.R. Partington, Black Berthold is a purely legendary figure invented for the purpose of providing a German origin for gunpowder and cannon. The source for Mamluk usage of cannons in the Battle of Ain Jalut is a text dated to the late 14th century. The dating of the cited Sanskrit texts is often dubious at best, with one example, '' Sukraniti'', containing descriptions of a musket and a cart-drawn gun. Proponents of Chinese invention and transmission point out the acute dearth of any significant evidence of evolution or experimentation with gunpowder or gunpowder weapons leading up to the gun outside of China. Gunpowder appeared in Europe primed for military usage as an explosive and propellant, bypassing a process which took centuries of Chinese experimentation with gunpowder weaponry to reach, making a nearly instantaneous and seamless transition into firearm warfare, as its name suggests. Furthermore, early European gunpowder recipes shared identical defects with Chinese recipes such as the inclusion of the poisons sal ammoniac and arsenic, which provide no benefit to gunpowder. Bert S. Hall explains this phenomenon in his ''Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics'' by drawing upon the gunpowder transmission theory, explaining that "gunpowder came o Europe not as an ancient mystery, but as a well-developed modern technology, in a manner very much like twentieth-century 'technology-transfer' projects." In a similar vein, Peter Lorge supposes that the Europeans experienced gunpowder "free from preconceived notions of what could be done," in contrast to China, "where a wide range of formulas and a broad variety of weapons demonstrated the full range of possibilities and limitations of the technologies involved." There is also the vestige of Chinese influence on Muslim terminology of key gunpowder related items such as saltpeter, which has been described as either Chinese snow or salt, fireworks which were called Chinese flowers, and rockets which were called Chinese arrows. Moreover, Europeans in particular experienced great difficulty in obtaining saltpeter, a primary ingredient of gunpowder which was relatively scarce in Europe compared to China, and had to be obtained from "distant lands or extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung and urine." Thomas Arnold believes that the similarities between early European cannons and contemporary Chinese models suggests a direct transmission of cannon making knowledge from China rather than a home grown development. File:Huolongjing Eruptor.jpg, An "eruptor" as depicted in the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. Essentially a fire lance on a frame, the 'multiple bullets magazine eruptor' shoots lead shots, which are loaded in a magazine and fed into the barrel when turned around on its axis. File:Ming Dynasty eruptor proto-cannon.jpg, An illustration of a 'flying-cloud thunderclap-eruptor,' a cannon firing thunderclap bombs, from the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. File:Poison eruptor.jpg, A 'poison fog divine smoke eruptor' (''du wu shen yan pao'') as depicted in the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. Small shells emitting poisonous smoke are fired. File:British Library Additional MS 47680 f.44v.jpg, Cannon and cannon-shooters from the page from ''About the Secrets of Secrets'' manuscript by Pseudo-Aristotle, 1320s File:Berthold-Schwarz.jpg, Portrait identifying Schwarz as the "inventor of artillery"


Spread throughout Eurasia and Africa


Middle East

The Muslim world acquired the gunpowder formula some time after 1240, but before 1280, by which time
Hasan al-Rammah Hasan al-Rammah (, died 1295) was a Syrian Arab chemist and engineer during the Mamluk Sultanate who studied gunpowders and explosives, and sketched prototype instruments of warfare, including the first torpedo. Al-Rammah called his early torpedo ...
had written, in Arabic, recipes for gunpowder, instructions for the purification of saltpeter, and descriptions of gunpowder incendiaries. Early Muslim sources suggest that knowledge of gunpowder was acquired from China and may have been introduced by invading
Mongols The Mongols ( mn, Монголчууд, , , ; ; russian: Монголы) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China and the Buryatia Republic of the Russian Federation. The Mongols are the principal membe ...
. This is implied by al-Rammah's usage of "terms that suggested he derived his knowledge from Chinese sources." Early Arab texts on gunpowder refer to saltpeter as "Chinese snow" ( ar, ثلج الصين ), fireworks as "Chinese flowers" and rockets as "Chinese arrows" (''sahm al-Khitai''). Similarly, the Persians called saltpeter "Chinese salt" or "salt from Chinese salt marshes" ( fa, نمک شوره چيني). Fireworks listed by al-Rammah include "wheels of China" and "flowers of China". The gunpowder formula of al-Rammah has a saltpetre content of 68% to 75%, which is too high for rocketry but suitable for explosives, however no explosives are mentioned. Al-Rammah's text, ''The Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices'' (''Kitab al-Furusiya wa'l-Munasab al-Harbiya''), does however mention fuses, incendiary bombs, naphtha pots, fire lances, and an illustration and description of the earliest
torpedo A modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, and with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. Historically, su ...
. The torpedo was called the "egg which moves itself and burns." Two iron sheets were fastened together and tightened using felt. The flattened pear shaped vessel was filled with gunpowder, metal filings, "good mixtures," two rods, and a large rocket for propulsion. Judging by the illustration, it was evidently supposed to glide across the water. Hasan al-Rammah was the first Muslim to describe the purification of saltpeter using the
chemical process In a scientific sense, a chemical process is a method or means of somehow changing one or more chemicals or chemical compounds. Such a chemical process can occur by itself or be caused by an outside force, and involves a chemical reaction of some ...
es of
solution Solution may refer to: * Solution (chemistry), a mixture where one substance is dissolved in another * Solution (equation), in mathematics ** Numerical solution, in numerical analysis, approximate solutions within specified error bounds * Soluti ...
and
crystallization Crystallization is the process by which solid forms, where the atoms or molecules are highly organized into a structure known as a crystal. Some ways by which crystals form are precipitating from a solution, freezing, or more rarely deposi ...
. This was the first clear method for the purification of saltpeter. According to Joseph Needham, fire lances were used in battles between the Muslims and Mongols in 1299 and 1303. The earliest surviving documentary evidence for cannons in the Islamic world is from an Arabic manuscript dated to the early 14th century. The author's name is uncertain but may have been Shams al-Din Muhammad, who died in 1350. Dating from around 1320–1350, the illustrations show gunpowder weapons such as gunpowder arrows, bombs, fire tubes, and fire lances or proto-guns. The manuscript describes a type of gunpowder weapon called a ''midfa'' which uses gunpowder to shoot projectiles out of a tube at the end of a stock. Some consider this to be a cannon while others do not. The problem with identifying cannons in early 14th century Arabic texts is the term ''midfa'', which appears from 1342 to 1352 but cannot be proven to be true hand-guns or bombards. Contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365. Needham believes that in its original form the term ''midfa'' refers to the tube or cylinder of a
naphtha Naphtha ( or ) is a flammable liquid hydrocarbon mixture. Mixtures labelled ''naphtha'' have been produced from natural gas condensates, petroleum distillates, and the distillation of coal tar and peat. In different industries and regions ''n ...
projector (
flamethrower A flamethrower is a ranged incendiary device designed to project a controllable jet of fire. First deployed by the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century AD, flamethrowers saw use in modern times during World War I, and more widely in World ...
), then after the invention of gunpowder it meant the tube of fire lances, and eventually it applied to the cylinder of hand-gun and cannon. According to Paul E. J. Hammer, the Mamluks certainly used cannons by 1342. According to J. Lavin, cannons were used by
Moors The term Moor, derived from the ancient Mauri, is an exonym first used by Christian Europeans to designate the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages. Moors are not a distinct or ...
at the siege of
Algeciras Algeciras ( , ) is a municipality of Spain belonging to the province of Cádiz, Andalusia. Located in the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula, near the Strait of Gibraltar, it is the largest city on the Bay of Gibraltar ( es, Bahía de Algeci ...
in 1343. A metal cannon firing an iron ball was described by Shihab al-Din Abu al-Abbas al-Qalqashandi between 1365 and 1376.


