Since the introduction of gunpowder into Europe, it has gone on to dominate warfare into the twentieth century. With the development of the first European guns in the fourteenth century, armies were given use of a weapon which was to radically deepen most of the ways of making war which had been established during the lay Ages, and changes began to be seen within only a few years. It is, however, suspect whether the nature of these early changes constituted a revolution in the methods of war, and even more so whether guns had by 1500 made a great deal of impact on the character of war as it had existed in 1300. In assessing whether a revolution had taken place (or at least whether one was in the wreak of happening) by 1500, it is necessary to examine three areas: the effectiveness of guns during the check; the extent of their use in conflicts; and finally the changes which resulted from the employment of the unused weapons in war.
The first reliable sources which assert the existence of guns appeared in the 1320s, and from the late 1330s the number of references to them rose dramatically.
The early guns were of large bore and used almost exclusively for sieges, although as early as Crécy in 1346, the English fired off more or less cannons which they had brought to the battle to frighten the Genoese. Guns were made in one of both ways. Firstly, there were cast metal guns, usually of bronze, which were made at the foundry. These were usually the better weapons because they were made of a single instalment of metal and therefore were less likely to burst by on firing. The second method was arranging wrought press out strips into tubes which were then bound together with iron...
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