Why did the arquebusier hold a burning cord in his hand?
When they say that a firearm weapon turned the war upside down, the fact of the shot itself is usually remembered. In fact, three independent engineering companies were behind it stories — and none of them worked alone. The intricate mechanics of the lock, the physics of the impact of a heavy lead bullet, and the colossal logistics of gunpowder. The 16th-century arquebus worked because all three lines matured simultaneously. The rest is in order.
Matchlock, or how to light gunpowder with one finger
Imagine a 16th-century soldier with an arquebus at the ready. A rifle in one hand, a burning fuse between the fingers of the other, which must not be extinguished, must not be dropped, must not be brought near the powder flask on his belt. Nearby is a wagon train with kegs of gunpowder. One misplaced spark, and a dozen of his closest comrades become news for chroniclers.
The main engineering problem of the early gun sounds almost comical: how to reliably apply fire to the gunpowder without removing your hands from the butt. The answer—the matchlock, in English. matchlockA small mechanism that replaced the assistant with the burning rod.
The heart of the design is an S-shaped lever, known as a serpentine. The upper end clamps a slowly smoldering fuse, while the lower end is connected to the trigger. When the shooter pulls the trigger, the lever rotates and drops the smoldering end of the fuse into a small metal cup on the side of the barrel. This cup is the flashover pan, about the size of a thimble.
A pinch of priming powder—a particularly fine powder, specially ground for ignition—is added to it beforehand. The smoldering fuse ignites the priming powder, which bursts into flame, and the flame breaks through a narrow touchdown hole in the barrel and ignites the main charge. The gases expand, pushing the bullet out. A spring returns the lever upward, and the lock is ready for the next shot. That's it.
The fuse itself is a separate engineering object. It was woven from flax or hemp, soaked in a saltpeter solution, and dried. A good fuse burns at about a centimeter per minute, evenly and without an open flame. The shooter wraps the fuse around his gun or belt and watches throughout the battle to ensure the flame doesn't go out.
Five Reasons to Hate Your Own Castle
By today's standards, such a design is a set of problems.
Firstly, the wick has to be kept burning all the time, even between shots. Near powder flasks, charges, and open kegs. A single spark is enough to kill several men in a tight formation, and if there's a supply train with ready-made charges nearby, the consequences increase exponentially.
Secondly, the wick gets wet and goes out. Rain, strong wind, a careless move—and the arquebusier is left holding a heavy, expensive club. Infantry, soaked by the downpour, becomes a useless mass in a field battle. It's no wonder that at Crespi (1544) and Moncontour (1569), sudden rains disrupted the firing plans of entire corps.
Thirdly, the smoldering end glows in the dark. An ambush and night attack with a matchlock weapon is, at best, a compromise: a line of shooters is visible from afar by orange dots, and the enemy gets a ready-made target.
Fourth, the delay in firing. There is a noticeable amount of time that passes from the moment the trigger is pulled until the bullet is fired – English-speaking instructors call it lock timeWith a matchlock, this ranges from half a second to a second, and even longer in bad weather. For a moving target, this means a lead, like a duck hunter. If the shooter is moving, the chance of missing increases.
Fifth, service. Black powder deposits clog the lock grooves, stick to the pan, and coke the touch hole. Cleaning is necessary after each shot, otherwise the next shot might not fire.
Blaise de Montluc, the future Marshal of France, who witnessed the Gunpowder Revolution from the inside and himself took an arquebus bullet to the face during the siege of Rabastin in 1570, wrote wistfully in his "Commentaries" that it would have been better if this unfortunate weapon had never been invented: it, he said, robs war of all its valor, allowing a scoundrel and a coward to kill the bravest knight from behind a bush. A veteran's lament, but essentially true: the castle, with all its shortcomings, still outweighed everything that came before.
A medieval illustration depicting the use of an early firearm, the arquebus.
A kilojoule versus two millimeters of steel
Despite all this fuss, the arquebus could do what neither the bow nor the crossbow could: reliably pierce steel cuirass. This is where physics comes in.
The kinetic energy of a flying object is calculated simply: half the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity. An arquebus bullet weighing 17–25 grams, flying at 300–400 meters per second, carries between 800 and 1300 joules. A heavy musket, which appeared in the mid-16th century, with a 40–50 gram bullet, could carry up to 2500–3500 joules—essentially a separate weapon. For reference: a modern .308 caliber rifle bullet Winchester — about 3500 J. That is, the arquebus is three to four times weaker in energy than a modern rifle, but for the 16th century this is an unattainable value.
