The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600^81
defensive weapons involved the use of guns. The idea that the explo
sive power of gunpowder, if suitably confined, might be made to shoot
a projectile with previously unattainable force seems to have dawned
almost simultaneously upon European and Chinese artificers. At any
rate, the earliest drawings that clearly attest the existence of guns date
from 1326 in Europe and from 1332 in China. Both drawings portray
a vase-shaped vessel, armed with an oversized arrow that projects
from its mouth. This certainly suggests a single origin for the inven
tion, wherever it was actually made.^11
But even if the idea of guns as well as of gunpowder reached Europe
from China, the fact remains that Europeans very swiftly outstripped
the Chinese and every other people in gun design, and continued to
enjoy a clear superiority in this art until World War II. But Italians do
not ever appear to have attained the primacy as gunfounders that they
had enjoyed in crossbow manufacture and armor making, perhaps
because European guns quickly became giant tubes, weighing more
than a ton. This put Italians at a disadvantage, since they had to
import metal from the north, and overland portage was expensive.
Except in the case of untransportable objects, like the guns that bat
tered down Constantinople’s walls in 1453, it was easier to refine the
ore and to produce finished metal goods close beside the mining sites.
Italian metal workers therefore could not easily compete with gun
founders nearer the source of supply. Consequently as soon as guns
became critical weapons in war, Italian technical primacy in the arma
ments industry decayed.
Before considering the early development of gunpowder weapons,
it seems best to glance briefly at what had been happening north of the
Alps, where the feudal system, according to which a knight owed his
lord military service in return for a grant of income-producing land,
was much more firmly established than it had ever been in Italy.
When the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) began, the French king
still relied primarily on the infeudated chivalry of his kingdom to meet
and repel the English invaders,^12 though by the time of the Battle of
- Cf. L. Carrington Goodrich, “Early Cannon in China,” Isis 55 (1964): 193–95; L.
Carrington Goodrich and Feng Chia-sheng, “The Early Development of Firearms in
China,” Isis 36 (1946): 114–23; and Joseph Needham, “The Guns of Khaifengfu,”
Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1980. On early guns in Europe innumerable
books exist, of which O. F. G. Hogg, Artillery, Its Origin, Heyday, and Decline (London,
- is a worthy recent example.
- Feudal service had already been partially monetized by the fact that after a stated
period of time (usually forty days) the lord was expected or required to pay his knights a
daily allowance to permit them to remain under arms. Since the English remained in
France winter and summer, their arrival put an intolerable strain on traditional patterns
