98 Chapter Three
great effort to cast guns on the spot, as Babur (1526–30) did, or else to
haul them overland, as his grandson Akbar (1566–1605) did. But in
each of these states, even in those immediately abutting upon western
Europe, once a decisive advantage accrued to central authorities
through the use and monopolization of heavy guns, further spontane
ous improvements in gunpowder weapons ceased. Rulers had come
into possession of what obviously seemed to be an ultimate weapon,
however difficult it might sometimes be for heavy artillery to be
brought to bear in a given locality. There was little incentive to exper
iment with new devices. On the contrary, anything that might tend to
make existing artillery pieces obsolete must have seemed wantonly
wasteful and potentially dangerous to those in power.
In western Europe, on the contrary, improvements in weapons de
sign continued to be eagerly sought after. Whenever anything new
really worked, it spread from court to court, shop to shop, and camp
to camp with quite extraordinary rapidity. Not surprisingly, therefore,
the equipment and training of European armed forces soon began to
outstrip those of other parts of the civilized world. Western Europe’s
emerging battlefield superiority became apparent to the Ottoman
Turks in the war of 1593–1606, when, for the first time, Turkish
cavalry met disciplined infantry gunfire.^27 The Russians discovered a
similar gap between themselves and their neighbors to the west in the
course of the Livonian war (1557–82).^28 Asian states only discovered
the discrepancy later. By that time the gap between their own military
skill and that of the Europeans had become much greater than was the
case at the turn of the seventeenth century—often too great to be
bridged successfully without first submitting to foreign invasion and
conquest. Europe’s extraordinary global imperialism of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries became possible as a result.
In this connection it is worth pointing out that in most of Asia the
second bronze age, like the first, gave military power to a small body
of foreigners who ruled over subject populations by virtue of their
control over a sovereign weapon of war—chariots supported by
fortified encampments in the first case, cannon backed up by cavalry in
the second. It is true that Ming China and Tokugawa Japan departed
from this pattern; but when China came under Manchu rule (1644–
1912), it too came to be governed by a small ruling stratum of foreign
- Halil Inalcik, “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Firearms in the
Middle East,” in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds., War, Technology and Society in the
Middle East (London, 1975), pp. 199–200.
- Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), pp.
152–68.
