A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Gunpowder and Firearms

Gunpowder was a serendipitous invention of Chinese alchemists while experimenting with mixtures of sulfur and saltpeter in an attempt to make gold. The oldest surviving recipe dates from ad 800, and by the thirteenth century they had developed fragmentation bombs and kinds of explosive projectiles. The Mongols transmitted the technology westward, and gunpowder recipes appear in Hasan al-Rammah’s Kitab al furusiya wa’l-munasb al-harbiya (Treatise on Horsemanship and Stratagems of War), written in 1280. Muslims introduced artillery into Nasrid Granada, where “iron pellets that were shot with fire” were used in an attack on Elche. In the seventeenth century, Muslim exiles from Spain (then called Moriscos) introduced advanced weapons technology into Ottoman North Africa, where Ibrahim ibn Ahmad ibn Ghanim al-Andalusi wrote an influential artillery manual based broadly on Luis Collado’s Plática Manual de artillería (1592): Kitab al-izz wa’l-manafi lil-mujahidin fi sabil illa b’il-madafi (The book in which one seeks triumph and advantage when fighting against the infidel with military stores). It was a precept of Ottoman jurisprudence that infidels must be opposed with their own weapons. Such an ideology makes intelligible the demand for foreign military technology.