Let's say gunpowder reached Europe some 500 years earlier than it did IOTL. What would have been the biggest differences during this period?
The Medieval world with wide-spread gun powder
- Thread starter Mitchell Hundred
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That wouldn't be possible, I'm afraid, save an earlier discovery in China.
See, gunpowder appeared in the XIIIth century in Europe, either trough Mongol or Arabo-Islamic transmission, while it was discovered in China in the VIIth century.
What you ask would mean that as soon it's invented in China, it's generalized in Europe.
Assuming, tough, it's invented earlier in China, much earlier, and reaches Europe in the VIIIth century, it would be largely unusable (except, maybe, to make noise).
Mettalurgic and chemilal technologies weren't develloped nearly enough to produce gunpowder artillery (IOTL, you had to wait the hydraulic hammer for that) and a broader use of distillation.
Even these would produce not that efficient weapons (IOTL, between the XIIIth and the XVth century, gunpowder artillery was essentially a psychological weapon), as long metal-working isn't developed enough to produce resistant stocks and fitting ammunition (bullets in stone are doing significantly less damage).
I find that to be an extremely telling exemple on how technological PoDs works : a single introduction rarely works by itself as it was interconnected with a whole technological and social context (I didn't dwell too much with that, but even a working device would have a relative hard time getting adopted : think that the stirrup wasn't widely used before the Xth century, while it was known at least two or three centuries before!)
See, gunpowder appeared in the XIIIth century in Europe, either trough Mongol or Arabo-Islamic transmission, while it was discovered in China in the VIIth century.
What you ask would mean that as soon it's invented in China, it's generalized in Europe.
Assuming, tough, it's invented earlier in China, much earlier, and reaches Europe in the VIIIth century, it would be largely unusable (except, maybe, to make noise).
Mettalurgic and chemilal technologies weren't develloped nearly enough to produce gunpowder artillery (IOTL, you had to wait the hydraulic hammer for that) and a broader use of distillation.
Even these would produce not that efficient weapons (IOTL, between the XIIIth and the XVth century, gunpowder artillery was essentially a psychological weapon), as long metal-working isn't developed enough to produce resistant stocks and fitting ammunition (bullets in stone are doing significantly less damage).
I find that to be an extremely telling exemple on how technological PoDs works : a single introduction rarely works by itself as it was interconnected with a whole technological and social context (I didn't dwell too much with that, but even a working device would have a relative hard time getting adopted : think that the stirrup wasn't widely used before the Xth century, while it was known at least two or three centuries before!)
There were tons of military uses for blackpowder before it was used in guns, though; the Song were using it in landmines, massed fire arrow batteries, 'thunder bombs' thrown by trebuchets and later bombards, and multistage rockets. It's quite a powerful weapon, even without its most efficient and destructive use.
Hmm, how about let's say Europe developed Gun powder independently from Byzantines trying to make a Panacea in the 750's (same way the Chinese found it) and is used for fireworks and small military things that make little difference but then it starts to be used for small bronze cannons, and so on from there.
Depending on when it's discovered it could completely reshape the Crusades and Reconquista.
The efficience of this would be really limited before other technological breaktrough : we know what primitive gunpowder with trebuchets and all looked like, because it's what happened historically between the XIIIth and XVth.
Suffice to say it was deemed unimpressive : mostly because medieval mettalurgic techniques weren't develloped enough to cast wollow projectiles in one piece. In matter of destructive power, better to just hurl a big rock onto walls.
Massed fire arrows batteries were definitely not about precision and went into random directions. While it was certainly useful for large armies gatherings as you did have in Chinese warfare, the overwelming defensive and siege part of medieval warfare would make it moot.
I point that it's not my viewpoint, but the results of the IOTL weapon known as pot-de-fer which was basically about hurling arrows thanks to gunpowder.
As for the "landmines" (basically, balls of iron full of powder, relied and ignited at some point) their use necessited a precise and well-timed organisation of the battlefield. It was not a static weapon, which wouldn't be that used in a medieval warfare where 3/4 of the fight was about siege.
