CHAPTER V
THE ARABS
Although the Arabs had had relations with the Greeks, Romans, and Persians for centuries, and were acquainted with the details of the siege of Jerusalem, 70 A.D., the earliest allusion to their use of machines is the tradition that Jodhaimah, King of Heerah, constructed manjánik in the third century A.D.182 The scarcity of timber in Arabia may partially explain the lateness of their introduction, and the position of Heerah, in the north-east province of Arabian Irak, raises a suspicion that the Arabs learned the use of machines from the Persians, who got them from the Greeks.
When the Prophet besieged Tayif in 8 A.H. (630 A.D.), the defenders had recourse to heated projectiles.183 We may safely assume that they were the balls of hot clay spoken of in the 11nth Sura of the Qur’an, in describing the destruction of the Cities of the Plain: “we rained upon them stones of baked clay.”184 Half a century afterwards, 683, during the siege of Mecca, the Ka’aba was burned down by incendiary compositions, discharged, not by Arabs, but by Syrians, who doubtless understood the manipulation of naphtha and the other combustibles used.185 In 712 the howdah in which sat Dahir, King of Alor in Scinde, was set on fire by a fire-arrow shot by a Moslem naphtha-thrower186—the same nature of projectile that had been used by the Persian archers at the taking of Athens, 480 B.C. In speaking of the capture of Alor, both Mir Ma’sum Bhakkari, in his “History of Scinde,” and Haidar Razi, in his “General History,” mention the employment of atish bazi, or fire-throwing machines, “which the Moslems had seen in use with the Greeks and Persians.”187 Stones were discharged from machines to so little purpose at the siege of Heraclea, 805, that Harun er-Reshid urged his generals to fasten incendiaries to them. This was done with such effect that the resistance of the besieged at once collapsed, the inhabitants being terror-stricken at the sight of the flaming naphtha.188 There is no trace of an explosive here, yet a French Arabist would have us believe that muskets were in use during this Caliph’s reign.
Al-bunduqani, the man who carries a bunduq, which in this connection is a contraction for qaus al-bunduq, or simply qaus bunduq,189 was an epithet bestowed on Harun by the public, or assumed by himself; and in translating one of the “Arabian Nights” with this title, M. Gauttier remarks: “Bondouk signifie en Arabe harquebuse, albondoukani signifie l’arquebusier.”190 This argument may be illustrated by a more familiar one: “Jonathan gave his artillery unto his lad” (1 Sam. xx. 40); but artillery signifies cannon; therefore, &c. &c. It may be remarked that arquebuse is ambiguous. “Avant d’être une arme à feu l’arquebuse était une arme à jet,” says Dr. Dozy,191 who is supported by M. Scheler: “l’arquebuse était à son origine une sorte d’arbalète.”192 Assuming, however, as Gauttier evidently did, that arquebuse meant a firearm, his argument only establishes the use of firearms in the ninth century, if we take signifie as equivalent to means now, in the year 1822, and meant also in the time of Harun. The question, therefore, turns upon the meaning of the words bunduq, or qaus bunduq, in the time of the great Caliph, and an anecdote told by Masudi leaves no doubt about what that meaning was.193 He tells us that in the time of Muhtadi Billah, 868-9, a negligent porter was sentenced by his master to be tied up (apparently in a room or courtyard) and shot at fifty times by a man armed with a qaus bunduq, which carried leaden bunduq. There is not the slightest allusion to charge, cartridge, gunpowder, wad, or match, nor to the operation of loading. The ammunition consisted solely of leaden balls. Although the marksman sent his fifty bunduq home, the porter was so little the worse for his punishment that, when all was over, he made a coarse but cutting remark to his tormentor. There can be no question of firearms here: one, or at most two bullets fired by so good a shot from any firearm ever constructed would have silenced the porter for ever. The marksman was al-bunduqani, the bunduq were leaden balls, and the qaus bunduq was a pellet-bow = stone-bow194 = كلوله كمان (golulé keman) = golail, used to this day by the Karens of Burma, and known to everybody who has been in India. Such is the explanation of qaus bunduq given by the commentator Tabrizi in a note on one of Motanebbi’s poems—a bow which discharges a ball as big as a hazel nut.195 The bow itself is a long-bow with two strings joined at their centre by a bit of cloth or soft leather, which supports a ball generally of baked clay or stone. If Hansard’s plate be correct, the western stone-bow was a cross-bow with two strings.196 The golail, as we learn from one of the oldest of the “Arabian Nights,” was chiefly used for shooting birds, squirrels, &c.: “he shooteth birds with a pellet of clay,”197 ببندقة من طين. Again, when the first Kalandar missed his bird and hit the Wazir in the eye, he was using a qaus al-bunduq,198 قوس النبدق. The insult conveyed by the words of the Sultan Kai-kubad, when speaking of the dead leader of the Mughals, lay in the fact that the golail was not a soldier’s weapon, but merely a sporting implement: “No one would condescend to shoot an arrow at a dead body; it is only a pellet-ball that is fit for such (carrion) as this.”199 We need not pursue the matter further: in the primitive and simple golail is found the musket carried by the Caliph Harun er-Reshid.
From a passage in the “Chachnama,” given in Barnes’ “Travels into Bokhara,” it is clear that the Moslems in their invasion of India relied upon incendiaries to meet the attacks made upon them with elephants, which are very much afraid of fire. At the battle of Alor, 712, already mentioned, the Moslems “filled their pipes” (hukkaha-e atish bazi = grenades or siphons) “and returned with them to dart fire at the elephants” (i. 67). This fact goes far to explain a difficulty raised by the words toofung (musket) and tope (cannon) found in some MSS., in place of the khudung (arrow) and nuft (naphtha) given in other copies of Ferishta’s account of the battle fought near Peshawur in 1008. He says: “On a sudden the elephant upon which the prince who commanded the Hindus rode, becoming unruly from the effects of the naphtha balls and the flights of arrows, turned and fled. This circumstance produced a panic among the Hindus, who, seeing themselves deserted by their general, gave way and fled also.”200 The best critics reject the readings musket and cannon in this passage. These words were unknown to other Indian historians, and the circumstances of the case make the use of an incendiary exceedingly probable.
