Firearms

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FIREARMS

FIREARMS. Firearms first emerged through Chinese alchemical experimentation, which produced gunpowder explosives by the ninth century and gradually developed early gunpowder weapons technologies. Gunpowder mixtures and weapons slowly diffused throughout Eurasia over Chinese trading networks, but contemporary political, cultural, and technical conditions inhibited firearms' impact on the practice of war. When gunpowder was introduced in Europe in the late medieval period, firearms began to change European warfare radically.

FIREARMS AND LATE MEDIEVAL WARFARE

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europeans developed relatively inexpensive methods of manufacturing gunpowder, producing stable powder mixtures, and forging large siege guns, often known as bombards. These guns fired immense stone shot weighing hundreds of pounds, and their gunners personified them, giving them names such as Mons Meg and Pumhart von Steyr. When employed in sieges, bombards could pummel medieval walls and towers into ruin, allowing attacking soldiers to storm fortifications, if the town or castle did not surrender first. Late medieval sieges are often remembered for Shakespeare's dramatic rendering of Henry V's siege of Harfleur and the theatrical king's appeal for his soldiers to head "once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more." The Elizabethan playwright prudently avoided mention of the powerful French royal siege train that battered English castles in Aquitaine and northern France and ultimately produced the French victory in the Hundred Years' War of 1337–1453.

Outside of siege operations, firearms initially had little impact on late medieval warfare. Late medieval artillery pieces were heavy and difficult to move, so these firearms were not practical for battles in open plains. Most medieval infantry and cavalry continued to use a variety of handheld personal weapons, and the emergence of coherent infantry pike squares, especially in Flanders and in the Swiss cantons, had a much stronger effect on fifteenth-century warfare than did handheld firearms. While a few late medieval soldiers employed hand cannon—early experiments in infantry firearms—crossbows and longbows represented the most significant infantry projectile weapons throughout the fifteenth century. These weapons systems could deliver their arrows or bolts with great force and accuracy, but the slow-loading, delicate mechanisms used in crossbows and the social technology, including intensive muscular training, necessary to fire long-bows ensured that firearms would eventually replace them.

RENAISSANCE FIREARMS AND THE EMERGENCE OF EARLY MODERN WARFARE

European royalty and nobles rapidly adopted firearms and promoted their use. All of the "renaissance monarchs" of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries recognized the dramatic power of siege artillery. Renaissance artillery was so crucial to the latter stages of the Reconquista in Spain that Weston F. Cook's study refers to the "cannon conquest" of Granada. Ottoman emperors recognized the devastating potential of siege artillery and sponsored the forging of immense artillery pieces. The Ottoman army of Mehmed II besieged Constantinople in 1453 and used immense artillery pieces firing stones to bash the city's famous walls, which had long been considered impregnable. Mughal armies employed firearms and artillery in their swift conquest of northern India in the early sixteenth century. Renaissance armies also used tunneling operations to plant large gunpowder mines beneath fortifications and then to detonate them.

Renaissance engineers experimented with a variety of new fortification designs intended to respond to the threat of the powerful siege artillery of the fifteenth century. Medieval round towers could be modified to serve as platforms for defensive artillery, and walls could be reinforced to protect against besiegers' guns. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many rulers constructed new artillery towers to maximize the potential of artillery to defend towns and strategic sites. Many fortification experiments were more pragmatic and improvised, however. Defenders relied on earthworks, ditches, and outworks to disrupt besiegers' attacks and keep enemy siege artillery at a distance—especially during the Italian Wars of 1494 to 1559, which provided an impetus for rapid military developments.

BASTIONED FORTIFICATIONS AND SIEGE TACTICS

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, military engineers in Italy began to transform the pragmatic earthwork fortification techniques into a system of bastioned fortifications, the trace italienne. These fortifications were often known as "star forts" because of the pointed protruding bastions and the regular diamond or pentagonal plans of many bastioned citadels. The defenses are perhaps more properly referred to as artillery fortifications because the real defensive mechanism of the fortification system was artillery firepower. The mutually supporting bastions created well-protected firing platforms for guns, which could use interlocking lines of sight to create devastating crossfire on besieging forces. Printed treatises with complex plans and diagrams communicated the architectural principles of the trace italienne, and bastioned fortifications multiplied quickly through Europe between the 1500s and 1550s. Strategic concerns and prestige competition combined to pressure monarchies, small principalities, and cities to build expensive bastioned fortifications, brimming with artillery. The enormous costs of forging artillery, digging trenches, constructing fortifications, and maintaining garrisons meant that fortress building often required noble and state patronage, and sometimes produced financial exhaustion or serious political ramifications.

The new artillery fortifications were not impregnable, but they often forced long, costly sieges. The newly refortified city of Siena, for example, succumbed to a siege in 1555, but only after a sustained attack against the vigorous Sienese and French defenders. Taking a fortress defended by artillery involved envelopment operations, followed by a laborious process of digging approach trench systems and siting batteries of siege artillery. Often, months of digging and mining activities had to be endured before besiegers could breach the defenses of an artillery fortress. Then, if the defenders still refused to surrender, costly assaults had to be launched by besieging infantry.