Europe

A common theory of how gunpowder came to Europe is that it made its way along the
Silk Road The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and reli ...
through the Middle East. Another is that it was brought to Europe during the Mongol invasion in the first half of the 13th century. Some sources claim that Chinese firearms and gunpowder weapons may have been deployed by Mongols against European forces at the
Battle of Mohi The Battle of Mohi (11 April 1241), also known as Battle of the Sajó River''A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East'', Vol. I, ed. Spencer C. Tucker, (ABC-CLIO, 2010), 279; "Although Mongol losses in t ...
in 1241. It may also have been due to subsequent diplomatic and military contacts. Some authors have speculated that
William of Rubruck William of Rubruck ( nl, Willem van Rubroeck, la, Gulielmus de Rubruquis; ) was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer. He is best known for his travels to various parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the 13th century, including the ...
, who served as an ambassador to the Mongols from 1253 to 1255, was a possible intermediary in the transmission of gunpowder. His travels were recorded by Roger Bacon, who was the first European to mention gunpowder, but the records of William's journey do not contain any mention of gunpowder. The earliest European references to gunpowder are found in Roger Bacon's ''
Opus Majus The ''Opus Majus'' (Latin for "Greater Work") is the most important work of Roger Bacon. It was written in Medieval Latin, at the request of Pope Clement IV, to explain the work that Bacon had undertaken. The 878-page treatise ranges over all ...
'' from 1267, in which he mentions a
firecracker A firecracker (cracker, noise maker, banger) is a small explosive device primarily designed to produce a large amount of noise, especially in the form of a loud bang, usually for celebration or entertainment; any visual effect is incidental t ...
toy found in various parts of the world. The passage reads: "We have an example of these things (that act on the senses) in he sound and fire ofthat children's toy which is made in many iverseparts of the world; i.e., a device no bigger than one's thumb. From the violence of that salt called saltpeter ogether with sulfur and willow charcoal, combined into a powderso horrible a sound is made by the bursting of a thing so small, no more than a bit of parchment ontaining it that we find he ear assaulted by a noiseexceeding the roar of strong thunder, and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning." In the early 20th century, British artillery officer Henry William Lovett Hime proposed that another work tentatively attributed to Bacon, ''Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de Nullitate Magiae'' contained an encrypted formula for gunpowder. This claim has been disputed by historians of science including
Lynn Thorndike Lynn Thorndike (24 July 1882, in Lynn, Massachusetts, USA – 28 December 1965, Columbia University Club, New York City) was an American historian of medieval science and alchemy. He was the son of a clergyman, Edward R. Thorndike, and the young ...
, John Maxson Stillman and
George Sarton George Alfred Leon Sarton (; 31 August 1884 – 22 March 1956) was a Belgian-born American chemist and historian. He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study. His most influential work ...
and by Bacon's editor Robert Steele, both in terms of authenticity of the work, and with respect to the decryption method. In any case, the formula claimed to have been decrypted (7:5:5 saltpeter:charcoal:sulfur) is not useful for firearms use or even firecrackers, burning slowly and producing mostly smoke. However, if Bacon's recipe is taken as measurements by volume rather than weight, a far more potent and serviceable explosive powder is created suitable for firing hand-cannons, albeit less consistent due to the inherent inaccuracies of measurements by volume. One example of this composition resulted in 100 parts saltpeter, 27 parts charcoal, and 45 parts sulfur, by weight. The oldest written recipes for gunpowder in Europe were recorded under the name Marcus Graecus or Mark the Greek between 1280 and 1300 in the '' Liber Ignium'', or ''Book of Fires''. One recipe for "flying fire" (''ignis volatilis'') involves saltpeter, sulfur, and
colophonium Rosin (), also called colophony or Greek pitch ( la, links=no, pix graeca), is a solid form of resin obtained from pines and some other plants, mostly conifers, produced by heating fresh liquid resin to vaporize the volatile liquid terpene com ...
, which, when inserted into a reed or hollow wood, "flies away suddenly and burns up everything." Another recipe, for artificial "thunder", specifies a mixture of one pound native sulfur, two pounds linden or willow charcoal, and six pounds of saltpeter. Another specifies a 1:3:9 ratio. The earliest known European depiction of a gun appeared in 1326 in a manuscript by
Walter de Milemete Walter de Milemete was an English scholar who in his early twenties was commissioned by Queen Isabella of France to write a treatise on kingship for her son, the young prince Edward, later king Edward III of England called ''De nobilitatibus, sap ...
, although not necessarily drawn by him, known as ''De Nobilitatibus, sapientii et prudentiis regum'' (Concerning the Majesty, Wisdom, and Prudence of Kings), which displays a gun with a large arrow emerging from it and its user lowering a long stick to ignite the gun through the touchole In the same year, another similar illustration showed a darker gun being set off by a group of knights, which also featured in another work of de Milemete's, ''De secretis secretorum Aristotelis''. On 11 February of that same year, the
Signoria A signoria () was the governing authority in many of the Italian city states during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The word signoria comes from ''signore'' , or "lord"; an abstract noun meaning (roughly) "government; governing authority; ...
of
Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...
appointed two officers to obtain ''canones de mettallo'' and ammunition for the town's defense. In the following year a document from the Turin area recorded a certain amount was paid "for the making of a certain instrument or device made by Friar Marcello for the projection of pellets of lead." The 1320s seem to have been the takeoff point for guns in Europe according to most modern military historians. Scholars suggest that the lack of gunpowder weapons in a well-traveled Venetian's catalogue for a new crusade in 1321 implies that guns were unknown in Europe up until this point. From the 1320s guns spread rapidly across Europe. The French raiding party that sacked and burned
Southampton Southampton () is a port city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire in southern England. It is located approximately south-west of London and west of Portsmouth. The city forms part of the South Hampshire built-up area, which also covers Po ...
in 1338 brought with them a ribaudequin and 48 bolts (but only 3 pounds of gunpowder). By 1341 the town of Lille had a "tonnoire master," and a tonnoire was an arrow-hurling gun. In 1345, two iron cannons were present in Toulouse. In 1346 Aix-la-Chapelle too possessed iron cannons which shot arrows (busa ferrea ad sagittandum tonitrum). The
Battle of Crécy The Battle of Crécy took place on 26 August 1346 in northern France between a French army commanded by King PhilipVI and an English army led by King EdwardIII. The French attacked the English while they were traversing northern France du ...
in 1346 was one of the first in Europe where cannons were used. By 1350
Petrarch Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited w ...
wrote that the presence of cannons on the battlefield was 'as common and familiar as other kinds of arms'. Around the late 14th century European and Ottoman guns began to deviate in purpose and design from guns in China, changing from small anti-personnel and incendiary devices to the larger artillery pieces most people imagine today when using the word "cannon." If the 1320s can be considered the arrival of the gun on the European scene, then the end of the 14th century may very well be the departure point from the trajectory of gun development in China. In the last quarter of the 14th century, European guns grew larger and began to blast down fortifications. File:Gum of Mantua (1322).jpg, Gun of Mantua (image produced 1869), no longer extant File:EarlyCannonDeNobilitatibusSapientiiEtPrudentiisRegumManuscriptWalterdeMilemete1326.jpg, Oldest known European depiction of a firearm from ''De Nobilitatibus Sapientii Et Prudentiis Regum'' by
Walter de Milemete Walter de Milemete was an English scholar who in his early twenties was commissioned by Queen Isabella of France to write a treatise on kingship for her son, the young prince Edward, later king Edward III of England called ''De nobilitatibus, sap ...
(1326). File:Arrow fireing cannon1.jpg, Reconstruction of an arrow-firing cannon that appears in a 1326 manuscript. File:HandBombardWesternEurope1380.jpg, Western European handgun, 1380. 18 cm-long and weighing 1.04 kg, it was fixed to a wooden pole to facilitate manipulation.
Musée de l'Armée The Musée de l'Armée (; "Army Museum") is a national military museum of France located at Les Invalides in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. It is served by Paris Métro stations Invalides, Varenne and La Tour-Maubourg The Musée de l'Armée ...
. File:Gun Sweden Morko.jpg, The Mörkö gun is another early Swedish firearm discovered by a fisherman in the Baltic Sea at the coast of Södermansland near Nynäs in 1828. It has been given a date of c. 1390. File:Tannenbergbüchse.jpg, The Tannenberg handgonne is a cast bronze firearm. Muzzle bore 15–16 mm. Found in the water well of the 1399 destroyed Tannenberg castle. Oldest surviving firearm from Germany.


Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, cannons were used by the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1352 during its invasion of the Khmer Empire. Within a decade large quantities of gunpowder could be found in the Khmer Empire. By the end of the century firearms were also used by the
Trần dynasty The Trần dynasty, (Vietnamese: Nhà Trần, chữ Nôm: 茹陳)also known as the House of Trần, was a Vietnamese dynasty that ruled over the Kingdom of Đại Việt from 1225 to 1400. The dynasty was founded when emperor Trần Thái T ...
in
Đại Việt Đại Việt (, ; literally Great Việt), often known as Annam ( vi, An Nam, Chữ Hán: 安南), was a monarchy in eastern Mainland Southeast Asia from the 10th century AD to the early 19th century, centered around the region of present-day H ...
. The
Mongol invasion of Java The Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan attempted in 1292 to invade Java, an island in modern Indonesia, with 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers. This was intended as a punitive expedition against Kertanegara of Singhasari, who had refused to pay tribute to ...
in 1293 brought gunpowder technology to the Nusantara archipelago in the form of cannon (Chinese: 炮—''Pào''). The knowledge of making gunpowder-based weapon has been known after the failed Mongol invasion of Java. The predecessor of firearms, the pole gun (
bedil tombak Bedil tombak or bedil tumbak is a type of early firearm from the Nusantara archipelago. The weapon consist of a gun or small cannon mounted on a wooden pole, forming a type of weapon known as " pole gun" (''stangenbüchse'' in German). Etymolog ...
), was recorded as being used in Java by 1413, while the knowledge of making "true" firearms came much later, after the middle of 15th century. It was brought by the Muslim traders from West Asia, most probably the
Arabs The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Wester ...
. The precise year of introduction is unknown, but it may be safely concluded to be no earlier than 1460. Portuguese influence to local weaponry after the
capture of Malacca (1511) The Capture of Malacca in 1511 occurred when the governor of Portuguese India Afonso de Albuquerque conquered the city of Malacca in 1511. The port city of Malacca controlled the narrow, strategic Strait of Malacca, through which all seagoing ...
resulted in a new type of hybrid tradition matchlock firearm, the
istinggar Istinggar is a type of matchlock firearm built by the various ethnic groups of the Maritime Southeast Asia. The firearm is a result of Portuguese influence on local weaponry after the capture of Malacca (1511). Before this type of gun, in the archi ...
.Andaya, L. Y. 1999. Interaction with the outside world and adaptation in Southeast Asian society 1500–1800. In ''The Cambridge history of southeast Asia''. ed. Nicholas Tarling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 345–401. Saltpeter harvesting was recorded by Dutch and German travelers as being common in even the smallest villages and was collected from the decomposition process of large dung hills specifically piled for this purpose. The Dutch punishment for possession of non-permitted gunpowder appears to have been amputation. Ownership and manufacture of gunpowder was later prohibited by the colonial Dutch occupiers.Dipanegara, P.B.R. Carey, ''Babad Dipanagara: an account of the outbreak of the Java war, 1825–30 : the Surakarta court version of the Babad Dipanagara with translations into English and Indonesian'' volume 9: Council of the M.B.R.A.S. by Art Printing Works: 1981. According to colonel McKenzie quoted in the book ''
The History of Java ''The History of Java'' is a book written by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, and published in 1817. It describes the history of the island of Java from ancient times. It was reprinted from a digital master by the Cambridge University Press in 2010. ...
'' (1817) by
Thomas Stamford Raffles Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (5 July 1781 – 5 July 1826) was a British statesman who served as the Lieutenant-Governor of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1816, and Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen between 1818 and 1824. He is ...
, the purest sulfur was supplied from a crater from a mountain near the straits of
Bali Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...
.


