138 • 9 FIREARMS, SLAVES, AND EMPIRESCarlo M. Cipolla's Guns, Sails, and Empires shows how the development of
gunpowder weapons and long-distance sailing ships enabled the Euro¬
peans to expand at the expense of the Muslim world in the sixteenth cen¬
tury. But the author also uses Turkish sources to show that some Muslim
armies used siege cannons and field artillery as early as the Western Chris¬
tians did, several centuries before the sixteenth.
The spread of gunpowder and firearms was as momentous a technologi¬
cal change at that time as the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been
since 1945. Gunpowder had been used in China for fireworks since the tenth
century, possibly earlier. It was being used as an incendiary device during
the Mongol era, spreading from northern China to Europe. By 1330 both
Christian and Muslim armies in Spain were loading gunpowder into can¬
nons in order to fire huge projectiles against enemy fortifications. The big
guns were too clumsy to do much harm to an enemy soldier, but they could
block a cavalry charge by injuring or frightening horses. During the four¬
teenth and fifteenth centuries, Italian and German gunsmiths were refining
these weapons. Bronze (easy to cast but very costly) gave way to iron, the di¬
ameters of the barrels were slowly standardized, and the weapons were
made easier to load and to move around. Simultaneous improvements were
being made in the related areas of mining, metallurgy, designing and assem¬
bling the component parts, harnessing draft animals, and building roads.
New methods of recruitment and training were devised to produce dis¬
ciplined corps of foot soldiers and sailors who could maintain and fire
these gunpowder weapons. Any European ruler who wanted to keep his
territory—or even to survive—had to obtain these new implements. Those
Muslim states that opposed Europe had also to acquire firearms. The amir
of Granada had them by 1330 and the Mamluks (although they used them
reluctantly) by 1365, but the greatest Muslim gunpowder state was the
Ottoman Empire.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIREOur tale begins with a humble Turkish principality located near Sogut, a
mountain village in northwest Anatolia. At the end of the thirteenth cen¬
tury it was one of several dozen such petty states, fragments of the once
mighty Rum Seljuk sultanate. The growth of this principality into a sprawl¬
ing empire, perhaps the greatest power of the sixteenth century, is an amaz¬
ing success story that has been told time and again. An ancient legend
traced the empire's origins to the Turkic Kayi tribe, whose members fled