"In Real Life, gunpowder and derivative inventions have existed since the High Middle Ages."
While that holds true for China, it does not seem the case for Europe, which is really what we're talking about when we refer to a "Middle Age" - the rest of the world doesn't really match the Western system of ages until the beginning of the Modern Age around 1450. According to The Other Wiki, the earliest reference is in 1261, after the High Middle Ages ended in 1250, and it further notes:
"Scholars suggest that the lack of gunpowder weapons in a well-traveled Venetian's catalogue for a new crusade in 1321 implies that guns were unknown in Europe up until this point. From the 1320s guns spread rapidly across Europe."
It generally seems that the 1320s, and 1326 in particular, were when guns first were acquired in Europe, well into the Late Middle Ages, and even longer when we consider the first use in battle:
"The Battle of Crécy in 1346 was one of the first in Europe where cannons were used."
So, historically, guns were unknown in Europe until about 1260, nobody had them until 1320, and hardly anyone used them until 1340-1350.
Now, I know I should simply fix things, but this seems to contradict the general thrust of the entire article (that guns existed for significant time frames in Medieval Europe), considering they were essentially only around for the second half of the Late Middle Ages.
Edited by Callid Hide / Show Replies
I thought this trope was about use/non-use of firearms in medieval fantasy fiction - unless I am mistaken, real-life examples are by definition off-topic. Removed:
- Feudal Japan adopted firearms and cannon shortly after contact with the Portuguese. They used them in warfare amongst themselves and with foreign powers (for which see Ran), and even made some modifications of their own. After that, they stopped, because the solidified Shogunate liked the way things were before guns, when a warrior class meant something. They managed to keep the whole gun business under tight wraps for over two hundred years. Then Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay with his "black ships" and the prohibition quickly came to end. Most Edo Period armies still included guns — but the Shogunate placed restrictions on who could have armies, where before, there had been all kinds of irregulars, militias, and warrior monks running around. Also, the martial art of iaido (Quick Draw) became popular because it let a swordsman get close to a gunner with his sword still sheathed, negating the range advantage before the opponent realized he was a threat.
- To clarify, the Shogunate restricted firearms so they could control them and make sure that only their supporters would have regular access to them. It didn't have to do with warrior class, but monopoly of force.
- The Chinese, the very people who invented the whole shebang: gunpowder, guns, bombs, rockets, stagnated in their development by the 1700's. By the late 19th century, they were still using matchlock firearms alongside polearms and crossbows. Reasons why one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world suddenly declined in progress remains debatable to this day. General consensus seems to hold that the Chinese somehow intentionally repressed their development, while others point to a superstitious approach to scientific research.
- One source puts this down to not inventing glass: Famous tea-drinkers, they went with porcelain (china) cups forever, while Europeans used glass vessels to store their wine etc. Glass is of course used to make lenses for spectacles and magnifying glasses, as well as other scientific advancements that China never invented.
- It is not that hard to come up with a plausible explanation. The Chinese by the 1700s were more or less unified under the Manchu Qing Dynasty and lacking enemies with similar sizes and strength as it was (at that time anyway), it was no wonder that they paid little attention in improving their existing military technology. Europe, on the other hand, was wrecked by constant warfare amongst relatively equal powers (which changed over the years). The 1700s for example include the infamous Seven Years' War. And it was in such a context did military technology advanced rapidly, as states tried to upstage their opponents with better weapons. Although by "better", it usually means weapons suited for mass-training purposes....
- Indeed. China's wealth and immense power as an empire wound up biting the Chinese in the ass in the long run, as they withdrew from international trade along the Indian Ocean(which they'd dominated for the better part of the millennium thanks to their very powerful navy) around the middle of the medieval era. As a result, they went into Medieval Stasis that they were violently jerked out of by the enterprising European countries.
- The reality is more prosaic than that. Despite China's long history of warfare, they primarily fought against enemies who relied heavily on mobility rather than on massed armies, so the Chinese tactics were designed specifically to combat those threats along with the occasional civil war. They noticed early on the effect of gunpowder weapons and their weaknesses. They decided to stick with crossbows.
- A reasonable explanation as to why a fantasy culture might eschew firearms is that, up until the invention of repeating firearms in the mid-19th century, guns were not actually as effective as longbows. For example, an English longbow from Edward III's time (1300s) had an effective range of 400yds (~366 meters) and could be fired between six times per minute (if the archer was going for endurance) to ten (in a pinch). By contrast, a musket, even in the hands of the most experienced troops, had an effective (accurate) range of only around 100-150yds, and could be fired only five times a minute by a crack company (6 if they were astonishingly good). The Duke Of Wellington, Genre Savvy as he was, actually inquired if a corps of archers could be trained for the Napoleonic Wars. Unfortunately, there were not enough men in England still able to use the weapon (it took daily training from age six to develop the muscle structure needed to draw the weapon), and the idea was shelved.