“I am slow in believing this premature use of artillery,” says Gibbon; “I must desire to scrutinise first the text and then the authority of Ferishta.” “These readings must be due to interpolators,” adds Professor Bury.201 “It appears likely,” says General Briggs, the translator of Ferishta, “that Babar was the first invader who introduced great guns into Upper India, in 1526, so that the words tope and toofung have been probably introduced by ignorant transcribers of the modern copies of this work, which are in general very faulty throughout.”202
Sir H. M. Elliot says: “The Tarikh-i Yamini, the Jami’u-t Tawarikh of Rashidu-d Din, the Tarikh-i Guzida, Abu’l Fida, the Tabakat-i Nasiri, the Rauzatu’-s Safa, the Tarikh-i Alfi and the Tabakat-i Akbari, though almost all of them notice this important engagement ... and mention the capture of thirty elephants, yet none of them speak of either naft or tope.”203
Finally, we must remember that there is an abundant supply of naphtha in the neighbourhood of Peshawur,204 and that the practice of throwing incendiary missiles was universal in Asia long before the battle in question. The Ka’aba, as we have seen, was burnt down by incendiaries in 683, and this tremendous event of course became instantly known all over Islam. At the battle of Alor, 712, the Moslems specially prepared incendiaries to repulse the attacks of the elephants. Igneous projectiles were employed by Harun er-Reshid in 805 at the siege of Heraclea. The last day of the siege of Baghdad, 813, is described by the poet Ali as “a day of fire”: “the machines played from the hostile camps ... and fire and ruin filled Baghdad.”205 So well known were incendiary shell in Persia at the close of the tenth century that Firdusi mentions them in the episode of Nushirvan and Porphyry: “The Romans began the fight from the gates and discharged arrows and pots (of fire).”206 In 1067 Shems al-Mulk Nasr, when besieging Bokhara, ordered incendiaries to be discharged against some archers posted in the minaret of the Grand Mosque. The wooden roof of the minaret took fire, the sparks fell upon the main building, and in the end the whole mosque was burned down.207
We may rest assured, then, that the words Ferishta wrote in his account of the battle near Peshawur, 1008, were naphtha and arrow, not musket and cannon.
Far from possessing muskets in the ninth century, there is no evidence to show that the Arabs had firearms, that is, arms charged with an explosive, during the whole of the Crusade period, 1097-1291. So strange and deadly an agent of destruction as gunpowder could not possibly have been employed in the field without the full knowledge of both parties; yet no historian, Christian or Moslem, alludes to an explosive of any kind, while all of them carefully record the use of incendiaries. The Arab accounts of these campaigns will be found collected together in M. Reinaud’s Extraits des Historiens Arabes relatifs aux guerres des Croisades, Paris, 1829; the Christian accounts are scattered in various volumes; but they teach us no more than we have learnt already in the two preceding chapters about incendiaries and Greek fire: “les projectiles incendiaires ont pu rester à peu près les mêmes pendant toutes ces Croisades.”208
At the siege of Nice, first Crusade, we read of the Saracens throwing balls of pitch, oil and fat against the machines of the Christians.209 Fire-arrows bearing pitch, wax, sulphur, and tow were discharged from the walls of Jerusalem during the siege in the same Crusade.210
During the second Crusade we find the Arabs making use of similar incendiaries,211 mixtures practically identical with that of Æneas Tacticus, cir. 350 B.C., given in Table II. Shell full of burning naphtha were used at the siege of Acre, 1189-91, in the third Crusade;212 and Richard of England, on his voyage thither, sank a ship which an eye-witness had seen laded at Beyrut with ballista, bows, arrows, and lances, and a large supply of Greek fire secured in bottles (ignem Græcum abundanter in phialis),213 a phrase which reminds us of the 18th recipe of the Liber Ignium of Marcus Græcus: “put the mixture in a glass bottle” (hoc in vase vitreo ponatur). For the sixth Crusade, we have the invaluable Histoire du Roy Saint Loys of Joinville, who describes the terror excited by the incendiaries of the Moslems, believed by all to be the work of the Powers of Darkness. “Quant le bon chevalier Messire Gaultier mon compagnon vit ce feu, il s’escrie et nous dist: Seigneurs, nous sommes perduz á jamais sans nul remède. Car s’ilz bruslent nos chaz chateilz, nous sommes ars et bruslez; et si nous laissons nos gardes, nous sommes ahontez.... Et toutes les fois que nostre bon Roy saint Loys oyoit qu’ils nous gettoient ainsi ce feu, il se jettoit à terre, et tendoit ses mains la face levée au ciel, et crioit à haulte voix à nostre Seigneur, et disoit en pleurant à grans larmes: Beausire Dieu Jesuchrist, garde moy et tout magent,” &c.214 Yet the incendiaries which created all this panic appear to have wounded but few and to have killed nobody!
Although no evidence is forthcoming to show that explosives were used in Palestine during the Crusade period, there is good evidence, it has been said, to prove that gunpowder was used by the Arabs in Spain during the thirteenth century.
