end swung up and shot the missile at the enemy stronghold. The trebuchet was probably copied from the Chinese huo-pa’o, which had been adopted by the Mongols and carried west by them.
The trebuchet’s power was limited only by its size. In the Middle Ages, some trebuchets were used to throw dead horses into a besieged city to spread disease. Modern experimenters have built trebuchets capable of throwing an automobile several hundred yards. Around the turn of the last century, Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey built smaller versions of some mechanical artillery. He found that an onager equipped with a sling could throw an eight- pound shot almost 500 yards, and that a catapult with two arms powered by twisted cord, he found, would shoot a 5 or 6 pound spear 500 yards. The same catapult, equipped to shoot stones, would shoot a 1-pound shot 350 yards. Payne-Gallwey did not attempt to make a trebuchet, but he noted that the French Emperor Napoleon III built one with a 33-foot beam and a counterpoise of 10,000 pounds. Napoleon’s trebuchet shot a 50-pound cannon ball 200 yards, but, Payne-Gallwey wrote, that it was “so lightly constructed that its full power could not be safely applied.”
In the Hellenistic world, during the heyday of mechanical artillery, the mere existence of these machines was a potent factor in international relations. According to Dr. Serafina Cuomo, a British historian of science quoted in the New York Times, “You didn’t just have to have catapults to use them. You needed your potential enemy to know that you had them so they would not attack you in the first place.”
10 The Big Bang: Gunpowder
Kublai Khan “ruled most of the world” — from the Yellow Sea to steppes of Russia. But, a true grandson of Genghis Khan, he wanted more. He had not yet finished the conquest of southern China when, in 1274, he sent an army and a fleet to subdue Japan. The fleet was manned by Korean sailors and carried 40,000 Mongol soldiers. They were greeted by 120,000 Japanese samurai. The Mongols had the powerful central Asian composite bow, but their opponents were no mean archers. The Japanese had their unique longbow, which was a good match for the Mongol weapon. But although the Japanese outnumbered the Mongols three to one, Kublai’s men pushed the islanders back. One reason was their discipline and training. The Mongol army was organized on a decimal basis: squads of 10, companies of 100, regiments of a 1,000, and divisions of 10,000. All units responded to orders given by the beating of kettle drums and the waving of standards. And at this time, the Mongol armies were the most experienced in the world.
Fortunately for the Japanese, a typhoon swept up the west coast of Japan and wrecked most of the Mongol fleet. The Mongol commander took what was left of his army and armada and returned to China.
Kublai Khan did not give up easily. In 1281, he sent another expedition to Japan. This time, there were 150,000 soldiers. Again the Mongols pushed the Japanese back, but resistance was stiffer this time. The Japanese had built a high stone wall around the area on Kyushu where the invaders had first landed.
That turned out to be where they landed the second time. The Japanese brought up a huge crowd of samurai warriors, but they were barely able to hold the wall.
During the night, though, they raided the Mongol camp. They attacked the invasion fleet with small boats and managed to set fire to some of the Mongol ships. The Japanese resistance stalled the Mongols for seven weeks. The Mongol commander decided to move his fleet, and then another typhoon struck.
Approximately 4,000 Mongol ships were sunk, and more than 30,000 Mongol troops were drowned.
To be saved from a Mongol invasion twice by typhoons seemed to be more than a coincidence to the Japanese. The decided they had been saved by the gods, who sent the Kamikazes, the divine winds, against their enemies.
The Kamikazes also left conclusive proof of one reason for the Mongols’ success before the storms arrived. Recent exploration of the sunken wrecks of Kublai Khan’s warships disclosed ceramic pots filled with gunpowder. Similar pots with ignited fuses had been shot from mechanical artillery against the Japanese defenders. Japanese tradition also maintains that the Mongols shot rockets at the samurai soldiers, and old Japanese paintings show defenders being attacked by exploding bombs.
