Hand Cannon

The hand cannon was among the earliest gunpowder firearms, a simple metal tube, typically of bronze or iron, mounted on or lashed to a wooden pole or stock and fired by manually touching a lit match or hot iron to a small ignition hole, emerging in China by the thirteenth century and spreading across Eurasia through the fourteenth. Early hand cannons were heavy, inaccurate and slow to reload compared to the bows and crossbows they gradually supplemented, but their armor-piercing potential and relatively low training requirement compared to a skilled archer made them attractive to European and Asian armies alike from the 1300s onward. Chinese hand cannons of the Yuan and early Ming dynasties are among the oldest surviving gunpowder weapons recovered archaeologically, while European variants, sometimes called hand gonnes, saw growing battlefield use through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The hand cannon's basic principle, a tube launching a projectile by igniting a propellant charge, directly established the mechanical lineage that would develop through the matchlock arquebus into all subsequent firearms.