Late Middle Ages

How gunpowder changed medieval warfare

The first European reference to gunpowder is in a work of Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292), the Franciscan friar of Oxford, who described the recipe for “a certain mixture, which makes a noise greater than thunder, and a flash brighter than the sun” in a letter of c. 1267. The first certain use of a European cannon is dated to 1326, when the Arabic incantation of al-shaytani — the devil’s toy — appears in the arsenal list of the commune of Florence. The introduction of gunpowder to European warfare was the result of a long transmission of knowledge from China, by way of the Islamic world, and the development of cannon in Europe was the work of the 1320s and 1330s, in Italy, in the German lands, and in the Iberian kingdoms. The Hundred Years’ War was, in part, the war in which gunpowder was tested, in which the longbow and the crossbow were challenged by the new weapons, and in which the medieval art of war was at last transformed.

The slow road from the Orient

Gunpowder was invented in China, probably in the ninth century, and the recipe for the mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur that is the basis of gunpowder was known in China by the eleventh century. The Chinese used gunpowder for fireworks, for rockets, for military purposes, and for the celebrated flamethrower, the huǒqiú, of the Wujing Zongyao of 1044. The knowledge of gunpowder spread westward along the Silk Road, and by the thirteenth century it was known in the Islamic world. The Arabic treatise of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the Muqaddimah, contains a section on gunpowder warfare that is a generation ahead of the European knowledge.

The first European use of gunpowder weapons is usually dated to the 1320s, in the context of the Italian wars of the period, in the work of the condottieri of the Trecento. The German cities of Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Cologne developed cannon in the 1380s, and the German master gunners, who were famous for their craft, were to dominate the European art of artillery for the next century. The first certain use of cannon in France is dated to 1338, in the siege of Puy-Guillaume; the first in England, to 1346, in the army of Edward III.

The early cannons were clumsy and dangerous. They were made of wrought iron, bound with hoops, and they were prone to explode; the powder was liable to detonate prematurely. The earliest cannon-balls were stone, and the powder-charge was small; the effect on the masonry of the castle was less than the effect of the conventional siege-engines. The advantage of the cannon, however, was its predictability: the gunner could aim it with reasonable accuracy, and the cost of operation was not much more than the cost of a trebuchet. By the 1370s the new guns were a recognisable feature of European warfare.

The first European guns

The European guns of the 1340s were large, heavy, and expensive. The bombard, a short, stubby weapon, was the typical form; the powder was loaded from the muzzle, and the projectile was a stone ball of perhaps 50 to 100 pounds. The English used such weapons at the siege of Cambrai in 1339, at the siege of Tournai in 1340, and at the siege of Calais in 1346–1347. The French, by the 1370s, had developed a substantial artillery, and Charles V was using guns in his reconquest of the lost territories between 1369 and 1380.

The evolution of the gunpowder weapon in the fourteenth century was, however, more interesting than the bombard. The hand-cannon, a small weapon held by the gunner, appeared in the 1380s; the veuglaire, a lighter gunner-portable piece, was in use in the 1390s. The crossbow, the long-standing enemy of the mounted knight, was itself improved in the 1370s with the introduction of the steel bow, the windlass, and the stirrup. The combination of the longbow and the crossbow with the new gunpowder weapons was, in the 1380s and 1390s, a real revolution in the arming of the European infantry.

The first European treatise on artillery, the Bellicorum instrumentorum liber of Conrad Kyeser (c. 1405), is a compendium of the art. Kyeser, a canon of Eichstätt, was a working gunner; his book is a manual of the practice, with drawings of the weapons, the powder-mixtures, and the gunner-shelters. The treatise is the first systematic treatment of the new art.

The death of Salisbury at Orléans

The first great demonstration of the effectiveness of gunpowder in the Hundred Years’ War came in 1428. The English, having decided to finish the conquest of the Loire, were laying siege to Orléans, the last great city in central France still loyal to the dauphin. The English army, under the command of Thomas, Earl of Salisbury, brought with it a substantial train of artillery, including the great bombard Le Passe-Volant, and a number of smaller cannon.