At the time of the Mongol expeditions to Japan, gunpowder was known in Europe — Roger Bacon’s famous manuscript was written in 1252 — but there’s no record of it being used. For years, it became something of a cottage industry among some Western scholars to prove that gunpowder was not invented in China, but the evidence was mostly negative — neither Marco Polo nor Giovanni di Plano Carpini mentioned seeing gunpowder in China; therefore it was not there. But the wrecked Mongol ships prove that gunpowder was in use, and a standard weapon, in the mid-13th century. And the medieval Arabs, who probably had gunpowder before the Europeans, referred to potassium nitrate, the key ingredient, as “the snow from China.” Further, evidence that gunpowder was known in Europe appears immediately after the Mongol conquerors of northern China galloped into Europe.
Early Chinese writing records the use of what could only be gunpowder.
Why was there so much doubt about the Chinese?
Besides an enormous ethnic bias on the part of many Westerners, it seems the Chinese did not consider gunpowder a particularly important weapon. From about 1000 A.D. it had been mostly used for firecrackers. Martin van Creveld, in his Technology and War, points out that in the 12th century, the Chinese were using crude hand grenades. These were paper and bamboo tubes filled with gunpowder and pebbles or bits of broken porcelain. After another century, they had bamboo guns (devices like the bamboo grenades, but open at one end). Though, like the rockets and ceramic bombs the Mongols brought to Japan, none of these weapons were considered serious weapons. The gunpowder was weak, and so were the shells in which it was exploded. The bombs and rockets were mostly useful in scaring horses — or troops like the Japanese who had no experience with gunpowder.
Lieutenant Colonel H.W. Hine concluded, after much study, that the Oriental gunpowder used unrefined potassium nitrate, which made it impossible to get a powerful explosion.
The first written directions for refining potassium nitrate are in Roger Bacon’s letter to the Bishop of Paris. There was great interest in the process in Europe but little anywhere else. Warriors in medieval China ranked just above thieves in popular esteem. Nobody in power felt any need to develop more potent powder. The Mongols’ scientific tradition was non-existent. Besides, they were sure they had the ultimate weapon: the horse archer. And, until after guns had developed for several centuries, the Mongols were right. The Arabs and Turks also had complete faith in the supremacy of the horse archer.
In western Europe, however, the desire for better weapons was keen. The Crusades had demonstrated to the Europeans that they could not compete with horse archers on the open steppes. Nor, in their damp, forested homeland, could they develop effective horse archers of their own. But there was a continuous search for better weapons among warriors who never dreamed of leaving their homeland. Europe was a quarreling mass of dukedoms, principalities, and city-states. It was inhabited by armed nobles, armed townsmen, and armed mercenaries, all of whom were trying to find some weapon that would trump everyone else’s. Consequently, Europe developed the first effective guns. The Chinese learned to improve their guns only after they’d examined European models.
Japan, voluntarily cut off from the rest of the world, ignored guns completely until the 16th century. Then, for a short time, Japan had more handguns — but little artillery — than anywhere else in the world. Guns, however, let a low-born peasant who couldn’t even recognize a good sword kill any samurai master of swordsmanship. Therefore the samurai, who controlled Japan, stopped all development and most manufacturing of guns.
Europeans, on the other hand, not only adopted gunpowder, they continued to improve it. They increased the proportion of potassium nitrate to make a more powerful explosive. Then, because the three components of the mixture tended to separate, they mixed them wet and formed them into “corns,” which could not separate. Near the end of the gunpowder era, they molded the “corns”
into various sizes depending on the size and mission of the gun. Some were made with a hole through them to produce a powder than gave consistent gas pressure. As the outside of a corn burned, the surface decreased, causing pressure to drop. But as the inside of hole in the corn burned, the surface increased, producing more gas and raising the pressure. All this “burning,” of course, happened in about 1/100,000 of the blink of an eye.
Guns were not the only use of gunpowder. One use gave new life to one of the earliest techniques of siege