The first, I believe, to start the theory that the Spanish Arabs possessed gunpowder at this early period was Michael Casiri, a Maronite, who was librarian of the Escorial and published his Bibliotheca Arabico Hispana Escurialensis in 1760-70; and his method of supporting his theory when translating the MS. of Shehab ben Fadhl, which he dates at 1249, was the simple one of translating barud by pulvis nitratus, the recognised Latin phrase for gunpowder.215 Had he translated barud by saltpetre no difficulty could have arisen, since an Arab alchemist, Abd Allah, states that saltpetre was so called in the West during the second quarter of the thirteenth century.216 There would be nothing surprising, therefore, in finding saltpetre mixtures employed in Spain at this period; but saltpetre mixtures, such as the last three given in Table II., are not necessarily explosive. Not only is Casiri’s translation of barud unwarrantable, but he probably dates his MS. a century too early. M. Reinaud, a safe guide, believes that the MS. is Al-Omari’s, and dates 1349,217 eighteen years after the siege of Cividale where the Germans used cannon,218 and three years after Cressy where we certainly had guns.219
Casiri’s methods are well illustrated by his translation of an Arabic passage relating to the siege of Baza, 1325, by Ismael ben Nasr, King of Granada. The literal translation of the passage is as follows: “He (the King) marched through the enemy’s country to the town of Baza, which he invested and attacked. By means of a great machine provided with naphtha (made up in) hot (burning) balls, he struck the arch of an inaccessible tower.”220 According to Casiri the passage reads: “Shifting his camp, he besieged with a large army the town of Baza, where, by applying fire, he discharged (explosit) with much noise a great machine, provided with naphtha and a ball, into a fortified tower.”221 He introduces, it will be observed, an explosion (explosit) into a passage which neither mentions nor suggests one. The application of fire has no place in the original, and suggests the ignition of an explosive charge. He changes the meaning of the original by gratuitously inserting an and between naphtha and ball, which were one and the same thing. He leaves us to infer that the charge was naphtha, though it was not explosive and could not project a ball. He speaks of the explosion being accompanied by a loud noise, of which there is nothing in the original. The incendiary balls are mentioned in another Arabic account of this siege, translated by Conde in his Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en Espagna, p. 593: “The Arabs attacked the city night and day with machines and engines which threw balls of fire with a loud noise” (combatio la ciudad de dia y noche con maquinas é ingenios que lanzaban globos de fuego con grandes truenos).
In this passage the discharge of the incendiary balls is said to have been accompanied by “thunderings,” and at the siege of Niébla, 1257, we are again told that the Moors “launched stones and darts from machines, and missiles of thunder with fire” (lanzaban piedras y dardos con maguinas, y tiros de trueno con fuego).222 From this innocent metaphor, trueno con fuego, the Emperor Leo’s “thunder with smoke,” has been wrenched the meaning that the Arabs possessed a train of artillery. “Il n’y a rien à cela que de vraisemblable,” says the Emperor Napoleon III.223 Nothing, I venture to think, can be more unlikely. The Arab writer is dealing with machines which, he says in his own way, discharged stones and darts, and also igneous missiles which burned with much noise. Another Arab, already quoted (p. 4), gives a freer rein to his fancy: the projectiles “roar like thunder; they flame like a furnace; they reduce everything to ashes.” In plain words, they are incendiaries. The writer makes no allusion to the effect of their momentum or shock; he impresses on us the effect of their essential quality—their incendiary power, exaggerating the noise made by their combustion. Joinville writes in a similar style of Greek fire: “La manière du feu grégeois estoit telle ... Il faisoit tel bruit à venir qu’il sembloit que ce fust fouldre qui cheust du ciel ... et gettoit si grant clarté qu’il faisoit aussi cler dedans nostre ost comme le jour, tant y avoit grant flamme de feu.”224 Unless we make due allowance for the luxuriant Oriental imagination, we may despair of ever being able to reach the meaning of the Eastern writers. One of them wants to explain that the ditch of a fort was deep and wide, and he tells us it was “broad as the ocean and fathomless.”225 Wishing to state that on the arrival of the army on its banks, the Nerbudda, which happened to be in flood, subsided quickly, another writer says: “You might say that it (the river) was a remnant of the universal deluge. As the miraculous power of the saintly Sultan accompanied the Army, all the whirlpools and depths became of themselves immediately dry on the arrival of the Army, and the Musulmans passed over with ease.”226 A similar indulgence in metaphor, although not so unbridled, is found in European writers. For instance, Vegetius likens the projectile hurled by an onager to a thunderbolt;227 and the Princess Anna Comnena compares the fiery particles blown by the breath through a popgun, or spitfire, to lightning.228
It is hardly necessary to examine the accounts given by Conde of the siege of Tarifa, 1340, and by Casiri of the siege of Algesiras, 1342, since both sieges took place some years after that of Cividale, 1331. The reader will find the two accounts ably analysed in Reinaud and Favé, pp. 70-74.
If the Arabs had possessed an explosive in the thirteenth century, the fact must have been known to their alchemists, and they show no such knowledge. There is not an allusion to saltpetre in the Leyden Arabic MS. of 1225.229 Hassan er-Rammah, who died in 1295, knew nothing of explosives. In speaking of saltpetre in the year 1311, Yusuf ibn Ismaël al-Juni says: “The people of Irak use it to make a fire which tends to rise and move. Saltpetre increases the ease and rapidity of ignition.”230 This sentence contains the sum total of Yusuf’s knowledge of saltpetre mixtures. He was aware of the effects of their progressive combustion, but he knew nothing about their explosive combustion.
By whomsoever gunpowder was invented, it was not by the Arabs.
CHAPTER VI
THE HINDUS
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, by order of Warren Hastings, a committee of Brahmins collected a body of Gentoo (or Hindu) laws from a number of ancient Sanskrit books. These laws were translated into Persian under the superintendence of one of the Brahmins, and the Persian version was translated into English in 1776 by Mr. N. B. Halhed, Bengal Civil Service. In his preface he states that gunpowder had been known in India “far beyond all periods of investigation,” a conclusion arrived at by a method now familiar to the reader: “the word ‘firearms’ is literally in Sanskrit agni astra ... Cannon in the Sanskrit idiom is shataghni.”