India

Gunpowder technology is believed to have arrived in
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
by the mid-14th century, but could have been introduced much earlier by the
Mongols The Mongols ( mn, Монголчууд, , , ; ; russian: Монголы) are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China and the Buryatia Republic of the Russian Federation. The Mongols are the principal membe ...
, who had conquered both China and some borderlands of India, perhaps as early as the mid-13th century. The unification of a large single
Mongol Empire The Mongol Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries was the largest contiguous land empire in history. Originating in present-day Mongolia in East Asia, the Mongol Empire at its height stretched from the Sea of Japan to parts of Eastern Europe, ...
resulted in the free transmission of Chinese technology into Mongol conquered parts of India. Regardless, it is believed that the Mongols used Chinese gunpowder weapons during their invasions of India. It was written in the ''Tarikh-i Firishta'' (1606–1607) that the envoy of the Mongol ruler Hulegu Khan was presented with a dazzling
pyrotechnics Pyrotechnics is the science and craft of creating such things as fireworks, safety matches, oxygen candles, explosive bolts and other fasteners, parts of automotive airbags, as well as gas-pressure blasting in mining, quarrying, and demolition. ...
display upon his arrival in Delhi in 1258. The first gunpowder device, as opposed to naphtha-based pyrotechnics, introduced to India from China in the second half of the 13th century, was a rocket called the "hawai" (also called "ban"). The rocket was used as an instrument of war from the second half of the 14th century onward, and the Delhi sultanate as well as the
Bahmani Sultanate The Bahmani Sultanate, or Deccan, was a Persianate Sunni Muslim Indian Kingdom located in the Deccan region. It was the first independent Muslim kingdom of the Deccan,
made good use of them. As a part of an embassy to India by
Timur Timur ; chg, ''Aqsaq Temür'', 'Timur the Lame') or as ''Sahib-i-Qiran'' ( 'Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction'), his epithet. ( chg, ''Temür'', 'Iron'; 9 April 133617–19 February 1405), later Timūr Gurkānī ( chg, ''Temür Kür ...
id leader
Shah Rukh Shah Rukh or Shahrukh ( fa, شاهرخ, ''Šāhrokh'') (20 August 1377 – 13 March 1447) was the ruler of the Timurid Empire between 1405 and 1447. He was the son of the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), who founded the Timurid dynas ...
(1405–1447), 'Abd al-Razzaq mentioned naphtha-throwers mounted on elephants and a variety of pyrotechnics put on display. Roger Pauly has written that "while gunpowder was primarily a Chinese innovation," the
saltpeter Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and nitrat ...
that led to the invention of gunpowder may have arrived from India, although it is also likely that it originated indigenously in China. Firearms known as ''top-o-tufak'' also existed in the
Vijayanagara Empire The Vijayanagara Empire, also called the Karnata Kingdom, was a Hinduism, Hindu empire based in the region of South India, which consisted the modern states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Goa and some parts of Telangana an ...
of Southern India by as early as 1366. In 1368–1369, the Bahmani Sultanate may have used firearms against Vijayanagara, but these weapons could have been pyrotechnics as well. By 1442 guns had a clearly felt presence in India as attested to by historical records. From then on the employment of
gunpowder warfare Early modern warfare is the era of warfare following medieval warfare. It is associated with the start of the widespread use of gunpowder and the development of suitable weapons to use the explosive, including artillery and firearms; for thi ...
in India was prevalent, with events such as the siege of
Belgaum Belgaum (ISO 15919, ISO: ''Bēḷagāma''; also Belgaon and officially known as Belagavi) is a city in the Indian state of Karnataka located in its northern part along the Western Ghats. It is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous ...
in 1473 by Muhammad Shah III. Muslim and Hindu states in the south were advanced in artillery compared to the Delhi rulers of this period because of their contact with the outside world, especially Turkey, through the sea route. The south Indian kingdoms imported their gunners (topci) and artillery from Turkey and the Arab countries, with whom they had developed good relations.


Korea

Korea had already come into possession of cannons by 1373, when a Korean mission was sent to China requesting gunpowder supplies for the artillery on their ships. However Korea did not natively produce gunpowder until the years 1374–76. In the 14th century a Korean scholar named
Choe Museon Choe Mu-Seon (1325–1395) was a medieval Korean scientist, inventor, and military commander during the late Goryeo Dynasty and early Joseon Dynasty. He is best known for enabling Korea to domestically produce gunpowder by obtaining a recipe ...
discovered a way to produce it after visiting China and bribing a merchant by the name of Li Yuan for the gunpowder formula. In 1377 he figured out how to extract potassium nitrate from the soil and subsequently invented the juhwa, Korea's first rocket, and further developments led to the birth of
singijeon ''Singijeon'' or ''shinkichon'' ( ko, 신기전; Hanja: ; literally "Divine machine arrows") was a type of Korean fire arrow rocket, used during the era of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897). Multiple ''singijeon'' could be launched by ''hwacha ...
s, Korean arrow rockets. Korea also began producing cannons in 1377. The multiple rocket launcher known as
hwacha The ''hwacha'' or ''hwach'a'' ( ko, 화차; Hanja: ; literally "fire cart") was a multiple rocket launcher and an organ gun of similar design which were developed in fifteenth century Korea. The former variant fired one or two hundred rocket-p ...
("fire cart" 火車) was developed from the juhwa and singijeon in Korea by 1409 during the
Joseon Dynasty Joseon (; ; Middle Korean: 됴ᇢ〯션〮 Dyǒw syéon or 됴ᇢ〯션〯 Dyǒw syěon), officially the Great Joseon (; ), was the last dynastic kingdom of Korea, lasting just over 500 years. It was founded by Yi Seong-gye in July 1392 and re ...
. Its inventors include
Yi Do Sejong of Joseon (15 May 1397 – 8 April 1450), personal name Yi Do (Korean: 이도; Hanja: 李祹), widely known as Sejong the Great (Korean: 세종대왕; Hanja: 世宗大王), was the fourth ruler of the Joseon dynasty of Korea. Initial ...
(이도, not to be mistaken for Sejong the Great) and
Choi Hae-san Choi may refer to: * Choi (Korean surname), a Korean surname * Choi, Macau Cantonese transliteration of the Chinese surname Cui (崔) and Xu (徐) * Choi, Cantonese romanisation of Cai (surname) (蔡), a Chinese surname * CHOI-FM, a radio station ...
(최해산, son of Choe Museon). However the first hwachas did not fire rockets, but used mounted bronze guns that shot iron-fletched darts. Rocket launching hwachas were developed in 1451 under the decree of King Munjong and his younger brother Pe. ImYung (Yi Gu, 임영대군 이구). This "Munjong Hwacha" is the well-known type today, and could fire 100 rocket arrows or 200 small
Chongtong The Chongtong ( Hangul: 총통, Hanja: 銃筒) was a term for military firearms of Goryeo and Joseon dynasty. The size of chongtong varies from small firearm to large cannon, and underwent upgrades, which can be separated in three generation ty ...
bullets at one time with changeable modules. At the time, 50 units were deployed in
Hanseong Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 ...
(present-day Seoul), and another 80 on the northern border. By the end of 1451, hundreds of hwachas were deployed throughout Korea. Naval gunpowder weapons also appeared and were rapidly adopted by Korean ships for conflicts against Japanese pirates in 1380 and 1383. By 1410, 160 Korean ships were reported to have equipped artillery of some sort. Mortars firing thunder-crash bombs are known to have been used, and four types of cannons are mentioned: chonja (heaven), chija (earth), hyonja (black), and hwangja (yellow), but their specifications are unknown. These cannons typically shot wooden arrows tipped with iron, the longest of which were nine feet long, but stone and iron balls were sometimes used as well.


Japan

Firearms seem to have been known in Japan around 1270 as proto-cannons invented in China, which the Japanese called teppō (鉄砲 lit. "iron cannon"). Gunpowder weaponry exchange between China and Japan was slow and only a small number of hand guns ever reached Japan. However Japanese
samurai were the hereditary military nobility and officer caste of medieval and early-modern Japan from the late 12th century until their abolition in 1876. They were the well-paid retainers of the '' daimyo'' (the great feudal landholders). They h ...
used
Fire lances The fire lance () was a gunpowder weapon and the ancestor of modern firearms. It first appeared in 10th–12th century China and was used to great effect during the Jin-Song Wars. It began as a small pyrotechnic device attached to a polearm weap ...
in 15th-century. The first recorded appearance of the
Fire lances The fire lance () was a gunpowder weapon and the ancestor of modern firearms. It first appeared in 10th–12th century China and was used to great effect during the Jin-Song Wars. It began as a small pyrotechnic device attached to a polearm weap ...
in Japan was in 1409. The use of gunpowder bombs in the style of Chinese explosives is known to have occurred in Japan from at least the mid-15th century onward. The first recorded appearance of the cannon in Japan was in 1510 when a Buddhist monk presented
Hōjō Ujitsuna was the son of Hōjō Sōun, founder of the Go-Hōjō clan. He continued his father's quest to gain control of the Kantō (the central area, today dominated by Tokyo, of Japan's main island). Biography In 1524, Ujitsuna took Edo Castle, whi ...
with a teppō iron cannon that he had acquired during his travels in China. Firearms saw very little use in Japan until Portuguese matchlocks were introduced in 1543. During the
Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–1598) The Japanese invasions of Korea of 1592–1598 involved two separate yet linked invasions: an initial invasion in 1592 (), a brief truce in 1596, and a second invasion in 1597 (). The conflict ended in 1598 with the withdrawal of Japanese force ...
, the forces of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi , otherwise known as and , was a Japanese samurai and ''daimyō'' (feudal lord) of the late Sengoku period regarded as the second "Great Unifier" of Japan.Richard Holmes, The World Atlas of Warfare: Military Innovations that Changed the Cour ...
effectively used
matchlock A matchlock or firelock is a historical type of firearm wherein the gunpowder is ignited by a burning piece of rope that is touched to the gunpowder by a mechanism that the musketeer activates by pulling a lever or trigger with his finger. Before ...
firearms against the Korean forces of
Joseon Joseon (; ; Middle Korean: 됴ᇢ〯션〮 Dyǒw syéon or 됴ᇢ〯션〯 Dyǒw syěon), officially the Great Joseon (; ), was the last dynastic kingdom of Korea, lasting just over 500 years. It was founded by Yi Seong-gye in July 1392 and re ...
, although they would ultimately be defeated and forced to withdraw from the
Korean peninsula Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...
.