And that's assuming you could cast these in one piece, as it was in chinese warfare.
I could see an earlier fougasse-like weapon, but for being efficient, you'd need mechanical devellopment going along.
You can't really expect putting a material as gunpowder into a society that doesn't have the technological means to use it efficiently, and have particularily important results.
There's a too much important lack in basic chemisty knowledge for that being possible. You'd need to wait at least until translations and exchanges with the Arabo-Islamic world for the gap being filled, as there's no way it's going to be develloped independently on the historical bases.
Byzantines might devellop it independently, probably without Arabo-Islamic invasions tough, but it think it would take a long time (Greek Fire didn't get develloped before a huge pressure was made on Byzzies), so clearly later than Chinese invention (giving that Mongol hegemony could get easily butterflied there, Chinese/Mediterranean transmission would probably not happen as IOTL tough)
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PhilippeO
Banned
Gunpowder, and good cannon developed from it will give advantage to Kings. local lords will be much weaker, and with stronger Kings, the Church might be weakened. Crusades and Reconquista might not happen at all, some Kings (like French Bourbon in Early Modern OTL) might instead ally with Muslims and fighting popes influence.
By who? Just a decade after Roger Bacon first described gunpowder in the west, the city arsenal at Yangzhou exploded; roof tiles were blown off thirty miles away, and beams the size of whole tree trunks were launched three miles.
One of the key reasons the Ming were able to defeat their rivals within the Red Turban rebellion was because they had the best gunpowder artillery officers, who, drawing on Song technology, compiled one of the first treatises on gunpowder weapons. Sure, cannons and muskets were ultimately the best use of the technology, but Chinese weren't just lighting off strings of firecrackers.
Ha, those silly Chinese didn't know anything about sieges! That's why the city walls of Xian are 50 feet thick, and remained practically indestructible into the 19th century!
Even without the metallurgy required for proper cannons, integrating gunpowder into the army's siege train would multiply their combat power; most sieges were resolved through negotiation, and gunpowder's ability to set camps and cities ablaze from a distance in short order (the intended use of the thunder bomb, mind) is a powerful card to play when demanding your enemy's surrender, if you don't just blast the wall down with explosives.
By the actual use of gunpowder artillery in medieval warfare. We have remains (pot-de-fer) being generally deemed unimpressive by everyone studying it.
I suggest you to read Philippe Contamine's War in the Middle Ages on this (on the third part of the book, specifically)
That a large arsenal where gunpowder was entierly gathered exploded and destroyed the building is irrelevant. (Unless arguing that gunpowder warfare should be about buildings rooms and gather all the powder, and then make it explode).
Quantities (as well as quality*) of powder in warfare are important would it be to be handled. If not, if overloaded for exemple, you're not destroying the ennemy : you're destroying you.
*Roughly, medieval gunpowder suffered from this, and you had to wait a broader use of distillation to have more refined variants.
I never said that : you're either not reading my post, or you're trying to pull a strawman.
Are you able to restrain yourself? If not, this discussion ends for what matters to me.
Summarizing my point : medieval warfare, contrary to Song warfare that much more involved large armies gathering (allowing non precise, but saturating weapons to be efficients), consisted essentially of sieges.
A large part of the weapons you described were fit for open battlefield, necessited a military organisation based on it (hence the importance of signaling in Chinese armies, which simply didn't existed as such for western armies at this point).
The first real defensive use of gunpowder in Europe necessited decisive mettalurgic discoveries, in order to not damage one's own positions.
Not only cannons : munitions, bombs, mines, etc. required to cast pieces in one same part.
This was clearly outside medieval possibilities, and using these with the ones that existed would have made these weapons either unefficient, or extremely dangerous for who would operate them without much damage on ennemies.
Contemporary military experts certainly didn't consider early gunpowder weapons unimpressive, or else they wouldn't have gone through all the trouble of manufacturing, storing, and weaponizing it in such staggering qualities.