The English longbow, the very same one that inflicted heavy losses on the French knights at Agincourt in 1415, fired an arrow weighing 60–90 grams at a speed of approximately 50–60 m/s. The arrow's energy—approximately 80–150 J, according to reconstructions from guns recovered from the Mary Rose—was ten times less than that of an arquebus bullet. A heavy steel crossbow delivered 100–200 J, with the most powerful examples delivering up to 400 J, but its rate of fire was dismal: one shot every half-minute to a minute with a slingshot or goat's foot.
Now, what happens at the other end of the trajectory? A 16th-century knight's cuirass is a sheet of steel (often hardened) 1,5–3 mm thick, up to 4 mm in reinforced "bulletproof" breastplates from the end of the century. The tensile strength of such steel is 200–400 MPa.
When a bullet strikes armor, its energy is concentrated over an area of several square millimeters. The pressure at the point of contact reaches several thousand megapascals, many times exceeding the material's tensile strength. The steel is locally fractured. A crater forms, with some metal flying outward and some being pressed inward. If the energy is sufficient, the bullet continues on: through the plate, through the underarmor, through the person.
According to experimental data from Williams and his followers, the arquebus reliably penetrated thin cuirass (1,5–2 mm) at ranges of 30–50 meters, and light cavalry armor at ranges of up to 100 meters. Reinforced breastplates, 3–4 mm thick, were increasingly resistant to bullets, especially beyond 50 meters—which is why, by the end of the century, test shots at cuirasses right in the workshop became fashionable: the gunsmith would fire at the breastplate, and the resulting dent would serve as a guarantee stamp.proof mark). But even without through penetration the weapon worked.
Ambroise Paré, court surgeon to four French kings and a man who operated on crowned heads and common musketeers on the same table, described it best. During the Italian campaign of 1536–1537, the young Paré, finding himself without the traditional boiling oil used to cauterize gunshot wounds, made do with an ointment of egg yolk, rose oil, and turpentine. By morning, it turned out that the wounded he hadn't cauterized were sleeping peacefully, while those whom his colleagues had doused with oil according to the canon were writhing in fever. Thus, the age of gunpowder revolutionized surgery.
Pare left behind detailed descriptions of the wounds that puzzled every army doctor for centuries. The cuirass is intact, there's no hole, but underneath it are broken ribs, crushed muscles, and torn blood vessels. In English, this is called crush injury — a closed compression injury, a crushing blow: a blow of such force deforms the armor and transfers energy through the steel to the body. A hit to the chest often meant death, even if the cuirass held. For knightly culture, this was a death sentence: armor ceased to be a guarantee.
Three German mercenaries are armed with arquebuses. The soldier on the right has a powder flask hanging from his neck.
One battle eats up a ton of gunpowder
Mechanics and physics are only half the story. The other half is where to get the gunpowder.
By the end of the 16th century, the composition of black powder had become established: approximately 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur. In earlier periods, the proportions varied considerably, and gunpowder from different workshops varied significantly in strength. Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is an oxidizer, a source of oxygen for combustion. Charcoal is the fuel. Sulfur lowers the ignition temperature and binds the components. The proportions are precisely maintained; otherwise, the powder is either too sluggish or too harsh, causing barrels to burst.
In 1540, Italian metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio's "Pyrotechnics" was published in Venice—the first printed textbook on gunpowder making and metallurgy. It described in detail how gunpowder mills were constructed, what kind of coal to use (alder or willow), and how to distinguish good saltpeter from a cheap counterfeit by taste and color. The book was read throughout Europe, and for the next half-century, gunpowder makers from Naples to Antwerp used its recipes.
The problem is that saltpeter is found sparingly in nature. It was scraped from the walls of damp cellars, stables, and barns, where animal nitrogen slowly converts to nitrates. In France, a separate profession existed for this purpose—saltpeter distillers (French: saltpeter distillers). salpêtriers). Officials with royal warrants had the right to enter any citizen's cellar without permission, dig up the earthen floor, extract the saltpeter soil, and carry it away. Compensation was almost nonexistent. Citizens hated the saltpeter miners with a passion, wrote petitions, and complained to Parliament—but the king replied that without gunpowder there was no kingdom, and therefore no cellar. In the 17th century, the system was only tightened.
