Europeans began using guns in the early 1300s. The first references to cannons appear in historical records from that period, and the earliest known illustration of a firearm in Europe dates to 1326. Within a few decades, guns went from exotic curiosities to battlefield weapons, appearing at major engagements like the Battle of Crécy in 1346.
The Earliest Evidence: 1320s
The oldest European image of a gun comes from an English manuscript written by Walter de Milemete between 1326 and 1327. The illustration shows a vase-shaped cannon loaded with a large arrow, attended by a knight holding a hot iron to the touchhole. The image is telling in its awkwardness. As one historian noted, the odds of the giant arrow flying forward to its target didn’t appear much better than the odds of the gun recoiling backward and killing the person firing it.
These first European guns were large, crude, and rare. They were essentially metal pots that used gunpowder to hurl projectiles, and they bore little resemblance to what we’d call a gun today. But by the 1320s and 1330s, multiple references to such weapons appear across England, Italy, and other parts of Western Europe, confirming that gunpowder technology had arrived on the continent.
Where Gunpowder Came From
Gunpowder originated in China centuries earlier and likely reached Europe through trade routes and contact with the Islamic world. The powder itself is a mixture of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal. Early European recipes from the 1330s and 1340s used roughly equal parts saltpeter and the other ingredients, making the powder weaker and less consistent than later formulations. Modern black powder uses about 75% saltpeter, but medieval versions typically contained less saltpeter and more sulfur.
Gunners sometimes used vinegar to recrystallize the saltpeter and help the dry ingredients mix together so they wouldn’t separate during transport. Getting the recipe right was a slow, experimental process, and the quality of gunpowder varied enormously from batch to batch throughout the 1300s.
From Siege Cannons to Hand Cannons
The first European guns were large cannons designed for siege warfare. The earliest were probably cast from brass or bronze, materials that could be melted and poured into molds. Soon after, gunmakers began building barrels from wrought iron, using techniques borrowed from barrel-making (cooperage). Iron strips were hammered together and bound with hoops, similar to how a wooden barrel is constructed. By the last quarter of the 1300s, wrought-iron siege bombards were firing stone cannonballs weighing 450 pounds or more.
These weapons had serious reliability problems. Hand-forged iron couldn’t create a perfect seal where the powder charge sat, so hot gases escaped through gaps in the metal, eroding the barrel over time and creating real danger for the crew. Wrought-iron cannons also required constant maintenance, especially in damp or salty environments.
By around 1390, guns had been successfully miniaturized into hand cannons that one or two soldiers could operate. A surviving example from that period weighs about 35 pounds, measures roughly 40 inches long, and has a barrel diameter of about one inch. To fire it, a gunner rammed gunpowder and a projectile down the muzzle. Anything on hand could serve as ammunition: arrows, stones, or purpose-made lead balls. One soldier aimed the weapon while a second lit the powder charge through a small hole in the side of the barrel, using either a piece of hot iron or a slow-burning match cord.
Guns on the Battlefield: Crécy, 1346
The Battle of Crécy is one of the earliest major European engagements where guns played a role. The English army brought several types of gunpowder weapons to the fight: small guns firing lead balls, multi-barreled devices called ribauldequins that shot metal arrows or grapeshot, and bombards that fired iron balls roughly 3 to 3.5 inches in diameter. Iron balls matching that size have been recovered from the battlefield site.
How much these weapons actually mattered at Crécy is debatable. Contemporary accounts disagree on whether the bombards inflicted significant casualties. Their main effect was likely psychological, adding noise and confusion to a battlefield already dominated by English longbowmen. Nobody in 1346 was thinking of guns as a war-winning technology. They were an unpredictable supplement to archers, crossbowmen, and cavalry.
How Guns Changed Armor and Warfare
Early firearms were not powerful or accurate enough to punch through the plate armor worn by knights. For most of the 1300s and 1400s, a well-armored horseman had little to fear from handheld guns at any real distance. Knights continued to dominate European battlefields for well over a century after guns first appeared. It was not until the 1600s that field armor had to be made significantly heavier to protect against increasingly accurate firearms, a change that eventually made full plate armor impractical to wear.
The real shift happened gradually. Armies that once centered on mounted knights increasingly relied on mixed forces: pikemen, crossbowmen, archers, and handgunners all fighting together. Guns didn’t replace other weapons overnight. They slowly earned their place alongside them, becoming more reliable and more lethal with each generation of improvements.
The First Gun Control Law
As guns became smaller and easier to carry, authorities started worrying about them. The development of the wheel-lock pistol in the early 1500s was a turning point. Unlike earlier firearms that needed a burning match cord to fire, wheel-lock pistols used a mechanical ignition system, meaning they could be concealed and fired with one hand. By 1517, these pistols had become common enough that Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I banned them outright, ordering that no one in his territories of Lower Austria be permitted to carry “self-striking hand-guns that ignite themselves.” This is likely the first gun control law in European history, passed roughly two centuries after guns first appeared on the continent.
The ban reflected a broader anxiety. Guns had started as massive weapons of war, operated by trained crews and hauled to battlefields on carts. By the early 1500s, they had shrunk to something a person could hide under a cloak. That transformation, from siege weapon to concealed pistol, took about 200 years and reshaped European society in ways that the knights firing awkward hand cannons in the 1300s could never have imagined.