East meets west. Peter Hofkircher C 1525

[Pukka Bundook]

We need Rudyard here Barud, as he has copied a dragon head muzzle before now!
I will have to think on this. That's the trouble when references are all in ones head!

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=18046&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
This link may be pertinent to the way this thread has gone! LOL!
Ful on fanciful dragon, but may be interesting..
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=15788&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
Unlikey heading to this link, but no time to look further right now, Barud.

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=17655&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
Couple here ....not Exactly what I was looking for....

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=13477&highlight=monster+head+muzzle
Must get at me day!
R.

 

[Barud]

We need Rudyard here Barud, as he has copied a dragon head muzzle before now!
I will have to think on this. That's the trouble when references are all in ones head!

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=18046&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
This link may be pertinent to the way this thread has gone! LOL!
Ful on fanciful dragon, but may be interesting..
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=15788&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
Unlikey heading to this link, but no time to look further right now, Barud.

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=17655&highlight=Dragon+head+muzzle
Couple here ....not Exactly what I was looking for....

http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showthread.php?t=13477&highlight=monster+head+muzzle
Must get at me day!
R.

Oh my. That North Italian one is especially interesting since muzzle is almost identical in form with the Ottoman matchlocks that I mentioned. I wonder if the gunmakers were directly inspired by such an example?

 

[TobJohn]

Tob,
I was meaning guns of Any kind, not just what we call hand gonnes....and I should have been more specific!
Incendiary in China yes, as also was Roger Bacon's discoveries in England.
The picture of that vase -shaped 'cannon' on a table firing an arrow, is from about 1320 If I remember right, but is thought to me a fair bit older than the manuscript.
This puts is more to the end of the 13th century for anything solid.
Do we actually have depictions from China of anything earlier?
This isn't a cross -examination Tob, it is just interest in a very wooly time and what was developed where!
Unfortunately these Chinese Ms are 17th century copies of earlier works, and no actual earlier manuscripts survive.
It is believed that as these old (and now lost )manuscripts were copied, they were also updated, as the illustrations of cannon are from the 1600's.

All best!
Rich.

It is an engaging topic of debate!

There are surviving Chinese cannons from the late 1200s and the earliest depiction of a fire lance is 950. Wuwei Bronze Cannon - Wikipedia

Given that the Chinese cannons are more developed than the pot-de-fer of a couple decades later it is fairly convincing they were first.

However, it is very intriguing that cannons appear chronologically so close together across Europe and Asia, when every other piece of technology seems to have taken a while to travel.

One study I have read (I think it’s in the book I linked earlier) is that recipes of early Chinese gunpowder were unsuited as a propellant in a barrel and only as a rocket (fire work) propellant and incendiary. Tuning the recipe to its familiar use is one reason why it took so long for it to be used in guns, despite being known for centuries.

 

[RAEDWALD]

If I recall correctly, it was the Mughals (Babur specifically) that led to the proliferation of firearms in India, having brought along Ottoman and Persian gunsmiths with him (he speaks of an Ustad Ali-Quli as his master cannonmaker in the Baburnama, and Quli is a Persian Turcoman surname/title, and Rumi means "of Anatolia", and as far as I remember Mustafa Rumi was his master of arquebuses). Of course, then another question arises, that being - who did the Ottomans learn of the gun from? We know that they had been using handgonnes for at least since the 15th century.

Here is a 1522 dated Shahnama illustration that shows a soldier of Alexander the Great (apparently), styled after an Ottoman Janissary with an awfully familiar looking gun in his hands:
View attachment 269582View attachment 269583

The shape of the stock always reminded me of the early snap arquebuses that were common in Germany:
View attachment 269584View attachment 269586

It seems to me that Ottoman gunmakers either substituted the German snap mechanism for an integrated serpentine trigger of their own volition, or took a now-extinct (or at the very least unknown to me) example as their standard, which was then brought to Babur's attention, who took these to India, where they evolved into their common form (independently of the Ottomans, it seems; the geometric, blocky Ottoman gun that we now know seems to have settled in form in the later 1500s, if not the 1600s).

Barud, I am not qualified to argue against Rumi being Anatolian but I would have expected it to be more Balkan. ie Roman associated with the Eastern Roman Empire. My grandfather was born on what was then Eastern Rumelia ie southern Bulgaria. But then, from the Mughal point of view Anatolia is far enough away to it all be lumped in as Rumi as the Roman Empire had only recently ended.