Africa

In Africa, the Adal Empire and the
Abyssinian Empire The Ethiopian Empire (), also formerly known by the exonym Abyssinia, or just simply known as Ethiopia (; Amharic and Tigrinya: ኢትዮጵያ , , Oromo: Itoophiyaa, Somali: Itoobiya, Afar: ''Itiyoophiyaa''), was an empire that historica ...
both deployed gunpowder weapons during the Adal-Abyssinian War. Imported from
Arabia The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plate. ...
, and the wider Islamic world, the Adalites, led by
Ahmed ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi ( so, Axmed Ibraahim al-Qaasi or Axmed Gurey, Harari: አሕመድ ኢብራሂም አል-ጋዚ, ar, أحمد بن إبراهيم الغازي ; 1506 – 21 February 1543) was an imam and general of the Adal Sultana ...
, were the first African power to introduce cannon warfare to the African continent. Later on as the
Portuguese Empire The Portuguese Empire ( pt, Império Português), also known as the Portuguese Overseas (''Ultramar Português'') or the Portuguese Colonial Empire (''Império Colonial Português''), was composed of the overseas colonies, factories, and the l ...
entered the war it would supply and train the Abyssinians with cannon and muskets, while the
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
sent soldiers and cannon to back Adal. The conflict proved, through their use on both sides, the value of
firearms A firearm is any type of gun designed to be readily carried and used by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see Legal definitions). The first firearms originated in 10th-century China, when bamboo tubes c ...
such as the
matchlock A matchlock or firelock is a historical type of firearm wherein the gunpowder is ignited by a burning piece of rope that is touched to the gunpowder by a mechanism that the musketeer activates by pulling a lever or trigger with his finger. Before ...
musket A musket is a muzzle-loaded long gun that appeared as a smoothbore weapon in the early 16th century, at first as a heavier variant of the arquebus, capable of penetrating plate armour. By the mid-16th century, this type of musket gradually d ...
, cannon, and the
arquebus An arquebus ( ) is a form of long gun that appeared in Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the 15th century. An infantryman armed with an arquebus is called an arquebusier. Although the term ''arquebus'', derived from the Dutch word ''Haakbus ...
over traditional weapons. Ernest Gellner in his book 'Nations and
Nationalism Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of peo ...
' argues that the centralizing potential of the gun and the book, enabled both the
Somali people The Somalis ( so, Soomaalida 𐒈𐒝𐒑𐒛𐒐𐒘𐒆𐒖, ar, صوماليون) are an ethnic group native to the Horn of Africa who share a common ancestry, culture and history. The Lowland East Cushitic Somali language is the shared mo ...
and the Amhara people to dominate the political history of a vast area in Africa, despite neither of them being numerically predominant.
"In the
Horn of Africa The Horn of Africa (HoA), also known as the Somali Peninsula, is a large peninsula and geopolitical region in East Africa.Robert Stock, ''Africa South of the Sahara, Second Edition: A Geographical Interpretation'', (The Guilford Press; 2004), ...
both the Amharas and the Somalis possessed both gun and Book (not the same Book, but rival and different editions), and neither bothered greatly with the wheel. Each of these ethnic groups was aided in its use of these two pieces of cultural equipment by its link to other members of the wider religious civilization which habitually used them, and were willing to replenish their stock." – Ernest Gellner


Transition to early modern warfare


Early Ming firearms

Gun development and proliferation in China continued under the Ming dynasty. The success of its founder
Zhu Yuanzhang The Hongwu Emperor (21 October 1328 – 24 June 1398), personal name Zhu Yuanzhang (), courtesy name Guorui (), was the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty of China, reigning from 1368 to 1398. As famine, plagues and peasant revolts in ...
, who declared his reign to be the era of Hongwu, or "Great Martiality," has often been attributed to his effective use of guns. Most early Ming guns weighed two to three kilograms while guns considered "large" at the time weighed around only seventy-five kilograms. Ming sources suggest guns such as these shot stones and iron balls, but were primarily used against men rather than for causing structural damage to ships or walls. Accuracy was low and they were limited to a range of only 50 paces or so. Despite the relatively small size of early Ming guns, some elements of gunpowder weapon design followed world trends. The growing length to muzzle bore ratio matched the rate at which European guns were developing up until the 1450s. The practice of corning gunpowder had been developed by 1370 for the purpose of increasing explosive power in land mines, and was arguably used in guns as well according to one record of a fire-tube shooting a projectile 457 meters, which was probably only possible at the time with the usage of corned powder. Around the same year Ming guns transitioned from using stone shots to iron ammunition, which has greater density and increased firearm power. Aside from firearms, the Ming pioneered in the usage of rocket launchers known as "wasp nests", which it manufactured for the army in 1380 and was used by the general
Li Jinglong Li Jinglong () (1369–1424), nickname Jiujiang (), was a Ming dynasty general. He was the son of Duke Li Wenzhong, the nephew of Zhu Yuanzhang ( Hongwu Emperor) through Zhu's older sister. During the Jingnan civil war in the Ming, Li Jinglong in ...
in 1400 against Zhu Di, the future
Yongle Emperor The Yongle Emperor (; pronounced ; 2 May 1360 – 12 August 1424), personal name Zhu Di (), was the third Emperor of the Ming dynasty, reigning from 1402 to 1424. Zhu Di was the fourth son of the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming dyn ...
. The peak of Chinese cannon development prior to the incorporation of European weaponry in the 16th century is exemplified by the muzzle loading wrought iron "great general cannon" (大將軍炮) which weighed up to 360 kilograms and could fire a 4.8 kilogram lead ball. Its heavier variant, the "great divine cannon" (大神銃), could weigh up to 600 kilograms and was capable of firing several iron balls and upward of a hundred iron shots at once. The great general and divine cannons were the last indigenous Chinese cannon designs prior to the incorporation of European models in the 16th century. The lack of larger siege weapons in China unlike the rest of the world where cannons grew larger and more potent has been attributed to the immense thickness of traditional Chinese walls, which Tonio Andrade suggests provided no incentive for creating larger cannons, since even industrial artillery had trouble overcoming them. Asianist Kenneth Chase also argues that larger guns were not particularly useful against China's traditional enemies: horse nomads. File:Organ gun.jpg, An organ gun known as the 'mother of a hundred bullets gun' (''zi mu bai dan chong'') from the Huolongjing. File:Ming Dynasty field artillery cannon.jpg , An illustration of a bronze "thousand ball thunder cannon" from the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. File:Seven barreled organ gun.jpg, A seven barreled organ gun with two auxiliary guns by its side on a two-wheeled carriage. From the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. File:Barbarian attacking cannon.jpg, A 'barbarian attacking cannon' as depicted in the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
''. Chains are attached to the cannon to adjust recoil. File:1350 AD early Chinese vase-shaped cannon.jpg, An "awe-inspiring long range cannon" (威遠砲), from the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
'' File:Hudunpao-huolongjing.jpg, A depiction of the "crouching tiger cannon" from the ''
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
'' File:Greatgeneralcannon.png, Drawing of a Great General Cannon, from 'Wu Bei Yao Lue (《武備要略》').


Big guns

The development of large
artillery Artillery is a class of heavy military ranged weapons that launch munitions far beyond the range and power of infantry firearms. Early artillery development focused on the ability to breach defensive walls and fortifications during siege ...
pieces began by
Burgundy Burgundy (; french: link=no, Bourgogne ) is a historical territory and former administrative region and province of east-central France. The province was once home to the Dukes of Burgundy from the early 11th until the late 15th century. The c ...
. Originally a minor power, the duchy grew to become one of the most powerful states in 14th-century Europe, and a great innovator in siege warfare. The Duke of Burgundy,
Philip the Bold Philip II the Bold (; ; 17 January 1342 – 27 April 1404) was Duke of Burgundy and '' jure uxoris'' Count of Flanders, Artois and Burgundy. He was the fourth and youngest son of King John II of France and Bonne of Luxembourg. Philip II was ...
(1363–1404), based his power on the effective use of big guns and promoted research and development in all aspects of gunpowder weaponry technology. Philip established manufacturers and employed more cannon casters than any European power before him. Whereas most European guns before 1370 weighed about 20 to 40 lbs (9–14 kg), the French siege of Château de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in 1375 during the
Hundred Years War The Hundred Years' War (; 1337–1453) was a series of armed conflicts between the kingdoms of England and France during the Late Middle Ages. It originated from disputed claims to the French throne between the English House of Plantagen ...
saw the use of guns weighing over a
ton Ton is the name of any one of several units of measure. It has a long history and has acquired several meanings and uses. Mainly it describes units of weight. Confusion can arise because ''ton'' can mean * the long ton, which is 2,240 pounds ...
(900 kg), firing stone balls weighing over 100 lbs (45 kg). Philip used large guns to help the French capture the fortress of Odruik in 1377. These guns fired projectiles far larger than any that had been used before, with seven guns that could shoot projectiles as heavy as 90 kilograms. The cannons smashed the city walls, inaugurating a new era of artillery warfare and Burgundy's territories rapidly expanded. Europe entered an arms race to build ever larger artillery pieces. By the early 15th century both French and English armies were equipped with larger pieces known as
bombard __NOTOC__ Bombard may refer to the act of carrying out a bombardment. It may also refer to: Individuals *Alain Bombard (1924–2005), French biologist, physician and politician; known for crossing the Atlantic on a small boat with no water or food ...
s, weighing up to 5 tons (4,535 kg) and firing balls weighing up to 300 lbs (136 kg). The artillery trains used by
Henry V of England Henry V (16 September 1386 – 31 August 1422), also called Henry of Monmouth, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1413 until his death in 1422. Despite his relatively short reign, Henry's outstanding military successes in the ...
in the 1415
Siege of Harfleur The siege of Harfleur (18 August – 22 September 1415) was conducted by the English army of King Henry V in Normandy, France, during the Hundred Years' War. The defenders of Harfleur surrendered to the English on terms and were treated as pr ...
and 1419 Siege of Rouen proved effective in breaching French fortifications, while artillery contributed to the victories of French forces under
Joan of Arc Joan of Arc (french: link=yes, Jeanne d'Arc, translit= an daʁk} ; 1412 – 30 May 1431) is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronati ...
in the
Loire Campaign (1429) The Loire Campaign was a campaign launched by Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years' War. The Loire was cleared of all English and Burgundian troops. Campaign The English under John, Duke of Bedford ordered John, Lord Talbot to besiege Orlé ...
. These weapons were transformational for European warfare. A hundred years earlier the Frenchman Pierre Dubois wrote that a "castle can hardly be taken within a year, and even if it does fall, it means more expenses for the king's purse and for his subjects than the conquest is worth," but by the 15th century European walls fell with the utmost regularity. The
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
was also developing their own artillery pieces.
Mehmed the Conqueror Mehmed II ( ota, محمد ثانى, translit=Meḥmed-i s̱ānī; tr, II. Mehmed, ; 30 March 14323 May 1481), commonly known as Mehmed the Conqueror ( ota, ابو الفتح, Ebū'l-fetḥ, lit=the Father of Conquest, links=no; tr, Fâtih Su ...
(1432–1481) was determined to procure large cannons for the purpose of conquering
Constantinople la, Constantinopolis ota, قسطنطينيه , alternate_name = Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma ("New Rome"), Miklagard/Miklagarth (Old Norse), Tsargrad ( Slavic), Qustantiniya (Arabic), Basileuousa ("Queen of Cities"), Megalopolis (" ...
. Hungarian
Urban Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to: * Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas * Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities Urban may also refer to: General * Urban (name), a list of people ...
produced for him a six-meter (20-foot) long cannon, which required hundreds of pounds of gunpowder to fire; during the actual
siege of Constantinople The following is a list of sieges of Constantinople, a historic city located in an area which is today part of Istanbul, Turkey. The city was built on the land that links Europe to Asia through Bosporus and connects the Sea of Marmara and the ...
the gun proved to be somewhat underwhelming. However, dozens of other large cannons bombarded Constantinople's walls in their weakest sections for 55 days, and despite a fierce defense, the city's fortifications were overwhelmed. File:Nicopol final battle 1398.jpg, Battle of Nicopolis 1398 File:Braunschweig Brunswick Faule Mette.jpg,
Faule Metze The Faule Mette ( German for ''Lazy Mette'', alluding to the gun's rare deployment, difficult mobility, and limited loading and fire rate) or Faule Metze was a medieval large-calibre cannon of the city of Brunswick, Germany. Cast by the gunfoun ...
(Metze, old term for a whore)("Lazy Mette"), a medieval supergun from 1411 from
Braunschweig Braunschweig () or Brunswick ( , from Low German ''Brunswiek'' , Braunschweig dialect: ''Bronswiek'') is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the Nor ...
, Germany Image:Siège d'Orléans (1428).jpg,
Thomas Montagu, 4th Earl of Salisbury Thomas Montagu, 4th Earl of Salisbury, KG (13 June 13883 November 1428) of Bisham in Berkshire, was an English nobleman and one of the most important English commanders during the Hundred Years' War. Origins He was the eldest son of John Monta ...
is fatally injured at the
siege of Orléans The siege of Orléans (12 October 1428 – 8 May 1429) was the watershed of the Hundred Years' War between France and England. The siege took place at the pinnacle of English power during the later stages of the war. The city held strategic an ...
in 1428 (illustration from '' Vigiles de Charles VII''). File:Artillery in the MMB.jpg, Faule Magd ("Lazy Maid"), a medieval cannon from c. 1410–1430. File:Edinburgh Castle, Mons Meg.jpg,
Mons Meg Mons Meg is a medieval bombard in the collection of the Royal Armouries, on loan to Historic Scotland and located at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. It has a barrel diameter of making it one of the largest cannons in the world by calibre. ...
, a medieval
Bombard (weapon) The bombard is a type of cannon or mortar which was used throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Bombards were mainly large calibre, muzzle-loading artillery pieces used during sieges to shoot round stone projectiles at the wal ...
built in 1449. Image:Dardanelles Gun Turkish Bronze 15c.png, The bronze
Great Turkish Bombard The Basillica or Great Turkish Bombard ( tr, Şahi topu or simply ''Şahi'') is a 15th-century siege cannon, specifically a super-sized bombard, which saw action in the 1807 Dardanelles operation.Schmidtchen (1977b), p. 228 It was built in ...
, used by the
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...
in the
siege of Constantinople The following is a list of sieges of Constantinople, a historic city located in an area which is today part of Istanbul, Turkey. The city was built on the land that links Europe to Asia through Bosporus and connects the Sea of Marmara and the ...
in 1453.