NEW ARMIES

Fighting campaigns that involved sieges of artillery fortifications encouraged European infantry to adopt harquebus firearms as their principal projectile weapons and produced new armies. Harquebus firearms used a matchlock system—composed of a serpentine mechanism, which held a slow-burning match that would ignite gunpowder in the barrel—to fire the weapon's lead ball. Projectiles fired through a harquebus's smoothbore barrel took erratic trajectories, making the weapon highly inaccurate. To be effective, the harquebus had to be used at close range by groups of harquebusiers, soldiers who specialized in using the weapon, firing together. Infantry who used the harquebus in combat were highly vulnerable, though, since their weapon required numerous, complex movements to reload. Further, using the firearms proved highly dangerous, since infantrymen had to use individual doses of gunpowder, usually carried in pouches suspended from bandoliers around the soldier's chest; sparks from the slow-burning match could touch off one of the doses of gunpowder on one's own (or a neighboring soldier's) bandolier, producing an explosion. The transformations of armies did not just involve technological changes, but also organizational changes. Spanish tercios (infantry regiments) and other new armies increasingly relied on the coordination of infantry using firearms to avoid accidents, and on the support from pikemen who could protect harquebusiers while reloading.

While the growing numbers and importance of infantry in warfare might suggest that European nobles' prominence in military systems was threatened, firearms did not lead to the end of noble participation in warfare. Nobles remained in elite cavalry units and some noble horsemen developed caracole tactics, using complex rotating maneuvers to fire their delicate wheel-lock pistols in succession. Other nobles became officers, commanding infantry units and capitalizing on the new armies' demands for military leadership, experience, and firearms expertise. Swiss mercenaries, German Landsknechts, and other stipendiary troops were led by noble and non-noble military elites, who attempted to profit from warfare as military entrepreneurs, known as condottiere in Italy. Military enterprisers recruited, outfitted, and trained their infantry and engaged in conflicts throughout Europe.

The many long conflicts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave ample opportunities for the new armies to demonstrate their power. The Habsburgs' firearms-based armies waged seemingly interminable warfare against Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, in Hungary, and even at the gates of Vienna, which endured long sieges in 1529 and 1683. Emperor Charles V launched campaigns against the Ottomans in the Mediterranean and in North Africa that relied heavily on artillery. Religious divisions between Protestants and Catholics fueled conflicts and intensified hatreds between contending armies beginning with the wars of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany. A militant French Protestant minority in France successfully raised powerful armies during the French Wars of Religion of 1562–1629, but Catholic forces' superiority in artillery and numbers gradually wore down the French Protestant cause. Catholic Spanish rulers used tercio armies in their attempts to suppress the Dutch Revolt of 1566–1648. The Protestant Dutch forces led by Maurice of Nassau began to develop new techniques of military discipline, drill, and linear tactics to increase the firepower of their infantry units. These trends were reinforced by the advent of the matchlock musket—essentially a larger, more powerful version of the harquebus—which was such a heavy and clumsy weapon that infantry had to use a forked rest to support the barrel when aiming and firing it.

The internationalization of the Thirty Years' War, which engulfed central Europe between 1618 and 1648, ensured that firearms techniques and developments were shared and spread throughout Europe. Near-constant warfare produced a widespread proliferation of firearms that allowed many people to have firearms in their homes. European nobles and monarchs built up huge arms collections, such as Louis XIII's personal armory. It is no surprise that contemporary artists heavily emphasized camp scenes and military imagery in their works. Imperial, Spanish, Catholic League, Protestant Union, Swedish, and French armies crisscrossed Germany, wreaking devastation. Jacques Callot's Miseries of War portrayed the brutalities of seventeenth-century warfare, which often involved conflicts between peasants and soldiers, in addition to more conventional battles and sieges. The most horrifying atrocities involved the sacking of cities after sieges. Contemporaries referred to the "law of the siege," a set of conventions over military practices that allowed besieging armies to pillage towns that refused to surrender when a breach was made in their walls. Rampaging troops pillaged numerous towns in the war zone, and General Tilly's army utterly destroyed the German city Magdeburg after a siege in 1631. Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish army perhaps utilized firearms most effectively, but all of the armies fighting in the Thirty Years' War began to use smaller, more mobile guns extensively as field artillery, which could support infantry in pitched battles. The immense financial and human costs of warfare gradually exhausted all of the states involved in the continuing warfare, leading to the famous compromise Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