- This explanation only seems reasonable for someone who has no idea of the place of archers in medieval warfare: the musket replaced the crossbow, what destroyed the bow was the cannon, while the pistol replaced the lance (although it made a comeback in the west through Napoleon's polish lancers), as archers were indirect artillery weapons. Musketry drills at the time of the napoleonic wars also reached four to six shots a minute, while ten shots is actually nearly unheard of in actual combat for bows. The english romantic attachment to the longbow was even skewered as early as the 16th century by english military men who had fought on the continent and had seen what war had evolved into.
- The Russian Empire used Kalmyk units armed with bows in the war with Napoleon. The casualty levels among the Frenchmen were quite high... because nobody knew how to treat arrow wounds.
- Greek fire was an early form of Napalm, allowing for a ranged use of fire long before it's time. However, the formula was a VERY closely guarded secret, preventing anyone not allied closely to the Byzantine Empire from using it. After the fall of the Eastern empire, the formula was lost, so the flame thrower wouldn't be a mainstay in European warfare for hundreds of years.
Welcome, traveller, welcome to Omsk
Thanks whoever corrected my entry about Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon in Literature. I hadn't read it for years, thence my mistake.
Edited by DoktorvonEurotrash It does not matter who I am. What matters is, who will you become? - motto of Omsk Bird
Are there any examples where firearms don't have a chance to catch on due to magically enhanced armor? IRL, the first handguns were invented in 1610, but personal armor capable of shrugging it off - Kevlar - wasn't invented until 1965. If gunpowder was discovered in a world where the equivalent of bulletproof vests already existed...
Hide / Show Replies
There was armor capable of stopping a bullet, but just like today, it was too expensive for the average person to afford. The term "bullet proof" originates from around that time.
That's why the Spanish Conquistadors wore plate armor. And I'm sure that magic armor is also too expensive to the average person.
There was a period where guns and more traditional armor overlapped. The first handheld gunpowder weapons started appearing in the late 14th/early 15th centuries, which was also the period when plate armor began to displace the more traditional mail armor.
It obviously depends on how tough your magical armor is, but unless you're doing poorly defined "No Limits" resistance to bullets, or arbitrary "Only my magic sword can cut that armor" rules, a gun is still likely going to do more damage than more traditional weapons like bows and spears.
"Which coincides nicely with literal thousands of bullets studies show it takes a modern soldier armed with a modern, accurate-to-hundreds-meters gun to kill another modern soldier on a modern battlefield"
What does this sentence mean? I think it means: for each battle where records are available, take the quartermaster's list of how many bullets were used, divide by the casualty list and the number is thousands even with well trained soldiers and good rifles.
I would change it myself if I knew the numbers.
Hide / Show Replies
"(early gunpowder took more than a year to make)"
I deleted this. It is meaningless. How much gunpowder? A ton? Pound? Ounce? How many people are working on making that ounce?
Before the early twentieth century, the process of making potassium nitrate ("saltpeter") for gunpowder took 12-24 months.
It's super effective.
Something that doesn't come up often in discussions about Guns in Fantasy is questioning the idea that the invention of Gunpowder is somehow an inevitability. However, in our own History, Gunpowder was pretty much a massive fluke.
Unlike the evolution of, say, the throwing spear to the bow, and then to the crossbow, there is no true path here, the evolution of firearms only really starts with Gunpowder (firelance to handgonne, to arquebus, to musket...).
The Chinese, namely the Tang in the 9th Century, discovered it by trying to concoct medicinal mixtures, where they, to put it somewhat crass, just tossed whatever they could get their hands on into a bowl, stirred it a bit, and looked what came out, leading to rather weird combinations, like pills with mercury in them (one of those notably did Emperor Qin Shi Huang in, back in the 2nd Century BC).
What I'm trying to say is that the creation of Gunpowder was a pretty much an accident, not something guaranteed to happen eventually. It would take a rather sizable coincidence for an alchemist in a different world to mix the exact ingredients together as the Tang did, and then spread it around as flammable powder to be used as a weapon.
Not that it couldn't happen, of course, I like myself some Pike and Shotte, but there is more justification to not having Gunpowder than you'd initially think.
Edited by ShogunTrooper Name was supposed to be "Shotgun Trooper". A missing "t" turned me into a Japanese Warlord.