The Business of War in Europe. 1000–1600 87iron guns.^17 Prior to that time, access to copper and tin was of vital
strategic importance to the rulers of the world.
Economic patterns registered this fact. The importance of central
European copper and silver mines increased sharply, for example. The
burst of prosperity in south Germany, Bohemia, and adjacent regions
in the late fifteenth century reflected a mining boom in those parts of
Europe; so did the financial empire raised by the Fuggers and other
south German bankers, who briefly rivaled older Italian centers for
managing large-scale interregional economic enterprises.^18 A similar
period of economic effervescence in the West Country of England was
related to intensified exploitation of the Cornish tin mines. Likewise,
Japanese copper and Malayan tin became critically important when the
sovereign value of bronze artillery became apparent to the rulers of
India and the Far East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The substitution of iron for bronze and brass cannon eventually
undercut central Europe’s mining prosperity. Cheap silver from the
New World began to compete with the products of European mines at
almost exactly the same time that copper mining was affected by the
appearance of cheaper gunmetal. But the setback in central Europe
was offset by gains elsewhere. England in the sixteenth and Sweden in
the seventeenth century profited most directly from the new im
portance of iron in cannon making. The political and military history
of Europe turned to some degree on these facts.
Long before the second bronze age came to a close, gun design
underwent a second major advance. The bombards of the mid
fifteenth century were so big (often thirty inches or more in diameter
and twelve to fifteen feet long) that they could be moved only with the
greatest difficulty. The cannon that breached Constantinople’s walls in
1453, for example, were cast on the spot, since it was easier to bring
the raw materials to the scene of action and build the necessary fur
naces and molds outside the walls than it would have been to move the
finished guns. However powerful their discharge, the immobility of
such giant weapons was a serious handicap and an obvious challenge to
gunfounders.
Between 1465 and 1477 an arms race between France and Bur
gundy^19 provided artisans and rulers with means and motive to invent
a practical solution to the problem. The gunfounders of the Low
Countries and France discovered that much smaller weapons could do
- Maurice Daumas, éd., Histoire générale des techniques (Paris, 1965), 2:493.
- Cf. Léon Louis Schick, Un grand homme d'affaires au début du XVIe siècle: Jacob
Fugger (Paris, 1957), pp. 8–27. - A convenient shorthand to refer to the territories gathered together by dukes of
Burgundy between 1363 and 1477. The Low Countries constituted the richest part of