On 27 October 1428, as Salisbury was looking over the walls of the city from a window of the bastide of the Tourelles, a stone shot from a French cannon on the city wall passed through the window and struck him. The earl, mortally wounded, was carried from the field and died three days later, on 30 October. The chronicler of the Journal du Siège d’Orléans recorded the event; the modern historian Philippe Contamine has argued that it was the first recorded killing of a major commander by a cannon-ball. The death of Salisbury was, in short, a symbolic moment: the first English commander of the war to fall to a gunpowder weapon.

The siege of Orléans, which the English resumed in the summer of 1429, was also a moment of gunpowder history. The French guns, now in the hands of Jean Bureau and the king’s artillery, played a critical role in the defence. The English guns, while substantial, were not able to break the city walls. The siege was lifted on 8 May 1429, by the army of the dauphin and Joan of Arc, and the English army withdrew.

Castillon, 1453: the new battle

The final great demonstration of the effectiveness of gunpowder in the Hundred Years’ War came at the Battle of Castillon on 17 July 1453. The English army, under the command of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was marching to relieve the French siege of Castillon-sur-Dordogne. The French army, under the command of the constable Jean Bureau, was drawn up in a strong position behind a line of earthworks, and was supported by a substantial artillery train, including 300 guns of various calibres, many of them bombards cast in the foundries of the Meuse and Berry.

Talbot, finding the French position too strong to assault by storm, attempted a reconnaissance. He was beaten off; he was reinforced; he attacked again; he was beaten off again. The French, with their superior artillery, were able to break the English charges at a distance, and the English army, with its longbowmen, was unable to close. The English army was destroyed. Talbot was killed, his son Sir John Talbot was killed, and the English losses were catastrophic. The war came to an end, and Castillon became the model of a new kind of battle: the standing army, the dug-in position, the superiority of the cannon.

The battle of Castillon is sometimes seen as a milestone in the military revolution. The French victory demonstrated that the new gunpowder weapons had become an essential part of the European military arsenal, and it laid the foundations for the further development of artillery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The work of the Bureau brothers, who directed the French artillery between 1439 and 1465, was a real innovation: the first state-run artillery arm in European history, financed by a special tax, the grenier à poudre, and directed by professional gunners.

The cost of powder: warfare and the fiscal state

The introduction of gunpowder was an important element in the transformation of the European state. The new weapons were more expensive than the old ones: a single bombard might cost the equivalent of 200 to 500 crowns, and a small train of guns could absorb a substantial portion of a state’s annual revenue. The state had to organise the production of gunpowder, the casting of cannons, the training of gunners, and the supply of ammunition. The cost of war increased dramatically, and the state had to develop new systems of taxation and administration to pay for it.

The French case is the most striking. Charles VII (1422–1461) was the first French king to make the new taxes of the taille and the aides permanent, and the new institutions of the Élection and the Généralité, the regional fiscal agencies, were developed in the 1440s. The Compagnies d’ordonnance of 1445, fifteen companies of a hundred lances, were the first permanent French standing army. The state, in short, was a product of the war; and the war was a product of the new weapons. The art of the gunner, in the work of Jean Bureau, was the first European art of military administration.

The introduction of gunpowder also had effects on the European balance of power. The new weapons, which favoured the larger and more centralised states, gradually displaced the smaller and more fragmented ones. The result was a long process of state-formation that produced the great European powers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The Hundred Years’ War, which began as a war of longbow and crossbow, ended as a war of cannon. The change, as Geoffrey Parker argued in The Military Revolution (1988), was one of the most important in the history of warfare.

References and further reading

  • Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
  • Kelly DeVries, Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1992), and Gunpowder in Medieval Warfare (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012).
  • Philippe Contamine, Guerre, État et société à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: École pratique des hautes études, 1972).
  • Jean-Pierre Adam, Le château de Vincennes (Paris: CNRS, 1989), and his essay on the bricole in Revue archéologique.
  • Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).