My point is that you're completely wrong about the nature of Chinese warfare; the widespread use of massive rammed earth city walls and siege engines indicates that warfare in China was also heavily siege focused, as was medieval European war. Even into the Taiping rebellion, most the war came down to Zeng Guofan laying siege after siege to the rebel strongholds along the Chang Jiang; in the Shanghai theater, even modern artillery was only really useful against the gates of Chinese walls.
Furthermore, the lower stress of being thrown from a trebuchet (as opposed to being packed tight against a gunpowder charge in the barrel of a cannon, mind) would allow for less sturdily built munitions; the punch comes from the gunpowder, not the shell, so a wrought iron thunder bomb could probably be made to work with some experimentation.
Adopting early gunpowder weapons would give a Early/High Medieval army sharp advantages in warfare, whether on the battlefield or in the siege lines.
My point is that you're completely wrong about the nature of Chinese warfare; the widespread use of massive rammed earth city walls and siege engines indicates that warfare in China was also heavily siege focused, as was medieval European war. Even into the Taiping rebellion, most the war came down to Zeng Guofan laying siege after siege to the rebel strongholds along the Chang Jiang; in the Shanghai theater, even modern artillery was only really useful against the gates of Chinese walls.
Furthermore, the lower stress of being thrown from a trebuchet (as opposed to being packed tight against a gunpowder charge in the barrel of a cannon, mind) would allow for less sturdily built munitions; the punch comes from the gunpowder, not the shell, so a wrought iron thunder bomb could probably be made to work with some experimentation.
Adopting early gunpowder weapons would give a Early/High Medieval army sharp advantages in warfare, whether on the battlefield or in the siege lines.
They didn't, actually. The crushing majority of medieval artillery up to the XVth century is mechanical.
Roughly, up to 1380's, the use of artillery in open field is largely unknown, and (quoting the mentioned above study) "even during the latter half of the XVth century, cannons only served episodically during fights".
As for siege warfare, massive use of gunpowder artillery is only tracable up to the first half of the XVth century. It's telling that the first tactical manuals only appears in the mid XVth.
It's due to many causes, almost all of them technological or technologically-related (such as cost of the powder)
We're talking of use of early gunpowder weaponry in medieval warfare, and comparing it to the use of early gunpowder artillery in chinese warfare.
Using Taiping exemple on the latter, is as relevant than using Franco-Prussian War as an exemple on how XIVth gunpowder armement was powerful.
Not that Song warfare didn't included a large siege warfare part, of course. But it wasn't nearly as predominant as it was for medieval warfare, neither as decisive.
Any TL or PoD about military aspects of the period have to include that or be largely implausible.
The problem isn't how it's hurled/launched, but the damage capacities.
You're right the punch doesn't come from the shell itself (altough there's exceptions), but the gunpowder and the shrapnel damages depends a lot from how it's packaged.
Zhen Tian Lei were cast iron spheres, filled with gunpowder and shards. In order to get an efficient explosion and dispersion, the package have to be reliable, and that alone isn't sufficient : the gunpowder quality is a huge factor as well.
A good ration of salpetre/sulfur/coal is 75/12/13, roughly. Medieval gunpowder ratios were variable, but didn't really approach that before the 1380's.
Furthermore, the efficiency comes as well from the grain of the powder, its homogeneity, and humidification. All of that took time to reach, and that's not until the XVth it became really understood, contrary to what happened in China.
Powder, furthermore, remained quite expensive up to the XVth century : during the siege of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte in 1375, only 3 pounds where used for the whole gunpowder artillery (roughly 32 pieces, of various size, most of them hurling shrapnel). The detonation power of these pieces were really limited.
You're comparing two warfares with their own huges differences, but only with a really important technological gap.
It was attempted IOTL, even somes launched trough modified crossbow. It generally fell into disuse, tough., as they were much more costly and less efficient than mechanical or basic weapons.
Most problems of an early/high medieval gunpowder can be essentially resumed as a technological gap , that can't be handwaived. You'll have as well the ideological issues, but let's not get into details and these would be more about delay than adaptability.
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In the West, you mean; in Song and Yuan China, gunpowder weapons were mass produced in a scale that wouldn't be seen in Europe for centuries. Qingzhou alone was producing in the neighborhood of two thousand thunder bombs a month, sending out great shipments of ten or twenty thousand at a time.