Changes to fortifications

As a response to gunpowder artillery, European fortifications began displaying architectural principles such as lower and thicker walls in the mid-1400s. Cannon towers were built with artillery rooms where cannons could discharge fire from slits in the walls. However this proved problematic as the slow rate of fire, reverberating concussions, and noxious fumes produced greatly hindered defenders. Gun towers also limited the size and number of cannon placements because the rooms could only be built so big. Notable surviving artillery towers include a seven layer defensive structure built in 1480 at
Fougères Fougères (; br, Felger; Gallo: ''Foujerr'') is a commune and a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine department in the region of Brittany in northwestern France. As of 2017, Fougères had 20,418 inhabitants. The Fougères area comprises appr ...
in Brittany, and a four layer tower built in 1479 at Querfurth in Saxony. The star fort, also known as the bastion fort, ''tracé à l'italienne'', or renaissance fortress, was a style of fortification that became popular in Europe during the 16th century. The bastion and star fort was developed in Italy, where the Florentine engineer
Giuliano da Sangallo Giuliano da Sangallo (c. 1445 – 1516) was an Italian sculptor, architect and military engineer active during the Italian Renaissance. He is known primarily for being the favored architect of Lorenzo de' Medici, his patron. In this role, Giulia ...
(1445–1516) compiled a comprehensive defensive plan using the geometric
bastion A bastion or bulwark is a structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of a fortification, most commonly angular in shape and positioned at the corners of the fort. The fully developed bastion consists of two faces and two flanks, with fi ...
and full ''tracé à l'italienne'' that became widespread in Europe. The main distinguishing features of the star fort were its angle bastions, each placed to support their neighbor with lethal crossfire, covering all angles, making them extremely difficult to engage with and attack. Angle bastions consisted of two faces and two flanks. Artillery positions positioned at the flanks could fire parallel into the opposite bastion's line of fire, thus providing two lines of cover fire against an armed assault on the wall, and preventing mining parties from finding refuge. Meanwhile, artillery positioned on the bastion platform could fire frontally from the two faces, also providing overlapping fire with the opposite bastion. Overlapping mutually supporting defensive fire was the greatest advantage enjoyed by the star fort. As a result, sieges lasted longer and became more difficult affairs. By the 1530s the bastion fort had become the dominant defensive structure in Italy. Outside Europe, the star fort became an "engine of European expansion", and acted as a force multiplier so that small European garrisons could hold out against numerically superior forces. Wherever star forts were erected the natives experienced great difficulty in uprooting European invaders. In China, Sun Yuanhua advocated for the construction of angled bastion forts in his ''Xifashenji'' so that their cannons could better support each other. The officials Han Yun and Han Lin noted that cannons on square forts could not support each side as well as bastion forts. Their efforts to construct bastion forts and their results were inconclusive. Ma Weicheng built two bastion forts in his home county, which helped fend off a Qing incursion in 1638. By 1641, there were ten bastion forts in the county. Before bastion forts could be spread any further, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, and they were largely forgotten as the Qing dynasty was on the offensive most of the time and had no use for them.


Classical cannon

Gun development and design in Europe reached its "classic" form in the 1480s – longer, lighter, more efficient, and more accurate compared to its predecessors only three decades prior. The design persisted, and cannons of the 1480s show little difference and surprising similarity with cannons three centuries later in the 1750s. This 300-year period during which the classic cannon dominated gives it its moniker. The early classical European guns are exemplified by two cannons from 1488 now preserved in a plaza in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The Neuchâtel guns are 224 centimeters long, with a bore of 6.2 centimeters and the other is slightly longer, 252 centimeters, with the same bore size. They are differentiated from older firearms by an assortment of improvements. Their longer length-to-bore ratio imparts more energy into the shot, enabling the projectile to shoot further. Not only longer, they were also lighter as the barrel walls were made thinner to allow for faster dissipation of heat. They also no longer needed the help of a wooden plug to load since they offered a tighter fit between projectile and barrel, further increasing the accuracy of gunpowder warfare – and were deadlier due to developments such as gunpowder corning and iron shot. When these guns reached China in the 1510s, the Chinese were highly impressed by them, primarily for their longer and thinner barrels. The two primary theories for the appearance of the classic gun involve the development of gunpowder corning and a new method for casting guns. The corning hypothesis stipulates that the longer barrels came about as a reaction to the development of corned gunpowder. Not only did "corned" powder keep better, because of its reduced surface area, but gunners also found that it was more powerful and easier to load into guns. Prior to corning, gunpowder would also frequently demix into its constitutive components and was therefore unreliable. The faster gunpowder reaction was suitable for smaller guns, since large ones had a tendency to crack, and the more controlled reaction allowed large guns to have longer, thinner walls. However, the corning hypothesis has been argued against on two grounds: One, the powder makers were probably more worried about spoilage than the effect of corned gunpowder on guns; and two, corning as a practice had existed in China (for explosives) since the 1370s. The second theory is that the key to developing the classic gun may have been a new method of gun casting, muzzle side up. Smith observes: "The surviving pieces of ordnance from earlier in the 15th century are big pieces with large bore sizes. They do not look like the long thin gun.… Essentially they are parallel-sided tubes with flat ends. The explanation is, probably, that they were cast muzzle down in the traditional bell-founding method whereas the long thin guns were cast muzzle up.… Perhaps this marks the real 'revolution' in artillery. Once the technique of casting muzzle up with the attendant advantages, and it is not clear what those are at present, had been mastered by cannon founders, the way was open for the development of the 'classic' form of artillery." However, Smith himself states that it is not clear what advantages this technique would have conferred, despite its widespread adoption. File:16th Century Artillerie.jpg, 16th-century Artillerie File:French bastard culverin 1548 with arms of Henri II and Catherine de Medicis and crescent of Diane 85mm 300cm 1076kg.jpg, French bastard culverin dated to 1548, 85mm 300 cm 1076 kg. File:Coulevrine Etudes-3 P.172 2-3.png, Two 15th-century culverins, one of forged iron, the other of cast bronze. File:Canon Gribeauval 1780 front.jpg, 18th-century French cannon File:Gunpowder1.png, Different shapes of corned gunpowder, each with its own function


Iron and bronze

Across the 15th and 16th centuries there were primarily two different types of manufactured cannons. The wrought iron cannon and the cast-bronze cannon. Wrought iron guns were structurally composed of two layers: an inner tube of iron staves held together in a tight fit by an outer case of iron hoops. Bronze cannons on the other hand were cast in one piece similar to bells. The technique used in casting bronze cannons was so similar to the bell that the two were often looked upon as a connected enterprise. Both iron and bronze cannons had their advantages and disadvantages. Forged iron cannons were up to ten times cheaper, but more unstable due to their piece built nature. Even without use, iron cannons were liable to rust away, while bronze cannons did not. Another reason for the dominance of bronze cannons was their aesthetic appeal. Because cannons were so important as displays of power and prestige, rulers liked to commission bronze cannons, which could be sculpted into fanciful designs containing artistic motifs or symbols. It was for all these reasons that the cast-bronze cannon became the preferred type by the late 1400s. Some cannons cast in China during the 1370s may have been of steel rather than iron.