Agni is found in the Latin ignis = fire; astra, Romocki explains, is connected with the Slav ostr = point (of an arrow, &c.); and the compound agniastra is simply a fire-arrow or rocket. In the shataghni, or “hundred killer,” we have some weapon described in the exaggerated style usual in early times and by no means confined to India. When Sigurd struck an anvil with his sword Gram, “he cleft it down to the stock thereof;”231 and “if one smote a mountain” with al-Mahik (the annihilator) the sword of Gharib, “‘twould overthrow it.”232 There is nothing to connect the shataghni> with fire: indeed it seems to have been a mace, for in the “Raghuvansa” the demon is said to have laid his iron-headed shataghni upon Rama, just as Kuvera laid his club on Jamraj.233 No mention of any projectile discharged by an explosive is to be found in Manu’s “Code of Laws,” and to Manu belongs a passage in the “Code of Gentoo Laws” (p. 53) which either Halhed has mistranslated from the Persian, or the Persian translators have mistranslated from the Sanskrit. Professor Rāy has unearthed the original text of Manu (vii. 90), and gives the correct translation: “The king shall not slay his enemies in battle with deceitful or barbed or poisoned weapons, nor with any having a blade made red hot by fire,234 or tipped with burning materials.”235 Halhed’s translation is: “The magistrate shall not make war with any deceitful machine, or with poisoned weapons, or with cannon and guns, or with any other kind of firearms.” Mephistopheles was right:—
Halhed’s mistakes might have been forgotten had they not been revived and elaborated by Professor G. Oppert in an essay “On the Weapons, &c., of the Ancient Hindus,” London, 1880. His argument is briefly this: firearms are clearly mentioned in the “Laws of Manu” and two very ancient Sanskrit poems; therefore at some very remote period the Hindus possessed an explosive which, for whatever reason, fell into disuse eventually.
“Does the passage in Manu refer to firearms or not?” asks Dr. Oppert. “In our opinion it certainly alludes to them” (p. 70). We need not recur to the mistranslation of Manu already noticed.
The two poems on which Dr. Oppert relies for further evidence are the Nitiprakásika of Vaisampayana, and the Sukraniti of Sukra. According to the former, the Hindu deities, Sita, Indra, Krishna, &c., were authors of “books on polity.” Brahma’s contribution to literature consisted of 10,000,000 double verses (p. 36). The constitution of an army was as follows (p. 5):—
| Foot | 2,187,000,000 |
| Horse | 21,870,000 |
| Elephants | 218,700 |
| Chariots | 21,870 |
The “arms in use” of one species were forty-four in number; of another species, fifty-five. Rabelais has only succeeded in cataloguing forty-six arms in the introduction to the third book of “Pantagruel.” Lest the ninety-nine arms in use might fail to ensure success, a spell (of thirty-two syllables) is given (p. 10) which would bring certain victory to him who repeated it 32,000 times. Both of these veracious works, however, undoubtedly mention cannon and muskets, and a recipe for gunpowder is given in the Sukraniti.236
Dr. Oppert makes no critical examination of the texts of these poems to ascertain whether they contain the interpolations to be found in most Oriental works. Of their age he only says that “no Chinese work ... can, with respect to antiquity, be compared with the Sukraniti” (p. 45). As the reader will find in the following chapter, this implies a considerable age.
It is hard to believe that gunpowder was known to a people whose language contained no word for saltpetre;237 that cannon were used by men whose books make no allusion to gunpowder, with the exception just mentioned. “It is peculiar,” says Dr. Oppert, “that powder should not have been mentioned in Sanskrit works” (p. 63). The same peculiarity is observable in Anglo-Saxon works, and is probably due to the same cause. But the fatal objection to the existence of this very early explosive is the admitted fact that after a time it was discarded and forgotten. Writers who lightly tell us so are apparently unconscious of the greatness of the demand they make upon our credulity. They ask us, in effect, to accept the astonishing proposition, that a nation voluntarily surrendered, without any assignable cause, an incalculable “advantage” in the “struggle for existence”—the eager, continuous, and unending preparation for self-defence which is, in Mr. Bagehot’s words, “the most showy fact” in human history. It is infinitely more probable that the passages in the two poems which mention gunpowder and cannon were interpolated by the scribes of after-ages than that the Hindus wantonly broke the first and strongest law of human nature, the law of self-defence. There can be no reasonable doubt that the recipe for gunpowder in the Sukraniti is an interpolation. The proportions are given in the first place as 5:1:1, and then it is added, “if the powder is to be used for a gun,” let them be 4:1:1, or 6:1:1.238 And why not 5:1:1 also? This recipe was not written by a gunner: it is the handiwork of some charlatan of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, who imagined that, by making a certain mystery about the proportions 5:1:1, he should give a semblance of great antiquity to the recipe. But he blundered badly about the proportions. The proportions 4:1:1 were only reached by the Swedes about the middle of the sixteenth239 century, and approached by the English about the middle of the seventeenth,240 and powder of such strength would have blown weak, early bombards to pieces. Other sound reasons are given by competent critics for rejecting from first to last the allusions to firearms contained in the two poems. A critic in Nature points out that a work which mentions the Hunas (Huns or Europeans) cannot be of the age apparently assigned by Dr. Oppert to the Nitiprakásika.241 “Oppert,” says Sir R. Burton, “shows no reason why the allusions to, and descriptions of, gunpowder and firearms should not be held modern interpolations into these absurd compositions.”242 Mr. W. F. Sinclair concludes from the strong resemblance between the firearms described and those which we know were imported into India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, either that the MSS. date no further back than the sixteenth century, or that the allusions to firearms were interpolated at that period.243 “One is naturally led to suspect,” says Professor Ray, “that the lines (of the Sukraniti) relating to gunpowder ... are interpolations.” The suspicion is further enhanced when it is borne in mind that in the “Polity of Kamandaki,” an ancient work of undoubted authenticity, “there occurs no reference whatever to firearms, nor is there any in the Agnipurana, in which the subject of training in the use of arms and armour takes up four chapters.... The more rational conclusion would be that the Sukraniti is a patchwork, in which portions of chap. iv. were added some time after the introduction of gunpowder in Indian warfare during the Moslem period.”244 “The last chapter is apparently spurious,” says Rajendralala Mitra, “as it describes guns as they existed a hundred years ago.”245 Finally, Herr von Romocki utterly rejects Dr. Oppert’s theory.246
The military history of India confirms the conclusions of the writers who have been quoted: not a fact is to be found there which lends any support to the theory of early gunpowder in India.
