Historical Facts

Gunpowder in Europe History
The first record of gunpowder in Europe dates from 1267, while the first record of guns from 1326.

By the end of the 1400s, thanks to advances in iron and copper mining, metallurgy and gunpowder manufacture, Europeans were making firearms in great quantity and great variety, from enormous cannons to handheld arquebuses.

If one of the essential characteristics of modernity is the substitution of chemical for muscle power, then firearms may be regarded as the first modern invention.

The spread of gunpowder was not welcome by everyone. The nobility, in particular, did not like weapons that rendered obsolete old notions of chivalry and if allowed, as one contemporary complained, “so many brave and valiant men” to be killed by “cowards and shirkers who would not dare to look in the face the men they bring down from a distance with their wretched bullets.”

Firearms were by no means a European monopoly – Mogul India, Ming China, Safavid Persia, Choson Korean, Ottoman Turkey and Tokugawa Japan also made effective use of them – but Europe early on became the worldwide leader in their production and development.

China and many other non-Western countries continued producing guns but by 1500 their weapons were markedly inferior to those being crafted in the workshops of Europe.

Even the siege guns used by the Ottoman to conquer Constantinople in 1453, including two titanic cannons firing stone projectiles weighing more than eight hundred pounds, were created not by a Turk but a Hungarian in Sultan Mehmed II’s employ.

The most immediate impact of firearms, once they became more reliable, was to end the military ascendancy of the horse archers of central Asia. Cavalrymen equipped with bows and arrows were no match for infantrymen armed with guns, and since the Mongolian nomads could not manufacture firearms of their own, their reign of terror came to an end.
Gunpowder in Europe History