Composite metal

Composite iron/bronze cannons were far less common, but were produced in substantial numbers during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The resulting bronze-iron composite cannons were superior to iron or bronze cannons in many respects. They were lighter, stronger, longer lasting, and able to withstand more intensive explosive pressure. Chinese artisans also experimented with other variants such as cannons featuring wrought iron cores with cast iron exteriors. While inferior to their bronze-iron counterparts, these were considerably cheaper and more durable than standard iron cannons. Both types were met with success and were considered "among the best in the world" during the 17th century. The Chinese composite metal casting technique was effective enough that Portuguese imperial officials sought to employ Chinese gunsmiths for their cannon foundries in Goa, so that they could impart their methods for Portuguese weapons manufacturing. The Gujarats experimented with the same concept in 1545, the English at least by 1580, and Hollanders in 1629. However the effort required to produce these weapons prevented them from mass production. The Europeans essentially treated them as experimental products, resulting in very few surviving pieces today. Of the currently known extant composite metal cannons, there are 2 English, 2 Dutch, 12 Gujarati, and 48 from the Ming-Qing period.


Arquebus and musket

The arquebus was a firearm that appeared in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early 15th century. Its name is derived from the German word ''Hackenbüchse''. Although the term ''arquebus'' was applied to many different forms of firearms from the 15th to 17th centuries, it was originally used to describe "a hand-gun with a hook-like projection or lug on its under surface, useful for steadying it against battlements or other objects when firing." These "hook guns" were in their earliest forms defensive weapons mounted on German city walls in the early 1400s, but by the late 1400s had transitioned into handheld firearms, with heavier variants known as "muskets" that were fired from resting Y-shaped supports appearing by the early 1500s. The musket was able to penetrate all forms of armor available at the time, making armor obsolete, and as a consequence the heavy musket as well. Although there is relatively little to no difference in design between arquebus and musket except in size and strength, it was the term ''musket'' which remained in use up into the 1800s. It may not be completely inaccurate to suggest that the musket was in its fabrication simply a larger arquebus. At least on one occasion the musket and arquebus have been used interchangeably to refer to the same weapon, and even referred to as an "arquebus musket." A Habsburg commander in the mid-1560s once referred to muskets as "double arquebuses." The definition of arquebus and similar firearms is therefore quite convoluted as the term has been applied to different sorts of firearms as well as acquiring several names like ''hackbut,'' ''harquebus'', ''schiopo,'' ''sclopus,'' ''tüfenk'', ''tofak'', ''matchlock'', and ''firelock''. Some say that the hackbut was a forerunner of the arquebus. The dating of the ''matchlock'' firing mechanism's first appearance is disputed. The first references to the use of what may have been arquebuses (''tüfek'') by the
Janissary A Janissary ( ota, یڭیچری, yeŋiçeri, , ) was a member of the elite infantry units that formed the Ottoman Sultan's household troops and the first modern standing army in Europe. The corps was most likely established under sultan Orhan ...
corps of the Ottoman
army An army (from Old French ''armee'', itself derived from the Latin verb ''armāre'', meaning "to arm", and related to the Latin noun ''arma'', meaning "arms" or "weapons"), ground force or land force is a fighting force that fights primarily on ...
date them from 1394 to 1465. However it's unclear whether these were arquebuses or small cannons as late as 1444, but the fact that they were listed separate from cannons in mid-15th century inventories suggest they were handheld firearms. In Europe, a
shoulder stock A gunstock or often simply stock, the back portion of which is also known as a shoulder stock, a buttstock or simply a butt, is a part of a long gun that provides structural support, to which the barrel, action, and firing mechanism are attach ...
, probably inspired by the
crossbow A crossbow is a ranged weapon using an elastic launching device consisting of a bow-like assembly called a ''prod'', mounted horizontally on a main frame called a ''tiller'', which is hand-held in a similar fashion to the stock of a long fi ...
stock, was added to the arquebus around 1470 and the appearance of the matchlock mechanism is dated to a little before 1475. The matchlock arquebus was the first firearm equipped with a trigger mechanism. It is also considered to be the first portable shoulder-arms firearm. Matchlock became a common term for the arquebus after it was added to the firearm. Prior to the appearance of the matchlock, handguns were fired from the chest, tucked under one arm, while the other arm maneuvered a hot pricker to the touch hole to ignite the gunpowder. The matchlock changed this by adding a firing mechanism consisting of two parts, the match, and the lock. The lock mechanism held within a clamp a two to three feet long length of smoldering rope soaked in saltpeter, which was the match. Connected to the lock lever was a trigger, which lowered the match into a priming pan when pulled, igniting the priming powder, causing a flash to travel through the touch hole, also igniting the gunpowder within the barrel, and propelling the bullet out the muzzle. While matchlocks provided a crucial advantage by allowing the user to aim the firearm using both hands, it was also awkward to use. To avoid accidentally igniting the gunpowder the match had to be detached while loading the gun. In some instances the match would also go out, so both ends of the match were kept lit. This proved cumbersome to maneuver as both hands were required to hold the match during removal, one end in each hand. The procedure was so complex that a 1607 drill manual published by Jacob de Gheyn in the Netherlands listed 28 steps just to fire and load the gun. In 1584 the Ming general
Qi Jiguang Qi Jiguang (, November 12, 1528 – January 17, 1588), courtesy name Yuanjing, art names Nantang and Mengzhu, posthumous name Wuyi, was a Chinese military general and writer of the Ming dynasty. He is best known for leading the defense on the ...
composed an 11 step song to practice the procedure in rhythm: "One, clean the gun. Two pour the powder. Three tamp the powder down. Four drop the pellet. Five drive the pellet down. Six put in paper (stopper). Seven drive the paper down. Eight open the flashpan cover. Nine pour in the flash powder. Ten close the flashpan, and clamp the fuse. Eleven, listen for the signal, then open the flashpan cover. Aiming at the enemy, raise your gun and fire." Reloading a gun during the 16th century took anywhere from between 20 seconds to a minute under the most ideal conditions. The arquebus is considered to be the first portable "shoulder" arms firearm. Arquebuses were used as early as 1472 by the Spanish and Portuguese at Zamora. Likewise, the Castilians used arquebuses as well in 1476. In 1496 Philip Monch of the Palatinate composed an illustrated ''Buch der Strynt un(d) Buchsse(n)'' on guns and "harquebuses." The Mamluks in particular were conservatively against the incorporation of gunpowder weapons. When faced with cannons and arquebuses wielded by the Ottomans they criticized them thus, "God curse the man who invented them, and God curse the man who fires on Muslims with them." Insults were also levied against the Ottomans for having "brought with you this contrivance artfully devised by the Christians of Europe when they were incapable of meeting the Muslim armies on the battlefield." Similarly,
musketeer A musketeer (french: mousquetaire) was a type of soldier equipped with a musket. Musketeers were an important part of early modern warfare particularly in Europe as they normally comprised the majority of their infantry. The musketeer was a pre ...
s and musket-wielding infantrymen were despised in society by the
feudal Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in Middle Ages, medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a wa ...
knight A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the Gr ...
s, even until the time of ''
Don Quixote is a Spanish epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, its full title is ''The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha'' or, in Spanish, (changing in Part 2 to ). A founding work of Wester ...
'' author
Miguel de Cervantes Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (; 29 September 1547 (assumed) – 22 April 1616 Old Style and New Style dates, NS) was an Early Modern Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-emin ...
(1547–1616). Eventually the Mamluks under
Qaitbay Sultan Abu Al-Nasr Sayf ad-Din Al-Ashraf Qaitbay ( ar, السلطان أبو النصر سيف الدين الأشرف قايتباي) (c. 1416/14187 August 1496) was the eighteenth Burji Mamluk Sultan of Egypt from 872 to 901 A.H. (1468–14 ...
were ordered in 1489 to train in the use of al-bunduq al-rasas (arquebuses). However, in 1514 an Ottoman army of 12,000 soldiers wielding arquebuses still managed to rout a much larger Mamluk force. The arquebus had become a common infantry weapon by the 16th century due to its relative cheapness – a helmet, breastplate and pike cost about three and a quarter ducats while an arquebus only a little over one ducat. Another advantage of arquebuses over other equipment and weapons was its short training period. While a bow potentially took years to master, an effective arquebusier could be trained in just two weeks. According to a 1571 report by Vincentio d'Alessandri, Persian arms including arquebuses "were superior and better tempered than those of any other nation." In the early 1500s a larger arquebus known as the musket appeared. The heavy musket, while being rather awkward to handle, requiring a fork rest to fire properly, had the advantage of being able to penetrate the best armor within a range of 180 meters, regular armor at 365 meters, and an unarmed man at 548 meters. However, both the musket and arquebus were effectively limited to a range of only 90 to 185 meters regardless of armor since they were incredibly inaccurate. According to some sources, a smoothbore musket was completely incapable of hitting a man sized target past the 73-meter mark. While rifled guns did exist at this time in the form of grooves cut into the interior of a barrel, these were considered specialist weapons and limited in number. In some aspects this made the smoothbore musket an inferior weapon compared to the bow. The average Mamluk archer for example was capable of hitting targets only 68 meters far away but could keep up a pace of six to eight shots per minute. In comparison, sixteenth-century matchlocks fired off one shot every several minutes, and much less when taking into consideration misfires and malfunctions which occurred up to half the time. This is not to say that firearms of the 16th century were inferior to the bow and arrow, for it could better penetrate armor and required less training, but the disadvantages of the musket were very real, and it would not be until the 1590s that archers were for the most part phased out of ''European'' warfare. This was possibly a consequence of the increased effectiveness of musket warfare due to the rise of volley fire in Europe as first applied by the Dutch. At this time gunners in European armies reached as high as 40 percent of infantry forces. As the virtues of the musket became apparent it was quickly adopted throughout Eurasia so that by 1560 even in China generals were giving praise to the new weapon. Qi Jiguang, a noted partisan of the musket, gave a eulogy on the effectiveness of the gun in 1560: Other
East Asian East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, North Korea, South Korea a ...
powers such as
Đại Việt Đại Việt (, ; literally Great Việt), often known as Annam ( vi, An Nam, Chữ Hán: 安南), was a monarchy in eastern Mainland Southeast Asia from the 10th century AD to the early 19th century, centered around the region of present-day H ...
also adopted the matchlock musket in quick order. Đại Việt in particular was considered by the Ming to have produced the most advanced matchlocks in the world during the 17th century, surpassing even Ottoman, Japanese, and European firearms. European observers of the
Trịnh–Nguyễn War The Trịnh–Nguyễn Civil War ( vi, Trịnh-Nguyễn phân tranh; Hán tự: 鄭阮紛爭) was a 17th-century lengthy civil war waged between the two ruling families in Vietnam, the Trịnh lords of Đàng Ngoài and the Nguyễn lords of ...
also corroborated with the Ming in the proficiency of matchlock making by the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese matchlock was said to have been able to pierce several layers of iron armour, kill two to five men in one shot, yet also fire quietly for a weapon of its caliber.