The employment of gunpowder in Europe revolutionised the art of war and affected, more or less, almost every human institution. “The military art,” says Gibbon, “has been changed by the invention of gunpowder.... Mathematics, chymistry, mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the science of war.”247 Gunpowder, says A. Comte, “en emprimant à l’art de la guerre un caractère de plus en plus scientifique, a directement tendu à intéresser tous les pouvoirs à l’actif dévellopement continu de la philosophie naturelle.”248 We may reasonably assume that the discovery of so tremendous an agent as gunpowder would have produced in India some few effects, at least, similar in their general features to the effects it produced in Europe. To mention one or two details: Sanskrit would have coined a word for saltpetre, which it did not possess; the use of the bow would have been curtailed; a lasting mark would have been put on fortifications; and some few specimens of the early firearms might have survived. Not a trace of these or similar changes is to be found; not a vestige of early firearms has remained. General Cunningham thought that the state of the ruins of certain ancient Kashmir temples proves the use of an explosive in their destruction,249 but more prolonged observation shows that their condition is chiefly the effect of natural agencies. “The fingers of Time, and moderate movements of the earth, have been making openings in some of the other old Hindu buildings in Kashmir,” such as the little temple of Payach and the splendid temple of Martand; “and from their appearance it may be believed that these same agencies, together with undermining work applied for wilful destruction, could do what has been done.”250 The plentiful supply of saltpetre to be found in the valley of the Ganges has been brought forward as a proof that the ancient Hindus must have had gunpowder, but the fact proves nothing. How many centuries did coal lie within reach of man’s hand, in England and elsewhere, before it was discovered and made use of? The attractive property of the magnet was known to Plato in the fifth century B.C., and Lucretius in the first century B.C. devotes a long passage of his poem to it (vi. 909-1089); yet its property of pointing north and south when free to move horizontally is first distinctly mentioned (in Europe) in the twelfth century A.D.251
Early Indian gunpowder is a fiction.
The first gunpowder and firearms used in India were neither invented nor manufactured by the Hindus: they were imported during the Middle Ages from the West. The guns of Upper India entered through Afghanistan; those of Western India were brought by ships. Let us consider the latter first.
“If any reliance is to be placed on Moulla Daud Bidury, the author of Tohfutu-s Salutin,” says General Briggs, “guns were used (in 1368) by the Hindus (of Bijanagar), and in a subsequent passage (Ferishta remarks) that the Muhammadans used them for the first time during the next campaign. But I am disposed to doubt the validity of both these statements.... Ferishta ... also observes that Turks and Europeans skilled in gunnery worked the artillery. That guns were in common use before the arrival of the Portuguese in India in 1498, seems certain from the mention of Faria y Sousa.”252
The first observation suggested by this passage is, that Ferishta does not say the Hindus had guns on this occasion; he says they had عرابه (’arábah),253 a word which originally meant a cart. In the early days of field artillery the guns were carried in carts,254 from which they were taken and laid on trestles when required for use. Wheeled gun-carriages only came into general use in Europe during the reign of Louis XI. of France (1461-83).255 Things followed the same course in India, and the word ’arába thus came in time to have two meanings; most arába being simply carts, some being (so to speak) gun-carriages. Then later writers arose who insisted that all ’arába were gun-carriages at the early date of 1368, because some ’arába were gun-carriages in and after 1526. Ferishta (who died about 1611) fell into the trap, and after him fell several modern historians.
Secondly, General Briggs’ conclusion about guns in India before 1498 seems somewhat unguarded. It is beyond dispute that firearms were used on the west coast of India during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, but the evidence we possess points to the conclusion that they belonged almost exclusively to Arab and Portuguese ships. The fact that Captain Cook cruised on the coast of Otaheite in 1769 in a ship equipped with firearms, does not warrant the conclusion that the natives possessed firearms. Ferishta was writing about events which took place two hundred years before he was born, and there is a particular reason for doubting the existence of firearms in Bijanagar at this early period.
In 1441 ’Abd ur-Razzak, who had been sent to India by Shah Rukh on an embassy to Calicut, visited Bijanagar, whose ruins may still be seen on the banks of the Tumbhadra. He has given us a full and amusing account of what he saw, bursting forth into poetry on the ugliness of the natives:—
He was present at the great review held during the festival of Mahanawi, when “the number of people and the huge elephants resembled the green sea and the myriads which will appear on the Plains of the Resurrection.” Not an allusion is made to firearms, although he notices the naphtha-throwers mounted on elephants.257
Ferishta tells us that in the year 887 A.H. (A.D. 1482), Mahmoud Shah Begurra of Gujarat, hearing that Cambay was likely to be raided by the pirates of Bulsar, collected a fleet containing “a force of gunners, musketeers, and archers,” and defeated them. On this passage General Briggs remarks: “This is the first mention of artillery and musketry in the Gujarat history. They were probably introduced by the Arabs and Turks from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.”258 The firearms that came from the Persian Gulf must have been few and far between. Writing in 1549, a Jesuit says: “The Persians use no bombards or arms of this kind.”259
There is no mention of the Bulsar expedition in the “History of Gujarat,” by Ali Muhammad Khan, translated by Mr. J. Bird.
The Mirat-i Sikandari, a history of Gujarat translated by Sir E. C. Bayley, speaks of an attack made by Mahmoud on certain pirates as early as 878 A.H. (A.D. 1473), but neither Bulsar nor firearms are mentioned. We are told, however, that during a previous expedition in the same year against the island of Sankhodhar, the infidels (Hindus) “resisted bravely and kept up a sustained discharge of arrows and muskets” (pp. 198-9).
Ferishta relates that during the siege of Champanir, 1484, a shell (hookah) fell on the Rajah’s palace; but he does not state how it was discharged, nor whether it was explosive or incendiary.260
On landing at Calicut in 1498, Vasco da Gama and his followers were led through the streets with tomtoms beating, and from time to time an espingarda, or musket, was fired off.261 The town seems to have possessed only one of these weapons. At least, the soldiers of the guard who mounted over Gama after he had been arrested were not armed with espingardas, but with swords, daggers, and bows,262 and no mention is made of there being any cannon in the town.
