Gunpowder Change Warfare

Abstract

Gunpowder seems to have been first invented by alchemists in ninth-century China, where the explosive began to be used in ceremonies and for limited military purposes. Thirteenth-century trade along the famous Silk Road then brought gunpowder to Europe and the Middle East, where it began to impact military practices significantly3. Gunpowder was quickly adopted by designer's of late medieval European war machines, and armies fighting in the Hundred Years' War soon employed early gunpowder cannon in sieges. European bell-founding techniques and processes probably influenced the early techniques of founding artillery pieces, which tended to be shaped like church bells. By the early fifteenth century, heavy bombards were being built that could shoot immense stone shot of 700 pounds or more against city walls. In this paper, we try to focus on the gunpowder. The paper will discuss how gunpowder changes warfare.

Gunpowder Change Warfare

Introduction

Gunpowder artillery strengthened the offensive capabilities of armies that could employ cannon in large numbers. Aragon and Castile employed a huge artillery train to accomplish a rapid “cannon conquest” of Granada in the fifteenth century and complete the reconquista1. Extensive use of siege artillery allowed French armies to seize many castles during the latter stages of the Hundred Years' War, contributing significantly to the ultimate French victory. The Ottoman imperial army used over seventy guns to batter the walls of Constantinople in 1453.

Discussion

Larger and more extensive military forces developed during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partly because of the pressures of gunpowder warfare. States began to use permanent units of soldiers armed in part with gunpowder weapons and led by military elites. By the early seventeenth century, infantry were using heavier, more powerful matchlock muskets6. These firearms required soldiers to carry forked rests to support the weight of muskets when aiming them, while new forms of military drill and discipline were developed to use them effectively. Seventeenth-century armies, such as Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish army in the Thirty Years' War, also used significant amounts of field artillery. States sometimes used their larger armies to man lines of fortifications, as in the Netherlands, where Calvinist Dutch forces mounted a largely successful defense of their towns against Spanish armies during the Dutch Revolt2.

Gunpowder radically transformed naval warfare in this period, as shipbuilders adapted naval vessels to the possibilities of firearm technologies. Although attempts had been made to use naval artillery for centuries, shipborne artillery only became really effective in the sixteenth century. New heavily armed sailing ships, known as galleons, resembled floating fortresses brimming with artillery. European states began to build up extensive naval forces in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to assert power and to protect shipping on key trading routes4.

The combination of galleons with the bastioned fortifications to control ports gave Europeans the key tools to build and sustain powerful maritime empires in the Americas and coastal trading posts in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. Galleons could easily withstand attack by other forms of naval vessels, giving European maritime power a great advantage over ...