Gunpowder Empires

The
Gunpowder Empires The gunpowder empires, or Islamic gunpowder empires, is a collective term coined by Marshall G. S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill at the University of Chicago, referring to three Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire and the Mugha ...
generally refer to the Islamic Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. The phrase was first coined by
Marshall Hodgson Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson (April 11, 1922 – June 10, 1968), was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago. Works Though he ...
in the title of Book 5 ("The Second Flowering: The Empires of Gunpowder Times") of his highly influential three-volume work, ''The Venture of Islam'' (1974). Hogdson applied the term "gunpowder empire" to three Islamic political entities he identified as separate from the unstable, geographically limited confederations of Turkic clans that prevailed in post-Mongol times. He called them "military patronage states of the Later Middle Period," which possessed three defining characteristics: first, a legitimization of independent dynastic law; second, the conception of the whole state as a single military force; third, the attempt to explain all economic and high cultural resources as appanages of the chief military families. Connecting these empires were their traditions which grew "out of Mongol notions of greatness," but " ch notions could fully mature and create stable bureaucratic empires only after gunpowder weapons and their specialized technology attained a primary place in military life." William H. McNeill further expanded on the concept of gunpowder empires by arguing that such states "were able to monopolize the new artillery, central authorities were able to unite larger territories into new, or newly consolidated, empires." In 2011 Douglas E. Streusand criticized the Hodgson-McNeill Gunpowder-Empire hypothesis, calling it into disfavor as a neither "adequate r accurate" explanation, although the term remains in use. The main problem he saw with the Hodgson-McNeill theory is that the acquisition of firearms does not seem to have preceded the initial acquisition of territory constituting the imperial critical mass of any of the three early modern Islamic empires, except in the case of the Mughals. Moreover, it seems that the commitment to military autocratic rule pre-dated the acquisition of gunpowder weapons in all three cases. Whether or not gunpowder was inherently linked to the existence of any of these three empires, it cannot be questioned that each of the three acquired artillery and firearms early in their history and made such weapons an integral part of their military tactics.


Ottoman Empire

It's not certain when the Ottomans started using firearms, however it's argued that they had been using cannons since the Battles of Kosovo (1389) and Nukap (1396) and most certainly by the 1420s. Some argue that field guns only entered service shortly after the Battle of Varna (1444) and more certainly used in the Second Battle of Kosovo (1448). Firearms, (especially grenades) were used in the 1683 siege of Vienna The arquebus reached them around 1425.


India and the Mughal Empire

In India, guns made of bronze were recovered from
Calicut Kozhikode (), also known in English as Calicut, is a city along the Malabar Coast in the state of Kerala in India. It has a corporation limit population of 609,224 and a metropolitan population of more than 2 million, making it the second la ...
(1504) and Diu (1533). By the 17th century, Indians were manufacturing a diverse variety of firearms; large guns in particular, became visible in
Tanjore Thanjavur (), also Tanjore, Pletcher 2010, p. 195 is a city in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Thanjavur is the 11th biggest city in Tamil Nadu. Thanjavur is an important center of South Indian religion, art, and architecture. Most of the ...
,
Dacca Dhaka ( or ; bn, ঢাকা, Ḍhākā, ), formerly known as Dacca, is the capital and largest city of Bangladesh, as well as the world's largest Bengali-speaking city. It is the eighth largest and sixth most densely populated city ...
,
Bijapur Bijapur, officially known as Vijayapura, is the district headquarters of Bijapur district of the Karnataka state of India. It is also the headquarters for Bijapur Taluk. Bijapur city is well known for its historical monuments of architectural ...
and
Murshidabad Murshidabad fa, مرشد آباد (, or ) is a historical city in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is located on the eastern bank of the Bhagirathi River, a distributary of the Ganges. It forms part of the Murshidabad district. During ...
. Gujarāt supplied Europe saltpeter for use in gunpowder warfare during the 17th century."India." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.
Bengal Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...
and Mālwa participated in saltpeter production. The Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English used Chāpra as a center of saltpeter refining.
Fathullah Shirazi Sayyed Mīr Fathullāh Shīrāzī Namazi ( fa, ; died 15 August 1589) was a Persian Sufi polymath - an Islamic jurist, mechanical engineer, mathematician, astronomer, physician and philosopher—who worked for Akbar, ruler of the Mughal Em ...
(c. 1582), who worked for Akbar the Great as a mechanical engineer, developed an early multi gun shot. Shirazi's rapid-firing gun had multiple
gun barrel A gun barrel is a crucial part of gun-type weapons such as small firearms, artillery pieces, and air guns. It is the straight shooting tube, usually made of rigid high-strength metal, through which a contained rapid expansion of high-pressure ...
s that fired
hand cannon The hand cannon (Chinese: 手 銃 ''shŏuchòng'', or 火 銃 ''huŏchòng''), also known as the gonne or handgonne, is the first true firearm and the successor of the fire lance. It is the oldest type of small arms as well as the most mecha ...
s loaded with gunpowder.
Mysorean rockets Mysorean rockets were an Indian military weapon, the iron-cased rockets were successfully deployed for military use. The Mysorean army, under Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, used the rockets effectively against the British East India Compan ...
were an Indian military
weapon A weapon, arm or armament is any implement or device that can be used to deter, threaten, inflict physical damage, harm, or kill. Weapons are used to increase the efficacy and efficiency of activities such as hunting, crime, law enforcement, s ...
, the first iron-cased
rockets A rocket (from it, rocchetto, , bobbin/spool) is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely ...
successfully deployed for military use. The Mysorean army, under
Hyder Ali Hyder Ali ( حیدر علی, ''Haidarālī''; 1720 – 7 December 1782) was the Sultan and ''de facto'' ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India. Born as Hyder Ali, he distinguished himself as a soldier, eventually drawing the att ...
and his son
Tipu Sultan Tipu Sultan (born Sultan Fateh Ali Sahab Tipu, 1 December 1751 – 4 May 1799), also known as the Tiger of Mysore, was the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore based in South India. He was a pioneer of rocket artillery.Dalrymple, p. 243 He i ...
, used the rockets effectively against the
British East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...
during the 1780s and 1790s.
The Indian war rockets were formidable weapons before such rockets were used in Europe. They had bam-boo rods, a rocket-body lashed to the rod, and iron points. They were directed at the target and fired by lighting the fuse, but the trajectory was rather erratic. The use of mines and counter-mines with explosive charges of gunpowder is mentioned for the times of
Akbar Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (25 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great ( fa, ), and also as Akbar I (), was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Hum ...
and Jahāngir.
File:Battle of Panipat.jpg,
Timurid Timurid refers to those descended from Timur (Tamerlane), a 14th-century conqueror: * Timurid dynasty, a dynasty of Turco-Mongol lineage descended from Timur who established empires in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ** Timurid Empire of C ...
cannons at the First Battle of Panipat, 1526. File:Babur’s army in battle against the army of Rana Sanga at.jpg,
Babur Babur ( fa, , lit= tiger, translit= Bābur; ; 14 February 148326 December 1530), born Mīrzā Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad, was the founder of the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent. He was a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan through his ...
's army using cannons (bottom) at the
Battle of Khanwa The Battle of Khanwa was fought at Khanwa on March 16, 1527. It was fought between the invading Timurid forces of Babur and the Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga for suprermacy of Northern India. The battle was a major event in Medieval ...
, 1527. File:Bullocks dragging siege-guns up hill during the attack on Ranthambhor Fort.jpg,
Akbar Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (25 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great ( fa, ), and also as Akbar I (), was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Hum ...
's cannons at the
Siege of Ranthambore (1568) In the siege of Ranthambore, on 8 February 1568, Akbar led a massive Mughal Army of over 50,000 men and besieged Ranthambore Fort. Akbar had become emboldened after his victories at the Battle of Thanesar and the siege of Chittorgarh and only ...
. File:1567-A mine explodes during the siege of Chitor-right-Akbarnama-large.jpg, Both Mughal and
Mewar Mewar or Mewad is a region in the south-central part of Rajasthan state of India. It includes the present-day districts of Bhilwara, Chittorgarh, Pratapgarh, Rajsamand, Udaipur, Pirawa Tehsil of Jhalawar District of Rajasthan, Neemuch and Man ...
troops using firearms at the
Siege of Chittorgarh (1567–1568) Siege of Chittorgarh (23 October 1567 – 23 February 1568) was a part of military expedition of Mughal Empire under Akbar against the Mewar kingdom that began in 1567 in which the Mughals successfully captured the fort of Chittorgarh after a ...
. File:Malik E Maidan.jpg, Malik-i-Maidan File:जयगढ़ किले में प्रदर्शित तोप जयबाण.JPG, Jaivana Cannon, 1720


Civil engineering


Canals

Gunpowder was used for hydraulic engineering in China by 1541. Gunpowder blasting followed by dredging of the detritus was a technique which Chen Mu employed to improve the Grand Canal at the waterway where it crossed the
Yellow River The Yellow River or Huang He (Chinese: , Standard Beijing Mandarin, Mandarin: ''Huáng hé'' ) is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the List of rivers by length, sixth-longest river system in the world at th ...
. In Europe, gunpowder was used in the construction of the Canal du Midi in Southern France.Brown (1998), Chapter 6: ''Mining and Civil Engineering''. It was completed in 1681 and linked the
Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...
sea with the
Atlantic The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe an ...
with 240 km of
canal Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flow un ...
and 100 locks. Another noteworthy consumer of black powder was the
Erie canal The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing t ...
in New York, which was 585 km long and took eight years to complete, starting in 1817.