In 1502 a sea-fight took place in these waters between a Portuguese man-of-war and a Moorish (Arab) ship, during which the Arab bore down on the Portuguese, “pouring in her shot, and then made away.”263 The original says: “Una nube de flechas sobre nuestra gente y algunas balas;” i.e. a cloud of arrows and some balls.264 These balls were undoubtedly cannon balls.
It is stated in MSS. 826-8, Bib. Nat., Paris, that in 917 A.H. (A.D. 1511-12) Modhaffer Shah of Gujarat sent to Kansuh, King of Egypt, asking him for arms and cannon to enable the Gujaratis to defend themselves against the Europeans; “the people of India not having hitherto possessed Artillery of any kind.”265 In answer to this request, Hossain was sent to sea in command of a considerable fleet. If Mahmoud possessed ships with guns in 1482, how came it that in 1511 the Gujaratis were sending round the world begging for firearms? Had Mahmoud merely hired for the occasion from the Arabs the ships and guns with which he crushed the Bulsar pirates? It is impossible to say categorically; but two facts may be extracted from the foregoing conflicting statements—first, that firearms were used by Arab and Portuguese ships on the west coast of India before the Hindus possessed them, and secondly, that there was an espingarda in the town of Calicut in 1498.
Whatever doubt there may be about the exact date at which the natives of Western India first procured firearms from the foreign ships which visited their shores, there can be none about the first employment of artillery in Upper India.
As has been already stated, the machines of the Greeks were adopted at an early period by the Persians, from whom they were eventually borrowed by the Arabs, Mughals, &c. The Hindus in turn adopted the machines they saw employed by their invaders and named them, according to their custom, after the part of the world they came from—maghribíha = western (machines or manjaník). At the abortive attack on Rantambhor, 1290, Sultan Jalalu-d Din ordered Westerns to be erected.266 The Hindus had collected materials for making incendiaries before being besieged in the same fortress by Sultan Alau-d Din in 1300. “Every day the fire of those infernals fell on the light of the Moslems, and, as there were no means of extinguishing it, they filled bags with clay and prepared entrenchments.... The Royal Westerns shot large earthen balls against that infidel fort.... The stones from the ballistas and catapults within and without the fort encountered each other half-way and emitted lightening.”267 During the attack on Arangal, 1309, the Westerns “were played on both sides and many were wounded.”268 The mud walls were so strong and elastic that the balls of the Westerns rebounded off them “like nuts which children play with.”269 Eventually the “western stone-balls” formed a breach and the fort fell. Such is the account given by Amir Khusru who died in 1315, of whom Sir H. M. Elliot says (vi. 465):—“He is full of illustrations and leaves no manner of doubt that nothing like gunpowder was known to him.” Near the close of the century, 1398-9, the Hindus besieged by Timur in Bhatnir “cast down in showers arrows and stones and fireworks upon the heads of the assailants.”270 At the attack on Chanderi, 1527-8, “the Pagans exerted themselves to the utmost, hurling down stones and throwing flaming substances on the heads” of Babar’s troops.271 In 1528-9, the Hindus succeeded in igniting with “fireworks, turpentine, and other combustibles” some hay which the Mughals had collected in the fort of Lucknow. The heat became so intolerable that the Mughals retired and the fort was taken.272
It is needless to enlarge the list of quotations: incendiaries pursued much the same course in Upper India as in Greece and Arabia. No reliable evidence of an explosive is to be found until the 21st April 1526, the date of the decisive battle of Panipat, in which Ibrahim, Sultan of Delhi, was killed and his army routed by Babar, the Mughal, who possessed firearms great and small.273
On the introduction of Artillery the word maghribiha was gradually replaced by the more definite word feringiha = European. At Panipat the Artillery of the left centre was commanded by Mustapha Rumi, whose name is sufficient proof of his western origin. But traces of European artisans are to be found long before this. When the King of Gor crossed the Attok in the twelfth century, he had with him “skilful Franks, learned in all the arts.”274 The success of the attack on Chitor in 1591, by Buhadur, Sultan of Gujarat, was chiefly due to his engineer, Labri Khan of Frengan = Frangistan, the country of the Franks.275 Speaking of the Mughal Artillery in 1695, Dr. Careri tells us that it was “all, especially the heavy Artillery, under the direction of Franks, or Christian gunners, who had extraordinary pay.”276
Haidar Mirza gives us one or two details about Babar’s guns which deserve a passing notice.277 There was a zarb-zan, or swivel gun, carrying a ball of 500 miskals, and a heavier gun throwing a “brass” ball which weighed 5000 miskals, and cost 200 miskals of silver. The former was drawn by four, the latter by eight pairs of bullocks. Let us adopt the weight of the miskal given in Steingass’ “Persian Dictionary,”—1-3/7 drachms = 39.045 grs. troy, which makes the weight of Babar’s large ball 34 lbs. nearly.278 Its price, 200 miskals, would then be 7809 grs. troy of pure (silver), or (since our standard shilling is 87.27 grs. troy and its fineness 37/40) 96.7 shillings of our present money. The price of a 10.18 lbs. ball of the same material would consequently be 29s., including the cost of manufacture. The price of the English 4” bronze ball of 10.18 lbs. given here in Table X., is 26.468d., or about 22s. of our present money, exclusive of the cost of manufacture. Adding 7s. to cover the cost of manufacture,279 its price would be about 29s. The value of the alloy in our shilling has been neglected here, and Queen Elizabeth’s money may not have been worth exactly seven times our money; but making full allowance for both these errors, the prices of the two balls approximate as closely as can be reasonably expected.