You fail to see the continuity at play in Chinese warfare; the fact that Song and Ming fortifications were still the decisive tools of warfare in the 1860s, with far more powerful weapons at play gives us a pretty strong clue that they were also decisive instruments when they were originally constructed, or else no one would have bothered, either with the walls themselves or with engines designed to attack them.
The purpose of the thunder bomb is to cause fires; fragmentation dispersion is a secondary concern at best. Being able to threaten a besieged city with incineration is a much more attractive proposition for a commander than actually having to break down the wall and storm the breach.
Such as it is, the costs still don't outweigh the long term benefits; every technology is expensive when first introduced, but gradually more efficient methods are hammered out and its use is expanded. Starting with smaller incendiaries, fire lances, fire arrows, etc, Europeans using the new weapons gain an advantage of their adversaries, and become more familiar with powder making and start to apply it to more ambitious designs, perhaps similar to those used in the contemporaneous Song Dynasty, since they too had extensive experience with siege warfare.
Yes, the whole discussion was about medieval early gunpowder usage, and how early introduction would encounter much technological problems if we want to see an earlier military use.
I'm not commenting on the quality of Chinese early gunpowder weaponry : I don't know much about it, except its technical advance compared to medieval early gunpowder weaponry.
My point is, basically, this one : an early gunpowder introduction in Europe isn't going to represent a qualitative jump. Medieval era simply lacks too much technological features to get weapons that are similar to the ones used by Song at the same period (and that appeared in Europe, IOTL, in the XIIIth century allowing to have something to look on about artillery relevance)
I'm sure there is. But I think you hold on too much on the structures continuity, and not enough on the differences in warfare trough different eras (there's, in Europe too, late medieval structures that went used up the XVIIIth/XIXth centuries. That's not enough room to argue in the absence of warfare differences).
Because structures remain in places doesn't mean military technology didn't changed (Mongol takeover, particularily, changed some things on the strategic tought on sieges).
It's hard to say : you have eventually too much conflicting descriptions (at the point Zhen Tian Lei describes probably different weapons after a time).
That said, thunder bomb as described there seems to be less about being incendiary than shrapnel.
And that's one of the differences with medieval warfare : winning a place was less about destroying it, than crushing its military capacities. (eventually controlling effectively the land), when Chinese fortifications were more focused on protecting populations gathering.
The threat to devastate the regions around the fortifications was generally more important to force the surrender of a fortification : if it didn't happened , it generally meant waiting either for a sortie or to bring the defense down.
Not, and I'm sorry to repeat myself there but I want it to be clear, that Chinese warfare didn't had an important siege part.
But for what matter medieval warfare, that's what's predominant and not usually involving large armies : making the use of saturation weapons relatively rare.
If there was just the cost issue, it would be indeed (relatively) easier. But mechanical artillery was simply less costly, more easily maintainable and more efficient until the XVth.
Again, I've to point that it did existed IOTL since the XIIIth century (earlier for inciendaries weaponry, that should be considered apart, tough).
Due to a lack of technological advance comparable to China's on this regard, an earlier introduction alone couldn't lead to much more than what existed in the XIIIth, as in unimpressive weaponry.
The problem isn't ambitious design, or poking around enough with powder to get used with, but that it's dependent on several discoveries that are unrelated to gunpowder (and almost all of these were transmitted from Arabo-Islamic world : distillation, hydraulic hammer, mettalurgic technics).
They weren't develloped first in Europe, and it's unlikely they will even if we handwave things enough for that gunpowder appears in VIIIth Europe : it's likely it would get mainly ignored without appearance of a structural support for (a bit like stirrup, if you will).
Let's be clear : high medieval technology is unable to turn gunpowder into a valuable weaponry. The gap is too great between XIth Song China and XIth Europe on this regard, and still was in the XIIIth century (it didn't get filled until the late XVth and XVIth).
I feel like we're running circles there, so you'll allow me to eventually answer points that I didn't adressed above (or to make only a passing remark) in the next posts to not overfill the thread.
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