Mining

Before gunpowder was applied to civil engineering, there were two ways to break up large rocks, by hard labor or by heating with large fires followed by rapid quenching. The earliest record for the use of gunpowder in mines comes from Hungary in 1627.Urbanski (1967). Chapter III: ''Blackpowder''. It was introduced to Britain in 1638 by German miners, after which records are numerous. Until the invention of the
safety fuse The safety fuse is a type of fuse invented and patented by English inventor William Bickford in 1831. Originally it consisted of a "tube" of gunpowder surrounded by a waterproofed varnished jute "rope." It replaced earlier and less reliable metho ...
by William Bickford in 1831, the practice was extremely dangerous.Earl, (1978). Chapter 1: Introduction. Another reason for danger were the dense fumes given off and the risk of igniting flammable gas when used in coal mines.


Tunnel construction

Gunpowder was also extensively used in railway construction. At first railways followed the contours of the land, or crossed low ground by means of bridges and viaducts, but later railways made extensive use of cuttings and tunnels. One 2400-ft stretch of the 5.4 mi
Box Tunnel Box Tunnel passes through Box Hill on the Great Western Main Line (GWML) between Bath and Chippenham. The tunnel was the world's longest railway tunnel when it was completed in 1841. Built between December 1838 and June 1841 for the Great We ...
on the
Great Western Railway The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...
line between London and
Bristol Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in ...
consumed a
ton Ton is the name of any one of several units of measure. It has a long history and has acquired several meanings and uses. Mainly it describes units of weight. Confusion can arise because ''ton'' can mean * the long ton, which is 2,240 pounds ...
of gunpowder per week for over two years. The 12.9 km long
Mont Cenis Tunnel Mont may refer to: Places * Mont., an abbreviation for Montana, a U.S. state * Mont, Belgium (disambiguation), several places in Belgium * Mont, Hautes-Pyrénées, a commune in France * Mont, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, a commune in France * Mont, Sa ...
was completed in 13 years starting in 1857 but, even with black powder, progress was only 25 cm a day until the invention of pneumatic drills sped up the work.


United States


Revolutionary War

During the American Revolutionary War, a number of caves were mined for saltpeter to make gunpowder when supplies from Europe were embargoed.
Abigail Adams Abigail Adams ( ''née'' Smith; November 22, [ O.S. November 11] 1744 – October 28, 1818) was the wife and closest advisor of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She was a founder of the United States, an ...
reputedly also made gunpowder at her family farm in Massachusetts. The New York Committee of Safety produced some essays on making gunpowder that were printed in 1776.


Civil War

During the
American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...
,
British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...
was the main source for saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder for the
Union armies Union commonly refers to: * Trade union, an organization of workers * Union (set theory), in mathematics, a fundamental operation on sets Union may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * Union (band), an American rock group ** ''Un ...
. This supply was threatened by the British government during the
Trent Affair The ''Trent'' Affair was a diplomatic incident in 1861 during the American Civil War that threatened a war between the United States and Great Britain. The U.S. Navy captured two Confederate envoys from a British Royal Mail steamer; the Brit ...
, when Union naval forces stopped a British ship, the RMS Trent, and removed two Confederate diplomats. The British government responded in part by halting all exports of saltpeter to the United States, threatening their gunpowder manufacturing resources. Shortly thereafter, the situation was resolved and the Confederate diplomats were released. The Union Navy blockaded the southern
Confederate States The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States or the Confederacy was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confeder ...
, which reduced the amount of gunpowder that could be imported from overseas. The Confederate
Nitre and Mining Bureau The Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau was a civilian government bureau to provide the Confederate States of America with needed materials such as copper, iron, lead, saltpeter, sulfur, zinc, and other metals. The Bureau oversaw civilian contracts ...
was formed to produce gunpowder for the army and the navy from domestic resources. Nitre is the English spelling of "
Niter Niter or nitre is the mineral form of potassium nitrate, KNO3. It is a soft, white, highly soluble mineral found primarily in arid climates or cave deposits. Historically, the term ''niter'' was not well differentiated from natron, both of w ...
". While carbon and sulfur were readily available throughout the south,
potassium nitrate Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and nitrat ...
was often produced from the
Calcium nitrate Calcium nitrate, also called ''Norgessalpeter'' (Norwegian salpeter), is an inorganic compound with the formula Ca(NO3)2(H2O)x. The anhydrous compound, which is rarely encountered, absorbs moisture from the air to give the tetrahydrate. Both anhyd ...
found in cave dirt, tobacco barn floors and barn stalls other places. A number of caves were mined, and the men and boys who worked in the caves were called "
peter monkey Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a su ...
", somewhat in imitation of the naval term "
powder monkey A powder boy or powder monkey manned naval artillery guns as a member of a warship's crew, primarily during the Age of Sail. His chief role was to ferry gunpowder from the powder magazine in the ship's hold to the artillery pieces, either in ...
" that was used for the boys who brought up charges of gunpowder on gunboats. On 13 November 1862, the Confederate government advertised in the Charleston Daily Courier for 20 or 30 "able bodied Negro men" to work in the new nitre beds at Ashley Ferry, S.C. The
nitre bed Potassium nitrate is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . This alkali metal nitrate salt is also known as Indian saltpetre (large deposits of which were historically mined in India). It is an ionic salt of potassium ions K+ and ni ...
s were large rectangles of rotted manure and straw, moistened weekly with urine, "dung water", and liquid from privies, cesspools and drains, and turned over regularly. The process was designed to yield saltpeter, an ingredient of gunpowder, which the Confederate army needed during the Civil War. The South was so desperate for saltpeter for gunpowder that one Alabama official reportedly placed a newspaper ad asking that the contents of chamber pots be saved for collection. In the winter of 1863, scores of enslaved people were set to work extracting it from a huge cave in Barstow County, Ga., where they labored by torchlight in grim conditions, hauling out and processing the so-called "peter dirt",. In South Carolina, in April 1864, the Confederate government hired 31 enslaved people to work at the Ashley Ferry Nitre Works.


Decline

The latter half of the 19th century saw the invention of nitroglycerin,
nitrocellulose Nitrocellulose (also known as cellulose nitrate, flash paper, flash cotton, guncotton, pyroxylin and flash string, depending on form) is a highly flammable compound formed by nitrating cellulose through exposure to a mixture of nitric acid and ...
and
smokeless powder Finnish smokeless powderSmokeless powder is a type of propellant used in firearms and artillery that produces less smoke and less fouling when fired compared to gunpowder ("black powder"). The combustion products are mainly gaseous, compared t ...
s which soon replaced traditional gunpowder in most civil and military applications.


See also

*
Black powder substitute A black powder substitute is a replacement for black powder used in muzzleloading and cartridge firearms. Black powder substitutes offer a number of advantages over black powder, primarily including reduced sensitivity as an explosive and in ...
*
Early thermal weapons Early thermal weapons, which used heat or burning action to destroy or damage enemy personnel, fortifications or territories, were employed in warfare during the classical and medieval periods (approximately the 8th century BC until the mid-16th ...
*
Hand cannon The hand cannon (Chinese: 手 銃 ''shŏuchòng'', or 火 銃 ''huŏchòng''), also known as the gonne or handgonne, is the first true firearm and the successor of the fire lance. It is the oldest type of small arms as well as the most mecha ...
* Green mix *
Gunpowder warfare Early modern warfare is the era of warfare following medieval warfare. It is associated with the start of the widespread use of gunpowder and the development of suitable weapons to use the explosive, including artillery and firearms; for thi ...
*
Huolongjing The ''Huolongjing'' (; Wade-Giles: ''Huo Lung Ching''; rendered in English as ''Fire Drake Manual'' or ''Fire Dragon Manual''), also known as ''Huoqitu'' (“Firearm Illustrations”), is a Chinese military treatise compiled and edited by Jiao ...
*
Jiao Yu Jiao Yu () was a Chinese military general, philosopher, and writer of the Yuan dynasty and early Ming dynasty under Zhu Yuanzhang, who founded the dynasty and became known as the Hongwu Emperor. He was entrusted by Zhu as a leading artillery ...
*
Jixiao Xinshu The ''Jixiao Xinshu'' () or ''New Treatise on Military Efficiency'' is a military manual written during the 1560s and 1580s by the Ming dynasty general Qi Jiguang. Its primary significance is in advocating for a combined arms approach to ...
* Meal powder *
Technology of Song Dynasty The Song dynasty (; 960–1279 CE) invented some technological advances in Chinese history, many of which came from talented statesmen drafted by the government through imperial examinations. The ingenuity of advanced mechanical engineering ha ...
*
Wubei Zhi The ''Wubei Zhi'' (; ''Treatise on Armament Technology'' or ''Records of Armaments and Military Provisions''), also commonly known by its Japanese translated name Bubishi, is a military book in Chinese history. It was compiled in 1621 by Mao Yu ...
*
Wujing Zongyao The ''Wujing Zongyao'' (), sometimes rendered in English as the ''Complete Essentials for the Military Classics'', is a Chinese military compendium written from around 1040 to 1044. The book was compiled during the Northern Song dynasty by Z ...


Notes


References

* * * * . * * * * * . * * . * * * . * * . * . * . * * * . * Hadden, R. Lee. 2005
"Confederate Boys and Peter Monkeys."
Armchair General. January 2005. Adapted from a talk given to the
Geological Society of America The Geological Society of America (GSA) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the geosciences. History The society was founded in Ithaca, New York, in 1888 by Alexander Winchell, John J. Stevenson, Charles H. Hitchco ...
on 25 March 2004. * * * * * . * . * * . * . * * * * . * * * * * * * * * . * * * * * * * * * . * * . * * . * . * * . * * * * * * * * * Schmidtchen, Volker (1977a), "Riesengeschütze des 15. Jahrhunderts. Technische Höchstleistungen ihrer Zeit", ''Technikgeschichte'' 44 (2): 153–173 (153–157) * Schmidtchen, Volker (1977b), "Riesengeschütze des 15. Jahrhunderts. Technische Höchstleistungen ihrer Zeit", ''Technikgeschichte'' 44 (3): 213–237 (226–228) * . * * . * * * * * * * * *


External links


"A Guide to Geometry, Surveying, the Launching of Missiles, and the Planting of Mines"
from 1791, in Arabic, discusses the storing of gunpowder and related subjects in the 18th-century Muslim world. {{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Gunpowder Warfare of the Middle Ages Warfare of the Early Modern period History of chemistry Alchemy Ammunition Gunpowder Weapon history