Gunpowder was not invented by the Hindus: its discovery by them would have fallen little short of a miracle. The extinction of Buddhism about the ninth century A.D., and the consequent establishment of a dominant priestly class, were a deathblow to the cultivation of physical science. By the seemingly innocent institution of caste, the Brahmins succeeded in trampling science in the dust. One caste was not permitted to touch this, another caste could not touch that substance; and the higher the caste, the greater the number of forbidden objects. The study of experimental science was consequently thrown back upon the lowest and poorest classes, who had neither the means, the leisure, nor the inclination to pursue it. Thus “the spirit of inquiry gradually died out,” says a Hindu Professor of Chemistry, “and the name of India was all but expunged from the map of the scientific world.”280
CHAPTER VII
THE CHINESE
China, like India, affords an example of “arrested civilisation:” the Chinese intellect and language became petrified while still in a primitive stage of development. But, unlike the Hindus, the Chinese betook themselves at an early period to historical pursuits. “Debarred both by the nature of the material at their command and by a lack of original genius from indulging in the higher branches of imaginative writing, Chinese authors devoted themselves with untiring energy and with very considerable ability to the compilation of information concerning their own and neighbouring countries.”281 Among the results of their labours are the “Twenty-One Histories,” from the third century B.C. to the middle of the seventeenth century, sixty-six folio volumes, and a number of vast Encyclopædias, of which the Koo-kin-too-shoo, &c., occupies 6109 volumes. From such immense compilations and other sources Chinese scholars have supplied us with much information about the present subject.
Although the invention of gunpowder is disclaimed for his countrymen “by every (Chinese) writer who treats seriously” on the subject,282 the people cherish the legend that the invention was made by a Chinaman in some forgotten past. The existence of this legend among a people possessed of a deep veneration for antiquity is in no way surprising. Every Chinese custom, art, and institution is supposed to be very ancient, and what is not really old is readily invested with fictitious antiquity. The world as we know it, they tell us, came into being 2,670,000 years before Confucius, who was a contemporary of the prophet Daniel. “The more sober historians, however, are content to begin with a sufficiently mythical Emperor, who reigned only 2800 years before the Christian era.”283 This insatiable craving for antiquity is shown in all their works. “As with all other arts (the Chinese) have claimed for the manufacture of porcelain an antiquity far beyond the actual facts of the case. This exaggerated estimate of the antiquity of Chinese porcelain was for a long time supported by the supposed discovery in Egypt of certain small bottles made of real porcelain and inscribed with Chinese characters, which were said to have been found in tombs at Thebes, dating as early as 1800 B.C. The fact, however, that they are inscribed with quotations from Chinese poets of the eighth century A.D., and have characters of a comparatively modern form, shows that the whole story of their discovery is a fraud.... During all periods Chinese potters were constantly in the habit of copying earlier styles and of forging their marks, so that very little reliance can be placed on internal evidence. Indeed, the forgeries often deceive the Chinese collectors of old porcelain.”284
According to the Jesuits, Chinese history is free from this defect. Father Moyria de Maillac (commonly called Mailla), in the long introductions to his Histoire générale de la Chine, begs us to put our full trust in the Chinese historians, and pleads that, however mendacious the lower orders of the nation, the better classes love the truth, and the historians are honest and accurate. But such pleas in bar of investigation and verification are of little weight unless it can be shown that Chinese historians never drew (in good faith) erroneous conclusions, never mistook the meaning of a document, were never misinformed, and never made a slip in writing. As Gibbon clearly saw,285 the Jesuits were blinded by admiration of the Celestials; their sharp, critical sagacity was blunted by the air of sincerity displayed in Chinese books.286 But this “accent de sincérité” is ruthlessly treated by MM. Langlois and Seignobos: “C’est une impression presque irrésistible, mais elle n’en est pas moins une illusion. Il n’y a aucun critérium extérieur ni de la sincérité ni de l’exactitude. ‘L’accent de sincérité,’ c’est l’apparence de la conviction; un orateur, un acteur, un menteur d’habitude l’auront plus facilement en mentant qu’un homme indécis en disant ce qu’il croit. La vigeur de l’affirmation ne prouve pas toujours la vigeur de la conviction, mais seulement l’habileté ou l’effronterie. De même l’abondance et la précision des détails, bien quelles fassent une vive impression sur les lecteurs inexpérimentés, ne garantissent pas l’exactitude des faits;287 elles ne renseignent que sur l’imagination de l’auteur quand il est sincère ou sur son impudence quand il ne l’est pas. On est porté de dire d’un récit circonstancié: ‘Des choses de ce genre ne s’inventent pas.’ Elles ne s’inventent pas, mais elles se transportent très facilement d’un personage, d’un pays ou d’un temps à un autre.—Aucun caractère extérieur d’un document ne dispense donc d’en faire la critique.”288 In spite of their zeal for the truth, Chinese historians are no more infallible than others, and it is certain that they were unconsciously led into error at times by the change in meaning which military words underwent in China as well as elsewhere. Thus
Mao-yiian-i erroneously believed that huo-p’áu meant cannon in old times, as it did in his own. But from a sketch he has fortunately given of one (reproduced by Romocki, i. 41) it is clear that it originally meant a machine for scattering blazing incendiary matter.
The first two questions that present themselves are: (1) Did the Chinese make use of gunpowder in a very distant past? and (2) did they possess an explosive shell in 1232?
The Chinese annals give no support to the hypothesis that gunpowder was known in China in very early times. Currency was given to the popular legends about it by such writers as Father Gaubil, who declares that gunpowder had been in use for 1600 years when he wrote, and Father Amiot, who fully accepts a much earlier date. With reference to Koung-ming, who is said to have employed earth-thunder (ty-lei) about 200 A.D., Amiot says: (a) “Les auteurs qui parlent de Koung-ming ne le font pas l’inventeur de cette manière de nuire à l’ennemi. Ils disent, au contraire, qu’il l’avait puisée dans les ouvrages des anciens guerriers; ce qui est une preuve sans réplique que les Chinois connaissaient la poudre à tirer ... bien longtemps avant que cette connaissance fût parvenue en Europe.... (b) Les anciens Chinois employaient la poudre (chen-ho-yen), soit dans les combats, soit pour mettre le feu au camp des ennemis.... (c) Cette poudre (ny-foung-yo) a une vertue qui, ce me semble, pourrait être d’une très grande utileté dans nos armées; c’est que la fumée va également contre le vent.”289 In (a) and (c) of these extracts the true note of legend is audibly sounded, and the tacit assumption that ty-lei was an explosive is to be noted. As to (b), Amiot was unwittingly describing some early incendiary similar to that of Marcus Græcus, No. 2: “Ignis quæ comburit domos inimicorum.” Such is Father Amiot’s “preuve sans réplique” that the Chinese possessed gunpowder in the times of the pre-adamite Sultans. It must be put aside; and with it must be laid the evidence of Fathers Maillac and Gaubil. First, their critical faculty became paralysed when dealing with Chinese history. Secondly, they evidently did not understand the difference between an explosive and an incendiary. Thirdly, without questioning their good faith, they are open to the charges brought against them by MM. Reinaud and Favé, when speaking of M. Quatremère’s dating Artillery in China at the thirteenth century: “(Il) ne s’est pas aperçu que PP. Mailla et Gaubil avaient traduits différement certains passages des Annales chinoises, et qu’ils y avaient même ajouté tantôt des expressions de leur cru, et tantôt des interpolations de la version tartare-mandchou, version qui date seulement d’un peu plus d’un siècle, et qui, par consequent, n’a aucune autorité.”290
Had the Chinese an explosive shell in 1232?
