GUNPOWDER

Three components of black gunpowder are:

• Charcoal - abundant in nature, flammable, can be used as fertilizer
• Sulfur - less abundant in nature, flammable, can be used as fertilizer
• Saltpeter - quite rare in nature, non-flammable, can be used as fertilizer

All 3 were well known in medieval yet both saltpeter and sulfure were rare in Europe. You didn't need to be an alchemist to invent gunpowder, you just needed saltpeter. Once you throw it into fire and realize it accelerates burning, you will add it to other flammable materials to see what happens. Sulfur was well known, charcoal too. But what would you do with this? The hardest part of inventing firearms was not the gunpowder, it was the gun: casting a bronze pipe requires more effort than mixing three powders. The very fact that firearms are reported no earlier than 1200 tells us how primitive technology was before 1200. It will take 200-300 more years to make steel barrels.

Timeline of gunpowder usage in Europe is faked to conceal the fact that the glorious Roman Empire was way behind in technology in medieval. Constantinople fell in 1453 due to lack of artillery! Turks had a lot, but they only had enough in 1453, not earlier, which is why they failed in 1411 and 1422.

There are some earlier manuscript illustrations showing cannons being used in 1428 Siege of Orleans, which are considered the first evidence of practical cannon usage in the West. There are also claims that "English" used cannons at Battle of Crécy in 1346, but no pictures this time. Hussite handguns are reported around 1420. Can we trust these reports? Any chance 100 Year War and Czech "pre-protestant" protestants are heroic legends? Have you heard of any other 100 Year Wars with leaders like Joan d'Ark? Have you heard of Bohemian Revolt (1618-1620) of so called Utraquist Hussites 200 years after the "original" Hussites?

Here is an album of frescoes of 1431 Battle of La Higueruela (Spain), and this is 1432 Battle of San Romano (Italy), no cannons or smoke anywhere. That's Italy and Spain, pretty civilized places with lots of international trade going on. If anybody anywhere used some advanced weapons, these guys would have it.

Another proof of faked European gunpowder adoption history is this quote from 1580 Essays by Montaigne: A man may repose more confidence in a sword ... than in a bullet he discharges out of a pistol ... that weapon ... only, by the way, the astonishment of the ear abated, which every one grows familiar with in a short time, I look upon it as a weapon of very little execution, and hope we shall one day lay it aside. Imagine somebody being that skeptical about any widely adopted technology. The year is not 1480, it's 1580.

Montaigne was born in 1533, you might say he's a grumpy 47 year old man but it was not just him: King of France Henry II died in 1559 in an accident at a knight tournament. It's not 1459, it's 1559, and it's not just an old fashioned king's hobby: French heavy armored knight cavalry were the elite regiment until their fiasco at Battle of Coutras in 1587 where they met protestant cavalry armed with pistols. Firearms became popular enough in Europe almost 100 years after America have been discovered.

Now that it was finally recognised, when does it actually become a weapon of choice? It's impossible to get reliable "tons per year" numbers on gunpowder production, but I found that in 1910 there were 11 gunpowder mills in France, first 5 of them established by Ludovic XIV, starting in 1660. Why so late? Given charcoal was abundant, and sulfur was imported from Sicily, I think saltpeter import from Near East was the problem. Eventually they figured out a way to make it from organic matter, probably much later than advertised. So much later that up until Ludovic XVI French law granted saltpetermen special "right to dig" (droit de fouille) the soil enriched with manure from anywhere, which caused constant complains from farmers. Lavoisier solved the problem right before the French Revolution, while British kept importing saltpeter from India.

Another proof that gunpowder adoption in Europe was late is the first book on ballistics Nova Scientia (1537) by Nicolo Tartaglia. The book presents absolutely wrong idea of projectile trajectory. It's clear the author never experimented, not even with a crossbow, he just wrote a purely theoretical book based on wrong Aristotle's(!) physics/movement theory. The trajectory he describes is a straight line which abruptly becomes a circular transition into a fall. The real parabola trajectory is first described by Galileo Galilei only around 1600.

This explains Islamic Gunpowder Empires reaching far into Europe in 1700. Turks just attempted to take Vienna in 1683, Russia paid them annually until 1685 (wiki article is in Russian, unfortunately there is no English one):

Realistic state of things in European warfare is well presented in this detailed battle scene from 1533 where among thousands of soldiers with spears, swords and shields, there are about a dozen of arquebusiers in the bottom right corner, only in one of the armies (you can zoom or open in a separate tab):