Saltpeter plantations, where the soil was deliberately layered with manure and urine and the harvest was expected to last for several years, were also an invention of the 16th and 17th centuries. Coal was simpler: it was obtained from wood fired in a closed pit. Sulfur was mined in volcanic areas or extracted from ores.
The finished mixture still had to be converted into gunpowder. Simply mixing the ingredients isn't enough: the fine dust separates when shaken, and what ends up in the barrel isn't gunpowder, but rather saltpeter and coal. Therefore, the mixture was moistened, pressed into cakes, dried, and crushed into grains of the required size. In Russian tradition, this process is called granulationLarge grains burn slowly, small grains burn quickly, therefore, for hand weapons and for artillery made different varieties.
Gunpowder should be stored dry and away from fire. Damp gunpowder loses its potency: saltpeter is hygroscopic and attracts moisture.
Now, the simple arithmetic of combat. An arquebusier fires one shot per minute and expends 5-10 grams of gunpowder per shot. Let's assume a thousand shooters and a two-hour battle. Even at a moderate rate of fire, the total consumption is 600-1200 kilograms. About a ton of gunpowder for a single battle of average intensity. To produce it, you need approximately 750 kg of saltpeter, 150 kg of coal, and 100 kg of sulfur. And all this is prepared in advance.
Mercenary arquebusiers and their supporting spearmen prepare for the Battle of Pavia in 1525.
Why gunpowder reshaped the state
Only a centralized power with money and officials could maintain such a chain. And countries aspiring to great power status built a gunpowder chain of command one after another.
The Venetian Republic maintained its manufacturing operations in the very heart of the city—the Arsenal, on its enclosed islands. By the end of the 16th century, the Arsenal produced gunpowder, cast cannons, and launched galleys in a single industrial complex, employing up to two thousand permanent workers. It was, in effect, Europe's first state-owned military manufactory.
The Spanish kings established state-owned gunpowder mills and warehouses that served the army and produced gunpowder of better quality than private workshops. France placed saltpeter itself under state control, through saltpeter distillers and a network of royal gunpowder mills. England, which always had a shortage of its own saltpeter, solved the problem radically by the 17th century: the East India Company organized the industrial procurement of Indian saltpeter from Bihar, and Indian supplies remained a strategic raw material for the crown until the end of the 18th century [Frey. The Indian Saltpetre Trade[In one generation, Gustav II Adolf's Sweden built its own gunpowder and copper industries, which became one of the material pillars of the "Swedish military revolution" of the 1620s and 1630s.
Transporting gunpowder was a separate headache. The kegs were transported on carts under military escort: the loss of a supply train meant that the army temporarily ceased to be an army. Each infantryman received a ration of gunpowder according to the norms of the Spanish tercios of the second half of the 16th century, a rifleman was entitled to about a pound or two of gunpowder per month; for a regiment of a thousand riflemen, this meant half a ton per month—an amount comparable to the monthly pay of several dozen soldiers [Parker. The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road[1972]. Of course, gunpowder wasn't the only thing that determined the ceiling of armies—mercenary wages, forage, provisions, and allied bribes also hung on it. But it was gunpowder logistics that for the first time required a permanent state infrastructure in peacetime—and that was its main innovation.
Technology that dictates tactics
The arquebus's engineering limitations weren't confined to the gunsmith's workshop. They took to the field and rewrote the rules of combat.
The rate of fire of one or two shots per minute made continuous shooting from one rank impossible - and from this grew all the European linear tactics of the next two centuries, from the Spanish tercio to the Dutch reforms of Maurice of Orange with his countermarch — a formation in which the rank that has fired retreats to reload, and the next rank takes its place. The unreliability of the breech in the rain and the high rate of misfires required constant pikemen to cover the riflemen. And the insatiable appetite for gunpowder forced armies to dance around the supply trains: they couldn't move far from the depot, maneuver for long periods, and fighting in enemy territory in winter was difficult. The strategic mobility of European armies in the 16th century was determined not by horsepower, but by the schedule of barrel deliveries.
Three invisible pillars, not one castle
Remove any of the three lines and the revolution will not happen.
Without a lock, you get a firecracker, dangerous to use. Without the necessary energy, a bullet is a noisy toy bouncing off a cuirass. Without logistics, it's an expensive piece in a king's arsenal, but not an army's weapon. The 16th-century arquebus worked because mechanics, physics, and logistics had matured simultaneously by then. And de Montluc was right about one thing: the era in which bushes mattered more than coats of arms has never ended.
To be continued, next part - Arquebus in the Russian army
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