- Ponting, Clive.
Gunpowder.
London: Pimlico, 2005.
ISBN 1-84413-543-8.
-
When I was a kid, we learnt in history class that gunpowder had
been discovered in the thirteenth century by the English Franciscan
monk Roger Bacon, who is considered one of the founders of Western
science. The Chinese were also said to have known of gunpowder,
but used it only for fireworks, as opposed to the
applications in the fields of murder and mayhem the
more clever Europeans quickly devised.
In The
Happy Turning (July 2003),
H. G. Wells
remarked that “truth has a way of heaving up through
the cracks of history”, and so it has been with the
origin of gunpowder, as recounted here.
It is one of those splendid ironies that gunpowder,
which, along with its more recent successors, has contributed
to the slaughter of more human beings than any other invention
with the exception of government, was discovered in the 9th
century
A.D.
by Taoist alchemists in China who were searching for an
elixir of immortality (and, in fact, gunpowder
continued to be used as a medicine in China for centuries
thereafter). But almost as soon as the explosive potential of
gunpowder was discovered, the Chinese began to apply it to
weapons and, over the next couple of centuries had invented
essentially every kind of firearm and explosive weapon which
exists today.
Gunpowder is not a high explosive; it does not detonate in a
supersonic shock wave as do substances such as nitroglycerine and TNT,
but rather deflagrates, or burns rapidly, as the heat of
combustion causes the release of the oxygen in the nitrate compound in
the mix. If confined, of course, the rapid release of gases and heat
can cause a container to explode, but the rapid combustion of
gunpowder also makes it suitable as a propellant in guns and rockets.
The early Chinese formulations used a relatively small amount of
saltpetre (potassium nitrate), and were used in incendiary weapons
such as fire arrows, fire lances (a kind of flamethrower), and
incendiary bombs launched by catapults and trebuchets. Eventually the
Chinese developed high-nitrate mixes which could be used in explosive
bombs, rockets, guns, and cannon (which were perfected in China long
before the West, where the technology of casting iron did not
appear until two thousand years after it was known in China).
From China, gunpowder technology spread to the Islamic world,
where bombardment by a giant cannon contributed to
the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire. Knowledge
of gunpowder almost certainly reached Europe via contact with
the Islamic invaders of Spain. The first known European
document giving its formula, whose disarmingly candid Latin title
Liber Ignium ad Comburendos Hostes
translates to “Book of Fires for the Burning of
Enemies”, dates from about 1300 and contains a number
of untranslated Arabic words.
Gunpowder weapons soon became a fixture of European warfare, but
crude gun fabrication and weak powder formulations initially limited
their use mostly to huge siege cannons which launched large stone
projectiles against fortifications at low velocity. But as weapon
designs and the strength of powder improved, the balance in siege
warfare shifted from the defender to the attacker, and the
consolidation of power in Europe began to accelerate.
The author argues persuasively that gunpowder played an essential part
in the emergence of the modern European state, because the
infrastructure needed to produce saltpetre, manufacture gunpowder
weapons in quantity, equip, train, and pay ever-larger standing armies
required a centralised administration with intrusive taxation and
regulation which did not exist before. Once these institutions were
in place, they conferred such a strategic advantage that the ruler was
able to consolidate and expand the area of control at the expense of
previously autonomous regions, until coming up against another
such “gunpowder state”.
Certainly it was gunpowder weapons which enabled Europeans
to conquer colonies around the globe and eventually
impose their will on China, where centuries of political
stability had caused weapons technology to stagnate by
comparison with that of conflict-ridden Europe.
It was not until the nineteenth century that other explosives
and propellants discovered by European chemists brought
the millennium-long era of gunpowder a close. Gunpowder
shaped human history as have few other inventions. This
excellent book recounts that story from gunpowder's
accidental invention as an elixir to its replacement by
even more destructive substances, and provides a perspective on
a thousand years of world history in terms of the weapons with
which so much of it was created.
January 2007 