See? You can't trust Mongols with gunpowder...they're such children, you know.

[Roma_Victrix]

Zhou Mi (周密 ; 1232-1298 AD), who lived during China's Southern Song Dynasty and the Mongol Yuan Dynasty led in his day by the formidably obese Kublai Khan, describes a rather terrifying event when incompetence on the part of inexperienced n00bs with gunpowder led to a massive unexpected explosion in 1280 AD of a pre-modern factory at Weiyang producing gunpowder. The following passage is found in his Guixin Zazhi (癸辛雜識), published in 1295 AD. Just for reference, the passage mentions the Chinese unit of distance called a li, which is about 500 m (1,600 ft), but during the late Song and early Yuan was IIRC the Tang-era measurement of about 323 m (1,060 ft) was still being used (correct me if I'm wrong about that). It's basically comparable to about a fifth of an English mile (5,200 ft or 1.6 km).

Anyways, on to the incompetence!

This translation is provided by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology; the Gunpowder Epic (Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd., 1986), pp. 209-210.

Formerly the artisan positions were all held by southerners (i.e. the Chinese). But they engaged in peculation, so they had to be dismissed, and all their jobs were given to northerners (probably Mongols, or Chinese who had served them). Unfortunately, these men understood nothing of the handling of chemical substances. Suddenly, one day, while sulfur was being ground fine, it burst into flame, then the (stored) fire lances caught fire, and flashed hither and thither like frightened snakes. (At first) the workers thought it was funny, laughing and joking, but after a short time the fire got into the bomb store, and then there was a noise like a volcanic eruption and the howling of a storm at sea. The whole city was terrified, thinking that an army was approaching...Even at a distance of a hundred li tiles shook and houses trembled...The disturbance lasted a whole day and night. After order had been restored an inspection was made, and it was found that a hundred men of the guards had been blown to bits, beams and pillars had been cleft asunder or carried away by the force of the explosion to a distance of over ten li. The smooth ground was scooped into craters and trenches more than ten feet deep. Above two hundred families living in the neighborhood were victims of this unexpected disaster.

Dear God, man, that's a huge explosion. I don't think Antonio Banderas could walk away comfortably from this one.



It's pretty impressive, considering how the Chinese formula for gunpowder (the earliest known written example being in the Wujing Zongyao of 1044 AD) wasn't refined enough yet in the previous 12th century to rip through cast iron casings of catapult-lobbed bombs. Yet by the mid 13th century nitrate levels in the improved formula reached above 90%, which was enough to shred through metal, not just weak paper casings used before in such Chinese bombs. This is around the same time that the first bronze "hand cannons" appeared in China as seen in modern archaeological finds. Fast forward to about the middle of the 14th century and both China and medieval Europe are using the first bombards, the earliest gunpowder-based artillery.

Another thing to take from this passage is that the Mongols could not be trusted with gunpowder. I mean just look at them. Disgraceful. Look at their failed invasion of Japan. Disgraceful. Nomads who live on horses should know better and trust the handling of such things by their betters, the Chinese.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Such incompetence some how led to this:



The gun craze of the 1500s and 1600s seeped into EVERYWHERE!!!
Even the god damned nomads are ignoring their bows for this stuff.

[The Wandering Storyteller]

And yet the Mongols managed to rule the whole of China.

[Roma_Victrix]

And yet the Mongols managed to rule the whole of China.

My OP is tongue-in-cheek obviously. Of course the Mongols were adept at adopting the technology of others to ease their path to success, such as adopting the counterweight trebuchet catapult from the Levant and gunpowder rockets from the Jurchen-led Jin Dynasty of northern China. They also built a large Chinese-style navy to conquer the Southern Song Dynasty, because southern China's mountainous terrain is more suitable to engagements on lakes and rivers than it is on flat open plains like in northern China (the Mongols, horsemen coming from the steppes, were best suited to fighting on this terrain). I think the sheer size of the Mongol Empire, stretching from Korea to Poland if you count their raids and sacking of Krakow, is a testament that they were the most formidable force of the day.

The main point of the thread is to illustrate the destructive force of gunpowder by even the late 13th century. It was an unfortunate accident caused by staffing the factory with people who didn't know how to properly handle gunpowder or appreciate its destructive power. Yet for historians, this misfortune is ultimately a nice piece of evidence in the history of the development of gunpowder.

[Markas]

Glad they didn't discover how to split the atom...

[Roma_Victrix]

Glad they didn't discover how to split the atom...

They'd probably wind up blowing themselves up...and everything else in a 5-mile radius.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Mongols in Medieval II, Total War, in their pre-battle taunts against the other side on the battle map:

"LEAVE NONE ALIVE!"

"Sacrifice them."

"YOU ARE WEAK!"

"Your skull is my trophy!"

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

So after the 1500s did the yurts start smelling like gun powder too? Why did the Mongols even adopt this gun powder. It doesn't at all seem adequate to their style of warfare. When they fought the Ming they were outmatched in terms of fire power, when they fought the Qing the Manchu compound bows and legit nomad tactics kicked their Mongolian asses all the way to Badakshan. Mongols got outmongoled by the filthy Manchu, un ing believable

[Roma_Victrix]

True, it's hard to outmongol a Mongol, but the Manchu Qing dynasty managed it. The Mongols' style of warfare just basically became trumped by better gunpowder technology over the centuries, and no empire lasts forever. The Russians were able to cast them out roughly two centuries after their conquest by the Golden Horde (the tributary overlord of the Grand Duchy of Moscow). The Timurids lasted a while in the Middle East and Persia, a descendent establishing the Mughal Empire of India, but the Safavids ended their reign over Persia at the beginning of the 16th century.

That's not to say cavalry became irrelevant. In the Western world, heavy cavalry with feudal knights became just as outmoded as the horseback archers of the Mongols by the 16th century. Yet lighter cavalry continued to play an important role in flanking maneuvers and hot pursuits well into the 19th century. Just look at the use of cavalry in say the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, with the cuirassiers, yet using cavalry alone was a dangerous offensive ploy to use. It was better to use combined arms of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Compare that to the 12th century Western-European crusaders in the Holy Land, who could basically just bulldoze everything in front of them by doing a simple cavalry charge (albeit useless during a siege or close-quartered street fighting).

I'll stop there, because anything beyond the discussion of the development of gunpowder in the medieval period is off-topic in this thread.

[Condottiere 40K]

When I was young and watched a film about the Mongols beating the Chinese, I thought it was because of Genghis' Gun(s).

[Roma_Victrix]

All that Genghis Khan, aka John Wayne, had to do was lift his arms and flex his muscles to bring you to the gun show, boy.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

"Ah feel this Tartar womahn is fur mee" - John Wayne

[Roma_Victrix]

"Ah feel this Tartar womahn is fur mee" - John Wayne

"...and my blood says, take her!"

Well, according to The Conqueror with John Wayne the Mongols didn't really need arrows that much, let alone early gunpowder rockets...all they needed were small daggers and string-guided javelins to stack up a body count.