THE MILITARY REVOLUTION AND EUROPEAN STATE DEVELOPMENT

The most important interpretive framework for assessing the impact of firearms on early modern European history has been the much-debated concept of a "military revolution." Michael Roberts, whose famous essay is reprinted in The Military Revolution Debate, originally articulated the notion of revolutionary changes in firearms tactics, strategy, the scale of warfare, and administrative demands that reshaped European military practices, states, and societies between 1560 and 1660. Geoffrey Parker and other historians have since adopted the concept of a "military revolution" but used it in radically different ways: debates have erupted over the periodization, dynamics, and development of the "military revolution," and even over whether it existed at all. All of the competing notions of a military revolution support the notion that "war made the state and the state made war." Governments invested in organizational and bureaucratic developments to support and supply their armies' "hungry guns" with firearms and gunpowder. Spanish armies used garrisons in Milan and the elaborate transportation system of the Spanish Road to supply their troops. Successive French monarchs patronized and updated the Arsenal at Paris, which manufactured, organized, and supplied French royal artillery throughout the early modern period. States began to develop permanent standing armies, despite some politicized debates questioning the wisdom of such structures. Growing armies and burgeoning state bureaucracies went hand in hand, especially in Louis XIV's France.

The "military revolution" also clearly had global implications. Military changes that began prominently in Europe and the Mediterranean diffused throughout the world as a result of early modern European imperialism and mercantilism. Spanish conquistadores used artillery and European siege tactics to conquer cities like Tenochtitlán (Mexico). Dutch and Portuguese fortifications at ports in Morocco, Goa, and Indonesia secured their trading networks. While the techniques developed in the "military revolution" allowed European states to extend empires over broad areas of the globe, some non-Western states and regions, such as Japan, China, and the Mughal Empire, developed ways of using firearms and fortifications that aided them in resisting European expansion.

At sea, however, the naval dimensions of the military revolution allowed European ships to dominate all of the world's oceans by the beginning of the seventeenth century. European shipbuilders had begun to adopt artillery as early as the fifteenth century. Venice's naval Arsenal, which dated from the medieval period, was reorganized to outfit and supply Venetian ships with artillery. The sixteenth century saw the development of the heavily armed sailing ship, or galleon, which packed dozens of guns into multiple decks to produce firepower that no other type of ship could match. Galleons carried gold and silver from mines in the Americas to Spain, but equally well-armed Dutch fleets and English privateers preyed upon them. The Spanish Armada of 1588 showcased battles between two competing designs of galleons. Galleons allowed fleets to pound ports into submission around the world, unless they were well defended by artillery fortifications. State-sponsored permanent navies developed during the seventeenth century, preparing the way for the refined ships of the line and linear naval warfare of the eighteenth century.

FIREARMS CULTURE AND MODERNITY

Rulers, nobles, and municipalities used fireworks and firearms in city entries, displays, processions, and ceremonies. Militants participating in Catholic League processions in Paris brandished firearms in the late sixteenth century, and municipal festivities at the city's Hôtel de Ville frequently employed cannonades of artillery. Elite corps of musketeers and bodyguards including the gardes françaises of Louis XIII, Russian streltsy, and Ottoman Janissaries demonstrated rulers' fascination with firearms.

Firearms shaped European popular imagination in the early modern period as well. Fears of the explosive power of gunpowder animated the English public's responses to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, while the awesome force of the "infernal machines" (fireships packed with explosives) used by the Dutch against Spanish besiegers at Antwerp in 1585 frightened soldiers throughout Europe. The need to produce firearms inspired new research, knowledge, and techniques. Artists and artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Michelangelo Buonarroti developed designs for fortifications and experimental weapons. Galileo Galilei and many of the leading early modern scientists performed chemical and ballistics experiments related to firearms and fortifications. The horrifying wounds caused by firearms stimulated anatomical research and new medical techniques. The proto-industrial production of gunpowder, firearms, and instruments for siege warfare employed artisans throughout Europe.

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought subtle refinements and increasing systemization of military changes that had begun earlier. Transitions in infantry weaponry to flintlock muskets and bayonets represented mere technological fine-tuning, simplifying arms procurement, logistical services, drill, and discipline. The Enlightenment brought an increasingly technical, "scientific" approach to firearms production and use, reflected in the military articles in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Military intellectuals theorized military structures, emphasized precision, and introduced standardization. Throughout the early modern period, military vocabulary related to firearms infused modern languages: "half-cocked," "first-rate," and "martinet" were just a few of the words that emerged from early modern military practices. The expanding process of industrialization, coupled with the social dimensions of the American and French revolutions, would quickly transform modern warfare as the mechanization of firearms exponentially increased firepower and the scale of destruction in the nineteenth century.

See also Military ; Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Thomas F. The Renaissance at War. London, 2001.

Black, Jeremy. War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450–2000. New Haven, 1998.

Contamine, Philippe. War in the Middle Ages. Translated by Michael Jones. Oxford, 1984.

Cook, Weston F., Jr. "The Cannon Conquest of Nasrid Spain and the End of the Reconquista," Journal of Military History 57, no. 1 (Jan. 1993): 43–70.

——. The Hundred Years' War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World. Boulder, Colo., 1994.