The following is a translation by M. Stanislas Julien of a passage in the Encyclopædia entitled Tung-Chien-Kang-Mu, relating to the siege of Pien-king (now Kai-fung-fu) in 1232, given by Reinaud and Favé in the Journal Asiatique, Oct. 1849: “A cette époque on faisait usage de ho-pao ou pao à feu, appelée Tchin-tien-louï, ou ‘tonnerre qui ébranle le ciel,’ On se servait pour cela d’un pot en fer que l’on remplissait de yo. A peine y avait-on mis le feu que le pao s’élevait, et que le feu éclatait de toute part. Son bruit ressemblait à celui du tonnerre, et s’étendait à plus de cent lis (i.e. thirty-three English miles); il pouvait répandre l’incendie sur une surface de plus d’un demi-arpent (i.e. about one-third of an acre).... Les Mongols construisirent avec les peaux de bœuf un couloir qui leur permit d’arriver jusqu’an pied des remparts. Ils se mirent à saper les murs, et y pratiquèrent des cavités, où l’on pouvait se loger sans avoir rien à craindre des hommes placés en haut. Un des assiégés proposa de suspendre à des chaînes de fer des pao à feu, et de les descendre le long du mur. Arrivés aux endroits qui étaient minés, les pao éclataient et mettaient en pièces les ennemis et les peaux de bœuf, au point même de ne pas en laisser de vestige.” There is another account of the shell in the Wu-pei-chi, published in 1621, but (as one gathers from Mr. Mayers291) it is so similar in the details that the two accounts cannot be taken as independent. They merely quote some common document or repeat some common tradition.
Like the Liber Ignium of Marcus Græcus, the Tung-Chien-Kang-Mu is not the work of one man or of one period. The original portions (the “Old Recipes” of Marcus) were written by Ssu-ma-kuang, 1019-86, and were named T’ung-Chien, or the “Mirror of History,” by the reigning Emperor. The book was brought up to date by Chu-hsi, 1130-1200, and was afterwards continued, with commentaries, by various writers, up to the seventeenth century. The above-quoted passage belongs to the commentators,292 and was written by some one whose date, name, and authority for his statement are alike unknown to us; but it was presumably written long after the event it records.
We have seen in Julien’s translation what the encyclopædist actually says, but what meaning did he intend to convey by his words? Did he mean to say the shell exploded? The passage may be divided into two clauses: in the first he explains generally the action of the ho-pao, and in the second he gives a particular example of its use. In the first clause he says that “no sooner was a light applied to it than the fire burst forth on all sides” (le feu éclatait de toute part): in the second clause he says, “the pao burst forth” (les pao éclataient). But the effect produced by the shell shows that this latter phrase is simply an elliptical way of saying, “the fire of the mixture contained in the pao burst forth.” On this point Reinaud and Favé are clear: “Les pao à feu éclataient s’applique aux éclats de la flamme qui sortait par les ouvertures,”293—holes in the shell which were probably numerous. Mayers agrees: the pao were lowered into the excavations, “when the fire burst out from them, utterly destroying every fragment of the hides,” &c.294 The Chinese writer was describing an incendiary, not an explosive. Gunpowder would have left in the hiding-place of the Mongols a tangled mass of charred human remains and scorched cowhide: only an incendiary could have destroyed its contents so that “not a vestige remained.” Father Gaubil and M. Berthelot acquiesce in this conclusion:295 Herr von Eomocki dissents from it.296
There is nothing in the military history of China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to lead us to suppose that the Chinese possessed an explosive during that period. In 1255 Prince Hulágu had 1000 Chinese arbalisters in his pay to work his incendiaries,297 and it may be presumed that he would have learnt the secret of gunpowder from them if they had known it; but he possessed no explosive. Father Carpini, cir. 1250, states that when hard-pressed the Tartars had recourse to incendiaries, and Rashid ed-Din, in his history of Hulagu’s campaign of 1260, makes no allusion to explosives.298 The Chinese had only reached the same stage as Marcus Græcus in 1257: in this year they had Roman candles.299 During the siege of Siang-yang-fu, 1268-73, “Khubelai sent to his nephew Abaka, in Persia, for engineers skilled in making catapults, called mangonals300 by Marco Polo. Two such engineers were sent.”301 We have three different notices of this siege, Chinese, Persian, and Venetian, and “they all concur as to the employment of foreign engineers from the West,”302 but none of them mentions the use of explosives by either side. “The Chinese at that period,” says Sir John Davis, “were as little acquainted with firearms as Europeans.”303 When Chang-chi-ki’s fleet on the Kiang River was destroyed a few years afterwards by Atchu, it was by means of fire-arrows.304 In a word, during the thirteenth century, the Chinese made a free use of various incendiaries already noticed in the chapters on the Greeks and Arabs; and they seem to have made no progress in the manufacture of their missiles during the course of the fourteenth.305 Not until we reach the fifteenth century do we meet with gunpowder and cannon.